Posted on 12/23/2013 8:41:52 AM PST by kronos77
he inventor of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, Mikhail Kalashnikov, has died aged 94, Russian TV reports.
The automatic rifle he designed became one of the world's most familiar and widely used weapons.
Its comparative simplicity made it cheap to manufacture, as well as reliable and easy to maintain.
Although honoured by the state, Kalashnikov made little money from his gun. He once said he would have been better off designing a lawn mower.
Mikhail Kalashnikov was admitted to hospital with internal bleeding in November.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
I'm not so sure Hugo himself had a whole lot to do with the success of the AK. He was one of several German engineers and designers working under Kalashnikoff. His contributions were viewed so highly that his salary was cut twice, while that of other Germans on the team was increased.
He was a sick man for most if not all of this time.
Not saying he wasn't a brilliant man, but he may not have been at his best any longer.
I suspect professional soldiers could win an even-numbers fight over peasants with AKs using a variety of considerably inferior weapons.
Always got a kick out of the TV show Deadliest Warrior. They'd determine which historical warrior was deadlier based on supposedly objective testing of their weapons.
While weapons are important, the warrior is more important, especially when the weapons are more or less comparable. Slight differences in weapon performance aren't likely to be important on the battlefield.
I agree that his salary was cut.
Part of me wants to believe that he was ‘shrugging’ but didn’t want to outright refuse, as that would have led to very harsh punishment.
This is not an area of history I know much about, but I suspect Americans tend to inflate the contribution of Hugo because he is known to us for his work during and between the two wars.
Anonymous other German engineers, well, we’ve never heard of them, so they couldn’t have been very important, could they?
I always thought that Schmeisser invented the assault rifle. And wasn’t he working for the Russians after the war?
If all Schmeisser had done was the Bergmann MP-18 and MP-28, Schmeisser should be well known. The Brits issued a close copy of it known as the Lancaster during WWII, which eventually influenced the Sterling SMG. He was born in 1884, so by 1947 he may have indeed been very old. He died in 1953, about a year after he was released.
Kalashnikov was the public face for the design team, very important to the Soviets in the day, and probably very important to the success of the weapon. He even went to the trouble of hiding his family’s counterrevolutionary past. What else he did for the design team is at this point unknown and unknowable.
His rifle is prolific, not because it is good, but because Soviets didn’t care about market conditions. They produced it at a loss and handed it out to client states for free. Certainly a free AK in your hand is better for you than an M-16 that you can’t get because it it too expensive. Its production numbers are a monument to Soviet bureaucratic stupidity.
It has been Suggested (by Tamara Keel) that Kalashnikov when he gets to Hell should beat up Marx and Lenin until they cough up the royalties he should have gotten.
Of course in Hell they are communists.
Probably more than anyone wants to know about cartridges, with pictures of nearly everything.
I have read that Texas Ranger Frank Hamer was fond of a Remington model 8 with a 15 round mag. If you look at the rifle and it’s available chamberings, it would be a very simple thing to create a modern assault rifle out of it.
The design is over a hundred years old.
I saw a supposedly genuine folding stock for a M1 carbine on eBay the other day, went for $208.00, I would like to have one, but not that bad.
This link works.
Quick,Joe——find a pic of Colt with a can of Colt .45 malt liquor!
Very cool! where’d you get that crystal clear animation?
Someone had it on some web page so I grabbed it. It was too good to let go.
Did Schmeisser Design the Kalashnikov?
If Kalashnikov was a real gun designer, how come in his long career he never invented anything that wasn't based on his "original" system.http://www.guns.com/2012/09/05/hugo-schmeisser-assault-rifle/After WWII, as General Designer of small arms for the Soviet Army, his design subordinates included the Germans Hugo Schmeisser, designer of the StG-44, and Werner Grüner (of MG 42 fame) who was a pioneer in sheet metal embossing technology in the 1950s.
Most Americans, to say nothing of firearms aficionados, are familiar with well-known gun makers such as John Moses Browning and Samuel Colt, yet few gun nuts know the role that Hugo Schmeisser had in firearms development. To put it in perspective, Hugo was to battle carbines and submachine guns, what John Browning was to handguns and machine guns.[snip]
The StG44
By 1942, the German Army, armed largely with bolt-action Mauser rifles, was neck deep in alligators fighting against US troops with semiautomatic M1 Garands and Soviet troops with semiautomatic SVT-40s. This led to a push to go to the next level in firearms development.
The German Army did a study in their recent combat actions and discovered that the majority of firefights they were encountering were in the 50-200 meter range. For this, 9mm submachine guns were inadequate and 8mm Mauser bolt action rifles both too slow, squandering the effectiveness of the long range round. The answer was a rapid-fire weapon that used an Ak-47 vs StG44.intermediate-sized round. Thus began development of the StG44.
If Hugo Schmeisser is thought of as an artist who, instead of paints or clay, molded his artwork from steel, wood, and plastic, then his masterpiece was the StG-44. This design, perfected over two years and numerous prototypes, used metal stampings for ease in mass production. Firing from a 16.5-inch barrel (similar in size to today’s M4), the rifle was only 37-inches long overall. Its 7.92x33mm round is ballistically similar to today’s 7.62x39mm AK round. Being fully automatic, the rifle would fire some 500 rounds per minute at a controllable rate that made short bursts possible for trained soldiers. Once adopted, it was christened the Sturmgewehr (Storm-rifle) and over 400,000 were handed out to German troops in the final days of World War II. Today it is generally thought of as the first successful assault rifle.
to be fair US, UK and German squads had roughly equivalent fire power at the start of the war.
The US squad had the firepower widely distributed, (with one BAR per squad in a fire support fire team and two Thompson SMGs in the scout team, usually attached to the assault fire team for close quarters assault) the German squad had the firepower concentrated (in the MG-34 team). The UK squad had the firepower distribution moderately concentrated.
After the M-2 Carbine or STG-44 was issued, the US and German fire teams were superior.
The Russians had few machine guns, but entire companies with Mosin Nagant rifles vulnerable to close quarters attack with high rate of fire, or companies with Ppsh-41/43s vulnerable to high rate of fire attacks at long range respectively.
Bravery against a bullet is a tough advantage to exploit. Soviets lost over a million 2nd Lieutenants in WWII.
[The AK-47 is best described as a hybrid of previous rifle technology innovations: the trigger mechanism, double locking lugs and unlocking raceway of the M1 Garand/M1 carbine, the safety mechanism of the John Browning designed Remington Model 8 rifle, and the gas system of the Sturmgewehr 44. Kalashnikov’s team had access to all of these weapons and had no need to “reinvent the wheel”, though he denied that his design was based on the German Sturmgewehr 44 assault rifle. Kalashnikov himself observed: “A lot of Russian Army soldiers ask me how one can become a constructor, and how new weaponry is designed. These are very difficult questions. Each designer seems to have his own paths, his own successes and failures. But one thing is clear: before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good appreciation of everything that already exists in this field. I myself have had many experiences confirming this to be so.” There are claims about Kalashnikov copying other designs, like Bulkin’s TKB-415[2] or Simonov’s AVS-31.]
M-1 Garand: 19 rounds to the pound
Might want to check that. Both shot the same ammo, but the Garand ammo was packed eight to an en bloc clip, which added weight. The Springfield had a stripper clip at most.
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