FIRST: Congrats, you bastard, for having $3,000 to drop on a firearm.
If only I had that kind of cake burning a hole in *MY* pocket. Kinda like when I talk to my buddy back in DC who likes guns as much as I do, has a much larger and nicer collection, and when I call him to shoot the shit starts lamenting about which sexy rifle or pistol he should spend several thousand smackaroos on as my broke ass listens to him and thinks "Man, these are the problems that I wish *I* had!"
The Sig550, so far as I know, is like everything else Sig makes: a top-drawer piece which is impeccably well-made and will likely perform beyond your needs and expectations.
Dunno about the Tavor-21, though the mere fact that it's made by Israel Military Industries is, to me, a good sign. IMI makes the guns that the home team in Israel uses to defend the country, and the Tavor-21 is the shoulder weapon that the IDF will be using as they begin phasing out their aging arsenal of Colt M16 and Galil R4/R5 variants. If IMI ever made a shitty firearm, I've never heard of it.
As for the Tavor (or any other "bullpup") rifle being complicated compared to more conventional shoulder arms: never heard that either. I know the Austrian Steyr-AUG is (from what I've seen) the definition of "simplicity" when stripped down, and others like the SAR-21 and the FAMAS are no more complicated than most rifles in that regard.
The main gripes about bullpups as a class of weapons I've heard generally involve two items:
1) The position of the ejection port near the rear of the weapon has been known to dramatically increase the odds of southpaw shooters getting pelted in the face by burning-hot spent brass, as well as maybe some gas escaping from the port as well. Those of us who've had the misfortune of shooting an M-16/AR-15 rifle when the gaps on the gas rings at the rear of the bolt line up into one big gap and spew hot gas out of the gap between the stock and upper receiver and into their face knows what a major pain in the ass that latter item can be.
I think most bullpup rifles have had this problem addressed fairly well since going into service.
2) The position of the magazine makes swapping mags when reloading awkward from some folks.
The big plus, of course, is that the oddball configuration of a bullpup makes the weapon shorter and more compact overall while still using a full-length barrel; this means you get a carbine-length rifle sans the sacrifice in terms of long-range accuracy common in compact/carbine versions of rifles.
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Originally Posted by Noobie
I didn't think about it. Sad part is the Sig has no built in rail and will probably need to drill the top of the rifle which kinda suxs.
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Not so. The SIG family of rifles accepts a scope mount which can be quickly attached/detached from the receiver to accept a scope if one is desired. I'm pretty sure that most military-style battle rifles in service today have either been built to accept such mounts or modified to accept them without the necessity of having a gunsmith tap the receiver. Not that it should really be necessary, since the SIG has sights very similar to those found on H&K rifles and SMGs; that configuration is one of my personal favorites, and provide excellent sight picture. With the SIG, you should be able to tag targets 500 yards away on a clear day if you've had proper marksmanship training without much trouble.
The bitch is: the SIG military mount in proprietary, built by SIG, and costs somewhere around $300 bucks. I have this same problem with my CETME Modelo C, which uses a similar mount produced for the German
Bundeswher. Thus, a scope mount + scope would come about about the same price and the frickin' rifle when I bought it.
This wouldn't bug me so much except the front sight is off and can only be adjusted using a special tool made for the task (which I did manage to order online) and only after a tiny screw in the front of the sight mount is loosened, a feature I think is idiotic for an infantry rifle (I'd bet real money that half the grunts using such rifles lose the tool within 24 hours of deploying to the field, 12 if it's a hot area where actual combat is probably) and on my example is stuck in place and will probably need to be tapped and replaced by an armorer.