Maintaining and Producing Weapons when industry has been reduced to Omsk-tier

Something's been bothering me ever since I saw the rusted AKs being handed out to Russia's newly mobilised troops and that is why isn't Russia just making new versions of older models to hand out to them?

Like, seriously, is it really beyond them to make guns out of stamped steel and wood? I can't imagine they've lost the plans as the AK and it's variants haven't changed much in decades.

It's not like we're seeing degradation of quality control either, like we saw with pre-war Japanese Arisaka rifles slowly devolving into basically hollowed out sticks with nails as a firing pin.

It seems they've gone from having guns in an adequate condition to no guns at all with no step in-between.

The only answer I can think of is that Russia simply doesn't make rifles in significant numbers anymore, which is moronic. But since this is Russia, the moronic answer is probably the correct one.

Either that, or everyone is high off the Copium Bird's farts and are just imagining brooms are AK-12s, pigeons are SU-57s and the Armata is a functional combat vehicle.

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I... honestly have no idea. Maybe they really have completely abandoned all their gun factories?

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Why would you manufacture guns if you have 1 million in storage? Everything they've done was predicated on the idea that they had massive weapons stockpiles ready and waiting. As it turns out, it was more just massive piles.

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >I saw the rusted AKs being handed out to Russia's newly mobilised troops
    Sauce? I guess I'd believe it with all the T-62s they're deploying, but I'd still like pictures or something.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      How did you manage to miss that? It was everywhere when they surfaced.

      https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russian-conscripts-sent-to-fight-in-ukraine-handed-rusty-kalashnikovs/ar-AA12fbuc

      https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/19912509/inside-russias-shambolic-mobilisation-rusty-weapons-soviet-tanks/

      Back on topic though, is there any reason that Russia can't just start churning out PPS-43's for the new conscripts? IIRC they got the production of that gun down to a little over 2 hours, with hand tools, and no resources bar sheet metal. If I was conscripted and they handed me a gun literally from WW2 I'd be pretty pissed off, but less so than if they handed me a gun that looked like it had been stored at the bottom of a bog for the last 60 years.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        puccia is such a ridiculous shithole they can't even manage that.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >is there any reason that Russia can't just start churning out PPS-43's for the new conscripts
        they would also have to churn out the ammo and have good enough logistics to distribute at least 300,000 in a couple months. Spoiler alert: if their logistics were good enough to transport 300,000 small arms in a couple months they'd never have had to stoop so low as to manufacture Stalin-era submachine guns in the first place.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        PPS-43 is a good compromise if you have a functioning manufacturing system but critical shortages of metal. Right now the situation in Russia is reversed: plenty of metal on hand but can't produce finished goods from it.

        In WW2 it took them two years of constantly losing until Stalin finished executing enough people to get a working war machine. Putin's been ordering plenty of executions, but it's not clear he has enough time.

        If he can get the mobiks through a proper training cycle over the winter and into a real spring offensive, they would start seeing results again. The big question is if he'll survive that long

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Recommend Ukrainians attack the training sites themselves to counter.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            if they had any kind of brain they've be stationing training camps at least 100km back from the border, and if they were really in a bad way come spring, marching them forward by foot

            also keep in mind stalin had basically infinite materials flowing in from the US, and russia is in the complete opposite situation now under sanctions

            russia largely exported raw materials and imported finished goods prewar. now they can't export anything and their domestic manufacturing base is largely idled. it should be possible to retool them, (like how US typewriter factories switched over to guns) if they had time and political will, which they probably don't

            >If he can get the mobiks through a proper training cycle over the winter and into a real spring offensive, they would start seeing results again. The big question is if he'll survive that long
            We know that’s not going to happen, they’re shoving the Mobiks piecemeal into combat as fast as they can organize and “””equip””” them (captured mobiks report as quick as 5 days from induction). Plus the training cadres were casualties back in August.

            If they had the ability to call up 1.5 million, and they shoved 2/3rds of that into Ukraine to clog the treads of the Ukrainian tanks for 3 months while they trained a new army from the remaining 500,000 men, but they don’t have the logistical prowess to even try.

            some mobiks are being sent straight to the front but obviously not hundreds of thousands of them otherwise we'd be seeing WW1 style photos of fields covered with corpses. at least some of them are seeing actual training

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              If only Russians had any trainers left alive lol.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              if anyone else is wondering why the hell "broadcast equipment" is number one, apparently that's HS4 ID 8525, which includes cell phones https://www.dripcapital.com/hsn-code/8525

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          also keep in mind stalin had basically infinite materials flowing in from the US, and russia is in the complete opposite situation now under sanctions

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >If he can get the mobiks through a proper training cycle over the winter and into a real spring offensive, they would start seeing results again. The big question is if he'll survive that long
          We know that’s not going to happen, they’re shoving the Mobiks piecemeal into combat as fast as they can organize and “””equip””” them (captured mobiks report as quick as 5 days from induction). Plus the training cadres were casualties back in August.

          If they had the ability to call up 1.5 million, and they shoved 2/3rds of that into Ukraine to clog the treads of the Ukrainian tanks for 3 months while they trained a new army from the remaining 500,000 men, but they don’t have the logistical prowess to even try.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Putin has zero patience as a commander of war.

            Ukrainians took their time training.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      The likely reason for T-62 deployment is because someone in charge of storing T-72's has been over last couple decades stripping tanks of spare parts and selling 'em black market. Some export clients probably have enjoyed discount spares for their T-72's.

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Ukraine was the Soviet Union's machine shop. Many Uke immigrants to the US (bugging out from the first Russian genocide) went into industrial jobs in the Northeast where communities remain today.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I know a ukie family from the midwest and they are absolutely one of the coolest families ive met. My cousins are friends with some hungarians and i had to tell their kids to stop double dipping the nachos at a bbq.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      And now they likely send as much technical aid back to Ukraine as possible.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    That's what the AK12 thing was about. Kill two birds with one stone, modernize your service rifle and replenish your armories. Except it went to shit like everything else during the ~2010s modernization.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Ukrainians might end up making superior AKs.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        We won't. We don't have large scale gun manufacturing nor ammo factories so it would be wiser to manufacture some ar15 clone since west has shitton of spares and ammo.

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    corruption, corruption and more corruption. Corruption absolutely destroys a war machine faster and far more insidiously than anything else. You can bet that every last machine tool needed to make AKMs along with the AKMs and ammo themselves were pawned off by some logistics officer so long ago Yeltsin was still alive.

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >is it really beyond them to make guns out of stamped steel and wood?
    Once you stop production on a line, you repurpose the machines. The machine tools on a line are set up to do one or two jobs and nothing else. If they wear out, they get rebuilt. Most of them have been hand-tweaked to work their best, and those tweaks are very rarely recorded while the factory is running. Setting up a factory to make an old gun takes very nearly the same amount of time to set it up to make a new one once you have a working prototype.
    This is particularly critical with stamped rifles, since they rely on a set of jigs that will eventually wear out. When a factory stops production on most stamped things, ESPECIALLY weapons, they chop up the jigs and sell them for scrap. So the AK-74 jigs that were even usable in the Russian armories were junked decades ago. The molds they used to cast stocks are likewise long-gone. At this point they'd have to have been gearing up to make new rifles for months, which involves admitting that YE NEXT FORTNIGHT is a lie on an administrative level. And also relying on everyone in the command chain not to waste the money on cronies and prostitutes.

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    What's stopping Russia from just making pipe guns and handing them over to conscripts?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      what's stopping russia from making extremely unstable and dangerous slipshod weapons to a drunken rabble?

      i meant for that to be a rhetorical question as i typed that out but honestly, that sounds like exactly the type of shit Putin would do. i'm starting to think that he's stubbornly going to sit this through on his own terms to the bitter end.
      he's got plenty of fight in him left because the three major wars Russia fought during his adulthood were Afghanistan and Chechnya twice, two of which were defeats because the leadership wasn't ruthless enough to persue victory until the end and the Second Chechen war being a long, grinding, slowly advancing bloodbath of a war that Russia won after more than a decade of pacification efforts. Putin understands that whenever Russia manages to win, it never comes quickly, easily or cheaply. He also thinks of this more like a mixture of a 1980s and 1990s war while the rest of the world thinks of it as a 2020s war.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I don't know why people didn't understand this from the get-go. As long as the pig-iron tanks move and shoot forwards, it doesn't matter how many they burn through to Putin and friends.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Except these are Ukrainians, just as ruthless and dedicated to suicidal levels.

        They will kill all Russians until they stop coming.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Russia had uncontestable airpower in Chechya and Syria. They don't have it here and won't at all, as these large increase in lost aircraft trying to stop these Ukrainian offensives show.

        Also, I'd like to point you to another critical difference that is actually relevant to Syria: Five Eyes total vision granted by satellite and other intelligence methods. The US knew well in advance Wagner was preparing to attack them in Khasam and warned Russian command in Syria repeatedly they would destroy them if they attacked the American position there. Russians feigned ignorance, Wagner attacked, US aerial and missile assets on standby destroyed them without even a US injury.

        I have no doubt Putin will likely send every Russian male to their death before he admits defeat, but Chechen and Syrian rebels did not have access to High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems or Caesar self-propelled howitzers.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Ukrainians are more than happy to kill all Russian invaders. They have the means to do it aplenty.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >without even a US injury.

          Hey now, I'm not going to let you disrespect the JTAC was injured in that action when he fell to the ground pissing himself with laughter.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I mean, we've already got a photo of them potentially using an honest-to-god 18th-century breach-loaded cannon, so I don't think home-made muskets would be too much of a stretch.

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Order 10,000 AK's in 2010
    >General Vatnikorruptski signs the invoice to his cousin's arms company
    >Rifles mysteriously never show

    >Order stockpiles of old AK's to be opened
    >Major Nofricksgivenavich and his predecessors have been selling them piecemeal to to goatfrickers and in bulk to arms dealers since the Wall fell
    >No AK's to give except rusted pieces of shit even the tallies didn't want

    >Order 10,000 AK's in 2022
    >Minister Bentomirev accepts bid from Shitbox arms which slides him 5% of the contract under the table
    >Front line troops open the crates to find sawdust and a few rifles even worse quality than the old CW shit.

    There's literally nothing that can be done. That's the beauty of this whole situation. There is literally NOTHING the vatniks can do short of a root, stem and branch cull of their entire political and military bureaucracy - which can't happen because they're the same people running the show who initiated this disaster in the first place!

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      This, and trips confirm
      People don't get that Russia's current corruption is in some regards even worse than in commie times.
      Sure you don't bribe your shopkeeper, conductor or doctor anymore (or at least not so often) but opportunities for corruption in the higher military ranks and r&d increased significantly since then.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      the fun part is this is also the exact state of their nuclear force too, except probably moreso because nobody even expects to ever have to use those

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The big problem is that China can pump out AK47s/AK74s/AR15s/M16 clones plus their own domestic rifles… but they were not totally on board with this nonsense so now Russia has to try and provide weapons and they are doing a relatively mediocre job against an opponent who is not Georgia or another European micro state. The Russians should start mass producing AR15s because those are very easy to produce with access to a mill and mold manufacturers.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      i was going to ask why China couldn't produce AKs with absolutely no markings of any kind on them and covertly ship them to Russia, but the answer is probably once again corruption.
      if Xi sends arms, Comrade General Oligarchov would probably have half of the AKs rerouted to equip some Ooga Booga warlord's Wagner-trained army before the ink dries on the contract.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        You don't get it. China won't mass produce guns for puccia because it doesn't want to get drawn into this embarrassing mess and suffer the consequences.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          pic related

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Do they even have enough 5.56 NATO ammo or will switch make them in 5.45 or 7.62?

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It's more likely an issue with procurement, storage, and logistics on the part of the military. Russia can make the guns it wants but if they're not brought into the military inventory it doesn't matter.

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Firstly a few videos of poorly stored AKs doesn't mean the Russian military is out of guns. Secondly, the military only gets the weapons they ask for. If the military runs out because they sold half their guns and left the other half to rust but never ordered new guns that's not a failing of the weapons industry. Typically in the west you order an intial batch of X guns per year until you acquire whatever number you want then Y guns per year in spare parts to account for attrition and keep the production lines running.

  13. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Russia simply doesn't make rifles in significant numbers anymore
    And that's the truth. They never bothered making the AK-12 and other modernized versions of the AK in huge numbers. Like many weapons they existed for export purposes and were adopted by the army to boost sales. And when you have huge stockpiles, why bother? That the AKs being handed out are rusty is besides the point, it just means they've been stored incorrectly. Would there be any point in manufacturing almost the exact same guns to replace stockpiled guns? And what proportion of these guns are actually rusty anyway? We see one picture and generalize it out to the entire force.

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Remember at the beginning of the war when everyone was meming about going to Ukraine and looting VSS's and AK12's?
    Now Ukrainians have all the good loot and are running around with GPNVGS, SCARs, and Gucci M4s

  15. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    All of Russia's post-WWII tier machining equipment was sold off to other nations, stolen, or melted down for scrap. Everyone with the skills left for Europe or the Anglosphere. Russia has two options for manufacturing:
    1. WWII tier machining equipment manned by prisoners who can't leave once they get skills.
    2. Import modern machining from the likes of Germany and let the workers steal enough of the stuff they make to live.

    Number 1 is no longer an option because they're conscripting everyone with a modicum of brains or skills to go get butchered by artillery, infantry, or drones.

    Number 2 is no longer an option thanks to the embargos.

    Once winter rolls around and Russia's oil wells freeze because they don't have the gear or people to keep them running, Russia is over for a generation. This is the killshot, and the real goal of this war. Once Russia can't export oil and gas, all the provinces held to Moscow by gunpoint declare their independence and it gets carved up by various ethnic and monetary interests.

    Good news is random anons like you or me can travel there, buy up a militia, and become a warlord.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Good news is random anons like you or me can travel there, buy up a militia, and become a warlord.

      LARPing as a Stalker in the Iron Thunderdome sounds like it would be a lot of fun.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      People shit on germany for trading with russia, but it has a lot of hidden benefits like this, and dependencies really do cut both ways. The embargoes wouldn't sting that much had russia relied on domestic or chinese machinery instead.

  16. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    You are confusing the ussr with russia.
    USSR was capable of producing military equipment by the thousands. Russia is not.
    Russia is living off of a dead empires reserves, massive, but finite and non renewable by a nation nowhere close to the one that produced them.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Ukrainians on the other hand stepped up to bat eventually when the ussr fell.

  17. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Putin will keep sending Russians to die until the cancer eats his brain, he runs out of women and children and cripples and it's just him alone in Russia, or some general with a bit of ambition finally frags him.
    I don't see Russians revolting against him, the spark has gone out of them. It'll have to be a coup d'etat, cut the head off the snake, but I think he's already sent anyone with bolshy great yarblockos to the front.
    So, it looks like the cancer is in the lead?

  18. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I mean, who would have thought there'd be a downside to living in a kleptocracy?

  19. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >the moronic answer is probably the correct one
    If stupidity can be applied to any situation begging explanation it's almost always the correct explanation.

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