KSC M93r Auto 9 C (RoboCop Gun)

By Brandon
July 7, 2011

Introduction:

While I cant factually speak to the universality of it, I’d be willing to assume that the vast majority of us have been wowed by the dystopian futurescape of Detroit portrayed by Paul Verhoeven.  Fraught with crime, primer black Ford Taurus police cars, and stop-motion claymation robots, the near future of 1987 Detroit is a scary proposition indeed.  Luckily for everyone, a stereotypical police officer gets gunned down in cold blood, and an evil corporation decides to graft his face onto C3P-O’s body, hand it a machine pistol and the keys to one of the aforementioned Taurii, and let their creation try and deal with the mess.  The results were equal parts entertaining and depressing.

KSC cashed in on this with their first generation 93r by pulling the burst functionality, tacking on some extra plastic, and making a movie replica.  Is it equally entertaining and depressing?

Real Steel History:

Given that this is a fictional weapon, I thought I’d provide you the fictional history of it, courtesy of the robocop wiki;

“Robocop’s Auto 9 is a highly advanced select-fire machine pistol with a 50-round magazine. It is holstered in a concealed compartment in his thigh, together with at least one reload magazine in storage. His most commonly utilized fire setting is three round burst; however, RoboCop is seen firing a single round in multiple instances. The weapon is also capable of utilizing special ammunition, which can be selected by its user via the targeting interface.”

Movie Appearances:

This part is pretty self explanatory…

RoboCop missing the point at a shooting range with his Auto 9.

More of the same

Weirdly enough, the Auto 9 also showed up in the hands of Detective Hartigan in Sin City in his vignette.

The Replica:

Lets get down to the gun.  The packaging is a pretty standard KSC Box adorned with the name of the replica over a fitted styrofoam box.  Inside is the replica, manuals and papers, a magazine, a 1mm allen wrench, a hopup key, and the token 100 BB packet.

Picking up the replica, one is struck with two things.  Firstly, the gun is impressively long.  You know those 7″ WE Hicapa Dragons?  They don’t even compare in length.  These things are absolutely enormous.  Second, the gun is impressively light.  I’ve owned several KSC 93Rs, and all have been significantly heavier than the Auto 9, regardless of their significantly smaller size.

 

From the left side of the gun we get a good idea of both the size and the profile of the gun. 

Trademarks are scarce on the gun, but on the left side, you can see the gun’s serial number on the barrel extension, just forward on the pin.  All of the Auto 9′s manufactured by KSC have unique serial numbers, Formatted ”XR 01XXXX”.   The gun also has a JASG marking stamped into the frame just above the trigger guard

 

The take-down lever is also present on this side of the gun.  The takedown lever, magazine catch, and the slide lock/release should all be familiar territory to any M9 users out there.  One way to ensure the gun is not a knockoff (as I believe Omega made a few of these a long time ago) is to flip the disassembly lever down, where a KSC Corporation logo hides on the frame.

 Just aft of the slide catch, we see the fire selector and safety set on the back of the frame.  Push the fire selector up for semi automatic, and down against the grip for full automatic.  The Safety is also simple, up for fire, down for safe.  The safety cannot be activated unless the hammer is cocked.

Notice that there is additional plastic fitted where te standard grip panels would be.  This has the effect of hiding the extended mag base of the long 93r magazine.  While it does get rid of the classy wood grip panels of the proper 93r, it is film accurate.

At the back of the gun, we see the ramped rear sights.  They can best be described as a large ramped set of bo-mar sights, however they are not adjustable.  They are marked OCP-POLICE 001-A9 (OCP being the evil corporate entity that created Robocop and antagonist throughout the movies).  Its a pretty cool shoutout to the gun’s movie lineage.

Moving over to the right side, there is not much to be seen here.  The trigger bar is visible, as is the button for the take down lever.  There are no visible trademarks on the right side.  You can see the pin for the barrel extension down at the point where the folding fore-grip would attach on a normal 93r.  This is the only point of attachment for the front end, which needs to come off to pull the slide.  More on that below, but I wanted to point out that I appreciate the simplicity here.

The barrel extension is huge, measuring over 4.5 inches on its own from the front of the 93r slide.  Based on the pictures above, its pretty close to the real deal.  There is a threaded barrel, but the threads are around the outside of the inner barrel, which does not extend beyond the end of the compensator.  If you felt this needed to be made longer with a suppressor replica, you’d need one with threads that extend inwards.  The front sight sits high on the front of the barrel extension, which allows it to correctly co-witness with the high rear sight.

Overall the takeaways here are;

1) The gun is huge
2) The gun is light
3) The gun is plastic.

More or less the whole thing is ABS, explaining its light weight.  The slide has good snap to it when racked however, which is more than can be said for several of the other iterations of KWA/KSC 93rs, where a big complaint is sluggish blowback/slide action.

It has a good feel overall (if a bit plasticene), but how does it shoot?

Shooting Impressions:

As far as GBBs go, the AUTO 9 is quite good to shoot.  The light ABS slide means that it cycles quickly and crisply.  As the gun is full auto capable, I had to let loose with it on full auto the moment I got it.  The gun’s cyclic rate is great (on par with a KSC Full-Auto Glock), which was a pleasant surprise to me.  Also, thanks to that long barrel extension, the gun’s inner barrel extends another inch or so past where it ends on a normal 93r, and as we should all be aware, longer barrels on gas blowback guns equate to significantly more room for gas to expand behind the bb, thus more FPS.  I experienced an average of 390 ft/s with .20g BBs on Propane.

Consistency was acceptable but nothing to write home about.  BBs fly straight, but with the occasional wide left or right flyer.  Consistency is worse when shooting on fully automatic.  I’d compare it to an older KSC Glock 18, which isn’t bad, but not stellar. 

Conclusion:

To summarize, the KSC 93r Auto 9 is huge, lightweight, and an excellent shooter.  This gun doesn’t really belong in the hands of a beginner as they’re so hard to find,  but an experienced player who knows the basics of gas gun maintenance would likely enjoy this gun alot.  Another aside is that anyone picking one of these up should be aware that parts for first generation 93rs are very hard to come by, and any parts failure is likely to write off the gun.  While I don’t think it would be hard to convert a System 7/NS2  93r with the one-piece pin on front end and the other various Auto 9 bits, it may be slightly more involved than the average player is ready for.  Below are the ratings I gave the gun in our three standard categories; 

 Performance: 4/5 Based on the rate of fire, the excellently crisp shooting feel and the long barrel, the gun is an excellent shooter.  In the performance department, the only drawback worth mentioning is the mediocre shot to shot consistency.

External Design: 3/5 The gun could use just a tad heavier materials to feel the best.  It still feels alright, but with all the ABS, it still brings up feelings of cheapness that harken back to old days springers.

Value: 2/5 These have been out of stock for a long time in just about every store I can find them in, and they cost $200 new for a stock plastic KSC gun.  I don’t think the value is really there unless you quite enjoy Robocop.

Overall: 3/5 Averaging the 3 ratings gives us a result which indicates a slightly better than mediocre replica.  I think this is driven by the gun’s tall order buy in,  and how hard it is to find.  I don’t feel like this is too hard on the gun, if you really want a Robocop replica, you’ll wind up with this.  If you don’t, theres no reason you would.

The Final Word:

Obviously I enjoyed these enough to buy two.  I enjoy rare and eclectic guns, and the Auto 9 fits both bills well. 

These are reasonably cool and a ton of fun to shoot, the only real difficulty will be in finding one. If you do, you’ll have to decide if its worth the buy in, granted all the other pistols you could get for so much less.  But then again, Robocop didn’t use a 1911…