Saturday, December 11, 2010

Soviet DShK AA MG and Crew from ORION!

Fresh news at the weekend!

The plastic figure producer Orion from Ukraine brought a new WW2 set in a 1/72 scale to the market:

Soviet DShK AA MG and Crew:



The set contents 3 MG's and 15 figures (5 different poses).

The russian name is "Degtyaryova-Shpagina Krupnokaliberny" and "Degtyaryov Shpagin" means "Large-Calibre".

It is a Soviet heavy anti-aircraft machine gun firing 12.7x108mm cartridges.

The weapon was also used as a heavy infantry machine gun, in which case it was frequently deployed with a two-wheeled mounting and a single-sheet armour-plate shield.

It took its name from the weapons designers Vasily Degtyaryov, who designed the original weapon, and Georgi Shpagin, who improved the cartridge feed mechanism. It is sometimes nicknamed Dushka (lit. "Sweetie", "Dear"), from the abbreviation.

The back side of the box (Photos are from "Benno's figures forum):



The requirement for a heavy machine gun appeared in 1929. The first such gun, the Degtyaryov, Krupnokalibernyi (DK, Degtyaryov, Large calibre), was built in 1930 and this gun was produced in small quantities from 1933 to 1935.

The gun was fed from a drum magazine of only thirty rounds, and had a poor rate of fire. Shpagin developed a belt feed mechanism to fit to the DK giving rise, in 1938, to the adoption of the gun as the DShK 1938. This became the standard Soviet heavy machine gun in World War II.

The DShK 1938 was used in several roles. As an anti-aircraft weapon it was mounted on pintle and tripod mounts, and on a triple mount on the GAZ-AA truck. Late in the war, it was mounted on the cupolas of IS-2 tanks and ISU-152 self-propelled guns. As an infantry heavy support weapon it used a two-wheeled trolley, similar to that developed by Sokolov for the 1910 Maxim gun. It was also mounted in vehicle turrets, for example, in the T-40 light amphibious tank.

(All the information is from Wikipedia, thankfully!)

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