“Each of them had a weapon in the form of a short automatic rifle with a disc in the middle.
Gusev, frowning, stood near the apparatus. Holding his hand on the Mauser, he watched as the Martians lined up in two rows. Their guns lay with their muzzle on their bent arm.
- Weapons, bastards, as women hold, - he grumbled.
A. N. Tolstoy. Aelita
People and weapons. It just so happened on our planet that weapons accompany us everywhere and everywhere, and even an inveterate pacifist, who never held it in his hands, still at least once, but saw him in the movies. And if he doesn't watch a movie like that, then he went to school, read children's books, and there weapons are mentioned even in children's poems. In a word, we have it everywhere: in poetry, and in prose, and on TV, and on training grounds, and in battles.
Moreover, very often in the same literature, the authors of works, describing the weapons of their heroes, sometimes make interesting finds, perhaps by accident, and maybe on purpose. One of the first on this path we will meet Alexei Tolstoy, who back in 1922 wrote his famous novel Aelita and after that became the father of new Soviet science fiction. Already in 1924, the novel was filmed and, although this film adaptation was too free, it is nevertheless very interesting in its own way and also fell into the category of classics of young Soviet cinema.
It is hardly worth retelling the plot of the novel here. For me personally, it was important that I met him a very long time ago, almost in elementary school, knew him by heart, and subsequently made even a diorama with an egg-shaped apparatus on the sandy surface of Mars and figurines of the engineer Elk, the Red Army soldier Gusev and red cacti on a scale of 1: 72. Everything is exactly like on the cover of the book I had then.
In the novel, I was attracted by the description of the weapon of the Martians: "… a short automatic rifle with a disc in the middle." And, it turns out, not only me alone. Recently I have come across a note about this on Yandex. Dzen. Typical truncated delivery style, but curious. It is curious that the local author drew attention to such a small fact as the phrase “disc in the middle”. Actually, this is the main detail in the description of the Martian automaton. This is a short gun, which "bastards Martians" hold "like women", that is, putting the barrel on a bent left hand without holding the forend. Its caliber was also small, since the metal door that Gusev carried during the uprising, hiding behind it like a shield, the bullets of these guns did not pierce.
The first thing that came to mind of the "Zenist" was to compare the described "Martian machine gun" with the Degtyarev submachine gun, created by that in 1929. It had a perforated barrel casing, a handle for easy holding from the bottom and a disc magazine mounted on top of the receiver. The receiver was similar to the DP machine gun box. The bolt handle with the classic ball at the end (drilled for relief) was on the right. The stock and butt are made of wood. The submachine gun was equipped with a fire translator, and could fire both single shots and bursts. Moreover, the fuse and the translator were separate parts and were located on different sides of the receiver. The aiming bar, combined with the magazine receiver, was designed for shooting up to 200 m.
The rate of fire was very high - 1000 rounds per minute. But different sources write about the capacity of the store in different ways, you can find both 22 cartridges and 44. For a disk magazine, of course, it is not enough, especially with such a rate of fire.
But this is where the first contradiction arises. The eye sees what it sees, while what it sees for the first time marks it in detail. And looking at this machine, the first thing we would have noticed is exactly this: "with a store on top." Above, but not in the middle, as it is written in Tolstoy's novel! And in the same way, PPD and PPSh are not suitable for the "Martian machine gun" - their shops are located at the bottom. Yes, maybe they are just in the middle, but from below, and the shop of the Degtyarevsky PP is clearly from above. Here is such a "trifle", but look what an interesting riddle the author put before us: how to arrange the magazine on a submachine gun so that it looks purely visually on it exactly "in the middle" and at the same time works.
First, I remember that a long time ago it occurred to me: the magazine for this machine, of course, must be round, disc, and put on it from the barrel, for which it must have a central hole. And so that it, protruding beyond the dimensions of the barrel, does not interfere with aiming, all the sights are mounted on it along the receiver. I hadn’t seen the M16 rifle and its scope combined with a carrying handle at that time, otherwise, perhaps, I would have tried to make myself such a "Martian machine gun" for playing the war, taking as a store a large jar of pickled herring - would have come out very cool for sure. But time passed, the past was almost forgotten, but I read the specified material, and immediately everything was remembered, as if it were yesterday. And I thought: what would a machine gun look like for Aelita, if we were to film this film today? So that he could both shoot and reflect the culture of the Martians - all sorts of their favorite spirals, described in the novel by A. Tolstoy.
Let's start with the main thing - the barrel, receiver, butt. Everything is simple here, there is nothing to be wise: the casing is round in cross-section, like that of the PPD, there are many perforated holes, a tube-shaped receiver with a bolt handle on the right or left, and a classic rifle-shaped buttstock, because nothing was invented better. There is an illustration from one of the later editions of "Aelita", which shows a Martian with this "gun", equipped with a magazine like PPD / PPSh, and a pipe butt. Well, in principle, you can put such a butt on our weapon, why not?
But, of course, the store will become the highlight of the whole structure. It is in the form of a through disk with a sufficiently large diameter so that you can look through it and aim through it. Nothing prevents this. To provide him with a rigid mount on the machine gun, there are three U-shaped stops, one of which is a U-shaped magazine receiver with a latch, and the other two are located - one on the bottom handle, which provides the shooter with a comfortable holding of the weapon, and the other on the right on the additional a grip that, say, a left-handed Martian could use when shooting, if they have one. Moreover, it can be made folding so that in the stowed position it does not interfere with the arrow. Inside the store there is a spiral "branch" through which the cartridges are fed, and which just enters the neck of the receiver.
A sufficiently large radius of the magazine allows you to conveniently place cartridges inside it in a checkerboard pattern, that is, to increase its capacity, and to ensure their reliable feed, since inside such a "snail" the feeder spring will work in the best possible way. Snail stores began to be installed on Parabellum pistols during the First World War. They held 32 cartridges, but the spring had to go through a special bend, which, of course, did not add to the reliability of the feed. The first "real", so to speak, MR-18 submachine gun was subsequently equipped with such a snail magazine. However, he "did not go further", and precisely because of its low reliability.
Well, in our Martian submachine gun, the spring will be very comfortable, so delays due to its fault on it can be completely eliminated. For convenience, the magazine lock control key can be placed in the back of the receiver under the thumb of the right hand. Well, the magazine is removed and put on through the barrel with the left hand, while the right submachine gun would be held by the neck of the butt. The back wall can be made of transparent plastic, which would make it possible to visually control the consumption of cartridges, which in such a store, and even a small "Martian caliber", could be more than a hundred …
One can argue, of course, that with such a store, the dimensions of the weapon increase significantly. But the Martian soldiers were firing from such "guns" over the sides of their flying ships, so it wouldn't hurt them too much!
And it seems to me personally that we have got a good gymnastics for the mind, besides, suddenly some of our director is really captivated by both the beautiful Aelita and … our machine gun! And he will finally make a feature film worthy of modern technologies based on this novel.
