Springfield Armory 1911 Prodigy OSP: Superlative Workmanship, Insane Capacity, Genetic Hybridization, and Warping Spacetime
The Springfield Armory Prodigy OSP (Optical Sight Pistol) is arguably the most capable 9mm 1911 in the world. The Prodigy OSP sports a top-tier feature set and a magazine capacity of which old John Moses Browning might only have dreamt. With its inimitable 1911 single-action trigger and a whopping 27 rounds on tap, the Prodigy brings capabilities to the combat handgun most typically reserved for pistol-caliber submachine guns.
I’ve never met a combat veteran who said he wished he had less ammo when he was neck-deep in the suck. Additionally, the fastest magazine change is clearly the one you don’t have to make. With a capacity this bounteous, you just don’t have to swap out mags terribly often. The Prodigy OSP is a delightfully fresh take on a classic combat pistol.
Hybridization
I have a friend with a fascinating problem. He likes dogs, as do I, and maintains a female pit bull and a male chihuahua as part of his family stable. Concerned he might end up with more canines than he had inclination for, he consulted a buddy purportedly knowledgeable on such things to ensure there wouldn’t be any unwanted amorous complications. The friend assured him the disparity in geometry should serve as effective birth control.
Now 12 puppies later, my buddy discovered to his dismay, that love always finds a way. The resulting bizarre little creatures look like a hyena had a baby with a rat. These tiny mutant dogs seemed like something spawned in some diabolical Nazi research facility. This was a really big pit bull and a really small chihuahua. How does that even work?
The subsequent offspring obviously represented a mystical combination of these two very different animals. Scientists who intentionally do this in a lab call it Somatic Cell Fusion — the act of combining tissues from disparate creatures into a new hybridized result. How could that ever go wrong?
Personally, I’m against this. While the art’s practitioners extol the virtues of Somatic Cell Fusion in the ongoing fight against disease, I am simply concerned some yahoo is going to retire to his laboratory and conjure up a skunkopotamus. I’ve seen those movies. Scientists are always doing stuff like that.
Believe it or not, genetic hybridization applies to our discussion today. By taking certain traits from John Moses Browning’s 111-year-old combat pistol and fusing them with an Information Age polymer fire control system, the mad scientists at Springfield Armory have created the most extraordinary, hybridized end result. Unlike the liger, tigon, wholphin, zebroid, grolar bear, beefalo or the aforementioned horrifying pithuahua or chipit (all real creatures … no kidding, Google it), the Springfield Armory Prodigy OSP is actually epically cool.
Technical Details
The Prodigy is one exceptionally manly pistol. The slide and frame are cut from big chunks of forged steel. At just over 2 lbs. empty, this gun has some serious heft. The frame is so thick the slide stop is inset into the meat of the thing. The extended thumb safety is replicated on both sides of the gun.
The dust cover is railed for accessories, while the fat contour heavy barrel seems absolutely massive. It comes in either 4.25″- or 5″-barreled versions. Think of them as awesome and extra-awesome.
The expected grip safety sports the obligatory memory bump for instant thought-free operation. An extended beavertail helps protect your sensitive squishy bits from hammer bite. The hammer is both skeletonized and ample.
The Prodigy OSP comes from the factory with a serrated Tactical Rack rear sight. The generous steel blade front sight includes a replaceable fiber optic light tube. For those who actually deign to read the manual, and both of you know who you are, you will find the instructions for replacing the light tube should it ever succumb to rough handling. However, none of that matters in this case. My Prodigy came equipped with a superlative HEX Dragonfly electronic red dot sight.
The HEX Dragonfly is Springfield Armory’s flagship full-sized pistol optic. The smaller version used on micro compact guns like the Hellcat is the Wasp. The Dragonfly, like everything on the Prodigy, is built like a main battle tank.
A left-sided pushbutton activates the sight. Change the battery every other birthday, and you’ll be fine. Dot adjustments require a small screwdriver and are stupid-proof. As the red dot co-witnesses with the iron sights, just point the gun in a safe direction and adjust the fall of the dot until it overlays your irons. An armored hood makes the sight tougher than you are.
The slide sports aggressive cocking grooves both front and rear. The full-length, two-piece guide rod and bushingless barrel interface make this 1911 the most accurate Browning design mankind can craft. Every single thing about this gun looks and feels perfect. The real magic, however, lives in the grip.
Steel Meets Polymer
Unlike John Browning’s classic, the grip of the Prodigy is a separate polymer component that fastens rigidly into the frame from the bottom. This assembly houses the magazine, incorporates the fire controls and includes the trigger guard. The traditional flat mainspring housing is beautifully checkered. The texturing of the grip feels like mid-grit sandpaper. Wrapping my paws around this rig locks the gun in place like it was bolted there.
The trigger is extended, skeletonized, adjustable for overtravel and beautiful. There is a scant, grit-free take-up followed by a delightfully crisp break. Springfield Armory has been building 1911 triggers since the 1970s. They’ve gotten good at it.
The magazine release is slightly extended for easy purchase. The end result is readily accessible yet discreet. Magazines shoot out of the butt like Aunt Gertrude’s award-winning boiled okra.
The overall personality of the grip is that of a serious polymer combat pistol. The volume fills the hand without being disproportionate. People are bigger now than was the case back in 1911 when John Browning created his masterpiece. Back then, troops complained the trigger reach was excessive. This resulted in the shorter trigger and scalloped frame of the 1911A1 in 1924.
Nowadays, our hands are larger than those of our forebears. I have big simian mitts and the Prodigy fits me perfectly. My bride is a petite rascal and she found the gun to be comfortable as well. There is a modest undercut to help lower the bore axis and enhance control. The polymer frame pitches the center of gravity forward to help minimize muzzle flip. The overall effect is pure unfiltered awesome.
Magnificent Magazines
The original .45 ACP 1911 packed seven rounds in the magazine. Subsequent single-stack 9mm Parabellum versions typically carried nine. So how did the gun-bodging savants at Springfield Armory get three times as much ammo into a handgun of such modest dimensions? My best guess would be they bent spacetime.
Here’s spacetime in a single paragraph: An Einstein-Rosen Bridge is a connection between hypothetical disparate areas of space. It can be modeled as a vacuum solution to the Einstein field equations. These numerical models can be considered an intrinsic part of the maximally extended version of the Schwarzchild metric. This mathematical construct describes an eternal black hole bereft of both charge and rotation. In this case, spacetime should not have any “edges” as we might imagine them. Per this model, it should be possible for a particle to continue its path arbitrarily far into either its future or past, describing any possible trajectory. In spacetime, this might be visualized as a geodesic.
All that sounds tedious and arcane because it is indeed undeniably tedious and arcane. Such brain-bending stuff might make for a fun hobby, but you wouldn’t want to live there. In the case of the Prodigy, the Springfield Armory engineers just seemed to somehow cram insane amounts of ammo into an otherwise pretty normal pistol. I can only presume they somehow warped spacetime to get there.
There are three magazine options available for the Springfield Armory Prodigy. The flush-mounted sorts pack 17 rounds. Slightly extended versions include an oversized base pad assembly that interfaces seamlessly with the grip and carry 20 rounds. The mac daddy extended mags include the same oversized base plate and indeed hold 26 rounds. Each of these magazines is built like a dump truck and remains surprisingly easy to load.
The baseplates include scalloped areas in the extremely unlikely event they ever get sticky. Stiffening ridges pressed into the bodies make them all but indestructible. The mags are finished out in some kind of dull gray. Were I to hazard a guess regarding the finish, I would suppose perhaps hand-rubbed testosterone.
Trigger Time
So how does she run? It’s actually tough to capture in print without retreating to hackneyed terms like epic, awesome and ballin’. I’m told juvenile turkeys will sometimes stare into the sky during their first vigorous rain shower long enough to actually drown. While I’m not technically a turkey, I could stay on the range shooting this gun until I starved to death.
The 9mm is the most popular centerfire cartridge on the planet. It hits hard yet offers modest recoil. However, in tiny little mouse guns, the 9mm can still be a handful. By contrast, I have shot 9mm carbines that seemed to produce more felt recoil than this pistol.
Each round cycles like a sewing machine on quaaludes. The effect is more of a shove than a snap. This is one delightful 1911 platform. The Prodigy grouped like a dream. Break-in took about 50 rounds.
The controls are perfect and the experience sublime. Rapid magazine changes will remind you of how John Browning earned his place atop history’s esteemed pantheon of weapon designers. I’d say something nicer about this gun were I a bit more creative, but this is honestly the best I can do.
What Can You Do With It?
That’s a good question. The Prodigy OSP would be mighty fine company tucked into a nightstand, riding in a glove box, perched on your hip while out in the wilderness or on the competition field. Additionally, I recently read something about Active SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). As part of this program, in 1974, the Aricebo message was transmitted toward globular star cluster M13, some 25,000 light years away. Scientists hoped to make contact with a friendly interstellar civilization and, in so doing, facilitate the greatest discovery in all of human history. Seriously! What were they thinking?
Have those guys never actually seen a science fiction movie? I doubt advanced extraterrestrial intelligence would be any friendlier than we are, and we really suck at being friendly. Second only to our scientists churning out hordes of genetically engineered duck monkeys, reaching out to unknown alien civilizations seems like a really bad idea to me. However, if ever I did have to face down hordes of hungry alien invaders for real, I’d want the Springfield Armory Prodigy OSP 1911 9mm by my side.
As awesome as the Prodigy undeniably is, you need to get into one with your eyes open. This is not a diminutive concealed carry gun. This is a service or competition pistol. Packing this handgun would get old underneath shorts and a T-shirt. However, I can think of nothing better to have strapped to my thigh when the aliens show up peckish after their long trip.
Denouement
I’m saving up for a cool machine gun at present and I really didn’t need to buy another pistol right now. However, after my play date with the Springfield Armory Prodigy, I dutifully retrieved my checkbook. This gun was just too cool to send home. A guy could go broke doing this job.
For more info: Springfield-Armory.com
