Colt SCAMP

The COLT SCAMP was designed to provide pilots, aircraft crews, armored vehicle personnel, and support/rear-line combat troops with a compact, lightweight, ergonomic, and controllable select-fire high-capacity weapons package that would allow them to either escape and evade enemy soldiers armed with assault rifles, or hold these enemy forces off until reinforcements or air support/air evac arrived.

The SCAMP's bottle-necked .22 Caliber cartridge was basically a "semi-rifle round" or "reduced-impulse mini-rifle cartridge" that was designed to allow the operator to engage the enemy at significantly greater distance than he could with any 9mm or .45ACP pistol. It's presumed that the round was designed to defeat the enemy's body armor or (possibly) loaded 7.62x39mm AKM/AK-47 magazines carried on the chest, and still incapacitate (or at least disable) the target. While the SCAMP projectile's flat trajectory and armor-piercing qualities were important, weapon controllability on full-auto was the key. Remember, the SCAMP was essentially a large machine pistol, yet it still had to allow the operator to hit what he was aiming at, even on the full-auto setting, at distance. If you can't hit the enemy, the projectile's capability doesn't matter.

This is where the gun's balance, weight, cartridge, and recoil compensator came into play, enabling the SCAMP's user to hit the enemy at distance with a full-auto burst from a pistol-sized and configured weapon, while firing it as a pistol (rather than from the shoulder)." The SCAMP was select-fire (semi-auto/full-auto), and, according to testers at the time, better-balanced than the 1911A1. The SCAMP's magazine capacity was a submachine gun-like 27 rounds, and incorporated a compensated barrel for recoil attenuation, so the weapon would be more controllable on full-auto.