Why This May Be The Ultimate Machine Gun

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By Charlie Gao,The National Interest

Mikhail Kalashnikov is known for creating the AK rifle, but his contributions to Soviet firearms design didn’t end there. In 1961 he designed the PK machine gun, which was modernized into the PKM in 1969. Like the AK, this machine gun serves on to the current day. However, in many ways, it can be considered a better design than his rifle, despite it serving a different role.

(This first appeared last month.)

The PKM is sometimes described as “an AK flipped upside down and made in a different caliber,” which is not totally incorrect. Both weapons use the long-stroke gas piston operation, where gas is tapped from the barrel to drive a piston that actuates the action. On the AK, the gas tube that houses this piston is above the barrel. On the PKM, it is below the barrel.

However, the PKM features a gas regulator to adjust the amount of gas being tapped off from the barrel to drive the action. Normally the regulator is placed on the “1” setting, with “2” and “3” providing more gas to cycle the action when conditions are rough. This allows it to have a gentler recoil impulse, unlike the AK which is slightly overgassed to be reliable in all conditions without adjustment.

While the reason for this design choice may be simplicity, presumably a machine gunner would have more time to train on their weapon than a rifleman, western rifles contemporary to the AK such as the FN FAL featured a gas regulator as well. We also see the move from a standard single overgassed setting to a gas regulator within the HK416 series, from the original HK416 to the HK416A5 and A7. This all suggests that a quickly adjustable gas regulator is the way to go to lower recoil on a firearm.