VAG 73 – Experimental Soviet Firepower Marvel
Note: Special thanks to h00st0n for suggesting this gun.
Ahhh… The VAG-73! Where do I even start?
Vladimir Alekseevich Gerasimenko was an engineer who worked in an aircraft factory in Kiev, and had been building sports and combat pistols as early as the 1940s. In the early 1970s he developed a caseless pistol round in 7.62x26mm size.
He first constructed the VAG-72, a semi-automatic pistol with a 24-round magazine, as a test bed for this new cartridge. But the real goal was to design an alternative / replacement for Makarov’s PM service pistol that had more firepower than the meager 8-round standard magazine chambered in 9x18mm could offer.
The VAG-73 prototype featured a semi/full auto select fire mechanism, and had features designed to reduce recoil. The magazine basically consisted of two 24-round magazines (as used in the VAG-72) stacked behind each other, resulting in an enormous capacity of 48 rounds.
Unfortunately the gun was much heavier and larger than the Makarov, and it is likely that the caseless ammunition caused rapid barrel fouling. In addition, the pistol required extensive and frequent maintenance, as well as special tools to do so.
Today the only prototype ever build can be seen in St. Petersburg’s Artillery Museum.
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Oh, how I got my hands on this, you ask? Well… Let’s just say I know a guy who knows a guy… Who got me the plans for this thing. And I do fancy myself a bit of a tinkerer… So for a very fair price my version of this gun can be yours – and a few handy attachments as well, if you want. What do you say?
Ah, before I forget – this gun does not feature a suppressor. It was never designed with this in mind, and neither was the ammunition (which is sort of a hybrid between caseless and gyrojet). It is less noisy than most other unsuppressed guns, though; especially when using subsonic rounds.
This mod contains a fully functional VAG-73 machine pistol, and a sizable number of attachments for it:
- 3 different sights
- 3 barrels
- 1 barrel mod
- 2 magazine mods
- 2 different springs
- 1 frame option
- 2 slide buffer mods
- 2 trigger mods
- 2 laser pointers (requires extended barrel)
- 1 foregrips (requires extended barrel)
- Comfort grip
- 4 different types of caseless 7.62x26mm ammuniton (standard, match, subsonic, overpressure)
After installing or uninstalling the 3-round burst trigger group you may need to cycle firemodes at least once to get the correct rate of fire.
P.S.: If you find any bugs that aren’t mentioned here, have balancing suggestions or want to help in making this mod even better just leave a comment! 🙂
