In the summer of 1942, in the village of Bilimbay, a group of engineers from an aircraft factory evacuated from Moscow tried (privately) to find a means of significantly increasing muzzle velocities and, consequently, armor-piercing of bullets and shells.
These engineers graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, had a satisfactory knowledge of mathematics and mechanics, but in the field of firearms they were, to put it mildly, amateurs. Probably, this is why they came up with a weapon "firing kerosene" because a decent artilleryman, tell him this, would then only cause a smile.
First, the well-known scheme of an electric gun in the form of two solenoids, a fixed part - the barrel - and a movable part - a projectile was subjected to calculations. The required power turned out to be such that the size and weight of the capacitor grew unacceptably. The idea of an electric gun was rejected.
Then one of these engineers, who had previously worked in a jet research institute in S. P. Korolev's group on gunpowder cruise missiles and knew about the regressiveness of the pressure curve of powder gases in the rocket chamber and the bore of the weapon (at the RNII he sometimes leafed through Serebryakov's "Internal Ballistics"), proposed to design a gun loaded with conventional gunpowder, but with a charge distributed along the bore in separate chambers communicating with the channel. It was assumed that as the projectile moves along the barrel, the charges in the chambers will alternately ignite and maintain the pressure in the projectile space at an approximately constant level. This was to increase the work of the propellant gases and increase the muzzle velocity at a constant barrel length and maximum allowable pressure in it.
It turned out to be cumbersome, inconvenient in operation, dangerous, etc., as a result of which the circuit was also rejected. After the war, in some magazine or newspaper there was a photograph of such a gun, created by the Germans and, apparently, also rejected.
Our efforts ran into a dead end, but chance came to the rescue. Once on the shore of the factory pond, a liquid-propellant rocket engine, tested at a neighboring plant, by chief designer Viktor Fedorovich Bolkhovitinov, where the BI-1, the first fighter in the USSR with a rocket engine, was being created, rumbled.
The roar of the RD led us to the idea of using liquid-propellant rockets instead of gunpowder in a firearm, continuously injecting it into the projectile space during the entire duration of the shot.
The idea of "liquid gunpowder" attracted inventors also by the fact that the specific energy intensity of known liquid mixtures, say kerosene with nitric acid, significantly exceeded the energy intensity of gunpowder.
There was a problem of injecting liquid into a space where the pressure reached several thousand atmospheres. The memory helped out. Once one of us read a book by P. W. Bridgman's "high pressure physics", which describes devices for experiments with liquids under pressure in tens and even hundreds of thousands of atmospheres. Using some of Bridgman's ideas, we came up with a scheme for supplying liquid fuel to a high pressure area by the force of this very pressure.
Having found schematic solutions to the main issues, we proceeded to design liquid weapons (unfortunately, immediately automatic) for the finished barrel of the degtyarevsky anti-tank rifle of 14.5 mm caliber. We carried out detailed calculations, in which invaluable help was provided by my now deceased comrade in the RNII, a prominent scientist-engineer Yevgeny Sergeevich Shchetinkoe, who then worked at the Vf Bolkhovitinov Design Bureau. The calculations gave promising results. The blueprints for the "liquid automatic weapon" (LAO) were quickly made and put into production. Fortunately, one of the co-authors of the invention was the director and chief designer of our plant, so the prototype was made very quickly. Due to the lack of standard PTRD bullets, they sharpened homemade red copper bullets, loaded weapons with them, and on March 5, 1943, in a shooting gallery made up of destroyed cupola casings (the aircraft plant was located on the territory of a former pipe foundry), they tested a "kerosene" machine gun. An automatic burst of shots should have followed, equal to the number of bullets inserted in the magazine box. But she didn't. There was only one, judging by the sound, a full-fledged shot.
It turned out that the column of bullets in the barrel had undergone such a pressure of gases from the side of the projectile space that the automatic bullet feed mechanism and the liquid fuel component jammed.
The mistake of the inventors, who decided to immediately create a machine gun for completing the single-shot system, was noted in his (mostly positive) review of the invention by the deputy. Chairman of the Artkom, Lieutenant-General E. A. Berkalov. We took this into account immediately.
The red copper bullet of the first liquid shot pierced the 8mm steel plate and lodged in the brickwork against which the plate was propped. The diameter of the hole significantly exceeded the caliber of the bullet and had a clearly visible crown of steel splash on the side of the impact, towards the bullet, which was reformed into a “mushroom”. Artillery scientists decided that the splash of material at the entrance of the bullet into the slab, apparently, should be explained by the high speed of the meeting, as well as the mechanical properties of the slab and the bullet.
The mock-up of the weapon from which, according to the artillery scientists, the first shot with liquid "gunpowder" was made, is kept in the museum of the plant.
After the first, not quite, thus, successful (the machine gun did not work out) testing of liquid automatic weapons on March 5, 1943, we started practicing a shot from an ATRM with a unitary cartridge equipped with liquid components of fuel and an oxidizer instead of gunpowder. For a long time they fired with homemade copper bullets, but with the return of the plant from evacuation in the summer of 1943 to Moscow, with the help of workers of the Central Committee I. D. Serbin and A. F. Fedotikov, received a sufficient number of regular anti-tank rifle cartridges and began to fire "liquid gunpowder" already at the armor plates with armor-piercing incendiary bullets. Having brought the thickness of the punched plates to 45 mm, with a charge of 4 grams of kerosene and 15 grams of nitric acid, instead of 32 grams of the standard powder charge, we drew up a detailed report and sent it to Stalin.
Soon, an interdepartmental meeting was held at the People's Commissariat of Arms, chaired by General A. A. Tolochkov, with the participation of representatives of the People's Commissariats of the aviation industry, weapons, ammunition and the Artillery Committee. The decision was made: NCAL - to submit to the People's Commissariat of Armaments working drawings and technical specifications for the manufacture of a pilot plant for studying the internal ballistics of LAO; The People's Commissariat of Arms - to make an installation at one of its factories and transfer it to the People's Commissariat of Ammunition for research. As far as I remember, the general scientific leadership of the entire work was entrusted to Artkom.
… Time has passed. And once, after a number of approvals, linkages with the plant, with the Research Institute of the People's Commissariat of Ammunition, we finally received an invitation to the defense of one of the employees of this Research Institute, Comrade Dobrysh, a Ph. D. thesis on the topic "Internal ballistics of a gun …" (followed by the name of one of the inventors - according to the tradition of gunsmiths: "Mosin rifle", "Kalashnikov assault rifle", "Makarov pistol", etc.). The defense was successful. The authors of the invention were mentioned in the report, the applicant noted their merit. More years passed, about ten years after the invention of LAO, the authors were invited to defend their second dissertation. This time, Lieutenant Colonel I. D. Zuyanov on a topic with a title approximately - "Theoretical and experimental research of artillery systems on liquid explosive mixtures." The authors of the invention read with pleasure the dissertation of I. D. Zuyanoa their names, remembered with a kind word. The supervisor of the dissertation applicant was Professor I. P. Grave.
The secretary of the party committee of our plant N. I. Shishkov. AA Tolochkov after the debate, after the speech of Professor I. P. Grave gets up and that the pioneers of liquid weapons are in the hall and that he asks one of us to share with the scientific council information about how we started our offspring. The people applauded in unison, but our comrade, whom we instructed in a whisper to speak as best he could, went into his heels. But there was nothing to do, he went and for about twenty minutes told how, where and why the idea of liquid weapons was born and how it was realized at its initial stage. Presumably, theses of Vol. Dobrysh and Zuyanova are kept in the archive of the Higher Attestation Commission, and our report, with all our drawings, calculations and results of firing with kerosene-acid charges, sent to Stalin, lies in another archive, possibly the Artkom. I hope that the minutes of the meeting held by A A. Tolochkov in the People's Commissariat of Arms.
What is the further fate of our invention, we do not know, but we know from the foreign open press that since the 70s, many patents and works have appeared in the USA, England and France on the topic of liquid fuel firearms.
Persons known to me who have made a contribution to the work on liquid weapons, in alphabetical order: G. I. Baydakv. - Director of a branch of the above-mentioned aircraft plant. Berkalov. E. A. - Lieutenant General, Deputy Chairman of the Artkom, Grave I. P. - Major General, Professor of the Art Academy, G. E. Grichenko - plant turner, Dryazgov M. P. - early. brigades of the plant's design bureau, Efimov A. G. - factory turner. Zhuchkov D. A. - early. laboratory of the plant, Zuyanov ID - lieutenant colonel, associate of the Art Academy, Karimova XX - design engineer of the design bureau of the plant, Kuznetsov E. A - design engineer of the design bureau of the plant, Lychov VT. - plant locksmith, Postoye Ya - plant locksmith, Privalov AI - director and public designer of the plant, Serbian ID - worker of the Central Committee of the party, Sukhov AN - plant locksmith, Tolochkov AA - major general, deputy. Scientific and Technical Committee of the People's Commissariat of Arms, Fedotikov A. F. - employee of the Central Committee of the Party, Shchetknkov E. S. - Engineer of the OKHB of the aircraft plant, headed by V. F. Bolkhovitinov.
M. DRYAZGOV, USSR State Prize Laureate
P. S Everything would be fine … But, it turns out many years ago, Lieutenant Colonel ID Zuyanov, who became a candidate of sciences for ZhAO, found that his dissertation in the VAK archive was erased to obscenity. That is, someone studied it. Who is not established. And you won't ask Lieutenant Colonel Zuyanov, he died.
