Who Watches the Watchmen (Our Chit Chat Thread)

Yay! I did good.

Thirdfox wrote: »

the massive seals (another feature to do with lack of precision machining in the USSR)

I'd agree with your other points T, but far less so on this point, though it's commonly repeated with regard to the Vostoks. There can be a hint of the cold war US prejudice going on.

The Soviets were bloody good at precision engineering. They were the first and for a goodly while the better space faring nation and were leaders in many aspects of aerospace in general. Put it another way; if you're able to machine a movement plate to the tolerances required to have press fit jewel bearings(rather than screw chaton set which allows more leeway*) and do that as a large scale industrial process, case machining to a high enough tolerance is not a problem. Put it another way they were able to machine the press fit crystal groove to such a degree that made it both watertight at the surface and allow for expansion within that groove all the way down to 200 and 300 metre depths as part of the water resistant design.

The main reasons they went with that innovative case design were 1) longevity of materials in the field. Not having to replace the seals every time a service was required cut down long term costs and lessened the chances of failures in the field. Important in a non commercial command economy that initially had the military in mind and 2) they were always looking to the export market for hard currency sales so wanted to avoid any existing patents that would impact their bottom line(the designers of the Amphiba case make this point very clear). So the back and front openings were no great problem for the Vostok factory, what was initially an issue in large scale production with steel cases was machining lugs of all things. Hence the first examples had clumsy wire type lugs and later the tonneau case shape helped avoid lugs entirely. The early ones with lugs were all chromed brass.

This is where the AK47 comparisons tend to lose some steam. The lower tolerance AK design was deliberately designed with ease of large scale manufacture, to be as cheap as possible and have extreme robustness in the field. In the original trials that Kalashnikov won, other designers had come up with some good designs with much higher requirements for tolerances, but they'd have cost a lot more to produce and those same higher tolerances were more likely to lead to jamming in use(and required better ammunition too). They had learned the lessons of WW2 against German tech which was of extremely high tolerances and standards, but tended to be overly complex. Great when they worked, but they tended to stop working more and took longer to repair and to produce. Of course this means the AK's tend to be much less accurate a weapon compared to western types, but accurate enough.







*Chaton set is often reported as more "luxury" these days by various online expert types because they say it's more complex and labour intensive and it is, but the main reason chaton set was originally in play was because large scale manufacturing tolerances weren't so great in stamping directly into the brass plates and using a separate setting of softer material(gold or copper) and screw adjustment allowed for more leeway and easier fettling of the settings.