"Military And Military Sub-Plane" by Hai Dongqing
In the previous article, the author introduced the Czech father SA-23 series submachine gun of the Israeli Uzi submachine gun, although the performance of the gun is excellent, but unfortunately it was not timely, it was replaced by the VZ-58 assault rifle not long after its birth, so it was replaced by the nameless, in the SA-23 series submachine gun body, in fact, it reflects the tragedy of the submachine gun, which was born at the end of World War I, and became the main force of infantry combat in World War II, but the scenery was replaced by the birth of the assault rifle within a few years. Kicked off from the position of the main infantry equipment.
▲ Czech VZ-61 Scorpion submachine gun.
However, submachine guns also have some advantages that assault rifles can not be compared, in terms of short size, submachine guns can do better than assault rifles, after all, assault rifles fire rifle bullets, no matter how short they can only be so, the Soviet AKS-74U almost represents the size limit of short assault rifles, but the length of the stock is still 490mm after folding, which is a little longer than SA-23, standard Uzi, M12S and other Cold War short submachine guns. And the above submachine gun is far from reaching the limit of the size reduction of the submachine gun, some submachine guns can even be pressed to within 300mm after the extreme compression size, these miniature submachine guns with the size advantage in the era of assault rifle rule successfully killed a world, and in the Cold War mini submachine gun, the best model is still from Czechoslovakia, a small Eastern European country, it is the VZ-61 scorpion submachine gun.
As mentioned earlier in the introduction of the SA-23 submachine gun, the Czechoslovak military in the early cold war required the development of a short and compact submachine gun, which gave birth to the SA-23, but was replaced by the VZ58 within a few years of service. However, the Czechoslovak military was not dead hearted, and in the late 1950s it again asked for the development of a miniature submachine gun that was short and lean to the extreme, requiring its size and weight to be only slightly larger than the pistol, as a self-defense weapon for pilots, junior officers and other non-front-line gun fighters, and Miroslav Riba, another genius postdoctoral firearms designer from the Brno Arsenal (another name of the plant is more well known, the CZ Arsenal), came up with his own design in 1959, and the prototype gun was called the S-59 type After a series of minor improvements, the unit was equipped in 1961 and was named the VZ-61, nicknamed the Scorpion Submachine Gun.
▲ VZ-61 Scorpion submachine gun.
The VZ-61 submachine gun did not adopt the T-shaped layout common to miniature submachine guns, but used a traditional layout, which used the principle of free bolt type, using the same envelope bolt as the SA-23, with an empty weight of only 1.28 kg, a total length of 270 mm (stock folding) / 522 mm (stock unfolding), a barrel length of 115 mm, firing .32ACP bullets, that is, 7.65X17 mm Browning pistol bullets, a rate of fire of 750-850 rounds / min, using a 10 or 20 round magazine to feed.
From these data alone, the Scorpion submachine gun does not seem to have much magic except that it is relatively short in length and light in weight, even compared with the fully automatic version of the Mauser C96 pistol (often called M1932 or M712) decades ago, it does not have much advantage, and the bullet power is not as good. But in fact, if you carefully analyze the internal structure of the Scorpion submachine gun, you will find that the design is exquisite, and even can't help but marvel at its shooting.
▲ The scorpion submachine gun's 10-round short magazine was specially designed for inclusion in the holster.
First of all, about the miniature submachine gun and the submachine gun (the two functions are the same and therefore discussed together), there is a fatal paradox, whether it is the use of the common free bolt principle of the submachine gun or the common barrel short recoil principle of the pistol, which will cause the automatic machine reciprocating movement of the stroke is very short due to the limited size of the whole gun, so the automatic reciprocating motion speed is very fast, which creates a problem, that is, the rate of fire is ridiculously fast when shooting fully automatically, such as micro (Micro UZI) and MAC-10, two typical Western miniature submachine guns, their full automatic rate of fire is more than 1200 rounds / min (Glock 18 submachine gun is also the same rate of fire), plus these two submachine guns are too short, the trigger front has no place to hold, the left hand is completely out of place when shooting, which leads to these two classic miniature submachine guns fully automatic shooting basically has no accuracy to speak of, can only provide a fire suppression effect, to say that the bad point is pure listening.
▲ The front design of the MAC-10 has a canvas harness, and the designer's intention is to let the left hand grasp this strap to shoot, but the actual effect proves that this design is no different from the blind man's ear.
Although Miroslav Riba was still a fledgling firearm designer at the time, he was also a postdoctoral high-achiever, which can be said to be talented, and in order to solve this problem, he adopted a genius-like design, called a reducer. Inside the grip of the scorpion submachine gun, there is hidden this exquisite reducer, in addition to the trigger resistance iron, the reducer also has a blocking iron, after the bolt recoil is in place, it will be hung by the reducer resistance iron, the bolt's rear seat energy is transmitted to the reducer body, the reducer body also begins to go down the back seat, the rear seat is in place after the spring action bounces back up, after completing a reciprocating movement, the resistance iron will release the bolt, it can be simply and rudely understood that the designer changed the submachine gun to semi-automatic, and then designed a set of "mechanical fingers" , use the "mechanical finger" of the reducer to buckle the bolt, but this "mechanical finger" can violently buckle a dozen times a second, so it has the same effect as fully automatic.
Relying on this exquisite reducer design, the Scorpion Submachine Gun pressed the rate of fire to 750-850 rounds per minute when the full gun size was only 270mm, plus the recoil of the .32ACP bullet itself was also small, so it was completely different from the micro-Uzi/MAC-10 sound submachine gun, the Scorpion submachine gun was a practical micro submachine gun that could be effectively controlled and aimed.
▲The reducer of the Scorpion submachine gun is hidden inside the grip.
It is precisely because of the excellent performance of the Scorpion submachine gun, so it was subsequently equipped with a large number of Czechoslovak officers, pilots, paratroopers, special forces and other units, the Czech police also loved the gun, and it just so happened that the .32ACP bullet was also common in the West, so the Scorpion submachine gun was also exported abroad in large quantities through various channels, with a total output of hundreds of thousands.
Of course, VZ-61 is not perfect, its most fatal drawback is that the .32ACP bullet kinetic energy is only more than 200 joules, the power is really not flattering, but the above leader named and asked to use this bullet, the designer can only pinch his nose.
▲ VZ-68 firing 9X19mm bullets.
After the success of the VZ-61, the designers immediately began to develop an improved version of the other bullets. The model that fired the .380ACP bullet (9X17mm Browning short bullet, kinetic energy 280-300 joules) was named VZ-64, the model that fired the 9X18mm Makarov pistol cartridge (kinetic energy 300-350 joules) was VZ-65, and the VZ-68 that fired 9X19mm Parabellum pistol cartridge (kinetic energy 420-500 joules), of which the VZ-64 length and weight remained unchanged, the length of the VZ-65 was increased to 1.32 kg, and the length of the VZ-68 was increased to 305 mm /595mm, empty weight is 2kg. Unfortunately, these three guns only made prototype guns, and after the death of Miroslav Riba in 1970, the CZ Arsenal also launched a variety of improved versions of fried cold rice, but none of them achieved great success, which may also be inseparable from the success of VZ-61's predecessor.