Not sure if the instructors at Springfield or Point Harvey were active duty....we were in a don’t ask mode with exceptions of the weapons and munitions, vehicles, radio and gear we were being taught.....
At Aberdeen instructors were in uniform without specific tabs or other ID shy of standard BDU’s and we didn’t care. Weapons I enjoyed and excelled with on the ranges in those courses were the PG-7 series and the SVD/FPK’s..... The FPK especially . That rifle w/o a scope was dead on accurate and instructors kept handing me more ammo and giving me more targets across the long part of the aberdeen range.
The PG-7’s big eye opener was a reversal of everything I had been taught on windage.......:o) Took me one round to go WTF and the rest were easy when the sighting principals were taught. Real quiet, tolerable on that big open ranges and so loud in urban and canyons I thought the damn thing had went off on my shoulder vs downrange !
Big fan of the FPK / SVD series.....
Stay safe Archy !
I can assure you that one guy who taught the 12.7 DShK and NSV MGs and 14.5mm KPV gunnery at Harvey Point was not active duty at the time. The 12.7mm Utjos and 6P50 Kord guns [.50 MG with bipod!] were not available at the time, which sort of broke my heart.
we were in a don’t ask mode with exceptions of the weapons and munitions, vehicles, radio and gear we were being taught....
It was strongly suggested that we pick short last *cover names* and instruction *work names* such as Ward, Davis, etc.- *Smith* and *Jones* were declared no-nos as beiong too obvious, and that we use our middle names as our first, in my case,*James.* So for a last name, I thought I'd follow their *short 4-letter name* suggestion, and I tried for *Kirk.* Middle initial *T....*
At Aberdeen instructors were in uniform without specific tabs or other ID shy of standard BDU’s and we didn’t care. Weapons I enjoyed and excelled with on the ranges in those courses were the PG-7 series and the SVD/FPK’s..... The FPK especially . That rifle w/o a scope was dead on accurate and instructors kept handing me more ammo and giving me more targets across the long part of the aberdeen range.
The *FPK* designation was a misnomer from a bad translation made from Romanian to Russian to English, though you still hear it in Army and spooky corners here and there from time to time and the folks at Tennessee Guns used the FPK moniker as the designation for their guns built up from new-manufactured receivers and PSL parts kits; the Romanians call the things Romanian PSL, the 4x scope the LPS. The two PSL rifles that I've wrung out extensively [over 2000 rounds each] were about as accurate as a good M1 Garand, and I like good Garands. I was less thrilled about the 4x scope, which may not have been optimized for the 7,62x54r 151-grain 7N14 sniper ammunition. The quick and dirty solution was to use the iron sights, as you describe, but my longer-term solution was to replace the LPS with a PSO 8x42D. Much nicer! And with Finnish Lapua 7,62x53R ammo with the 148gr D-47 bullet, they shoot even better, though I try to save that stuff for my Finnish boltguns.
The PG-7’s big eye opener was a reversal of everything I had been taught on windage.......:o)
Yeah, leading the target to account for a tailwind on the target seems...wrong. The same was true with the OG15V HE-Frag round used by the 73 mm smoothbore gun-launcher on the BMD/BMP tracked infantry vevicles and some BTP wheelies.
Took me one round to go WTF and the rest were easy when the sighting principals were taught. Real quiet, tolerable on that big open ranges and so loud in urban and canyons I thought the damn thing had went off on my shoulder vs downrange !
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, we suspended familiarization firing of PG-7 grenades for US troops, then mostly headed for Egypt for the annual Bright Star exercises with the Egyptians, after a couple of detonation-on-firing incidents, fatal for the firers. So sometimes they do go off on the firer's shoulder vs downrange....
Big fan of the FPK / SVD series.....
Me too. Pretty much uniformly good shooters, and available for under a grand or so.
Stay safe Archy !
Hold my beer, and watch this!
