THE RUSSIAN AMMUNITION PAGE - FOREWORD
     
     
    Foreword - Purpose of this Page
     
    For those, wondering - what an odd topic for a webpage - be assured, the subject of cartridges is most thrilling for many people. Most individuals interested in this topic start collecting these things, and the enthusiastic collectors organize in cartridge collector associations.
    For further information please proceed to www.ecra.info or www.cartridgecollectors.org.

    While military ammunition of western countries is not really confidential, the former Soviet Union and its associated states made a big military secret about their ordnance during the cold war. But still today, there are many questions to be answered, with many aspects of Soviet ordnance unclear even to western specialists.
    This page is intended to get in touch with as many people as possible who are familiar with eastern block ordnance and to share and exchange our knowlege. The results of these exchanges are presented free in these pages for everybodys reference.
    I hope you appreciate the information I have provided so far, but now, I need your help!

    The ammunition of Russia and its associated states is an enormously wide field, so I had to limit the topic. I will only deal in detail with military ammunition used past World War I in a caliber range of 12,7mm to 57mm. This range includes mainly aircraft cannon and anti-aircraft artillery (AAA). These rounds are always fixed ammunition, fed into high performance automatic guns.
    I drew these lines because Russian small arms ammunition is well documented, and ammunition beyond 57mm caliber, classified as artillery ammunition, is not my main interest. As this is a freely hosted site - many thanks to Geocities and Yahoo - there is limited space as well.

    One word about the pictures and drawings. They are mainly displayed smaller on this page than they actually are. Best download each picture you are interested in and print them in their actual size with a picture-editor. All pictures and drawings are in .jpg format and have a size from 15 to 150kB.

    The parts of the ammunition components in the drawings are not indicated, as the knowledge of these components as well as the basic function of fuzes and primers is expected to be known by the reader. If you are unfamiliar with the components of ammunition, see your local bookstore for basic gun and ammunition publications or find the basics of small arms ammunition here.

    Please note that metric dimensions are used! The cartridges are listed in the European system, giving the caliber separated by a "x", and the case length in millimeters. As an additional clue, a letter is enclosed after this basic information: R=rimed, SR=semi-rimed, B=belted, RR=rebateded rim (some people designate it as RB), no letter
    means the standard rimless type of cartridge case. After this code, the international designation of the cartridge-family is shown.

    This page with its pictures, drawings and explanations is not intended for EOD-personnel or people who want to disassemble, inert or dispose of ammunition, because the source of all this information is only completely inert ammunition, lacking any explosive, propellant, detonators, primers, etc. These parts, provided in the drawings are either taken from written sources and pictures, or when any information was unavailable, they are pure speculation or simply not shown! If this is the case, of course, notes in italic are made beneath the drawings. 

    I enclosed some pictures of general interest as well, and don´t bother on the simple layout of this page, as I am not a professional web-designer. Please note, that I can only answer concrete requests on the contents of this page, due to missing time. Please be patient, if I am temporarily not able to reply within a few days.

    Enjoy!
    Chris

     
     
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