Tervell [he/him]
I don’t think it’s necessarily related to the Sterling, but rather they both (and many other submachine guns, like the Sten, M3, Beretta M12, etc.) get their “shape” from a common source - the manufacturing simplicity of tubular receivers. Making a receiver like that work with a gas-operated gun is a bit trickier, since there needs to be some space for the piston to go, but with delayed blowback you can just have the bolt in a relatively cylindrically-shaped bolt carrier that fits snugly into a tube.
Here’s an StG-45, which doesn’t actually quite have a tubular receiver (since there’s a rectangular portion at the bottom, it’s overall more like a “keyhole” shape I guess), but it’s just to demonstrate how the internals of a delayed blowback gun can look
Russia is now fighting a war of attrition and way better positioned for it than Ukraine but it wasn’t their intention and it took months for them to swallow the fact that it was gonna be necessary (hence the mobilisation only coming months after).
Yes - and now that they have shifted to attrition, why would they be in a hurry to end things?
You wrote in your original comment that “Politically this will have given western support for Ukraine a shot in the arm which is the opposite of what Russia needs if it wants to end the war sooner rather than later”, but if Russia has accepted the framing of this being an attritional conflict, why would they “[want] to end the war sooner rather than later”? And thus, why would this be “embarassing”, rather than just the plan to attrit Ukraine continuing on? You can’t attrit the enemy if you don’t actually fight them.
like sorry but this is just revisionism of what happened in 2022
I don’t disagree that Russia’s original strategy was maybe naive (although I also disagree with the framing people have of assuming Russia didn’t have, you know, a plan B - to me, the drive towards Kiev was just an opportunistic “if it works, it works” move, with a more conventional attritional plan to fall back on otherwise; there’s also other strategic considerations beyond just taking the capital)- but they’re not fighting according to that strategy anymore, so what is its relevance exactly? Yeah, sure, we can criticize them for taking so long to adapt - but they have adapted. Like, this is the kind of thinking that causes Westerners to think Finland won the Winter War, because the Soviets happened to underperform, even though they actually achieved all of their strategic objectives, and more. Could the Soviets have carried out the campaign better and with less casualties? Maybe, but we can argue about counterfactuals all day long. Did they win? Uh, yes!
western support for Ukraine a shot in the arm
With what equipment, from what factory? The West can talk about support all they want, but the material reality of a crumbling industrial base doesn’t care.
the opposite of what Russia needs if it wants to end the war sooner rather than later
Why are we assuming Russia wants to end the war sooner? Like, I keep seeing people act as it’s some great failure for the war to drag on, but I just don’t get it - the strategic goal Russia has set for itself is demilitarizing Ukraine, and the longer the war drags on, the more equipment is destroyed (and that can’t keep being replenished forever, since Western countries have already given a lot of what they could and their efforts to push the “industrialize” button have amounted to fuck all, while conversely Russia’s military industry is doing very well), and more importantly (and gruesomely, but war is hell for a reason), the more Ukrainians die, ensuring less of a capacity to resist in the future.
The whole “fast war good” is an entirely Western conception, and nothing at all to do with the Soviet/Russian attritional way of war. We have two very good case studies disputing the “fast war good” standpoint - WW2, and the US invasion of Iraq. In WW2, towards the end there were Nazi plans to carry on a guerilla resistance after their defeat, which amounted to very little in reality - because by that point, most of the able-bodied (and sufficiently radicalized) men who could become insurgents were either dead or captured, so there was essentially no-one left to be a brave resistance fighter. In contrast, bandit and partisan groups kept troubling the Soviets in the Baltics, Poland and Ukraine until the 50s and early 60s, because there actually was a manpower pool (and Western support) for such groups to draw from.
So, a slow, grueling war certainly isn’t nice to fight, but it ensured the enemy is actually defeated for good (well, that didn’t quite work out in Germany’s case, since a lot of those captured soldiers were captured by the Allies - who proceeded to release them, including many who were on trial for war crimes, and basically re-activate the Wehrmacht under a new name in the name of anti-communism - which I guess shows the war should have been even more grueling, with the Soviets fighting through all of Germany and ensuring such trickery doesn’t happen, but that wasn’t necessarily a viable option).
Iraq, on the other hand, demonstrates the other extreme - an incredibly rapid and bloodless (for the invaders, anyway) war, one which Western military commentators insist perfectly illustrates the superiority of NATO doctrine over the Soviet one. This narrative works, of course, only if you pretend history ends with the fall of Baghdad, and completely ignore the years of brutal counter-insurgency that followed. Now, could these things that happened after one another, perhaps be… connected? Could it be that the Coalition’s rapid victory, in fact completely failed to “demilitarize” Iraq - and that, combined with the later mismanagement by the occupying administration, ensured an insurgency that had a large pool of resources and disgruntled men to draw from?
If Russia had won the war quickly, with most of the Ukrainian neo-nazi paramilitaries still intact instead of rotting in trenches across the country, they’d have had a brutal insurgency on their hands - one which Western countries would have a great time supporting. Instead, they now get to watch Ukraine feed its population and millions of dollars worth of Western equipment into the meat grinder. It’s a brutal outlook, yes, but it’s clearly militarily effective, if morally dubious.
That’s the shamshir, the tulwar/talwar is Indian. Although of course these categories are kind of arbitrary - both weapons belong to the same extended family of “scimitars”, and have various degrees of commonality. From what I know, tulwars are mostly identified by their unique hilt, and tend to have less-curved blades than the shamshir, but of course there’s going to be some level of variation between different examples.
Grenade launchers definitely add a bunch of weight - I’m not sure what this model is exactly, but the M203 for example is 1.36 kg, the grenades themselves vary based on the specific model, but let’s say around 0.25 kg per round. The vz. 58 is a 2.91 kg rifle, so that’s over half the weight of the full rifle, hanging off the front.
That’s why you don’t just issue a grenade launcher to each guy in the squad, but you usually have a designated “grenadier” who gets to lug around the heavier rifle, and you also carry the launcher unloaded and only put in the grenade right before firing.
It depends on how short - one of the problems with cutting down barrels is that you increase the muzzle blast (since a bunch of the generated hot gases, rather than expending their energy pushing the bullet forward, now just go out into the open air and explosively burn up). It’s why these days short-barreled builds are often paired with suppressors or other fancy muzzle devices, but those weren’t around back when these were used (well, suppressors were, but they were rarer and more expensive).
These ones probably wouldn’t be too bad - for the above one, I’m just guessing from an image, but I think it’s barrel length might actually be similar to a regular AK, maybe a bit shorter (but the gun itself is also heavier, which would help with recoil), so it’s probably comparable to an AK. The original RPD has a 20" barrel, which for a cartridge like 7.62x39mm is actually probably unnecessarily long, so you can lose some length safely.
I assume it’s probably an American custom job, I’m not aware of Soviet/Chinese/Vietnamese attempts to do this. I think this was mostly a special forces specific thing, and part of the reason for doing it was Western militaries lacking anything nice and compact in an intermediate caliber for a long time (there’s the CAR-15 in the 60s and 70s, but short-barreled ARs suffered from reliability issues for a long time). Vietnamese or other communist-aligned troops would just use their AKs (which yeah, aren’t proper machine guns, but the thing about the RPD is it doesn’t necessarily have the sustained fire capability that we might expect from a modern LMG like the M249, since there’s no quick-change barrel)
the cool thing about this one is it was apparently recorded live - not for any particularly good reason, but just because the sole programmer (and later co-founder of Interplay, Rebecca Heineman) had to make the entire port in 10 weeks and didn’t have the time to write the appropriate music driver for the 3DO, but luckily the 3DO happens to have a CD drive