Wow thanks for the tut respawnrt it helped me a lot! I applied the same principle to the ammo cylinder and flattened certain areas to match the reference and got some waffle-y looking shading around the front rim but after pushing around some verts to smooth it a bit I think it's looking a lot better And here's the back…
Yup, end result is gunna be a FPS game res model with normal maps baked onto it I tried rounding out the base of the barrel where you can see the wireframe is a bit jagged, didn't really work though. I'm thinking I might be able to make it show with more edge loops down the length of the barrel? To have more verts to push…