The Small Arms Thread, Part 8: 2018; ICSR to be replaced by US Army with interim 15mm Revolver Cannon.

Alex C. · July 31, 2019

42 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

the control blob

Its a real thing though. Ambi too!

LoooSeR · August 1, 2019

PL-15 and PL-15K from Army 2019

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SVCh-54

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SV-98 modernized

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Sturgeon · August 2, 2019

Looks like they're stepping their game up.

LoooSeR · August 4, 2019

LoooSeR · August 4, 2019

AN-94 with GP

LoooSeR · August 10, 2019

I don't see 60 rounds mags much. SSO guys in recent competition used RPK mags on their AKs. Competition is a tournament among special forces units dedicated to the 45th anniversary of the formation of the Directorate “A” of KGB, now part of TsSN FSB.

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LoooSeR · August 20, 2019

LoooSeR · August 20, 2019

Chinese ‘Chang Feng’ sub-machine gun in Venezuela

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The Chinese Chang Feng CF05 sub-machine gun remains in service with security forces in Venezuela. Perhaps the first appearance of this weapon in the country was during an awards ceremony in November 2017. In July 2018, it was observed during a rehearsal for the Independence Day parade on 5 July.

According to local sources, the weapon is being issued in small numbers to the 509 Special Forces Battalion of the Army, Presidential Honor Guard personnel, and members of the Special Unit for Security and Protection of State Personalities (UESPPE). Taking into account the military units that the weapon has been issued to, it is very likely to be used in a close personal protection (CPP) role. The Chang Feng SMG has been pictured in Venezuelan service without accessories, and in a configuration fitted with the Chinese LLR-2 light/laser module, optical sight, and suppressor.

Alex C. · August 20, 2019

Some more G3 photos:

Cold+war+military+picture+comp+swedish+s

Ag3+norwegian+masterrace+_8aefbf7fce3e0e

norwegian-soldiers-wearing-british-desig

LoooSeR · August 28, 2019

This is pretty well-written aticle about Tigr/SVD type rifles.

https://huntportal.ru/hunting/oruzhie-i-boepripasy/nareznoe-ognestrelnoe-oruzhie/rossiya/tigr-i-realnost

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"Tiger" carbine and reality

Anyone who has read the Russian-language weapons Internet knows that this is not the first decade that a unique type of shooting sport type has been actively developing in the post-Soviet space. The sport consists in buying the "Tiger" carbine and trying to make Wunderwaffe out of it.

Competitions are held in two disciplines: 1) “squeeze 1 minute accuracy” (whatever that means) and 2) “get it to a kilometer”. The first, as a rule, is a painful waste of ammunition until three random holes are close enough to each other. The second, basically, has its roots in the tales of a "friend of a friend," who, "about one and a half kilometers in Afghanistan" shot a valuable part of the body to the evil dushman. Sport is notable for the fact that in both disciplines everyone loses.

Saddened athletes, on the next step, are divided into two camps. The former are calmed down by the conviction that the civilian “Tiger” is only a miserable fake for the legendary Soviet SVD, and if the harsh reality of the “Manual on a small arms” contradicts beliefs, so much the worse for reality. The second ones go on a kind of “crusade” on the Internet, so that everyone who hasn’t hidden can be a subject of a prove that this helpless junk, a SVD, can't hit the wall of the shed (unlike some other Übergewehr).

This music will be eternal.

If you want to guaranteed to shoot a mosquito trunk, you need a barrel 50 mm in diameter. If you want to confidently hammer into human-sized a mile away, you need something of the class .338 Lapua Magnum. No need to try to make a company machine gun out of TOZ-8, no need to complain that the AGS is bad in the role of a sporting small caliber gun. SVD - infantry rifle for shooters at the squad level. Even so: the SVD is an excellent infantry rifle for squad level shooters. It is not wise to expect anything else from her. To make anything else out of it is only to spoil it. However, everything in order.

/.../

But suddenly an unexpected joy happened in a nearby small arms store, and I got hold of a pre-sanction tool of 2014 birth year, an SVDS clone with plastic furniture, a folding buttstock, with a 320 mm rifling. (Authentic instructions that was printed on a toilet paper notebook gave a special joy) The caliber was chosen .308 from selfish motives. Being a ballistic “twin brother” of pre-historic Russian 7.62×54R (generally same bullets, the same speed), 308 in our area has its value and assortment.

Right there, 50 rounds of Lapua 155 grains, 50 rnd Lapua 167 grains, 50 of S&B 147 grains, 600 Lithuanian M80 rounds, one and a half kilograms of N540, a Lapua bullet box, a box of capsules and a Forster matrix set for reloading were stocked up for business. All this - not only to fool around at the village shooting range, but also for the purposes of natural science: to find out what the rifle is really capable of, to find out the advantages and disadvantages and understand what a citizen equipped with excitement, playful hands and technologies of the third millennium can do with this device.

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Contact
The village shooting range in our area is equipped with comfort: the shooter’s position is protected from the weather, at the rifle lines of 300 m there are electronic targets with screens that immediately show the point of impact, an armored room with cartridges, an armored refrigerator with healthy drinks, in a word - all that is needed to worthily meet old age.

It was there that I rushed first thing, squeezing the Tiger in the sweaty palms, barely after wiping the factory grease. The first mag, shot at 300 m from open sights, with the rest in form of a bag, a Sellier & Bellot cartridge of 147 grains, produced the following result (printout from an electronic target).

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The first shot went below: I really did not understand where to aim. The fifth shot - "tore off", an unusual trigger pull. The rest neatly fell into the "four", the diameter of which is 20 cm.

From the first approach to the "sporting equipment", I fell in love with this rifle tenderly. Everything was perfect: natural grip, optimal ergonomics ( and this is without an adjustable body kit!), Balance with the center of gravity exactly in front of the magazine, well-thought-out folding stock system. SVD is made very competently, “by shooters and for shooters”.

The first great experience inspired me extraordinarily, and with enthusiasm I looked into the future. And the future, as it turned out, was hiding, like a Finnish sniper on a tree, pretty bad and nasty surprises for me.

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The second approach
The problems began as soon as the optics appeared. Let's start with the conclusions: lside rails, comrades - is evil. The lever of the force acting during recoil, especially with heavy sights, requires much greater strength and rigidity than any mount on the receiver cover.

In my case, constructive evil was compounded by the neophyte foolishness. Although there was no noticeable play, for about 20–30 rounds [with optics on] light RS Regulate, the Point of Impact (POI) "crawled" anywhere, which in combination with the Tiger's inherent POI creeps (see below) gave very interesting psychological (fierce irritation of shooter) and acoustic (energetic curses in different languages) effects. Having stood in place, the light side rail attachment did not stand for long - died a painful death, warped so that to remove it was necessary to cut the duralumin. Do not be, dear reader, like me, do not hope that the "Kalashoid" side attachment will survive on a rifle for adults. Put sturdy hard crown on the Tiger from the very beginning, it is a huge saving of money, time, ammo and nerves.

For its short (but bright) life, the lightweight rail, however, allowed to make the first estimates of the accuracy of the carbine. The shooting went to 300 m at the target “field V” of 10 points. The choice was due to the similarity to the Soviet target number 4 "chest": the same size of the overall circles and about the same area (2014 and 2025 cm2, respectively). The shooting program is exercise SV-2, a series of 10 lying down with a rest, for 8 minutes and a series of 10 lying down from hands, for 2 minutes. Printouts from electronic targets (Lithuanian standart M80 of the Gamykla brand (or how is it read correctly there?)):

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The result is 156. According to Soviet "prices", if we take into account the "departures" of some shots out of target, not even the third category.

Sellier & Bellot 147 Grain:

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The result is 169, i.e., the first category, even if we take into account the 4th shot that went out of target of the first series.

Lapua 167 Grain:

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The result is 176, i.e., CMS ("Candidate of Master of Sports").

In these funny pictures, we see visual illustrations for the brochure “Tables of firing at ground targets from small arms of caliber 5.45 and 7.62 mm (TS GRAU 55)”, 1977, table 42 “Dispersion characteristics for the Dragunov sniper rifle (SVD) ) ". At 300 m for the “best snipers”, the median deviations in height and lateral are 3.9: 4.2 and 5.7: 6.3 cm, respectively, for the sniper cartridge and standart machine gun round LPS. In other words, 95% should fly into a 26 × 28 cm rectangle for match ammunition (like Lapua), or 38 × 42 cm for machine-gun LPS rounds (pure GGG).

You, dear reader, must be expecting meaningful conclusions from this? Please. To begin with: 20 shots to determine accuracy - that is not a statistics, but a sad joke; in a good way you need to shoot three times more, but it still gives a general idea.

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Conclusion No. 1. The practical accuracy that can be expected from the Tiger with an excellent cartridge is two to two and a half minutes. More precisely, the average value of the maximum spread in a series of 5 shots:

at 300 m: ~ 18 cm,
100 m: ~ 6 cm
~ 2.1 MOA;

in a series of 10 shots:

at 300 m: ~ 23 cm,
100 m: ~ 7.6 cm
~ 2.6 MOA.

I especially draw attention to the word "average."

By the way, about statistics: the passport values of the shooting in a series of 4 absolutely do not say anything about the real accuracy of a particular barrel due to the complete mathematical inconsistency of such measurements. The purpose of the control shooting is to filter out substandard barrels with sufficient statistical certainty, which is not at all the same. Therefore, citizens that are "measuring" with each other by the passport accuracy of their rifles (and sometimes expecting miracles in the target, they say, "Well, at the factory, I’m a could!"), are engaged, in fact, in nonsense and in multiplying of entropy.

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Conclusion No. 2. People who wrote Soviet instructions were smarter than us, with resources immeasurably greater than ours. That is, what is written [in documents] is to be believed, also in terms of the probability of defeat of targets at different distances. And your anticipations should "dance" from that when shooting "far away".

It is worthwhile to speak separately on the definition of "far" in the case of SVD, and more broadly - infantry and sniper rifles of the last century. Competitions for 1000 yards (~ 914 meters) have been held since the 19th century - bullets completely fall into targets of realistic sizes, while maintaining deadly force. At the same time, for example, sniper distances of World War II extremely rarely exceeded 300 meters. The difference between competitions and combat is in the ability of the shooter to more or less accurately determine the distance to the target. As early as 20–25 years ago, compact laser rangefinders, as part of the equipment of a single sniper, were an expensive and impractical toy, and in the 1960s, when SVD was created, it was completely science fiction. According to army research, a well-trained shooter determines the distance "by eye" with an average error of 10-15%. Here is what it gives in practice, in good, but realistic shooting conditions:

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The picture shows the probability of getting a first shot hit at a target 1 m high at different distances from an SVD, with a 95% scattering ellipse, and two hundred "hits" to illustrate.

/.../ If for 300 meters the difference in aim angle is still small and the hit is almost guaranteed, then 600 meters is a realistic limit for effective shooting with an eye-measuring method for determining the distance.

And here we come to the most interesting - pay attention, dear reader, to the green target on the right. The illustration corresponds to firing under the same conditions from the non-existent SVD/2 rifle, with the same ballistics as the SVD, but twice as accurate (which roughly corresponds to the accuracy of an excellent manual reload rifle). The difference in the probability of defeat is less than one and a half percent. Beyond the limits of direct shot distances, errors in preparing the initial data for shooting (in particular, estimating the distance and wind speed) are incomparably more important for hitting a target than the accuracy of a rifle. In other words, the accuracy of the SVD is neither bad nor good, it is sufficient.

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However, times are changing. The reticle PSO-1, revolutionary for its time, includes stadimetric marks that make it possible to estimate the distance to a target of known sizes with much greater accuracy than "by eye". In good conditions, this allowed to “move” the effective firing distance by another hundred meters. And then the laser came. Laser rangefinders and pocket weather stations radically reduce data preparation errors, and - as we all guessed - the role of the rifle’s own accuracy increases accordingly. For example: a sniper equipped with all this gizmos (and who, moreover, was very lucky to estimate the wind speed on the trajectory), will get something like this:

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The double difference in the accuracy of the rifle takes on a slightly greater significance. Nevertheless, in practice, in the tactical niche for which the SVD was created, accuracy of rifle becomes a significant limiting factor only at long distances (from 700 meters) and only under ideal conditions (first of all, accurate knowledge of the distance to the target and an excellent estimate of speed of wind on the trajectory).

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Conclusion No. 3. This accuracy, albeit "sufficient" and expected, is by and large discouraging. For the same V10 from the regular Stgw90, the regular GP90 from the bipod, flies from me at 90–93 out of 100 in a series of 10.

The Tiger carbine, with remarkable, I repeat, ergonomics and with all the potential [regarding] the heavy barrel, should be capable of bigger and better things, reality is strict and stingy with joy. “Sufficient” own accuracy is only the first surprise that awaits us on the difficult path of the “Tiger drivers”.

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A good fellow, but there is a flaw
Getting acquainted with the new rifle, getting used to ergonomics and figuring out what it likes and what doesn't, I drew attention to two unpleasant design features of the SVD.

1) The Tiger carbine is very sensitive to grip. Or rather: the Tiger carbine is INCREDIBLY sensitive to grip. If you take it a little differently, the POI crawles away in a completely unpredictable direction by 20–30 centimeters, which is enough already at 300 m for a bullet to fly out of the "torso". At the same time (here, dear reader, I have to take my word for it), in general, I am trained in the classic shooting, I track my own mistakes with the situation and usually foresee their consequences. In the case of Tiger, there is exceptional capriciousness and unpredictability in this regard. As a result, a certain grip was found far behind, at the base of the magazine, tough enough, not the most natural but repeatable, and i zeroed optics for it.

2) The heating of the barrel responds in the target by the shift of the POI and a noticeable increase in dispersion.

Judging by the Russian Internet, these factors have long been studied, documented and well-known, but being a bore, I will not calm down until I try it myself. In order to exclude all unnecessary variables from the equation, Schmidt & Bender PMII 3–20 × replaced the questinable optics mount of turbid origin and replaced the dubious “Kalashoid” rails with a solidly milled SAG SVD bracket, strong and rigid.

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300 m, Lapua Scenar 167 gr cartridge, ISSF target (ten - 10 cm in diameter, nine - 20, etc.), printout from an electronic target.

The same tight grip behind the handguard at the base of the mag, 3 episodes of 5.

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Change of grip in the middle of the series (took up the middle of the handguard).