Comparison of Russian and American assault rifles through the eyes of an American soldier:
"This weapon seemed to everyone a kind of sling and bow of primitive savages, so simply it was arranged and finished …"
Joe Mantegna, OUTDOR TV presenter, on the M16 rifle:
"It is considered the most recognizable weapon in the world."
According to the degree of hackneyed topics around the Kalashnikov assault rifle, in second place after the myth of Hugo Schmeisser's involvement in its development is the topic of opposing the American M16 rifle to him. More precisely, AR-15 and all its subsequent clones. As with Schmeisser, this issue contains a lot of speculation, invented "facts", as well as many eyewitnesses and witnesses, independent and famous experts. The main thesis in this opposition is reliability. But what is it?
When we talk about reliability, we usually rely on the experience of using already manufactured and tested samples, as a result of which flaws in the design are revealed, the technical process is improved, the weapon becomes more reliable. This is the norm. But when designing from scratch, if you do not take into account the advantages and disadvantages of prototype designs, not knowing the basics of the reliability of the mechanisms of the engineering industry to which the development belongs is not the norm. American aircraft designer Eugene Stoner, it seems, can be safely classified in the category of "irregular". There is no other way to explain the birth of such a weapon misunderstanding as the American M16 rifle.
History
In technogenesis, just as in biogenesis, the laws formulated by Darwin work at the stage of evolution. The species is improved by natural selection of the best mutations of individual individuals. The more individuals and more mutations, the more likely the emergence of the most tenacious species. In the history of the development of an automatic machine for an intermediate cartridge, a variety of individuals (designs) and mutations (models and their modifications) were provided. Out of fifteen samples, the best one won. At the same time, information transparency was ensured through the competition, when participants could study the designs of competitors, the members of the commission, based on the test results, developed technical proposals for implementation in certain samples. The result of the work of this collective brain was the selection of the truly perfect design. It remains only to state that under the current conditions it is no longer possible to repeat this.
So the emergence of such a highly reliable weapon as the Kalashnikov assault rifle is primarily the work of natural law, and such individuals as Kalashnikov, Zaitsev, Bulkin, Deikin and many others did their best not to violate this law.
In the history of M16, there was no variety of mutations. There was continuous lobbying and protectionism of individual individuals and generals. One of the American propaganda films about the creation of the M16 explicitly states that when the question arose about developing weapons for a new small-caliber cartridge, the old and respected American gunsmiths from the Springfield Armory bluntly replied that they would need four years to do this.
But there was one friend who asked for six months to rework his unsuccessful AR-10 design. He was told: "Let's go." So, after the conversion from the hunting cartridge, the SS109 (5.56x45) cartridge appeared, the AR-10 turned into the AR-15, adopted for service under the M16 brand, and the Springfield Armory center for the development and production of firearms was closed in 1968.
Even more ancient history
When neophytes say that Herr Schmeisser laid the foundations somewhere, which are still used by all advanced weapons thought, they are not so far from the truth. Sturmgewer is a direct prototype for the M16. And not only because of the constructive legacy. Assault rifle is a translation of the German Sturmgewer, which means "assault rifle" in the native aspen language. The constructive Teutonic legacy, if you dig deep enough, is found much earlier, back in the MP-18. This is a transverse design of the magazine latch, which fixes it with its protrusion in the recess of the side wall. In the American rifle, it has changed slightly.
Together with the latch, the method of installing the magazine in the mine also changed.
The next prototype was the MP-38/40. From an evolutionary point of view, it was a revolutionary sample, although it was slightly spoiled by Schmeisser's buggy store. The stamped body of the receiver and the functional division of the weapon into two parts: the upper one containing the barrel and the bolt group, and the lower one with the trigger, connected by means of a retractable pin or on a hinge.
The method of installing the bolt group in a pipe-shaped casing (installed from the end) was transferred to the stormgiver, and from it to the M16. Directly the Sturmgewer solution, which passed into the American rifle, was a return spring in the butt and a protective curtain opposite the cartridge case extraction window.
Thus, by the totality of all the signs, it is obvious which designer was influenced by which designer when he created his rifle. The German Stg-44 is a direct prototype of the M16.
This obvious fact is not noted by anyone, but it is full of claims that Kalashnikov was impressed by the design of the Teutonic genius, or even Schmeisser himself had a hand in the creation of the AK.
An attempt to prove the inconsistency of these allegations on the basis of the use of different methods of locking the bolt in the AK and Sturmgever, when there are enough facts and documents refuting this, looks a little strange. General V. G. Fedorov in his work "On the tendencies of changes in the models of small arms of foreign armies according to the experience of the Second World War" in 1944 wrote: "The German automatic carbine from the point of view of design qualities does not deserve special attention."
Indeed, there are enough shortcomings in the Sturmgever. One of them is a stamped receiver casing. The point here is not in technology, but in the design itself. If you hit the cover of the AK, and it deforms so that it begins to interfere with the movement of the bolt carrier, then it can be simply removed. What happens if the same happens to the hull of the stormgower or the M16? The same as with the ingress of a sufficient amount of dirt between the bolt carrier and the body. In the best case, the frame roll energy will be lost, after which a whole chain of probabilities will follow from the lack of a cartridge to the shutter not closing. At worst, her wedge.
Gruner, Sudaev and Kalashnikov perfectly showed how to make reliable stamped structures in weapons.
About reliability
The first thing that the production faces after the sample has passed the tests and has been transferred to the series is the development of technological processes. Not always a file-cut part can be reproduced in a cheap and massive way. The reliability of weapons depends no less, if not more, on the choice of production technology, materials, creation of a quality control system, but this topic is incomprehensible and uninteresting to the absolute majority. Therefore, we will focus on what you can see and touch with your hands - on the design features of AR and AK.
There is such a concept - entropy. These are all possible states of the system that may arise during its operation. They, in turn, depend on the number of system elements and the variety of their interactions with each other.
Refusal is one such condition. The greater the entropy of the system, the higher the likelihood that sooner or later its state will come when it will not be able to fully or partially fulfill its functions.
The main suppliers of entropy to the system are dirt, debris, weather conditions, and fools. For the latter, a whole scientific section has been created, which is called "Protection from the Fool". But no matter how perfect the defense is, it will always fail, because the fool is perfect by definition. A striking example is the crash of the Proton-M launch vehicle on July 2, 2013, when the connectors of the sensors protected against incorrect connection were simply clogged with a sledgehammer. As for dirt and debris, this is the first thing that a gunsmith imagines at the point of contact between two parts.
The designer's task is to create a system with the least entropy. Sergeant of the Soviet Army Mikhail Kalashnikov perfectly understood this, and the American graduate engineer Eugene Stoner had a poor idea.
Continued here.
