The designers of the Kovrov Mechanical Plant pretty much surprised the Russian special forces with their design. Their machine gun "Badger" AEK-999 was more suited to a long battle than its competitors.
Kovrovtsy did not reinvent the wheel. At the heart of their "Badger" is the automatic Kalashnikov machine gun modernized. Reliability "Kalash" legends around the world. However, there is a number of weak points in their machine gun, to which they paid attention at the Kovrovsky Mechanical Plant.
The problem areas of the PKM were its noisy shooting, unmasking the location of the detachment, as well as the rapidly heating barrel, which had to be changed several times during the battle.
The problem with the barrel decided brilliantly. In KMZ used an alloy of metals, which was previously used only for the manufacture of automatic rapid-fire guns mounted on aircraft. The rate of fire and accuracy of the new machine gun did not suffer from this upgrade. And the continuous queue time even increased to 650 shots.
By the way, the ammunition system, the receiver and the stock remained from the PKM.
As for reducing the roar of firing, the KMZ created a device for low-noise firing. Thanks to him, the sound from the shot is almost not audible at a distance of half a kilometer from the position of the machine-gunner.
Well and most importantly, reducing decibels from a shot allows the machine gunner to maintain continuous radio communication and transmit the coordinates of the location of the enemy with whom the battle is fought.
According to experts, the sound of the shot resembles not the chirping of birds in the early morning, or the sound of a shutter without a powder charge.
By the way, the machine gun uses the widely used 7.62x54 mm cartridge round the world.
Badger has another advantage. The device for low-noise shooting almost completely extinguishes the muzzle flame. That is, at night the enemy will be quite difficult to detect the location of the machine gunner.
As a result, the old, reliable Kalashnikov automatics and new developments by Kovrov designers will allow Russian special forces to carry out the most complex combat missions in any conditions with minimal risk.
