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 knew ya could do it!
I still have a box of phone books (remember them?) in the basement for a pellet gun backstop.
I had a 225 slant six in a Plymouth Satellite wagon that was my first car. It was great for loading up with motorcycle gear and towing dirt bikes. Really smooth engine.
It is being reported that Kalashnikov has actually been brought back to life. They skipped the casket, buried him in dirt, left him a while, and then dug him back up, brushed him off, cleaned him up a little and he came back to life and was working fine.
WWI .30/06 round was 174 grains bullet.
WWII .30/06 round was 150 grains bullet.
There were two attempts to convert to 150 grain bullet, the first failed, because many officers and men recalled the usefulness of long range machine gun fire. The second one failed, as there were fewer old officers and men around, and as the fact that the 174 grain round overshot ranges was more important. In WWI heavy machine gun training was mostly conducted in Europe.
oops, should be ‘the second one succeeded. ‘
Germans also did a study, to see what caliber and velocity round is necessary to make a man die quickly.
They took prisoners out of concentration camps and shot them, and measured the time for them to die. The results had a range, based on where the victim was shot. They determined that 7mm and 2400 fps were the smallest round that had rapid effects. The 7x33 kurz round was developed, in part based on that study.
They changed to 7.92x33 because they made their bullets out of lead wire, and changing the caliber would have slowed production in the middle of the war.
Here is a question: Can you trust people willing to commit mass murder to do good science? If they were a little ethical, they would have done the minimum murders necessary to keep their own heads off the block, and lied as much as possible in their reports.
By comparison, in America, Thompson went to the stockyards to shoot cattle to examine the effectiveness of various pistol bullets. Candidates were the .38, .30 Mauser, and .45 Colt. Again, the range of results was wide, and Thompson got tired of it within a few days. He recommended the .45 caliber round, but that didn’t seem to be justified by the experimental results.
One of the stopping power enthusiasts reported a French study the “Strasbourg Goat” test. It was widely debunked, as it did not show the wide range of results that would be expected from shooting bullets into a complex target. What it did show is the lovely straight lines and good ‘R’ values that would be expected if someone with a bias was to synthesize their data.
Would love to have a 20 gauge Saiga, but my personally modified semi-auto 20 gauge, with extended magazine tube suits me currently. Mag holds seven, I have seven on the side of the collapsible stock and seven on the chamber housing.
Case in point: the M14E2 or M14A1 is the selective fire M14 dressed for the automatic rifle role (suppressive fire). To do this, the M14 had its selector lock removed and replaced by a selector switch, a new stock with a pistol grip, hinged butt plate fitted, a folding front grip added, and a muzzle compensator slid over the flash suppressor. The setup was similar to the old M1918A2 BAR of WW2 and Korea, but slightly lighter. In trials against the belt fed M60 GPMG, the M14E2 or M14A1 could not compete for sustained fire or accuracy. And so these automatic rifles were reconfigured to standard M14’s with their selectors locked.
If you are going to suppress the enemy, then you need a good belt fed machine gun with quick change barrel capability. The M60/M240 or Mk 48 Mod 0/1 work well in this role. If you want any kind of control with a 7.62 NATO caliber rifle in full auto, that means a beast approaching 15 pounds or more. But, the draw backs are that its magazines of 20 or 30 rounds limit it (frequent changes) and it overheats. In 7.62 NATO caliber machine guns or rifles, there is no free lunch.
To be full auto controllable in 7.62 NATO = gun of about 18.5-27.5 pounds, belt fed, and with a quick change barrel. Automatic rifles that are merely infantry rifles in 7.62 NATO with a selector switch are not controllable or accurate in full auto.
Case in point: the M14E2 or M14A1 is the selective fire M14 dressed for the automatic rifle role (suppressive fire). To do this, the M14 had its selector lock removed and replaced by a selector switch, a new stock with a pistol grip, hinged butt plate fitted, a folding front grip added, and a muzzle compensator slid over the flash suppressor. The setup was similar to the old M1918A2 BAR of WW2 and Korea, but slightly lighter. In trials against the belt fed M60 GPMG, the M14E2 or M14A1 could not compete for sustained fire or accuracy. And so these automatic rifles were reconfigured to standard M14’s with their selectors locked.
If you are going to suppress the enemy, then you need a good belt fed machine gun with quick change barrel capability. The M60/M240 or Mk 48 Mod 0/1 work well in this role. If you want any kind of control with a 7.62 NATO caliber rifle in full auto, that means a beast approaching 15 pounds or more. But, the draw backs are that its magazines of 20 or 30 rounds limit it (frequent changes) and it overheats. In 7.62 NATO caliber machine guns or rifles, there is no free lunch.
To be full auto controllable in 7.62 NATO = gun of about 18.5-27.5 pounds, belt fed, and with a quick change barrel. Automatic rifles that are merely infantry rifles in 7.62 NATO with a selector switch are not controllable or accurate in full auto.
As far as the many bullets....I agree. The general rule is to double tap. The problem we faced was re-supply. We would find ourselves in the thick and unable to get resupply - so we had to make it count.
Haji was often doped up....it would sometimes take quite a few 5.56 to drop him. The larger calibers seemed to work better as they made bigger holes.
While Hugo was at Izhevsk, Mikhail designed the AK at Kovrov. Little or nothing of the AK was similar to German weapons. Hugo probably helped with the metal stamping process. How do you know that Hugo (and other Germans) did indeed work under Mikhail?
I don’t. That was a response to someone else who claimed that he had. At the time I assumed he knew what he was talking about.
Good for you. Bigger holes are a good thing, but that can be obtained by bigger, heavier solid bullets, or by frangible bullets at higher velocity. The M-855 bullet turns sideways a bit slower than the M193 bullet, and on a thin target (as in Somalia, they called the locals ‘skinnys’) that best effect may be beyond where their meat is. The less dense nature of lungs also reduces the turning force on the bullet.
Double tap was invented with the idea that each bullet has about a .9 effectiveness. hit with 2 and you get .99.
If your effectiveness for one bullet is about .5, then two gives you .75, and three gives you 0.875- to get a standard effectiveness of 0.99 with a .5 prob bullet you need in excess of 6 bullets.
Soviet tactics were to use 7 to 11 round bursts with the AK, because they expected that most rounds would miss at combat distances. They used more bullets to fill in the empty space, recognizing that near misses tend to suppress rational enemies. If you had an irrational enemy (hadji) who really thought that Allah would protect him, or would permit him to die a forgiven jihadi at Allah’s good time, then suppression doesn’t really work. On the other hand, similar beliefs tend to work against marksmanship skills if Allah is thought to guide the bullet.
An enemy who fires 30 rounds in your direction, hitting with 2 with one killed and one wounded will normally be thought to be very effective. By contrast, a US soldier who fires 8 bullets, hitting with 7 and killing 2 is thought to be ineffective. That is just the nature of human psychology.
I think there are other ways to obtain control with automatic weapons than merely adding weight to the gun.
The BAR was 19 or so pounds, and had the reputation of being too accurate with automatic fire from the bipod. Its slow rate of fire, and the bipod location on the end of the barrel tended to reduce the error induced by fire.
The WWI 8mm Lebel chauchat had a very low rate of fire, and its long recoil system spread recoil force over the entire operating cycle. A properly designed long recoil system with a low rate of fire can have the ability to suppress with good accuracy, so long as there is no time for an enemy to pop up and shoot between bullets. The .30/06 Chauchat didn’t work. There was a reason why the 8mm Chauchat was the most produced MG of the war, and served afterwards in the ‘Pygmy Wars’ that occurred after WWI was over. Because of its low rate of fire, it didn’t overheat very quickly, though it would overheat.
Suppression occurs in part in the mind of the opponent. You can’t suppress a lion, nor a committed jihadi. Better for each to give them multiple solid hits that diminish their ability to perform combat.
In his book “The Gun” CJ Chiver asserts that
(1)Schmeisser was part of the team where the AK was first mass produced, Page 152.
(2) Kalashnikov’s design team tinkered with variations of Schmeisser’s trigger Page 192
(3) Schmeisser was in Izhevsk after the war, was familiar with the difficult path from prototype to production, having gone through many redesigns with his Stg-44.Page 207
(4) “The original AK-47 did not lend itself to available Soviet manufacturing processes” page 208.
(5) “What is uncontested is that Kalashnikov’s original design was phased out.” Page 209
(6) Note 16, personal contact from a biographer of Schmeisser in Germany, notes that what Schmeisser did in Izhevsk is still kept secret by Russia. P. 433
If a semiautomatic rifle has a failure of the components that prevent slam firing you have an automatic weapon. The select fire mechanism merely induces such a ‘failure’ on purpose.
today the requirement is to make inducing such a ‘failure’ complex enough to make the BATFE happy.
So much for ‘shall not be infringed’.
(1)Schmeisser was part of the team where the AK was first mass produced, Page 152.
(3) Schmeisser was in Izhevsk after the war, was familiar with the difficult path from prototype to production, having gone through many redesigns with his Stg-44.Page 207
Kalashnikov supposedly designed the AK in Kovrov.
(2) Kalashnikov’s design team tinkered with variations of Schmeisser’s trigger Page 192
The AK’s trigger is similar to that of the Garand, Chivers’ admitted it. The late Pete T. Kekkonen stated that it was derived from that of the Browning Auto-5 shotgun.
(5) “What is uncontested is that Kalashnikov’s original design was phased out.” Page 209
Many people believe that much of the AK-47 borrowed from a rival design by BUlkin.
(6) Note 16, personal contact from a biographer of Schmeisser in Germany, notes that what Schmeisser did in Izhevsk is still kept secret by Russia. P. 433
Still, nothing I’m aware of indicates that Hugo Schmeisser had anything to do with the AK. It’s development history is easily traceable. It starts with Kalashnikov’s own semi-auto carbine prototype of 1944, then there are two AK-46s, being derived from it. Then there is AK-47, which was combination of Kalashnikov’s bolt - bolt carrier cooperation (clearly inspired by the Garand and M1 Carbine) and main features taken from Bulkin’s AB-46 assault rifle, including some virtually identical parts, like mainspring guide and receiver cover (Kalashnikov had support of influential group in military-industrial complex and had access to competitiors work...). On of three AK-48 subvariants was what was adopted as AK and AK-49 was prototype of later AK with milled receiver.
I have heard that Herr Schmeisser was actually sick much of the time, so i don’t know how much he could have contributed in general.
(5) “What is uncontested is that Kalashnikov’s original design was phased out.” Page 209
I think they were talking about the AK-47 Type 1-the version with the stamped receiver.
The standard select fire FN FAL or M14 weighs in at 12 lbs and can't hit the broadside of a barn on full auto. The US Army spent millions of dollars in the late 1940s and early 1950s trying to prove it could and the laws of physic proved them wrong.
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