About the siege of Stalingrad. I think he used a Mosin-Nagant. Wasn't 50mm, that's for sure.

yes. Excellent movie.

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[SIGPIC] Diesel loving autocrossing grandpa Architect. 08 Dodge 3/4 ton with Cummins & six speed; I have had about 35 benzes. I have a 39 Studebaker Coupe Express pickup in which I have had installed a 617 turbo and a five speed manual.[SIGPIC]

..I also have a 427 Cobra replica with an aluminum chassis.

Great movie. I own a couple 1891/30 Mosins, and a couple of their variants such as a Dragoon, as well as a Finnish M24. Talk about a real beast of a rifle. If you run out of ammo, you could literally beat the hell out of someone with it if you were out in the open. It was far too long for efficient use in closer combat situations.

I have a love for that rifle, and can't say no when I find them in pawn shops or some gun shops I frequent. If I have the cash on me at the moment, I'll buy it. In the past 10 years or so, I've bought and sold a number of them. Back when Dunham's Sports had them for $75 each, I bought 10 of them...had loads of cosmoline to clean off, and build a tank to do just that. I picked up some nice ones there, as well as some that were not so nice. I had one with a split stock that I picked up from there for $45. A month later, I listed it for sale, and got $100 cash and a Mossberg 702 Plinkster that needed work. Mossberg gave me the parts for free, namely new front and rear sights, and it has turned out to be a fun shooter. I gave it to my son when he was ready.

Knowing that those rifles are still in use by Afghani Rebels proves just how well built they were...even in their roughest machined condition.

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IMO, it's a very good pistol that was designed to be cheaply built using loose tolerances making it almost jam proof ~ an important thing in a close quarters weapon .

Thank you for the details on making it shoot better, my son has a national match grade one he bought some decades back when he asked me to teach him how to shoot .

I'd thought the poor accuracy thing was lack of close tolerance barrel bushings ~ shows how little I know .

He asked me to not buy a wheel gun when we were equipping him to study/learn/practice so I bought a Colt 1903 Pocket Automatic chambered in .32 caliber, thinking it would have significantly less recoil .

WRONG .

I went to a pawn shop and they had two, one looked like new but looking down the barrel with a bit of white paper (PO-boy borescope) showed it to be not only shot out but poorly maintained with pitting, the other one looked scruffy and had signs of external rust but the barrel and action was perfect so I pitched a ***** about how bad it looked and levered the price to my liking .

It turns out that not keeping up with your practice really is a thing, in two weeks my son was far more proficient than I'd even been, in time he took ownership of it .

Many mock the Colt 1911 .45, I think it's a pretty good tool that does exactly what it was designed to do even decades later and after minimal care .

Plus of course, when you run out of ammo you can ***** slap the hell out of the other guy with it.....

Firearms are tools, nothing more nothing less ~ don't waste time trying to impress others with your big gun, learn how to shoot it and mainatain it and always be careful, it's just like a chainsaw : useful but very dangerous if you're incautious .

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-Nate
1982 240D 408,XXX miles
Ignorance is the mother of suspicion and fear is the father

I did then what I knew how to do ~ now that I know better I do better

Stalin did not become a war leader until he stepped back and let his capable generals run the fighting. Purging his generals was a huge mistake.

Churchill was a leader who supported his military professionals, as did FDR.

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Russia's strategy was very simple and effective. They sent waves of men to be killed. In the above mentioned movie it showed a seargant telling a group of new soldiers that he had one gun for every 10 soldiers. He said to advance in a row and as the front man was shot to grab the gun and commence firing. if anybody retreated they were shot with machine guns set up to do that task alone.

Stalin a great war leader....hmmm... well, he was successful. Without his soldiers we would have had a real problem in Europe.

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[SIGPIC] Diesel loving autocrossing grandpa Architect. 08 Dodge 3/4 ton with Cummins & six speed; I have had about 35 benzes. I have a 39 Studebaker Coupe Express pickup in which I have had installed a 617 turbo and a five speed manual.[SIGPIC]

..I also have a 427 Cobra replica with an aluminum chassis.

I am not a fan of Stalin. I think the guy was sick emotionally. Fundamentally evil people do exist in this world unfortunately. Yet he was able enough to direct breaking the back of the German army.

The Germans knew they were probably finished in the fall of 1941. Russia has always possessed the best intelligence system In the world.

Personally I believe Stalin lured them deep into Russia using their own propaganda that Russians where a pushover. Remember he just fed enough replacement troops into Stalingrad to hold on and look weak. Simular tactics where used before Moscow. He even left the road open to get them there.

He manipulated things so they would be at certain places at certain times. Where their supply lines and weapons where not of much use and the German troops where hungry and very cold out in the open. Then he slammed into them with a well equipped and fed forces that just about destroyed them.

Artillery was the great killer of soldiers in wars. He made sure they had far more than the Germans plus the first rocket launchers of sufficient quantity.

What was left of the German center front retreated in almost panic for a couple of hundred miles before Moscow. It took a maximum effort to establish another front line and the Germans where not even certain they could.

The mass of Studebaker trucks gave the Russians a mobility that the Germans just did not have. Plus the Germans had very limited fuel where the Russian army had all they wanted.

Anyways I suspect Stalin remained very functional where Hitler probably fell into heavy drug usage as the war progressed.

I have a bolt on mine . Bit sadly not a 50mm

Attached Thumbnails

 

That barrel looks short in that picture .


Many decades ago I bought a 1942 Lee Enfield rifle in (IIRC) .303 caliber .

$30, picked one out of many in a barrel in the sporting goods store in Oregon, it looks rough but shot great and didn't need any scope .

Whatever it hit, it destroyed .

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-Nate
1982 240D 408,XXX miles
Ignorance is the mother of suspicion and fear is the father

I did then what I knew how to do ~ now that I know better I do better

From google:

The appeal of the .50 BMG goes beyond just military and benchrest shooters. Many shoot the .50 "just once" to try it. It's a common misconception that .50 BMG has terrible recoil. Modern .50s usually weigh between 25 and 40 pounds and have very effective muzzlebrakes. These two factors together reduce the recoil to something more akin to the push from a 12-gauge shotgun than the hard recoil you might expect from a .300 Winchester Magnum in a light hunting rifle.

SEE PHOTO GALLERY
Watson's Weapons' The Boss uses an AR-15 receiver and mates with any AR lower. However, the action must be broken open to reload with a round in the bolt head.
The big muzzlebrakes work well, but they produce an extremely loud report and an area of overpressure blast. Once a shooter has had a visceral taste of what it's like to send a 650-grain bullet hundreds or thousands of yards downrange and see it smash into a target, his appetite has been whetted and he must own one. If you find yourself in this position, what are your options?

It used to be that the price of admission to the .50 BMG club was a rifle starting at about $5,000. In the last 10 years there has been an explosion in the numbers of .50 BMG options under $3,500. Many of these rifles have simplified frame construction or are built like tube guns, and many are single-shot bolt actions.

Sounds clever how they control the recoil.

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[SIGPIC] Diesel loving autocrossing grandpa Architect. 08 Dodge 3/4 ton with Cummins & six speed; I have had about 35 benzes. I have a 39 Studebaker Coupe Express pickup in which I have had installed a 617 turbo and a five speed manual.[SIGPIC]

..I also have a 427 Cobra replica with an aluminum chassis.

Enemy at the Gates was a good movie, but the book was way better. The movies was from one chapter of the book.

Carlos Hathcock was a highly accomplished marine sniper in Vietnam. He made a one shot kill with a fifty cal. of some description. I think it was a modified Browning machine gun. I expect that googling Carlos Hathcock would turn up lots of information. The snipers of his era had a much tougher job than today. Today there are apps to take care of the many calculations involved with thousand yard plus marksmanship. The calculations involve everything from density altitude to the rotation of the Earth.

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here is one way to fire a 50 cal

Very effective, but not exactly the same as the way that Gunny Hathcock modified and deployed it for a different purpose.

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2014 Porsche Cayenne six speed manual

Annoy a Liberal, Read the Constitution

In your mind, what led you to believe that that post was in any way about gunny?

Not at all. I simply offered a comment. What’s your problem?

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2001 SLK 320 six speed manual
2014 Porsche Cayenne six speed manual

Annoy a Liberal, Read the Constitution