Russian Assault Rifles/Carbines/Machine Guns Thread: #1

Actually, yes. If your goal is to design a suppressed heavy body armor
penetrator that can be used by your Special Forces, than it damn well
better penetrate the best vests that everyone uses.

You seem to be missing an important factor... these weapons have to be quiet... they are suppressed sniper rifles that can handle most targets out to extended ranges.
They can defeat the heaviest body armour by aiming for the legs or face... a 50 cal bullet though thigh is lethal fairly quickly without medical attention if it hits the main artery there.
I would also point out that the heaviest body armour is actually very heavy and generally only offers full protection to the chest area so a shot to the side or gut will still likely penetrate.

AFAIK, people who do buy body armor either purchase NIJ class IIIA (good
for shotgun and pistols) or NIJ class IV (good for 7.62 AP sniper
rounds). For the former you can use the VSK but for the latter the VSSK
won't cut it.

In which case a 50 cal sniper rifle that uses full power ammo like the OSN-96 would be used in that unlikely event.

And really, if your solution is to use a TGB-7V v.s. "heavy body armor" than why even develop the VSSK?

Sure, you don't understand the concept of using the tools you have... I am sure western special forces will see the enemy guards have heavy body armour and realise their VSSKs wont penetrate so they will just give up and go home without trying anything else.
Russian special forces on the other hand will want to get the job done even if it means they have to sneak right up and use a knife to cut the guards throat.... or if they can't get that close because of open terrain batter them to death with a HE rocket.

IMO, instead of developing a 30 mm round for sniper rifles, Russia
should just develop sabot penetrators for smaller calibers, like the
12.7 mm SLAP or the 25 mm APDS that we have, which can both penetrate
MRAPs as they are.

They already have SLAP type rounds according to western experts I respect. And the 30mm round is their standard 30mm round... not a new development, so in that sense they are basically using a 25mm portable gun... except their gun is rather more powerful and carries a more significant HE payload.
The development of this new gun I suspect will result in an APHE round being developed because the effect of a single shot Sabot round would be pretty weak unless you are actually targeting the driver or a specific location of the target like the engine. An APHE round would be much more effective at injuring or killing the occupants of light armoured vehicles in a package that is light and portable for special forces. The same ammo is used by all branches of the Russian military so ammo resupply should not be a problem.

GarryB wrote:The VKS (VSSK) was developed for the FSB, not the Russian Military and its purpose was to defeat targets in cars or those wearing body armour.

According to this page:

http://world.guns.ru/sniper/large-caliber-sniper-rifles/rus/vks-vssk-vychlop-e.html

Particularly this:

High penetration bullet can defeat Russian Class 5 (US NIJ Type III /
High-Powered Rifle) body armor at 100 meters or 16mm steel plate at 200
meters.

It meets the requirements set for it.

That'd blow the Special unit's cover.

Or they can take head shots...

Of course, the Russians always try to be cinematic but perhaps they've
missed the idea if their gun designers wanted a suppressed heavy armor
penetrator that doesn't actually penetrate the armor people actually
wear.

And how many people actually wear body armour capable of stopping 7.62mm armour piercing ammo on a regular basis?

It'd be smarter to actually make a suppressed gun/ammo that can
penetrate said armor while still maintaining the suppressed factor in
it, instead of just being all gung ho and blowing shit up.

Of course. They turn up to the target area and see the targets are all sitting in M1 Abrams tanks so they quickly increase the bullet mass of the rounds in their guns and fire quietly.

If for some reason the VKS rounds are not penetrating then the people not being killed will likely be shouting that there is an attack under way... in such a situation being quiet is no longer a problem is it and a single quite loud shot from a 50 cal rifle firing supersonic AP ammo suddenly makes sense... because if you can't be quiet you can over power them with heavy fire power.

No, they don't. AFAIK, the only Russian small caliber that has a sabot
is the 30 mm variant. I am talking 12.7 mm - 25 mm calibers.

You believe that do you?

So they will make a 12.7 x 54mm round especially for special forces use to take down targets with body armour, and they will develop and issue a 9 x 39mm round and assault and sniper rifles to fire it for recon units within motor rifle units, but they wont develop a simple round similar to the 50 cal SLAP round...

Again I say it is interesting that you think that.

For example, the .50 SLAP that we have can penetrate over 34 mm of steel
at 500 m, which is slightly more than the 14.5x114 mm B-32 API round
can penetrate at 500 m.

And a Russian 50 cal SLAP round has similar performance because it is a very similar round, but imagine the performance of a 14.5mm SLAP round...

In fact, the 25 mm M919 APDS round can penetrate more than the 30x165 mm
APDS round that the Russians use, 62 mm compared to 50 mm at 1.5 km.

Would be amused to see where you got those figures from. The 25 x 137 is hardly the biggest cannon round around... especially compared with the 30 x 165 Russian round.

Hell, I wouldn't mind seeing a 14.5 mm HMG rolling around spraying tungsten penetrators.

SLAP rounds don't make sense with machine guns... a SLAP round has high velocity and low drag so there is little point firing it out of the same tube you are also firing ball and HE rounds out of because no two shots would land in the same firing range...

...I'm not talking about meeting the Designer's requirements, I'm talking about meeting real life requirements. Like I've said, you're seldom to find a guy wearing anything other than a NIJ class IIIA or NIJ class IV vest/plate out there. The VSSK therefore, will usually fail to do it's role.

It is a sniper rifle for cops they will rarely shoot military personel and they will never shoot at more than 300m or so.

For this role the VSSK is fine.

So the question goes down to, "If I design a gun that can't penetrate that guy's armor, why make the gun at all?" Not to mention that the VSSK is not special purpose because it can do headshots, which most guns can anyways.

Its primary use will be chest shots against criminals but the guy shooting is hardly a moron. The heavier body armour is bulky and can't be hidden under normal clothes so a civilian in normal clothes will be shot in the chest. A civilian with heavy body armour will be shot in the head or perhaps the gut where there will be less protection even on the heaviest body armour.

Every competent professional army's infantryman does.

Why would FSB be shooting army personnel?

The point of the VSSK is supposed to allow a quiet entry into some compound while dealing with Heavy-body armor equipped soldiers.

No it isn't. It is for FSB and police use against crime gangs running drugs or some such thing. Some have started using light body armour under their civilian clothes so the FSB asked for a heavy quiet weapon to take down purps that are wearing body armour.

Well, do they? Prove to me they do, pictures, text, links etc. Until then they don't.

China makes HEI and APDS-T loadings for the 14.5mm. The designation for the latter is DGJ-02 and it fires a tungsten-cored 43.9g projectile at 1,250 m/s (the .50 SLAP tracer fires a 26.9g proj at 1,173 m/s).

Tony Williams: post #38 on this thread: http://russiadefence.forumotion.com/post?t=870&mode=reply

That's what I'm saying, Russia needs SLAP rounds! Of course, they haven't got that far yet in their thinking.

You admit that US 50 cal SLAP rounds provide only slightly better AP performance at 500m than the existing 14.5mm AP round.
Why exactly does it need a SLAP round again?

Second... as I said SLAP rounds are small calibre high velocity rounds with completely different trajectories than standard velocity standard drag rounds.

The KPV HMG is a belt fed weapon... if you mix SLAP rounds with standard rounds how do you zero the gun? If you zero to the standard rounds the SLAP rounds will miss and vice versa. The KPV has an effective AP round and an effective HE round already... there is no advantage to firing a SLAP round with it except for very specialist uses.

You don't know what a APFSDS DU can do then.

I know exactly what nuclear waste can do, I also know that if you need more penetration from a weapon rather than scatter nuclear waste on the battlefield it makes rather more sense to go in calibre instead.

In the 1990s the Russians are known to have tested a new 45mm calibre weapon and it has also been revealed that a 57mm round is being worked on for BMP use.

Might come as a shock to you but the vast majority of battlefield targets are better dealt with using HE than with AP ammo... and that will not change any time soon.

BTW listed armour penetration figures are like AAM missile range figures... there are plenty of factors that will effect performance in the real world.

It makes sense for penetrating light vehicles or light armor. There were exactually many penetrations recorded by 12.7 mm SLAP rounds used during the Gulf Wars v.s. ancient Soviet tanks.

Do you think those penetrations were from machineguns or from 50 cal rifles?
Current standard in service Russian APCs include the BTR-80 and BTR-80A which are armed with 14.5mm and 30mm calibre weapons respectively. Most 12.7mm HMGs are air protection weapons mounted on the turrets of tanks.

The SLAPs I have read about in 12.7 x 108mm will be used from 12.7mm calibre rifles and will likely be directed at weak spots on armoured vehicles. Firing them from machineguns only makes sense if that is the only ammo being fired from that machinegun due to ballistic matching issues.

Very simply you fire a belt of ball, AP, and HE rounds at a target at 1,000m and they will all strike the target area around the same point. Add SLAP ammo to the belt and the ball and AP and HE rounds will strike around the same point at 1,000m and the high velocity low drag SLAP round will strike about 50 metres high and miss the target area completely.
Firing it with all SLAP rounds doesn't make sense because for non armoured targets SLAP rounds are not particularly effective and for most targets the standard rounds are already good enough.

From a Russian perspective if you want SLAP performance in an MG use a 14.5mm gun.
If you want to exploit weak spots on an armoured vehicle then a Slap round through a rifle makes more sense... and according to Anthony Williams the Chinese make 14.5mm SLAP rounds... I remember reading in Rapid Fire somewhere that they make SLAP type rounds for their rifles in 12.7mm calibre.

As I have said SLAP rounds for russian 12.7mm MGs doesn't make sense because most are for infantry support or mounted on tanks... if enemy armour is a problem the 125mm gun or RPGs of an enormous range of types makes more sense than a round with a completely different zero. With a rifle you can have a seperate setting for a SLAP round... so they have a 12.7mm Slap round.

GarryB wrote:I have posted this before, but this version has English subtitles:



Will this be the new rifle of the Russian federation?

The AK-200 will have to be pretty good to beat this.