He built nothing, he just oversaw German scientists building it.
The AK is literally just a shittier, simplified stg-44 chambered in 7.62 soviet
Except it isn’t, you dumb hole. God, every time I see you, you always say some of the stupidest shit imaginable.
The Stg-44 is a tilting bolt rifle, meaning the bolt tilts and locks into the body of the three piece receiver, the stampings are fucking retarded, the fire-control group (part of the pistol grip as a unit) alone is like 50 individual parts, and the entire gun was made out of pot-metal and expected to last 5000-10000 rounds on average, before it would begin to beat itself apart (trying to keep one with a high roundcount functional is difficult at best).
The AK is a rotating bolt rifle (meaning the bolt locks into the trunnion or barrel) with a single piece box receiver (in the production models, either stamped or machined), with a lid sitting on top. The fire control group is two hooks, a cable, a pair of pins, a spring and a trigger piece, it’s separate from the pistol grip which is just a grip that attaches onto the receiver body.
What they actually share mechanically is the long-stroke gas-piston (seen decades earlier on the Browning Automatic Rifle), and the concept of an intermediate caliber select-fire rifle, but this is where it ends, the action is radically different, the structure of the receiver bodies and their composition and integration differs completely.
The AK, even the developmental productions with half-stamped-half-machined receivers, beat the Stg44 by a mile, they hold up for 100 000 rounds easy and aren’t rendered unusable if you drop it at a bad angle, the magazines don’t start to struggle after just a few load cycles, you can actually grab the fore-end while rapid firing and not fry your hands, in short, the AK is a success in every field where the Sturmgewehr 44 was a fucking failure.
The only thing notable about the Sturmgewehr was being first, but the bad design and manufacture, the absolutely chronic shortage of ammunition and magazines, meant that wherever it actually WAS fielded, it very rarely got to live up to the potential it had, the fucking Commies had FAR wider success just fielding entire battalions with guys armed with 7.62x25mm subguns, because they had the production capability and logistics to make it happen, despite being outranged and outpowered by 7.92x33mm rifles.
On top of all this, the Stg-44 was a developmental dead-end, little further development was seen of rifles of it’s kind and it was not copied, what it did concretely inspire was the Stg-45(m), or, the ‘Gerät 06′, an odd little prototype intended to do the same thing as the Stg-44, except not shitty and with a completely different action. It was half the cost and looked similar, but worked little like it, the 45(m) was finished in the final days of the war so in itself it’s moot, but the action and concept would later develop into the H&K G3, thus also the MP5 and HK21, meaning that in future developments, nobody went “God, that’s good, I’ll copy it”, but “God, that’s shit, I have a better idea”
Meanwhile, the AK and it’s action was direct inspiration for all sorts of things, it was scaled up and turned into a Naval canon, it was turned into one of the best belt-fed machineguns of the 20th century, it’s been turned into various shotguns and submachineguns and precision rifles.
Maybe do some fucking research before opening your stupid socialist mouth.
Re blogging again for that response. Fuck it’s so good.
And I learned some things today and it’s not even 8am
To be fair, the STG had possibly one bit of input regarding the AK family. About four to six months after the decision was made to start the project that lead to the M43 7.62x39mm round, the SKS, the AK, and the RPD, the STG was deployed, and probably very soon afterwards, captured.
So it probably lead to some “See, someone else is coming up with this idea, we’re not totally fucking batshit” proof of concept.
Otherwise, they look so similar because they’re the same concept. “Hey, rifles have a lot of power, but they shoot slowly, and are really more powerful than they need to be for most firefights. SMGs have a high rate of fire, are fantastic for close range, and are easy to manufacture. How about something that bridges the gap between them? Let’s cut our standard rifle round in half and make something that’s between an SMG and a rifle!”
With pretty similar ammunition in their rifles, the cut-down versions ended up being pretty similar, and so a lot of the external stuff is pretty similar. Internally though, well… see above.
Those issues with the STG, and the early issues with the AK- think that the initial AK came along in 1957, but the AKM, which is what the rest of the AK copies were based on, and the first seriously mass issued version, didn’t come along until the fifties- were what made the SKS a realistic research and production project. After seeing the issues with the StG and predicting problems with the AK, the Soviets went for the much safer, technically, SKS.
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