I've been planning/scheming/rationalizing a build like this; talked to Jerry at Mystic about ordering the shortie barrel, had both a 783 and a Savage action, a couple of stock choices, etc. all figured out. I've had a 14-inch barreled .308 Encore in the past, and it was cool and fun and...loud. Really loud. Really, really loud. The concussion and the muzzle flash didn't give me pause...actually added to the fun...but the sheer sound volume got real old, real fast. Then, after I played around a bit with the 16.5-inch barreled 783 that was to be the donor, I pretty much decided that 16.5 inches was plenty short enough for my purposes.
The 16.5 barrel is threaded, and I picked up a two-piece brake/blast shield off the EE to try. Just put a few rounds through it this afternoon. and although the gadget works as advertised in terms of re-directing the muzzle blast forwards, it does pretty much nothing discernible in terms of recoil reduction. No fancy-shmancy measurement devices, just watched the sight picture carefully while shooting. The unbraked rifle and the braked/shrouded rifle both seem to jump pretty much the same amount, give or take. So...I get the ballistics of a 16.5-inch barrel...the physical length of an 18.5-inch tube...the muzzle blast (guesstimate) of the longer tube...a weight that exceeds either one of those options (the brake is a Stinger and it's a heavy hunk of steel to hang on this relatively lightweight rifle)...and the weight is poorly balanced to boot.
All these negatives will probably be even more evident with a 10- or 12-inch barrel. In exchange for these concessions, I am getting...what, exactly? Oh, yeah, it's cool. Or, at least, it will look kinda cool if I put it into a chassis like the Remington factory offering. It better look pretty dang cool considering all the negatives piling up here, and maybe some folks will think the cool is enough. Personally, I am an admirer of guns that are shot just for the fun of shooting, but I just don't think that a porky, ballistically-challenged, loud-mouthed little rifle can ever look cool enough to be worth building/owning. Much better to have a buddy do the work and spend the money, so that I can quickly scratch the itch and then move on without commitment.