That pic you put up, Ian is not the picture I was talking about. In fact, it's probably better than the one I mentioned because that is a photo of the actual prop. I saw what was essentially a screenshot of the plastic pieces on a generic model, only in CAD.
It isn't uncommon for scifi shows to just take regular guns and tack new junk on there. For example, in rayra's giant block of pics, Jayne's pistol is just an old Lemat with a new shinier underslung shotgun barrel and some other junk stuck to it. It's not completely inconceivable that a prop company would just replace the entire outer body of the weapon or just a few parts. The extent of a company's need to change the look of the gun can be seen in something as minor as Han Solo's blaster to Deckard's pistol.
I noticed alot of people mentioned how they didn't like the sound of the guns. Since I know more about scifi than real guns, I always assumed that the firearms of Firefly, in particular Mal's pistol, used some kind of new propellant that brings the bullet to "hyper-velocities" therefore, the change in sound. Then again, in a genre that suffers as tight a budget as scifi, one must suspend their disbelief for the sake of the plot. After all, not everybody can have some pimped out space-age gun.
