What do we remember when it comes to caseless weapons? An interested person will immediately say about the German G11 machine gun, maybe they will also remember that the Germans developed a PDW-class submachine gun and a light machine gun with a magazine for 300 rounds under the same cartridge. A very meticulous (like your humble servant) comrade will also bring a competitor of this system - a Mauser machine gun and remember that Diehl also took part in the same competition. This is one scheme where the ammunition is a bullet pressed into an explosive parallelepiped. The second option is the so-called jet bullets in systems such as the American MBA Gyrojet pistol.
But there is another option - this is when the bullet consists of a metal head part and a hollow thin-walled rear part, which had the shape of a cylinder (cup). The rear part of the cartridge serves as a sleeve, inside of which there is a propelling powder charge and a charge of a flammable substance (burning capsule). Cartridges of this type are used, for example, in the Italian Benelli CB-M2 submachine gun and in the experimental Kazakhstani submachine gun designed by Zhetyosov PPZh-005, about which I am going to make a material later.
To summarize: when it comes to caseless weapons, many countries come to mind, except for the USSR. But this is unfair - similar systems were developed in the USSR. And it is about one of them - the VAG-72 (73) pistol (chambered for the third type I have given) of the Kiev designer, engineer of the aircraft plant, Vladimir Alekseevich Gerasimenko (1910-1987), I want to tell a little.
Gerasimenko since 1942 was engaged in the design of sports and combat pistols. In the early 70s of the last century, he developed and manufactured 7, 62-mm caseless pistol cartridges and two variants of automatic pistols for them: VAG-72 and VAG-73. The pistols differed in the capacity of the magazines: on the VAG-72 there was a 24-round magazine, and on the VAG-73 there was a 48-round magazine.
The Gerasimenko cartridge is a relatively thin-walled bullet carved from steel with a rounded head and a hollow rear (for gunpowder) and a thread for screwing the primer. The pistol has a rather impressive weight - 1, 2 kg and dimensions (235x135x28). USM allows firing both self-cocking and pre-cocking. The pistol does not have an external fuse, but it is equipped with a two-way translator of fire modes, since it can fire not only single shots, but also bursts.
To ensure accuracy during automatic firing, the pistol is equipped with a pneumatic retarder that brakes the bolt when it moves to its extreme rear position. The store for the VAG-73 is also interesting. It really holds 48 rounds and is essentially two magazines with separate feed springs, placed in one case, one after the other. First, cartridges from the rear magazine are consumed, and then the larva feeder, without encountering a cartridge on its way, runs idle, and the front part of the larva feeds a cartridge from the front magazine with each cycle. Stores of this type are used, for example, in the modern Russian OTs-53 submachine gun and they have a great future.
Some put forward the opinion that, they say, this is an unviable design, since steel bullets would very quickly "eat" the barrel. I can argue that these were prototypes intended for reconciliation of the trigger and serial samples (if they were) would have received quite normal bullets. The history of this weapon itself is indicative of the fact that in Soviet times, a completely public development of weapons was carried out on an initiative basis. a man without a weapons education.
