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Interestingly, the P90 fires a ultra specific round, DESIGNED to be super effective against body armor, and even vehicle plating. The 5.7mm is tiny though, a pistol cartridge. It's a necked (up/down from 227 Remington?) varmit round that has an extremely light recoil, flat trajectory, and is also extremely expensive. There are countries (Belgium) that completely main 5.7mm weapons. They carry FiveSeven Pistols by FN, and they carry P90s. Worthless at distances beyond 150m, but like I said, modern environments.

The Russians did have a very sleek Anti-body armor sniper rifle they designed in the 80s, that makes it into every videogame that features russians nowadays, but I forget the name, started with a V I think. But that was reportedly capable of penetrating anything upto level 4 at 400m. Nasty if true, but alas, like many things out of Russia, it never caught on, and was actually abandoned. They still have some in service, but the special rounds they developed for the rifle are kinda impossible to find now, unless they are hand loads.

China and Russia both recently adopted new ARs. Both of which are functionally similar to the late model M16 America is phasing out in favor of it's new design.

The Chinese QBZ 191 seems to combine elements of the latest model American M16 series and the AK 74 line from Russia, with just a little modernization. It's not surprising China's new AR is basically a fusion of other designs as the Chinese have openly admitted they don't spend money on research and just steal other nation's inventions and ideas. The only new thing in the qbz 191 design is the 5.8mm caliber.

Oddly enough the new Chinese rifle seems to have no burst mode, and is either semi auto or full auto, while most later American ARs were designed with 3rb mode but no full auto. Maybe the Chinese military has decided to use the "MORE DAKKA!" strategy?

The Russian AK 12 seems to be a modest update to their AK 74 line, which was Russia's attempt to copy the American military thinking that replaced the heavier larger caliber M14 with the lighter caliber M16. It seems to be more ergonomic and maybe a bit more accurate, but it's basically an AK 74 in a new dress and lipstick, but nice lipstick.

So both Russia and China have stayed with a design that is based on American thinking circa 1960s,while America has adopted a very different system that in some ways is an old concept mated with SOTA technology. Were they right? Were we?

Time will tell.

So again, the chinese army ALONE, is over 1 MILLION conscripts. Thats a LOT of Dakka.

The US Army just on it's own is about 300k, and about 50% of that is actual trained and ready to rock and roll front line soldier stock, not counting the Cav and the Tankers. Just the 11 Series. So maybe 50k. The Marines have about 100k, because every Marine is a Marine first. Not every person in the army is a Soldier if you get me. Some are cooks, electricians, mechanics, you name it.
Airforce is about 200k, but all of them are worthless in a standup fight. None of them are front line troops.
The Navy is well, kinda the same.

BUT WAIT, WHAT ABOUT SPACE FORCE???

They only exist on paper. From what I know, they are all 007X Combat Knife Throwers who wrestle Grizzly bears. No but seriously, not gonna stand and hold off 1,000,000 screaming Chinese Infantry.

So there you go, about 50k front line troops against 20 times as many malnourished, under equiped, and untrained civilian conscripts.

If the war in Ukraine has taught us anything, the Communist Militaries around the world only really have about 10% of their stated Military capacity ready to fight. Rest is lies.

So that makes it 50k vs 100k. We win that pants down and twice on Sunday if the soldiers are drunk.

People underestimate just how good the American US Army 11B is. I don't care what weapon they are using, I've seen a DI reduce a man to a slobbering sniveling mess with just words and a strong glare. Plus all our guys VOLUNTEERED to be there. Almost none of theirs did.

The Chinese rifles have defective barrels and keyhole at 10 meters. You can see it in the propaganda video they released. The holes in the paper targets look like the side profile of the projectile rather than being a round hole. It was immediately posted on a bunch of gun groups to show how crappy their technology is. If China invaded, a bunch of ex mil with ARs and farmers with .30-06 deer rifles would have a 100:1 kill ratio.

The new gunsite really makes this gun a game changer. Going for high AP gave the new round extreme velocity and range. This site supposedly lets you hit a man sized target at 800m, possibly 900. That's half a mile, folks.

Will it penetrate body armor at that range? I don't know. But the fact it can hit a man at that range is something.

The new Chinese and Russian rifles likely have an effective range of maybe 5-600M with scopes set to the range of the rounds.

Also the new scopes will be pretty easy for the soldiers to use when they get them. Most kids in America going into the military will have experience with things like video games and smartphones. They should easily acclimate to the smart sites.

The electronics in these scopes should be simpler than even a basic smartphone. I don't see much problem making tens of thousands of them reliably. The ability to outrange an enemy by at least 300m should be telling.

The thing I'm wondering and worried about is maybe the Russians and Chinese don't plan to fight America at the infantry level.

This has implications. One is they don't expect open war with America. The other is they don't expect to fight us in terms that involve infantry level conflict.

On a less gloomy note, I have a feeling this gun would likely outperform a standard IG lasgun in most ways, except that whole "recharge with solar power" thing...

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
The US Army just on it's own is about 300k, and about 50% of that is actual trained and ready to rock and roll front line soldier stock, not counting the Cav and the Tankers. Just the 11 Series. So maybe 50k. The Marines have about 100k, because every Marine is a Marine first. Not every person in the army is a Soldier if you get me. Some are cooks, electricians, mechanics, you name it.
Airforce is about 200k, but all of them are worthless in a standup fight. None of them are front line troops.
The Navy is well, kinda the same.

Here's a more important stat:

The US has nukes.
China has nukes.
Russia has nukes.

I don't see any plausible scenario where mass infantry combat between any of those three ever happens, at least not relevant mass infantry combat. Maybe the survivors will kill each other in the radioactive hellscape that used to be civilization, but at that point does any of it matter?

(Plus, the idea that Russia or China are "communist" is pretty hilarious.)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Nightraven wrote:
Were they right? Were we?

Everyone was right because they have different needs to meet.

The US needs a rifle for fighting aimless low-intensity wars as justification for funneling money to the defense industry and votes to the elected officials on their payrolls. An expensive new rifle, complete with cool marketing literature, is perfect for this role and ensures that the small arms manufacturers don't feel left out of the money faucet going to the companies providing heavy weapons to Ukraine.

Russia needs a rifle for murdering unarmed civilians. A slight update to the classic AK design works fine for this and the design changes make it a little harder for Ukraine to use them against Russian troops when they're inevitably captured. A new round would have been even better for keeping Ukraine from using them effectively, but TBH Russia probably wouldn't be able to supply enough ammunition to keep the war crimes from slowing down.

China needs a rifle to handle its internal conflicts and make some cash on the side. Ripping off someone else's work is good enough for selling a "new" gun and making some money before everyone realizes it's yet another piece of cheap Chinese garbage and any random gun works well enough for keeping Dear Leader in power and the organ harvesting camps well supplied.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Nightraven wrote:
The other is they don't expect to fight us in terms that involve infantry level conflict.

This is kind of common knowledge? Everyone knows a conflict between any combination of NATO/Russia/China is going to go nuclear. The only hope Russia and China have is a preemptive nuclear strike and/or nuclear blackmail, a conventional war against NATO would make the Ukraine debacle look like the height of strategic brilliance.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:

The Russians did have a very sleek Anti-body armor sniper rifle they designed in the 80s, that makes it into every videogame that features russians nowadays, but I forget the name, started with a V I think. But that was reportedly capable of penetrating anything upto level 4 at 400m. Nasty if true, but alas, like many things out of Russia, it never caught on, and was actually abandoned. They still have some in service, but the special rounds they developed for the rifle are kinda impossible to find now, unless they are hand loads.

The VSS. It fires 9x39mm, which is 7.62x39 casings that have been widened to accept 9mm projectiles. Slow, heavy, and subsonic projectiles because the VSS is integrally suppressed so it is whisper quiet.

They were rare, but recently the cartridge is starting to find its way into the US. There are a handful of kits which are making their way here and being rebuilt, and there are companies making AR pistol uppers chambered in 9x39, with a few manufacturing some ammo. You are pretty much going to want to handload because of the price, but it is doable. You can even easily convert 7.62 casings to 9x39 if you want.

I suspect once the Ukraine war is over we will see a flood of captured Russian weapons getting turned into kits and shipped here, including VSSs.

So to be fair, no "semi-automatic" weapon system is "Whisper quiet" as there is a very large port for the gas to escape from due to the cycling action. And the notion that Suppressors are "pfft pfft" is hollyWood, not reality. Even a .22 revolver with a can on it still makes a sound that would alert anyone within 50 meters of the shot. It's less of a crack though, more of a fist hitting a wall, a dull thud. But it's still loud enough that if you held it next to your head and fired you'd go deaf for about 20 seconds.

The quietest pistol on earth is the Welrod Assasination pistol, that just got re-released for mass production (America, you suck). It's a single shot, locked breach internally suppressed 9mm. It has crap accuracy, but it sounds like a literall "pfft" if you use the absolutely perfect SS ammo for it. All told it's about 6k, 8k if you want the license/certification to be able to own it, and I look forward to idiots being arrested with it in the coming political landscape.

Grey Templar, thank you for the ID on the VSS. all I remembered was that someone in the genius bar of Russia said, hey, lets make the SVD a third the size, and internally suppressed, and 9mm.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
So to be fair, no "semi-automatic" weapon system is "Whisper quiet" as there is a very large port for the gas to escape from due to the cycling action. And the notion that Suppressors are "pfft pfft" is hollyWood, not reality. Even a .22 revolver with a can on it still makes a sound that would alert anyone within 50 meters of the shot. It's less of a crack though, more of a fist hitting a wall, a dull thud. But it's still loud enough that if you held it next to your head and fired you'd go deaf for about 20 seconds.

The quietest pistol on earth is the Welrod Assasination pistol, that just got re-released for mass production (America, you suck). It's a single shot, locked breach internally suppressed 9mm. It has crap accuracy, but it sounds like a literall "pfft" if you use the absolutely perfect SS ammo for it. All told it's about 6k, 8k if you want the license/certification to be able to own it, and I look forward to idiots being arrested with it in the coming political landscape.

Grey Templar, thank you for the ID on the VSS. all I remembered was that someone in the genius bar of Russia said, hey, lets make the SVD a third the size, and internally suppressed, and 9mm.

But... but... I thought you could just hold an empty 2 liter bottle over the muzzle to make the noise go away.

You know, like in that movie...

 techsoldaten wrote:

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
So to be fair, no "semi-automatic" weapon system is "Whisper quiet" as there is a very large port for the gas to escape from due to the cycling action. And the notion that Suppressors are "pfft pfft" is hollyWood, not reality. Even a .22 revolver with a can on it still makes a sound that would alert anyone within 50 meters of the shot. It's less of a crack though, more of a fist hitting a wall, a dull thud. But it's still loud enough that if you held it next to your head and fired you'd go deaf for about 20 seconds.

The quietest pistol on earth is the Welrod Assasination pistol, that just got re-released for mass production (America, you suck). It's a single shot, locked breach internally suppressed 9mm. It has crap accuracy, but it sounds like a literall "pfft" if you use the absolutely perfect SS ammo for it. All told it's about 6k, 8k if you want the license/certification to be able to own it, and I look forward to idiots being arrested with it in the coming political landscape.

Grey Templar, thank you for the ID on the VSS. all I remembered was that someone in the genius bar of Russia said, hey, lets make the SVD a third the size, and internally suppressed, and 9mm.

But... but... I thought you could just hold an empty 2 liter bottle over the muzzle to make the noise go away.

You know, like in that movie...

Only if you lick the front sight post like Sgt. York.

Or if you are like Marky Mark, you do it while floating by on a slowly moving flat bottom boat with a bolt action squirrel gun. God that movie sucked.

Aecus Decimus wrote:
The US needs a rifle for fighting aimless low-intensity wars as justification for funneling money to the defense industry and votes to the elected officials on their payrolls. An expensive new rifle, complete with cool marketing literature, is perfect for this role and ensures that the small arms manufacturers don't feel left out of the money faucet going to the companies providing heavy weapons to Ukraine.

Russia needs a rifle for murdering unarmed civilians. A slight update to the classic AK design works fine for this and the design changes make it a little harder for Ukraine to use them against Russian troops when they're inevitably captured. A new round would have been even better for keeping Ukraine from using them effectively, but TBH Russia probably wouldn't be able to supply enough ammunition to keep the war crimes from slowing down.

China needs a rifle to handle its internal conflicts and make some cash on the side. Ripping off someone else's work is good enough for selling a "new" gun and making some money before everyone realizes it's yet another piece of cheap Chinese garbage and any random gun works well enough for keeping Dear Leader in power and the organ harvesting camps well supplied.

I sometimes wonder what compels someone to post hot takes on a subject that they clearly have little knowledge of.

 Grey Templar wrote:
The VSS. It fires 9x39mm, which is 7.62x39 casings that have been widened to accept 9mm projectiles. Slow, heavy, and subsonic projectiles because the VSS is integrally suppressed so it is whisper quiet.

They aren't really whisper quiet; they're functionally comparable to modern .300BLK carbines, except the suppressor used in the Val/VSS is a very crude design that is far less effective than its size implies. An 11.5" AR pistol firing subsonic .300BLK through any decent, modern can will be quieter and more compact. It's one of the most over-hyped rifles out there, probably because there's so little Western exposure besides propaganda.

I dunno where Fezzik gets the idea that 9x39 is gone, though, because Russia's still using the 9A-91 and VSK-94 systems that are chambered in it, and the Val and VSS are both still seeing combat use. Like you said it's not a 9mm as in 9x19, it's a 7.62x39 blown out to 9mm and downloaded to subsonic velocities. Only the armor-piercing SP6/7N9 round is capable of defeating level III body armor, and even then the claims of it doing so at 400m are highly dubious.

The Welrod isn't 'the quietest pistol on earth', either. Buy a Ruger MkII. Buy a SilencerCo Switchback. Voila, you have a quieter pistol than a Welrod. It's a historical novelty that was designed around what could be mass-produced in bicycle shops circa 1942; there's no magic to a locked-breech gun with an archaic wipe suppressor system, and the VP9 derivative that's getting freaked out over as the assassination tool du jour is actually less quiet at ~130dB. Any standard .45ACP handgun with, say, an Osprey will produce about the same amount of noise.

 catbarf wrote:
I sometimes wonder what compels someone to post hot takes on a subject that they clearly have no knowledge of.

Good question. Why are you posting here?

But do please tell me what you disagree with. Do you deny the reality of the US defense contractor money faucets? Do you believe Russia is engaging in a legitimate war in Ukraine, not genocide? Or do you believe China has a plausible war against someone other than their own citizens?

Aecus Decimus wrote:
But do please tell me what you disagree with.

Okay sure.

Aecus Decimus wrote:
The US needs a rifle for fighting aimless low-intensity wars as justification for funneling money to the defense industry and votes to the elected officials on their payrolls. An expensive new rifle, complete with cool marketing literature, is perfect for this role and ensures that the small arms manufacturers don't feel left out of the money faucet going to the companies providing heavy weapons to Ukraine.

The Spear is designed for a niche that has never ever existed in any low-intensity war we've ever fought. It's designed explicitly to defeat near-peer body armor at 500yds with a flat trajectory that makes hitting targets at that range viable, and it makes a lot of compromises in weight, complexity, barrel life, and logistics to accomplish that goal.

It tracks perfectly with any of the defense think tank literature that's come out since the results of the Russian Ratnik program (see below) came to light in 2014, and is in line with Army attempts to replace the M16 platform that date all the way back to the ACR program in the 80s, so to chalk it up solely as funneling money to the defense industry to continue the recent style of low-intensity conflicts (for which it would be terrible) is nonsense. If the goal were to funnel money to the contractors not selling to Ukraine, you'd be seeing an Abrams modernization package, a new Bradley/Stryker/Humvee replacement, or a resurrection of the F-22 program so the vehicular contractors (Lockheed, BAE, GE, GD, Boeing) get a slice of the pie. Even just looking at small arms, the established contractors like Colt, DD, FN, and KAC aren't getting in on it at all, just Sig. Sig is a tiny fish in a big pond (Booz-Allen alone draws over three hundred fifty times the yearly revenue) and they're outfitting one (1) branch of service.

Aecus Decimus wrote:
Russia needs a rifle for murdering unarmed civilians. A slight update to the classic AK design works fine for this and the design changes make it a little harder for Ukraine to use them against Russian troops when they're inevitably captured. A new round would have been even better for keeping Ukraine from using them effectively, but TBH Russia probably wouldn't be able to supply enough ammunition to keep the war crimes from slowing down.

So leaving aside that Russia's AK-12 is a stopgap while more substantive replacements are in trials, and that this idea that there are design changes to make it harder for Ukraine to use them is a big ???, Russia's military budget over the last decade and a half has gone squarely into the Ratnik program modernizing their mechanized infantry with body armor and relatively modern optics. You don't need body armor and optics to 'murder unarmed civilians', you need them to maintain credibility against a peer adversary or a near-peer adversary that may have materiel aid from a peer competitor and is largely fielding intermediate-caliber rifles that struggle against level III armor at typical modern engagement ranges.

Russia didn't integrate PKPs into their infantry squads to suppress civilians at longer range, they didn't update the SVD-M to murder civilians at longer range, they didn't redesign their service rifle to support 300-500m optics for extra-efficient civilian-killing at moderate range, they didn't invest in ceramic plates in case Uncle Pasha's got a shotgun in the farmhouse, they did these things to gain a competitive edge over their near-peer NATO-friendly neighbors whose sovereignty Russia deems threatening.

Aecus Decimus wrote:
China needs a rifle to handle its internal conflicts and make some cash on the side. Ripping off someone else's work is good enough for selling a "new" gun and making some money before everyone realizes it's yet another piece of cheap Chinese garbage and any random gun works well enough for keeping Dear Leader in power and the organ harvesting camps well supplied.

And this is just invoking national stereotypes, because China's QBZ-97 export variant on the QBZ-95 competes with ARs and AKs in foreign markets where it's imported, eg Canada. The 95 is a homegrown design in a novel cartridge, diverging significantly from the ubiquitous AR and AK layouts without aping any specific bullpups. Plenty of literature is already out there on the 97 so if someone is convinced it's just a cheap piece of Chinese ripoff garbage, it means they haven't done any research. It's not great, in part because China pretty openly focuses on operational and strategic assets (in particular rocket artillery and counter-peer systems like air-launched ASMs) as a more effective means of deterrence than small arms, but there are far worse systems in active service in Europe.

Attributing functional military requirements to boilerplate political statements or vapid observations of enduring themes (yes, the US has corruption in procurement, this is not news) does not make for particularly accurate analysis.

Well, "whisper quiet" is relative for guns. Anything you don't need to wear hearing protection for is pretty dang quiet. You'll still hear it firing of course, but mostly from the action of the gun.

 catbarf wrote:
It's designed explicitly to defeat near-peer body armor at 500yds

Which near-peer nation is a plausible opponent for the US?

they did these things to gain a competitive edge over their near-peer NATO-friendly neighbors whose sovereignty Russia deems threatening.

Which neighbors are those, and what is the plausible war scenario that does not end in the utter destruction of Russia at the hands of NATO? For this exercise assume that Sweden and Finland will be NATO members before Russia is able to extract itself from the Ukraine debacle and even consider another war.

It's not great, in part because China pretty openly focuses on operational and strategic assets (in particular rocket artillery and counter-peer systems like air-launched ASMs) as a more effective means of deterrence than small arms, but there are far worse systems in active service in Europe.

I direct you to the comment made in this very thread, about the video evidence that the gun is cheap Chinese garbage. After that, can you clarify which nations this new rifle is a deterrent against, and how the precise details of small arms design have any impact on how willing those nations are to attack China?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Meanwhile I have a theory here, about why a new rifle gets so much attention from amateurs despite having very little relevance on the battlefield or in strategic planning. It's because a rifle is the only military toy that is accessible to the average person. The operating costs on a MiG-21 are way out of reach for most people but a rifle, that's something you can buy at your local gun shop (at least in semi-auto form) and play with. And because all the other rifles are also accessible you can have an informed discussion on their various merits without getting into classified information and things few people have hands-on experience with. You can even get your very own copy of all that shiny new marketing material explaining how cool your new toy would be if you ever had to use it for anything other than shooting paper targets at the range and how it's just like the one Real™ Soldiers™ are using.

I don't know, maybe I'm wrong here, but I do find it interesting that Russia's new rifle seems to be of far more interest than, say, boring old stuff like the state of the maintenance programs on Russia's ICBMs.

Aecus Decimus wrote:
Which near-peer nation is a plausible opponent for the US?

Aecus Decimus wrote:
Which neighbors are those

If you need to ask who these countries see as competitors, I don't think you're in much a position to speculate on the motivation behind procurement decisions.

Aecus Decimus wrote:
I direct you to the comment made in this very thread, about the video evidence that the gun is cheap Chinese garbage.

Toofast's comment about defective barrels? Your assessment of Chinese small arms design is based on a secondhand comment about this video?

You can clearly see a lack of impact on the concrete backstops, indicating they're not firing FMJ. The gun groups that like to circlejerk about this stuff are generally unaware that the Chinese (among others) use rubber training ammunition for MOUT facilities that does not stabilize in a conventional rifling twist and will keyhole at any distance. The US and Europe generally use frangible ammunition which stabilizes better, but does the exact same thing in rifles with slow (1:9 or lower) twist rates.

The idea that China went from producing competent Type 56s and Type 95s/97s- both of which are very familiar to Western audiences, both of which require a sophisticated technological base, the former of which was made in the Mao era no less- to being unable to produce rifling in 2022 requires a hell of a lot more evidence than top minds of Twitter and Reddit not understanding how a shoot house works.

Here's another video that's been making the rounds in OSINT circles. There are a lot of interesting details here but the relevant point is a lack of keyholing and noticeably different recoil impulse from the training video.

Aecus Decimus wrote:
Meanwhile I have a theory here, about why a new rifle gets so much attention from amateurs despite having very little relevance on the battlefield or in strategic planning. It's because a rifle is the only military toy that is accessible to the average person. The operating costs on a MiG-21 are way out of reach for most people but a rifle, that's something you can buy at your local gun shop (at least in semi-auto form) and play with. And because all the other rifles are also accessible you can have an informed discussion on their various merits without getting into classified information and things few people have hands-on experience with. You can even get your very own copy of all that shiny new marketing material explaining how cool your new toy would be if you ever had to use it for anything other than shooting paper targets at the range and how it's just like the one Real™ Soldiers™ are using.

Speak for yourself. I've spent the last ten years in intelligence and then defense contracting, five of them in small arms analysis. This was literally my day job.

I don't comment on Russian ICBM readiness or demographic collapse or decay of NCO cadre because while those are undoubtedly more impactful to the outcome of a shooting war, they're not my department and I defer to those for whom it is.

And nukes are incredibly depressing to think about. Guns are much more fun, and it’s easy to think of a happy place where they might be used that doesn’t end civilisation for millennia.

Aecus Decimus wrote:

Which near-peer nation is a plausible opponent for the US?

Well any substantial military that forces America to fight at a distance (so limiting in theatre power), over something they only half care about, with a way to blunt US space dominance. So maybe China over Taiwan. But currently on the space side they only have 'destroy everything' as the option, so that is tricky to use unless you want the world to hate you.

Meanwhile I have a theory here, about why a new rifle gets so much attention from amateurs despite having very little relevance on the battlefield or in strategic planning. It's because a rifle is the only military toy that is accessible to the average person. The operating costs on a MiG-21 are way out of reach for most people but a rifle, that's something you can buy at your local gun shop (at least in semi-auto form) and play with. And because all the other rifles are also accessible you can have an informed discussion on their various merits without getting into classified information and things few people have hands-on experience with. You can even get your very own copy of all that shiny new marketing material explaining how cool your new toy would be if you ever had to use it for anything other than shooting paper targets at the range and how it's just like the one Real™ Soldiers™ are using.

I don't know, maybe I'm wrong here, but I do find it interesting that Russia's new rifle seems to be of far more interest than, say, boring old stuff like the state of the maintenance programs on Russia's ICBMs.

Yes undoubtedly a factor. People discuss what they can envisage. And people are terrible at systems. Both imagining them and thinking about them (nationally look at how few politicians understand them and use ideology as a crutch instead).It is a constant battle to tell even people who should know better to think about these things as a system. The individual weapon, the infantry man, the squad, the platoon, how all that both integrates into the expected way of war and can adapt to situation that call for rapid change. And then how much do you get to train to do all that. Keyboard warriors will point to tactical success for Ukraine for example as evidence they can sweep the Russians out - the Ukraine senior leadership sits and frets about the fact they have near zero experience in manoeuvre warfare above Brigade, and not much above battalion. We knock Russia, but their seniors were at least familiar with it due the the large scale exercises that take place.


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FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:

Grey Templar, thank you for the ID on the VSS. all I remembered was that someone in the genius bar of Russia said, hey, lets make the SVD a third the size, and internally suppressed, and 9mm.

Are we talking about their suppressed 9mm paratrooper weapon? The Val? Their is a vaguely sharpshooter version the Vintorez? I think they are trophy arms for Ukrainians but an oddity globally.


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Toofast wrote:
The Chinese rifles have defective barrels and keyhole at 10 meters. You can see it in the propaganda video they released. The holes in the paper targets look like the side profile of the projectile rather than being a round hole. It was immediately posted on a bunch of gun groups to show how crappy their technology is. If China invaded, a bunch of ex mil with ARs and farmers with .30-06 deer rifles would have a 100:1 kill ratio.

I would actually expect kill rations (assuming the US military disappeared somehow) akin to the Soviets in Afghanistan. Even poorly equipped and motivated soldiers have the basics of soldiering and civilians don't.

 catbarf wrote:
If you need to ask who these countries see as competitors, I don't think you're in much a position to speculate on the motivation behind procurement decisions.

That was a polite way of saying "no such country exists".


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The_Real_Chris wrote:
So maybe China over Taiwan.

China over Taiwan is a non-issue. China can't land troops (and if they tried it would be history's greatest massacre), Taiwan has no interest in attacking China. If China retakes Taiwan it will be after political efforts to get pro-China officials into power and Taiwan will voluntarily agree to be annexed. And in any case, the deciding factor in any hypothetical defense of Taiwan will be SAMs and anti-ship missiles. If rifles are ever fired in this hypothetical conflict something has gone very badly wrong.

Oh, well if a guy in France isn't convinced that China poses a threat to Taiwan, obviously that means the US Department of Defense doesn't consider China a threat either, and all those mountains of policy documents identifying China as a near-peer adversary must be smokescreens for government corruption.

I mean, if Aecus Decimus doesn't believe that Russia has policy goals besides 'shoot civilians lol', what other explanation is there?

 catbarf wrote:
Oh, well if a guy in France isn't convinced that China poses a threat to Taiwan, obviously that means the US Department of Defense doesn't consider China a threat either, and all those mountains of policy documents identifying China as a near-peer adversary must be smokescreens for government corruption.

The US considered it a threat, past tense. They took steps to prevent an attack from ever happening. But please do clarify what scenario you have in mind where a rifle is ever fired at any point in this hypothetical conflict.

(And please try to keep in mind the difference between the rhetoric used to justify the money faucet and the reality of the situation.)

I mean, if Aecus Decimus doesn't believe that Russia has policy goals besides 'shoot civilians lol', what other explanation is there?

Sure, they have policy goals involving the destruction of Ukraine's military to clear the way for more genocide. But let's be realistic here, the only thing they've been succeeding at has been murdering unarmed civilians.

 catbarf wrote:

Aecus Decimus wrote:
The US needs a rifle for fighting aimless low-intensity wars as justification for funneling money to the defense industry and votes to the elected officials on their payrolls. An expensive new rifle, complete with cool marketing literature, is perfect for this role and ensures that the small arms manufacturers don't feel left out of the money faucet going to the companies providing heavy weapons to Ukraine.

Russia needs a rifle for murdering unarmed civilians. A slight update to the classic AK design works fine for this and the design changes make it a little harder for Ukraine to use them against Russian troops when they're inevitably captured. A new round would have been even better for keeping Ukraine from using them effectively, but TBH Russia probably wouldn't be able to supply enough ammunition to keep the war crimes from slowing down.

China needs a rifle to handle its internal conflicts and make some cash on the side. Ripping off someone else's work is good enough for selling a "new" gun and making some money before everyone realizes it's yet another piece of cheap Chinese garbage and any random gun works well enough for keeping Dear Leader in power and the organ harvesting camps well supplied.

I sometimes wonder what compels someone to post hot takes on a subject that they clearly have little knowledge of.

Removed - rule #1

Removed - rule #1

Removed - rule #1