RPG-7: How it Works and a Demo Shot

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Awesome stuff, but why would the Afghanis and Iraqis take the safety cap off?

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Crazytrain38 📅︎︎ Oct 15 2015 🗫︎ replies
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Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, I am here today generously at Movie Gun Services taking a look at some neat stuff and, while this is in no way a forgotten weapon, I figured this would be a really cool opportunity to actually take a look at a live, registered, legal RPG. So the the RPG program in Soviet service really has its philosophical basis in World War Two Germany. The Germans developed what was called the Panzerfaust which was a single-shot, disposable, shaped charge warhead rocket launcher. And it was used to pretty darn good effect in fighting against Allied tanks. So the idea with a shaped charge is that you're actually, basically, you're creating this very small jet of plasma that can blow its way through armour plate far more effectively than high explosive. The Panzerfausts were extremely cheap to make, they were very easy to use, you know, they weren't particularly accurate at any sort of real distance, but if you put 1,000 of those things into the hands of a 1,000 Volkssturm and put them in a city with a bunch of tanks and you're gonna end up with a lot of blown-up tanks. Now the Soviets liked that premise. The Soviets actually copied a lot of German, not necessarily directly copied German technology, but they would copy German combat concepts. We've talked in the past about how the Dragunov is kind of ... a development of what the Soviets saw the Germans doing during the war. At any rate, the RPG absolutely is as well, although it doesn't share any real direct technical link to the Panzerfaust. The first [successful] one was the RPG-2, ... that was introduced in the Soviet Army in 1949, and then after a few years in 1961 it was replaced with the RPG-7. That's what this guy is, this is an RPG-7, and that's by far the most common one you'll find around the world today. These have ended up being used by people absolutely everywhere. In particular, you'll see them in the Middle East today, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all of the Arab Spring conflicts. The concept is pretty simple. This is basically a handheld recoilless rocket launcher. Got our projectile in the front, tube runs all the way down the length here, there's a little venturi cone at the end to kind of minimise blast a little bit. So this is a dummy round, of course. What we have in the back here is the initial propellant charge, and this is what blows the rocket out of the tube. Once you blow it out of the tube, ... and it gets a few metres downrange then you have the rocket engine with these six vents, then it takes over and starts propelling the projectile. If you had the rocket firing immediately, you would be blowing hot rocket exhaust directly into the shooter's face, and that wouldn't work out so well. So instead they have this two-part firing system. Some of the rockets have fins, more of them don't. The rocket vents are actually just slightly angled to give a spin to the projectile and give it some rifle type accuracy. ... So American, most of the the Western European designs, the American bazookas specifically, were electrically fired. And so you'd hook up two leads and a battery (there'd be a battery in the grip), and when you pull the trigger you're actually completing an electrical connection to fire the rocket. The RPGs on the other hand were primer fired. So there's a primer right here on the ... weapon, on the rocket, and when you pull the trigger on the actual launcher we have a hammer right here. And that hammer goes up, hits a firing pin, hits this guy, which starts the whole process. ... There wasn't a whole lot of safety involved in these, so the rockets have an impact fuse and they have a little plastic screw cap on the nose for safety. Yeah, I've heard some interesting anecdotes from some vets who were over in Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently a lot of the folks over there, as soon as they pick the weapon up they immediately take off the safety cap, so the thing is ready to use at any moment. I was told when the Americans are patrolling with, like, Afghan and Iraqi military units, the Afghans and Iraqis tend to pull the safety caps off and the Americans tend to pick them all up and then screw them back onto the rockets at the first opportunity. I did also hear an interesting anecdote from a service member who watched this happen, (let me point out, there is no time delay on this, well, this one's a dummy, but real rockets, there's no time delay. If you were to take the safety cap off and go plunk, it explodes right there and kills you), well, I have one guy tell me he watched an insurgent in Iraq, he had taken the cap off and he was running across the street with a loaded RPG, tripped, and fell headfirst and slid into a curb and the end of the rocket hit the side of the curb and kablooey, that was it for the guy. So these are not OSHA-approved weapons. This can very easily kill you if you don't know how to handle it. Why don't I bring the camera back over here, let's take a look at some of the actual mechanics going on here. We've got some iron sights, we've got some optics, trigger group, etc. First off, something I want to point out that kind of came as a bit of a surprise to me. These devices are heavier than I had expected. You look at this and you think well, it's just kind of a steel tube, so can't be all that heavy. These are actually like 16 or 17 pounds. And these two pistol grips work, but they are not actually the most ergonomic things ever. So a little more cumbersome to carry than I had been anticipating. There is a removable sight with a fairly standard Soviet style scope rail there. So if you don't want to use the optics you do have a set of backup iron sights. They fold down when not in use, fold up when they are in use. We have an adjustable scale here to go from 200 out to 500 metres. My understanding is when the US Army did some testing on these, they found ... at 200 meters on a slow moving target your chances of a first-round hit were about 50%. Closer than 200 metres you actually had a really good chance of making an initial hit. Beyond 200 the chances went down quickly and dramatically, so. 500 is really kind of the maximum range where you'd ever hit anything deliberately with one of these. (One exception to that maximum range comes from the fact that the rockets currently in use in most of the world actually have a self-destruct safety timer so that at about 950 metres they will automatically explode if they haven't hit anything already. And that is actually used fairly commonly by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan to use these rockets either as anti-aircraft munitions or as long-range ambush devices. So if they know exactly what 950 metres is from a given position, they can air burst rockets either around aircraft, or over convoys, or in other ways that probably weren't actually anticipated by the Russian designers.) The trigger mechanism is right here. Pretty simple. It's a single action piece. Cock the hammer, pull the hammer and you hit this little firing pin. So this is our firing pin, pulling the trigger drops the hammer. It does have a hammer safety, so if you're not holding the trigger down the hammer can't go. When I do hold the trigger, now I can hit. So basic old revolver technology with a rebounding hammer. The back of the tube does have this two-part wooden cover on it. That's a heat insulator and for a little bit more comfort than a plain metal tube. And then we have our venturi exhaust on the back. There is a conical back blast area when you fire one of these, typically extends something like 20 metres behind you. You do not want to stand right behind this, ... first an explosive that's shooting out the back and you don't want to be there. ... It'll do bad stuff to you. Alright, taking a look at the scope here. It is, of course, attached via a pretty standard Soviet quick-release rail. Couple interesting features to it. You actually have a little rubberised forehead rest, so that you can jam your head up against this to get the correct eye relief, but also not have the thing come back and pop you on the eyebrow, because you've got this padded rest for it. We have, down here, this is a battery container, and this is ... basically a lit reticle so you can use it at night. And then you have to go along with that, a rheostat here on the bottom to adjust the intensity of the lit reticle. There is not a battery in it at the moment, because it uses some type of Soviet battery that we don't have, but that's your battery compartment. And then, you don't have an elevation adjustment, but you do have a windage adjustment, should you want to get really tricksy with it. Now the reticle has a nice grid pattern for giving you holdovers and wind adjustment and also a range finding scale, you can see that. And that's pretty much all there is to it. Got a lens cap. Very simple to use. That's one of the things about a lot of Soviet weaponry. You didn't have to be complex, what it had to be was efficient, and functional, and easy to use. And the RPG is kind of a gold standard in that kind of criteria. This could be extremely effective and yet at the same time simple to use, easy to use, and easy to train people on. Go ahead and mount our optic here, just slides on, locks in place and you're good to go. So some people might, I don't know, might recognise the paint. This particular, specifically this RPG, was actually in the movie Black Hawk Down. We are of course looking at this at a movie guns supply place, so not shockingly, the guns here end up in movies. Now, I have one other piece here that I want to show you, which is really cool. This is a training rocket for an RPG. It is hollow at the end and it actually has a built in breech for a 7.62x39 cartridge. It has a bolt face in there. Actually, it looks pretty much like a modified AK bolt in there. What you do is load in a single cartridge and then the breech closes, rotates and locks. That's the button to open it. And then right in the same point as you would have the primer on a real RPG rocket, you have a firing pin. There is also a safety. So if this isn't depressed, ... the cartridge won't fire. But when that's depressed and you push that down, pop, that drops a firing pin and fires the 7.62x39 cartridge right out the barrel. And the barrel length on this is set so that a standard 7.62x39 ball cartridge has basically the same trajectory as an RPG rocket. So it gives you a real easy way to find out how your guys are for shooting. I should point out because this thing does have a bolt and a breech face and a trigger, these are actually considered Title 1 firearms. This is a little single-shot rifle that drops into your RPG. Alright guys, I have here a blank 7.62x39 cartridge and we're gonna go ahead and test-fire it in our training launcher. So go ahead and drop the cartridge into the breech, and then very gently, there we go, breach is locked. Now I want to be very careful to line up the key in the launcher, there we go. This rocket is keyed and ready, now once I am in position what I have to do is cock the hammer, weapon is ready to fire. Boom, direct hit. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching. This certainly isn't a forgotten weapon, but it is a pretty darn cool one, and I was happy to take the opportunity here to get a closer kook at what a real one of these actually looks like, and feels like, and how they work. So tune in again to Forgotten Weapons for infantry anti-tank weapons. Thanks to Movie Gun Services for letting me play with their RPG!
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Channel: Forgotten Weapons
Views: 3,862,937
Rating: 4.7312398 out of 5
Keywords: RPG-7, RPG, grenade, ropcket, Afghanistan, Iraq safe, safety, fuse, impact, explode, explosive, AA, antiair, detonate, China, Russia, USSR, Panzerfaust, Panzershreck, Bazooka, hammer, scope, optic, train, trainer, dummy, practice, blank, fire, shoot, Soviet Union (Country), Iraq (Country), Boom, Rocket, registered, legal, live, dd, Destructive Device, NFA, RPG-2, antitank, shaped charge, plasma, anti tank
Id: 8MrwJM1_kw8
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)
Published: Sun Oct 11 2015
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