Weapons Timelines for the Twilight War

[Raellus]

I recently picked up a copy of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Guns (Fowler, North, Stronge, & Sweeney) from the bargain bin @ my local Barnes & Noble.

The entry for the H&K G41 states that it was to be manufactured as a weapon for reservists while the G11 was produced simultaneously for the regular Bundeswehr. The end of the Cold War put an end to both weapons and eventually led to the later adoption of the G36. So, I reckon that in the Twilight timeline that the G41 would be fairly common, alongside the venerable G3 and former DDR AKs, in the German armed forces of 2000.

Also, the entry for the L85A1 savages the weapon. Apparently, nearly the entire production run was recalled and handed over to H&K for refurbishment. The end result (L85A2) was, by many accounts, still a disappointment, extremely unpopular with most of the British troops in the field in Afghanistan. I really wonder how this weapon would have been handled if the Cold War had continued. Based on this (and other similar reports), I'd like to think that the British military would have pursued alternatives, like bringing back the SLR and/or manufacturing the AR-18 to supplement/replace the L85A1/2.

I also learned from this volume that Bulgaria and Romania (as well as Poland, which I already knew about) produced AK-74 clones in 5.45mm. I had always assumed that the Warsaw Pact nations would have done so but had never seen specific, documented references to this happening. This seems to indicate that AKM variants would be slightly less common among front line and tier one WP reservists than I'd first thought.