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Automaton rifle trial#
Due to limited trial nature of its production, most of its parts were custom fitted and not interchangeable, including the magazine. The fixed magazine was replaced by a curved 25-round detachable box magazine. He retained the mechanism of his semi-automatic rifle, with the major addition of a selective fire switch. Fedorov set to the task upon his return to Russia in January 1916. His decision to adapt his semi-automatic rifle design for this purpose was one of wartime expediency. According to Fedorov's memoirs, it is here he came up with the idea of introducing into Russian service a weapon with firepower intermediate between the rifle and the light machine gun, but with mobility comparable to a rifle. Here he was impressed by the ubiquity of the French Chauchat and by the firepower it brought, but less so about its mobility. In the autumn of 1915, Fedorov was posted as a military observer to France, in the Mont-Saint-Éloi sector. 6.5 mm Fedorov rifles were tested late in 1913 with somewhat favorable results. When fired from an 800 mm barrel, this experimental cartridge propelled a pointed jacketed bullet weighing 8.5 grams at an initial velocity of 860 m/s with a muzzle energy of 3,140 J as opposed to the 3,550 J muzzle energy of 7.62×54mmR ammunition from a barrel of the same length. This new rimless ammunition was more compact than the rimmed Russian 7.62×54mmR, better suited for automatic weapons and produced less recoil, however, the round was prone to occasional jamming. In 1913, Fedorov submitted a prototype automatic rifle with a stripper clip-fed fixed magazine, chambered for his own experimental rimless 6.5 mm cartridge, called the 6.5mm Fedorov. A model was submitted to the Rifle Commission of the Russian army in 1911, which eventually ordered 150 more rifles for testing. Fedorov began a prototype of a semi-automatic rifle in 1906, working with future small arms designer Vasily Degtyaryov as his assistant. A bolt hold-open device is fitted and the firing mechanism is of hammer type.
Automaton rifle free#
Those plates are allowed to tilt slightly down after about 10 mm of free recoil, unlocking the bolt.
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The bolt locking is achieved by a pair of symmetrical plates mounted to either side of the breech and held in place by a sheet metal cover, each with two lugs, one square and one round, mounted at either side of the breech, latching barrel and bolt together through recesses on the bolt. The Fedorov Avtomat is a short-recoil operated, locked-breech weapon which fires from a closed bolt. Some consider it to be an "early predecessor" or "ancestor" of the modern assault rifle.
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The weapon saw limited combat in World War I, but was used more substantially in the Russian Civil War and in the Winter War. A total of 3,200 Fedorov rifles were manufactured between 19 in the city of Kovrov the vast majority of them were made after 1920. 'Fyodorov's automatic rifle') or FA is a select-fire infantry rifle and also one of the world's first operational automatic rifles, designed by Vladimir Grigoryevich Fyodorov in 1915 and produced in the Russian Empire and later in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The Fedorov Avtomat (also anglicized as Federov, Russian: Автома́т Фёдорова, tr. Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
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