TP-82 Cosmonaut survival pistol | Hacker News Reader

TP-82 Cosmonaut survival pistol

en.wikipedia.org

174 pointsBerislavLopac74 comments

This is is exactly the type of thing I come to this site for. Showing me fringe info I don’t even know I’m interested in knowing about.

The article had a link to an AK-74, and I thought is that a typo for an AK-47? Apparently Russia moved on to the next generation in 1974 and the rest of the world remained with AK-47s?

Remained with the name. AK-74 5.45mm cartridge AKM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKM) - 7.62mm

It's all about the cost.

During WW2 and Korea, militaries generally favored larger, heavier bullets. The thinking was power is good. Over time, people realized that carrying weight is bad, and volume of fire is usually better than the power of a single cartridge – so the US moved to the M-16 (M4, AR-15) and the Soviets to the AK-74.

The sticking point is you have to have the money for BOTH:

1. Mass caliber conversion (rifle replacement, new ammo, new tooling...), AND

2. Purchase of additional, larger caliber weapons to replace the capability you lost when switching most of your forces from the intermediate cartridge to the newer, smaller bullet.

So, poorer countries tended to stick with the AK-47, and wealthier Soviet-bloc countries went to the AK-74...but there aren't too many wealthy communist countries, so the AK-47 remained the standard.

Wait until you hear about the AK-94!

That's straight out of Scifi.

What it looked like: http://www.geraldika.org/images/06_2007/010_04.jpg

Seems like a movie prop. What evidence is there that this thing was a real prototype?

It's an exhibit in Russia's Strategic Missile Forces Academy museum.

Ok, that's evidence enough! Still looks like a prop though :P

Did you know that Princess Leia's blaster was not a prop but an actual Soviet handgun?

http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Original_Trilogy#DD...

Cool! Did not know that.

If I just saw a picture of it at random, I would guess it to be a cheesy prop from an old Flash Gordon movie.

What would a laser gun look like without looking like a movie prop?

They look kind of like a telescope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn-_oWl_x90

Worth noting it took two decades from Leonov's complaint to introduction of this handgun.

Soviet bureaucracy at its finest.

I thought the advanced team quickly building a log cabin to sleep in was very Russian.

I knew a guy years ago who kind-of described it as a right of passage that you would take a trip out into the woods and build your own cabin/dacha.

A Finnish friend sent me his pictures of building his, including the obligatory sauna.

It might be that Russians cooperate very well (I do definitely agree on that), but as the organisation grows bigger, it is definitely very Russian to not be able to do anything.

It's not a Russian trait, it's a common bureaucratic trait, and Soviet Union was bureaucratized over any sane limits.

One of signatures of Henry Spencer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer ) looks like this:

    -- 
    Americans proved to be more bureaucratic           |       Henry Spencer
    than I ever thought.  --Valery Ryumin, RKK Energia |   henry@zoo.toronto.edu

https://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/hydrogen.html

russians (and other citizens of soviet union) transitioned from serfdom to (at the time) bleeding edge political system. It required tremendeous amounts of bureaucracy in order to enforce ex-serfs not to get any funny ideas about their current 'freedom'.

Wow, just realized English has two phrases that are homonyms but mean very different things:

• “rite of passage” = “a ceremony or event marking an important stage in someone's life”, “when an individual leaves one group to enter another”. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rite_of_passage&o...)

• “right of passage” = right of way, “(approximately) a country's right for its ships to pass through the territorial seas of foreign states and straits used for international navigation”. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Right_of_passage&...) Seems to be more often a typo for “rite of passage”.

Yes, rite of passage. Not sure how I managed to type the wrong spelling, brain seeming a bit glitchy.

Russian version of the article states that he expressed his complaint only in 1979 when he was visiting weapons manufacturing in Tula. The development started shortly after.

I can’t be the only one who was disappointed to find out that these weren’t designed for Cold War space combat with American astronauts.