Mikhail Kalashnikov passes away

[mirth]

Had no idea he was still alive, til I heard of his passing on NPR a few minutes ago. RIP.

[Gusington]

Yeah I just assumed he died years ago. RIP you commie bastard.

[Keunert]

the guy that gifted me a romanian ak-47 was telling me that the ak-47 was revolutionary in several ways:

1. easy to produce in huge numbers, not needing high tech equipment and having a lot less parts than the german counterpart.

2. mechanically extremely solid: proved itself from jungle to desert. low maintenance. according to him the weapon proved itself in combat: even non trained troops are able to keep the gun going.

3. weight: thats also an issue in combat, less in training. but it weighted almost half of the swiss counterpart during the 50's -80's.

the guy is a Jarhead like gun collector and trained swiss artillery Hauptmann: in his opinion the ak on paper is a very mediocre gun but during war it more than proved it's superior design.

[MetalDog]

NPR, mirth?  So YOU're the liberal in the wood pile ;)

[GDS_Starfury]

I'm sure its what his girlfriend wanted to listen to.

[mirth]

NPR, mirth?  So YOU're the liberal in the wood pile ;)

I listen, but I do not donate :P

[Centurion40]

Yeah I just assumed he died years ago. RIP you commie bastard.

Yeah, but what a nice piece of kit that he stole designed.

[Jarhead0331]

Yeah I just assumed he died years ago. RIP you commie bastard.

Yeah, but what a nice piece of kit that he stole designed.

Oh that's not fair. Hugo Schmeisser can't take all the credit. Kalashnikov at least made it cheaper and easier to mass produce.

[MetalDog]

NPR, mirth?  So YOU're the liberal in the wood pile ;)

I listen, but I do not donate :P

Is that like smoking but not inhaling, Bill?

[LongBlade]

Oh that's not fair. Hugo Schmeisser can't take all the credit. Kalashnikov at least made it cheaper and easier to mass produce.

Yes, he made a great evolutionary improvement to a revolutionary design.

Therein lies the difference. Great as his genius might have been, it was an evolutionary genius, not revolutionary.

If you insist on calling him "great" then so it is, but he is not "epic" like some were.

And while I don't know it for a fact, I believe he also qualifies as a plagiarist since he failed to credit the original genius upon whose design he improved.

[Keunert]

it is closer to a m1 garand. it shares the look but not the mechanic of the Stgw. i wouldn't even call that a copy

[MikeGER]

  But I think he deserved a bit more than 'Good Riddance', especially from a grog site.

sure not from a Grog side! but from a German grog for sure... of course MK was a good engineer.
(or to put in war gaming terms ... a modder ;-) )
 
its like if the Americans had put some run out of the mill harvester engineer 'Joe Smith' to patron over and daily blackmail life threat over some now probally lesser known Wernher von Braun .... and 'Joe Smith' would now be the all American patriot who single handed brought a man to the moon (and a nice arsenal of ICBMs to the USA too) in the history book

well, Wernher von Braun had the fortune to cut a lucky deal with the OSS early to finally concentrate on his space visions -he always had- in a free society, instead of being a slave switching from a Nazi dictatorship monster (he was smart and charismatic enuf to wiggle his ways between the different envious factions inside that regime  -a thightropewalk) to a Commi dictatorship monster oppression   

[Keunert]

from another site:

To say he copied the design is like saying the Spitfire was 'copied' from the 109 (or vice versa) in as far as they are both Fighters that were developed at roughly the same time. Been re-reading and looking into it and the SU had no real need at all to copy the 44, fine heritage of automatic rifles in their own right and the AK was a fairly logical extension of these. The concept of the Intermediate round had also occured to them (and been adopted) long before. In fact you could say the arrangement of the 44 was an adaptation of the Russian Tokarev layout. The belief that the AK is a copy of the 44 seems to me to be a little lazy and based purely on their similar shapes... Remember if the Russians copied something, from Tank transmissions to cameras they tended to copy it exactly with modifications only to improve production efficiency. The Ak does not fit in this category.

[LongBlade]

from another site:

To say he copied the design is like saying the Spitfire was 'copied' from the 109 (or vice versa) in as far as they are both Fighters that were developed at roughly the same time. Been re-reading and looking into it and the SU had no real need at all to copy the 44, fine heritage of automatic rifles in their own right and the AK was a fairly logical extension of these. The concept of the Intermediate round had also occured to them (and been adopted) long before. In fact you could say the arrangement of the 44 was an adaptation of the Russian Tokarev layout. The belief that the AK is a copy of the 44 seems to me to be a little lazy and based purely on their similar shapes... Remember if the Russians copied something, from Tank transmissions to cameras they tended to copy it exactly with modifications only to improve production efficiency. The Ak does not fit in this category.

Thanks. I wasn't aware of that. I'll look more deeply into the subject and see what else I can learn.

[Staggerwing]

There's a famous story about the 'designing' of the Tu-4. During the War a B-29 crash-landed in Soviet territory and the Russians, having no true heavy bomber, were very interested in it. Stalin ordered Tupolev to copy the aircraft exactly and they did just that (to the best of their abilities). Rumors floated around that Tupolev (supposedly at Stalin's insistence) even built their planes with matching repair patches similar to those which had been applied to the original B-29 to cover war-time damage and also matched the bullet holes visible in the original. The story is most likely not true but illustrates the view of the Soviet state-run design approach held by the West at the time.