Monthly Archives: January 2015

Why Russia has been looking for a warm water port for 319 years

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A long term goal of the Russian military, ever since Peter the Great established that country’s navy in October 1696, is to have a place where their fleet didn’t get frozen into their slips come winter. You see the Baltic ports freeze solid as does Archangel in the far north. Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk in the Pacific do as well.

This aching led to expansion into the Crimea, courting Serbia in the 1900s to have a place in the sunny Mediterranean, building Murmansk in the middle of the permafrost reindeer land (which even though it is further north than Archangel, remains somewhat ice-free year round due to the warm North Atlantic Current) and getting involved in Manchuria in 1895 to steal Port Arthur out right from under Japan’s nose (which in the end didn’t work out too well for them in 1905). This is a reason why you still see the Russians being chummy to Syria when almost every other country wont return their phone calls– so they can send the occasional ship to Tartus where they have had a continuous presence since 1971.

The truth is, in winter its just cold as shit in Russia’s traditional naval ports, and further, if your ships are guaranteed to be locked in ice five months out of every year, do you really have a navy?

To reinforce this, here is a picture of the Republic of Korea’s Navy Ship Choe Yeong (DDH-981).

Choi_Young_(DDH-981)_cropped
This handy little 5500-ton/492-foot long Chungmugong Yi Sun-sin-class frigate (the Koreans term it a destroyer) are pretty well-armed with a 32-cell strike-length Mk 41 VLS for SM-2 Block IIIA area-air defense missiles, one 21-round RAM inner-layer defence missile launcher, one 30 mm Goalkeeper close-in weapon system, one Mk 45 Mod 4 127 mm gun, eight Harpoon anti-ship missiles and two triple 324 mm anti-submarine torpedo tubes.

Now here is a picture of the ROKS Choe Yeong in Vladivostok for a port visit last month.

No, this is not an iceberg, but a Korean frigate in a Russian port

No, this is not an iceberg, but a Korean frigate in a Russian port

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The view of the forward section over the bow, and yes, there is a 5-inch gun under there, somewhere.

Now you see why even the Russians say nyet to their ports in winter…

Further south he says....that way...

Further south he says….that way…

Kellgren’s Old School Room Brooms: The KG9 and 99

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In the early 1980s, back when it was still legal to make new full-auto firearms in America for law abiding Americans, a young Swedish engineer by the name of George Kellgren came from the Old World to Miami with a set of designs in his pocket and a gleam in his eye.

In invasion-conscious 1970s Sweden, the military was looking around for replacements for its vaunted Carl Gustav M/45, better known as K-gun. The Swedish K was a weapon for issue to commando types as well as truck drivers, vehicle crews and the like. It was a 7.7-pound (unloaded) 22-inch long 9mm burp gun that could chew out 600 rounds per minute. The only thing was that the gun was heavy, and dated back to World War II. With these increasingly elderly guns looking to be retired, the Swedish Army wanted something better

The local firm of Interdynamic AB of Stockholm put one of their best up and coming designers on the task, a young man named George Kellgren.

Kellgren produced a very efficient little machine pistol designated the MP-9 that operated entirely by elementary blowback. Revolutionary for guns designed in the 1970s, the MP-9 had a polymer frame with steel inserts to cut down weight. Chunky for a pistol at 67-ounces (over four pounds) with a loaded 32-round magazine, it was still lighter than the K-gun it intended to replace by half.

InterDynamicMP9
The magazine loaded forward of the grip like the WWII M3 Grease Gun, which it rather resembled. It was just 12.5-inches overall with a 5-inch shrouded barrel and a 10-inch sight radius over fixed sights designed to zero with 124-grain FMJ standard military loads of 9x19mm Luger at 100-meters.

kg9fieldstrip.jpg~original

To keep accidental shootings down since it fired from an open-bolt; it used a German Schmeisser-style safety to lock the bolt and a second catch that was integrated into the left-handed cocking handle. The bolt has a fixed firing pin and was the only moving part of the gun. This select fire little gun could let it rip at 1000-rounds per minute. To keep it under control it had a fore grip and a collapsible wire buttstock.

The gun was neat but it didn’t strike a chord with buyers and it never went into production. It’s thought that just 50 or so test prototypes came off the line in Europe.

While the MP-9 didn’t win any contracts with the Swedish military or any other force, the company saw the potential of the design for commercial sales in that great firearms candy store: the US.

KG-9

Read the rest in my column at The KTOG.org

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