sandy_boots said:
It looked cool to have a mag of 30 on the SLR and it would usually function with blank.
...and this was
almost the reason that I used to do it. One of the peacetime roles of the mob I was in in the 80s was to provide opfor during RAF TACEVALs. Chain of command reporting was always a weak point so we had to provide 'sightings' to be reported on. We had no access to the dressing up boxes that the septics were so good at providing so we had to improvise. The LMG mags were distinctive enough even for dozy crabs to spot so they became de rigeur until the time we blagged some dummy uniforms, ID cards and weapons (Sagger AT3 and RPG7s) from the USAF.
On the subject of AK47s, they were designed to be used by an ill-educated conscript army which had to work purely by drills because of the language difficulties. Someone once said that a Soviet section commander issuing a verbal order in the field would have been about as clear as a Geordie trying to tell a Gurkha a joke in French. Hence the reason that both their mech and armoured troops would be trained to debus, shake out into extended line and move forward on the axis of the vehicle with their AKs firmly clutched at waist level, firing as they went. This is why the backsight and foresight, certainly on the earlier AKs, seem to be a bit of an afterthought.
I seem to remember that the AK climbed high
and right which would still cause problems with a canted weapon.
BTW, Sandyboots, correct though they are, I don't think your points about hitting things on the move are that relevant to room clearing. Did you do any creative training along FISH lines? I used to try to get the boys to think 'holistically' and keep a weather eye out for the kind of materials the buildings were made of. Brick, block, plaster and other thin stuff meant that the SLR and GPMG could often do better work at clearing a building than a bombing team because, lets face it, the L2 was never the 'Editor's Choice' of grenades.
