The Lobaev Corporation, created by brothers Vladislav and Nikolai Lobaev, is currently developing and producing ultra-precise long-range rifles that can compete with the world's best models. Today this young Russian private company produces rifles that are distinguished by an extremely high accuracy of fire - about 0.2 - 0.3 arc minutes (MOA). Rifles under the Lobaev brand are in demand by shooting and hunting enthusiasts at long and ultra-long distances. They are also in service with units of the FSO (SBP), the Federal Penitentiary Service and a number of other special services of Russia.
Currently, Lobaev Corporation consists of: KBIS - Design Bureau of Integrated Systems, which specializes in the development and pilot production of small arms with high accuracy and range, firing systems, data preparation facilities for firing, as well as other innovative products; LOBAEV Arms - an enterprise that was formed by the team of Tsar Cannon, a leader in the production of unique high-precision and long-range sniper rifles; LOBAEV Hummer Barrels is a company specializing in the production of high-precision barrel blanks and barrels not only for firearms, but also for pneumatic weapons.
“I had more than 12 of the world's best sniper rifles, and I fired many more rifles, and four of them were Lobaev rifles,” Andrei Ryabinsky, who is the head of the board of directors of the MIC group of companies, told RBC reporters. Ryabinsky is seriously into sniper shooting. Vladislav Lobaev was his instructor, at the end of 2015 they were jointly able to set one of the world shooting records. Andrei Ryabinsky managed to hit a target measuring 50 by 50 centimeters located at a distance of 2165 meters from the Lobaev SVLK-14S "Twilight" ultra-long-range rifle, 5 times in a row (Vladislav Lobaev himself was a spotter). “I can responsibly declare that Lobaev's rifles in.408 Cheyenne Tactical (10, 3x77 mm) are currently simply unmatched in the world, and if.338 (8, 6x70 mm) caliber, if they are not superior now, then they definitely compete with the best examples of world sniper weapons, "Ryabinsky notes. It is worth noting that in April 2015 the company set a world record for rifle firing range - 3400 meters. The record shot, which confirms the high position of the Russian company in the international arena, was fired on April 9, 2015 from a custom version of the SVLK-14S rifle.
SVLK-14S "Twilight", photo: lobaevarms.ru
You can tell more about this rifle. The SVLK-14C TWILIGHT (Dusk) ultra-long-range rifle is a unique weapon that, over the past six years, has demonstrated record performance at ranges that significantly exceed the two-kilometer mark. The new model of this rifle has a reinforced multilayer "sandwich" made of carbon fiber, fiberglass, kevlar and is specially designed for use with such a powerful ammunition, which is the.408 Cheyenne Tactical (10, 3x77 mm). To further strengthen the design of the rifle, a long aluminum chassis was specially integrated into its stock.
At the heart of this rifle is the well-deserved King v.3 bolt action, which is manufactured to much tighter tolerances than is customary in the industry today. The receiver body is manufactured from aircraft-grade aluminum with a threaded insert of high-alloy corrosion-resistant steel. The bolt of the rifle is also made of solid corrosion-resistant steel. The SVLK-14S rifle was deliberately left exclusively in a single-shot version in order to provide the necessary rigidity of the receiver, which is needed when firing at ultra-long distances, as well as the modularity of the weapon and the changeable calibers (bolts with larvae: Cheytac, Magnum, Supermagnum). A matching stainless steel LOBAEV Hummer Barrels rifle completes the picture. Manufactured to the highest standards of the shooting world, these barrels make shooting to the brink of the possible - possible. True, a rather large amount will have to be paid for this. According to the manufacturer's information, the SVLK-14S rifle will cost the client at least 1,250,000 rubles.
The performance characteristics of SVLK-14S:
Caliber -.408 Cheytac /.338LM /.300WM.
The maximum effective range of use is 2500+ m.
Technical accuracy - 0.3 MOA / 9 mm between centers (5 shots per 100m).
Muzzle velocity - more than 900 m / s.
Overall dimensions: length - 1430 mm, height - 175 mm, width - 96 mm.
Barrel length - 900 mm.
Weight - 9600 g.
Effort of trigger - adjustable from 50 to 1500 g.
Working temperature range - -45 / + 65 C.
Vladislav Lobaev, chief designer and founder of Lobaev corporation, his brother Nikolai Lobaev is its director and co-founder. Vladislav was a graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University. It would seem that the specialty has nothing to do with firearms, but in 2000 he took up benchrest, becoming interested in this modern sport during his business trip to the United States back in the mid-1990s, as an employee of the private detective bureau Alex. Benchrest or shooting from the machine (English benchrest shooting) is a type of shooting technical sport, which is referred to as high-precision shooting. Its main task is to achieve high accuracy of fire. The task of the benchrest shooter is to fire 5 (or 10, depending on competition conditions) shots at a valid target. This type of high-precision shooting has grown from the most banal sighting of weapons from a sandbag, eventually turning into a separate type of shooting sport. Benchrest shooting is performed while sitting at a special table with the rifle at point-blank range for shooting.
High-precision and ultra-long range shooting training, photo: lobaevarms.ru
“A strong passion for shooting sports led to an understanding of the obvious - it is extremely difficult to win at serious international competitions with the available weapons,” Lobaev told RBC reporters. Accurate rifles were available only to a select few, in practice this meant only one thing: if your rifle was not prepared by a well-known gunsmith, then you automatically drop out of the list of contenders fighting for prizes. Therefore, Vladislav Lobaev decided to start designing his own rifles, going on an internship in the United States, where he studied with the famous gunsmiths Clay Spencer and Thomas Speedy Gonzales. Returning back to Russia in 2003, he founded LLC Tsar-Pushka with his brother, this enterprise engaged in the creation and production of high-precision rifles.
“At that time it was a real startup, in order to start a business, I had to sell my personal four-room apartment in Moscow on Arbat. The decision to start my own business was difficult, especially for my relatives and friends,”Lobaev notes now with a laugh. According to him, at the first stage, his colleagues and benchrest friends also helped with the money for business development. In 2005, Tsar-Pushka became the first private company in the country to obtain a license to manufacture weapons - the well-known Orsis and Skat companies will start operating in Russia later. “We became the first company to embark on this path from scratch,” emphasizes Lobaev. After obtaining a license in Russia, the company first rented premises located at the Podolsk Electromechanical Plant, and in 2007 opened a small production facility in the small town of Tarusa, located in the Kaluga Region.
In 2010, in an interview with Forbes magazine, Lobaev said that in 2009 the Tsar-Pushka company sold 80 rifles, earning about 20 million rubles in revenue, and in 2010 the company planned to produce up to 200 rifles. However, in the same year, the Ministry of Industry and Trade refused to renew the Tsar-Cannon license issued in 2005 for a period of 5 years. Because of this, the company was unable not only to produce weapons, but also to sell finished products in Russia. Without naming specific companies, Lobaev notes that the events of 2010 were a manifestation of "unfair competition." “We then made a decision - than to fight and lay our heads here, it is better to reduce the degree of tension,” he says. In 2010, almost the entire team of the company at that time, which consisted of 15 people, moved to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In this country, under a contract with the Arab holding Tawazun, a new enterprise was launched - Tawazun Advanced Defense Systems (TADS), where the team from Russia continued to engage in their direct business - the development and production of high-precision rifle systems.
While in the UAE, the Russians were able to develop and prepare for mass production about 20 models of ultra-precise long-range sniper weapons, two of their rifles eventually began to be produced by Caracal, which absorbed TADS in 2013. The result of their work in the Emirates was the creation of sniper rifles: the KS-11M (King Single) with interchangeable barrels, the TSR-30 (Tactical Sniper Rifle) in caliber 300 WM or.338 LM, as well as the TSR-40 in caliber.338 SnipeTac, which was created on the basis of the KS-11M rifle. These sniper rifles were adopted by the elite units of the UAE army and the Royal Guard. All rifles were designed for shooting at a distance of over 2000 meters.
In 2013, their contract with TADS ended, after which the Tsar-Cannon employees decided to return to Russia. Moreover, the Ministry of Industry and Trade issued a new license to the company very quickly in December 2013, this time the license for the production of weapons was issued indefinitely. After his return to Russia, Vladislav Lobaev, together with his brother Nikolai Lobaev, founded the Lobaev corporation, which is still in the stage of formation. In 2014, this corporation was able to design and introduce into production 7 new models of high-precision long-range rifles at once. “Nobody else in the world has done this, Russian manufactures cannot do it either,” Lobaev is justly proud of the speed of his company. According to him, at present the corporation is gradually moving away from the practice of producing "piece" rifles, intending to bring all new models of weapons to the market in series. “For the first time in the history of the company, we will work on overstocking the warehouse. We will add some variety to the coatings of the produced rifles, so that the buyer can choose “exactly the same, but with mother-of-pearl buttons,” Vladislav Lobaev told reporters smiling.
According to the designer, in 2016 the Lobaev corporation is going to earn 150-200 million rubles in revenue. At the same time, in 2015, the revenue was “several tens of millions of rubles”. According to Vladislav, in the past two years, a lot of money and effort has been spent on the creation of new models of high-precision small arms, now sales should grow. But the Lobaev corporation is not going to stop on the production of only rifles. In 2015, a tactical robot was added to the traditional products, which received the designation Minirex RS1A3, which was released by a new division of the corporation - Lobaev Robotics. The robot on a tracked platform weighs 23 kg, it will be armed with 7, 62 × 39 mm caliber systems, as well as sniper 40LW and 338LW. Moreover, this is only the first swallow in the corporation's line of combat robots. According to Vladislav Lobaev, the company has already announced the creation of assault robots, counter-snipers and robotic snipers. “Currently we are working on the network integration of robots into unified units on the battlefield, we are looking for specialists who will write the necessary software, but so far the work has been outsourced,” says Lobaev. The Lobaev Robotics division already has the first third-party investor, whose name is kept secret, in other divisions the Lobaev brothers have no partners yet.
Minirex RS1A3 Robot
In the Russian Federation, the demand for high-precision rifles is small and it is unlikely that it will seriously grow, for this reason the Lobaev corporation needs a global sales market, notes Andrei Ryabinsky. In his opinion, “Lobaev's” rifles are needed by the Russian army and special units, which, if they acquire them now, are in a very limited volume (according to Lobaev himself, now up to 80% of rifle sales are civilian weapons). Actually, these rifles were armed with the presidential security service (SBP) - a unit of the FSO of Russia, which first became interested in Lobaev's ballistic calculator, and then in his rifles.
Most often, a sniper, when solving a task assigned to him, deals with fixed firing ranges: he has the ability to measure the range to the target, enter all the necessary amendments to the sight and make a shot at the right time. At the same time, SBP snipers are essentially sniper hunters. They have neither a fixed range nor a large amount of time to prepare a shot: they must hit the target almost instantly in the entire range of ranges - from maximum to minimum, while their enemy prepares to fire. The chances of a sniper and a counter sniper are equalized due to the higher level of training of the FSO fighters, as well as more advanced equipment - in particular, the rifles themselves. The fact that the president's security service is armed with rifles of the Lobaev corporation is in itself a sign of recognition of the highest quality of their products.
Lobaev himself estimates the volume of the domestic market for high-precision rifles - from 2-3 to 8-10 thousand units per year. According to him, the Russian market is growing slowly, although it attracts new people. “One of the main constraints, he considers legislative restrictions on the possession of rifled weapons. It would be reasonable, for example, to lower the barrier from 5 years to 2 years, and for military personnel and citizens who have served in the army, cancel it altogether,”says Vladislav Lobaev. The sanctions against the Russian Federation, in fact, removed foreign competitors from the Russian arms market, but Lobaev is in no hurry to rejoice at this manifestation of affairs: the lack of cheap long-term loans on the market does not allow domestic arms companies to take advantage of the unique situation in order to seize the market freed from foreign products. “A high-quality, good, mass-produced and inexpensive rifle is within our power, but in practice, their introduction into mass production requires investments of $ 30 million or more. We are not yet in a position to provide this, there is no money, Lobaev emphasizes.
Snipers of the FSO unit (SBP) of Russia, photo: lobaevarms.ru
In addition, the sanctions against Russia do not allow the company to sell its products in the countries that have joined them. “Therefore, it is necessary to locate production directly on their territory. For us, this is a semblance of business expansion, we have already prepared proposals in this vein, Lobaev argues, noting that the corporation already has a number of proposals for the deployment of rifle production in other states. If we talk about proposals for cooperation from the Russian arms giants, then the matter does not go further than vague and informal negotiations. Russian private arms companies and state-owned companies cannot find a common language. Lobaev notes that in the Russian Federation, everyone is forced to do everything himself, although coordination in the arms industry is necessary and would only benefit it.
