not Irish are you, with links to a certain freedom faction are you? Lol, that could throw up some red flags in the government offices. Irish, freedom faction with AKM talk.... oh boy!
During the half a year I never even saw a bayonet. The people fool enough to stay the full year get a normal, rubbish Martiini puukko.
sight length is actually one of the biggest factors in a guns accuracy. it wont change the accuracy of the barrel obviously, if a barrel is no good you cant help that, but when aiming it makes a big difference. when aiming, have the sights close together makes it much harder to keep your aim center as the slightest movement moves the sights over alot. when they are further apart it takes more movement to put your aim off. i made a little pic to show what i mean. The black dots represent the front and rear sights. As you can see, when the gun is turn 5 degrees, the rear sights move alot more when the distance between front and rear is greater. This makes is easier keep the gun on target with longer front-rear sight distance because you need to move the rear sights alot more to make and affect on your aiming. So besides the barrel itself, the way the sights are, is probably the biggest factor in accuracy. ( not including the shooter )
I know, i do non-competitive sports shooting : ) Again, what i'm trying to get to is that the AK is (supposedly) less accurate than some similiar weapons with the same sight distance. So while the sight distance does matter a lot, when it's up against weapons with the same length and still performs worse there's more to it than that. Thus longer sight distance alone probably won't fix the AK.
sorry i guess I forgot the [/sarcasm] tag on my post. I know that 7.62 will go through most body armor (non ceramic) and is usually more than enough to finish the job, I was just messing around.
I reckon one of the reasons the AK is less accurate than similarly-sighted weapons may be something to do with the banana-like structural integrity. Ever seen one of them fired in ultra-slow-motion? The bullet may be already out of the barrel in semi-auto (not that that makes it immune), but in automatic mode the thing is flexing like a rubber band and your follow-up-shots are just all over the place even before you count the barrel climb and recoil, bandaid-esque muzzle brake or not. Contrast that with the altogether more modern AR family, and it's a different story altogether - almost no flex whatsoever (though of course you get vastly less recoil anyway thanks to the lightweight round).
How would an AR get similiar muzzle climb as an AK? Even though they tend to have a flash hider or a muzzle brake at best instead of a compensator it's still supposed to have no climb whatsoever due to the in-line stock. FYI i keep saying "supposedly" because i've never fired an AR, not because i want to mock it.
The only way I've fired the M16 on FA is from the hip, not prone or from the shoulder (FA M16 fire is prohibited as part of the IDF regs; the one mag of FA fire I did in Asia for fun rather than for serious shooting) and because of my generally rubbish handling and the different hold on the weapon I got slight climb. When the stock's not in your shoulder, the line-of-recoil thing is thrown off. Climb would have been lessened (I don't know about negligible) if I'd been firing it properly, I suppose. That said, I've never fired an original AK or an AKM (just derivatives like the Galil, which are pretty bad for climb but not supposed to be as bad as the original) so similarity is definitely outside my knowledge.
I see. The way i imagine it, if you did it from the hip then the axis would move from the buttstock to your pistol grip so that makes sense.
Also smaller round = less recoil/climb to begin with? I've understood the large 7.62 bullets combined with LOTS of mass on the moving parts, combined with the non in-line design are what makes the AK so impossible to keep steady at FA?
I, like Jipa, used the Finnish RK variant of the AK. Absolutely loved the thing. On a good day, I could get a nice neat spread of 10cm at 150m. Although Jipa says those of us who stayed a year in the Finnish army ( ) were fools, I loved it. I managed to get into the competition shooting group and got to the national military championships. Interesting to see others shoot, like the "hardcore" lads who would wear 5 or 6 layers of clothes to reduce the amount of movement in their body when firing. I thought the RK was exceptionally accurate. During live-fire exercises, being able to hit targets (small balloons) at 200m+ on the first shot was evidence enough for that. Ever since I've know the difference between the sights on any AK and the RK, with respect to the rear sights, I have wanted to test them both out side by side. I would imagine that the slightly more forward AK sights might be useful in close-range target acquisition. The RK would be better if that is true for longer ranges. As a Recon Sarge, I prefer to keep my distance when I can Also, Jipa, I see you had the old-school RK, same as myself, although I had an even older model with the pistol grip being very similar to the hand guard (etu-kahva). My Rk will be 37 this year. Sadly, she's in storage now, I wore the chamber out in her...
Ahh good Ol` RK 62. I loved mine to bits. Great weapon all over. Mine is turning 38 this year. In my last month of army i had the fortune to try out the newer RK 95. It has a lil lighter recoil and the buttstock is foldeble (sp?) which is great for tighter positions in houses. I kind of miss the whole shooting part of my army time. The sleeping in the woods part not so much
Yeah well it wasn't really a military knife, just something to show at home when you finally get out. True. Shooting rules, ok, but the camps just blew. I managed to miss a couple due to medical reasons and did not feel bad for skipping them AT ALL. All in all, if you've been camping in the woods and can tie your shoe laces, the only new thing during the half a year was the shooting.
