[HaplessOperator]

Originally Posted by Raellus

Isn't that a feature as much as a bug? I've read that the AK's loose tolerances contribute to reduced accuracy compared to the AR, but that they allow the AK to continue to operate in pretty much any environment with very little routine maintenance.

It might be useful to talk about meanings here, and to clarify what tolerances mean for a gun, as well as clarify my own language, since I was mirroring yours; it's going to remain obfuscated unless I do. So, tolerances in a gun - as with any manufacturing - are simply deviations from spec. It often gets used colloquially (especially in discussions on AK reliability) to mean the overhead in design. That is, in the case of designing a cylinder exactly 1 inch wide, when you need it to be a minimum of .95 inches for optimum function, you're generally talking about clearance. The tolerance for that part may be so many hundredths or thousandths of an inch plus or minus that diameter.

In a gun, if your manufacturing methodology has loose tolerances from the designed standard, that means - literally - nothing other than you're going to have parts that don't fit, due to both stacking tolerances and variance in one edge being off beyond a functionally acceptable tolerance at the same time the part mating to it is off as well. In Soviet AKs, this was fairly common, due to inconsistent manufacturing quality and essentially non-existent QC, though the platform can generally survive this due to a sufficient overhead in design specifications. For example, both the front and rear sight bases in Soviet-era AKs are often off-spec to a significant degree, as are the gas block, and - oftentimes - the front and rear trunnions themselves. When parts like the trunnions and gas blocks are out of tolerance, it doesn't contribute to reliability or resilience against environmental contamination; it merely means that it's going to be things like blowing more or less gas than designed, or the parts beating the absolute hell out of each other since the fitment isn't as designed.

This is no more easy on the AK than it is any other design. This isn't an indictment of your intelligence or knowledge, but you can see how this in and of itself wouldn't explain making something reliable, just wear out quicker, or serve as an indication of cheap (not efficient) manufacture. The lion's share of AK reliability is myth; it's no more reliable or less reliable than most other service rifles we've collectively made as humans after World War 2, and most of the characteristics ascribed to AKs apply more or less equally to other platforms. AKs deal with cold weather pretty well as designed, but that's about the only particularly notable thing about them, and it's a capability that can be rather efficiently engineered into existing designs, as the Canadians have done with several platforms over the years. That said, best way to keep your gun ice-free in ultra-low temperatures is to keep it sealed and well-lubricated with a temp-appropriate petroleum distillate, and an AK is far from sealed, and an AK full of ice is going to fail to cycle just as surely as any other gun full of ice is. THAT said... most weather almanacs I've seen for the time don't suggest that this would be a concern, anyway. Switzerland, in 4th Edition, on the other hand...

Something to mention in favor of the AK is how sharply tapered the cartridge it fires is; that's why the magazines look the way they do. It takes an awful lot wrong to cause a malfunction in cartridge extraction in an AK. Also, the internal open space in the receiver DOES allow for the buildup of gross particulate in some of the interior spaces without serious obstruction to the action, but once you get anything in the path of travel for the bolt, guide rod, or in the chamber, it fails just as easily as any other weapon, for the same reasons that any other weapon would fail: the operation is being physically obstructed. This is probably where a lot of the perception of its resilience to mud probably comes from; most weapons solve this problem by simply not letting the mud in in the first place, or by having nowhere for the mud to actually infiltrate.

On accuracy... it's mostly down to the 7.62 Soviet cartridge, and more specifically, the QC and batch quality of Russian ammo. 7.62x39 has a dog crap ballistic coefficient, but manufactured properly, it's fine. The trouble is that the same philosophy that applied to Soviet rifles was applied to their ammunition, and at the time, it was inconsistent as all hell, along with inconsistent barrel mounting and poor crowning at a number of their factories, which essentially causes the bullet to be thrown off by a minute degree as it leaves the barrel. This, combined with inconsistent ammunition quality, propellant loading, and the subsequent variability in velocity and trajectory. All of these things combine to give you a far more variable beaten zone at any given distance on any particular target at any particular angle of fire.

Originally Posted by Raellus

Lest anyone think that I'm an AR hater, I am not. Although I tend to be cynical and rather suspicious of the US military-industrial complex, there must be legitimate reasons that the AR platform is still going strong. It's the only assault rifle that I've ever operated and I haven't experienced any performance issues with it. I must say, though, cleaning it is a bit of a chore. Again, I don't know from experience but I've read that the AK has fewer working parts and is easier to disassemble/reassemble than the AR.

There's no assumption of hate/dislike. People can enjoy whatever guns they want. For the longevity of the platform, it's largely due to how iterated-upon it is, the depth of the market, and the simple fact that there's literally nothing out there that would be worth the cost of replacing it; there's plenty of guns that do this thing or that better than a rack-grade M16, but there's practically nothing out there that does so for the same cost, and reducing build quality of most platforms to match an AR in cost would turn the platform in question into a trash fire; meanwhile, the ceiling on ARs is essentially sky-high - spend HK416 money on an AR-15, and you've got an AR-15 that will run circles around a 416, or a SCAR, or... you get the idea.

As to the moving parts bit, they're more or less identical. An AR-15 has eight parts that move when the operating system cycles, the same as an AK. Assembly or disassembly is something I've genuinely never considered, as it's kind of neither here nor there. You disassemble a Glock with your finger and thumb by pulling down two tabs, giving the slide some play, and squeezing the trigger; this doesn't mean that it's more or less suitable than a Beretta 92's pressing a button and rotating a tab, or a Sig P226, etc., merely that it's disassembled in a different manner. The AK's method of disassembly (and its construction) mean that it's got kind of a garbage sight radius and that it's more or less impossible to mount optics to it in a typical manner without a side mounting fixture.

Originally Posted by Raellus

In the T2kU, I think I'd still take the AK-74 over the M-16A2. I'm not quite fully convinced that the AR family is as robust or likely to function in adverse conditions as the Kalashnikov, and in Poland, at least, ammunition for the latter would be easier to come by.

Here, we're in full agreement, after a fashion. I kept a couple AKs in my truck as insurance against an absolute worst case. Ammunition and supply of other sorts was never short, and I could literally walk into the ASP and walk out with entire pallets, and was often encouraged to do so simply to make room for the next shipment coming in, and we were rolling like Scrooge McDuck in 40mm, LAWs, AT4s, and ordnance of all descriptions, but by the end of my first deployment, I had run completely out of ammunition exactly once, and had resolved to take several measures to ensure such a thing would never impact me again, no matter what the failure point.

Bonus info: the best AKs were never made in Russia, or Poland for that matter. Bulgaria, Romania, and the German DDR were rocking what were basically Cadillacs in comparison to the Polish and Russian pieces, and once the iteration of the platform began by countries outside of RSFSR, the AMD series and like "upgrades" more or less left the original platform (both AKM and AK-74) in the dust.

AKs, like the T-series tanks, have a mythology around them that is wildly overblown compared to the actual hardware sitting in front of you. I could tell you some truly hilarious stories about the so-called "monkey models" I got to shoot hell out of, but that's probably a story for another thread, along with the elaboration of what being a monkey model actually means in a practical sense when you're considering smacking the things with HEAT rounds.

And please, call me Hapless. All my friends do.