Hi, guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're
taking a look at a Soviet D30 122mm gun. This is actually an interesting piece in
that it was intended to be both a howitzer, which is to say an indirect firing
gun (set up as it is right now), but also be capable of direct fire anti-tank roles.
Having the barrel at a much lower, direct-firing elevation. So this particular gun is owned by Battlefield Vegas, a
rental range in Vegas, where they will be setting this up to shoot for people like you, who show
up down there and are interested in it. But today we're out at the range to do
a little bit of an inaugural test-fire on it, and I figured it'd be a really cool
opportunity to show it to you guys. So there are a number of interesting things
about this that make it, frankly, a little different than a lot of other artillery, and different
than a lot of other Russian artillery as well. First off, you can see we have these two trails here,
and there's a third one running straight out in front. The wheels are lifted up and
out of contact with the ground. And the idea here is that this piece can be
rotated 360 degrees and fire in any direction, where a typical artillery piece the wheels
remain in contact with the ground and you have two split trails
that come out from the back. That tends to be faster and easier to set up. You can see how much goes into the set
up of this, it's not an easy or quick process. However, that limits the ability of the gun to traverse. There are a few other considerations that you have
to take when you're going to do a system like that. The trails have to be a little bit longer
because they are spread farther apart ... to ensure that the gun is properly stabilised.
And of course you see the two big red spikes holding these down in the ground, those are instead
of having little scoops on the ends of the trails. Now, this is a semi-automatic gun, which in the
context of an artillery piece like this means that when it fires the whole action
will cycle backward under recoil, and it will automatically spit
out the empty cartridge case. The gun will then return to battery, but the breech stays
open, ready for the gunner to load a new cartridge into place. So speaking of the cartridge, we have the components for one right here, and this was how the gun was actually used. The ammunition didn't come pre-assembled as a self-contained cartridge like we might think of it. Instead, this is more of what's called a "bag gun"
where you have a projectile, you'll load the projectile. You'll then load your powder charge
in a case, which acts as an obturator. So the purpose of this is to seal the
back end of the gun when it fires. This is 122mm, which is kind of standard,
... the Soviet equivalent of the US 120mm. This is a 19.1 kilogram, or about a 40 pound, projectile. And they had both armour-piercing and
high-explosive, high-explosive anti-tank, HEAT, a wide variety of shells for this
because of it's design as a multi-role gun. So I don't think the skull on the
trigger handle is original to the gun. But we do have pretty much all
the rest of the controls over here. We have a handwheel for traverse,
a handwheel for elevation, and we have our sighting systems, both
an indirect sight and a direct fire sight. This of course is the direct fire sight, and
this is basically a whole bunch of math in physical incarnation that
makes up your indirect fire sight. This was introduced into the Soviet military in 1963, and it actually remains in service in a
lot of places worldwide to this very day. These were widely exported and used around
the world, so you'll find them in places like, well, they served in the Iran-Iraq War, they've
served in Africa, they've served all over the place. In terms of construction and design, this is actually
kind of more like a German gun than it is a Soviet gun. It's more complex than most Soviet
artillery of this period and of this type. So if we look inside here we can
see a couple of the design elements. We've got the gear and sprocket right over there
for actually cranking the barrel up and down. That's assisted by a single pneumatic cylinder
on the opposite side to give you a ... lot of assist raising this thing. Obviously barrels on
something like this are relatively heavy. The wheels are going to pivot up
and down so that they can go down for transport when all three legs come
pivoting back here to match with this one. Then the wheels go down and you can tow the gun. ... Actually for firing you start
by putting down a central pad which you can see on the ground flat here. You use that pad to lift pressure off the wheels,
you then lift the wheels up, split the three legs out, and then you are ready to put the gun into service. Now located up here above the
barrel is a two part recoil system, you have one cylinder full of oil and that's going
to restrict how fast the barrel recoils backward. And then you have a second cylinder full of
compressed air or nitrogen (ought to be nitrogen), which will push the barrel, the whole breech assembly,
back into battery after it ejects the empty case. So without any further ado, let's go ahead and
lower the barrel down a little bit and fire this thing. - Is it in tight? - Yeah, felt like it went in there pretty good.
- OK. - We'll know ... when you put the case in behind it. 3 - 2 - 1 on the way. 3 - 2 - 1 Well thank you guys for watching,
hopefully you enjoyed the video. It's always really quite an experience to get out here and
be able to be around something like this firing. Definitely not your run of the mill sort of activity. As I mentioned at the beginning, this
particular gun belongs to Battlefield Vegas. If you're interested in doing something
like this yourself, definitely check them out. Thanks for watching. [ cc by sk cn2 ]
