At the 2017 SHOT Show, Heckler & Koch was proudly displaying their victorious CSASS entrant, now designated the M110A1 by the US Army. The Compact Semi-Automatic Sniper System competition was created to find a lighter weight, more compact sniper weapon system to replace the Knight’s Armament M110 SASS. The H&K rifle that reportedly won the contract was slightly different than the rifle on display at the show, the latter sporting the new Geissele M-LOK handguard which replaced HK’s proprietary “backwards Keymod” negative attachment handguard.
The M110A1 is based on H&K’s G28 rifle, which in turn is a derivative of the HK417 7.62mm counterpart to the company’s successful 5.56mm HK416 rifles. Unlike the steel-receiver G28, the M110A1 uses an aluminum upper receiver to save weight and meet the US Army’s requirement of 9.0lbs or less without optics and accessories. Without magazine or accessories, the M110A1 is listed at about 8.4 pounds unloaded, a much more competitive weight than any of HK’s previous AR-pattern 7.62mm rifles.
Interestingly, this specific example is marked “MR 762 A1”, which suggests it might not be an original CSASS rifle.
The M110A1 is advertised in H&K’s literature as coming fully equipped with a Schmidt & Bender 3-20×50 PMII Ultra Short optic, Geissele optic mount, OSS SRM6 suppressor, and 6-9 Harris bipod and mount. A little math on that setup gives us a weight of about 6.8kg for the fully loaded and equipped M110A1, which in Armstrong units is about 15 pounds. Whew! Not light, but then that’s the reason for the Army’s strict baseline weight requirement!
