Model: AShM-12.7
Size: Medium
Legality: Restricted to members of Russian special forces and exceptions are made for GRU and SVU tactical teams.
Faction: Russian special forces, GRU and SVU tactical teams.
Manufacturer: TSIINTOCHMASH
Intent: To create a powerful assault rifle for SSO and potentially GRU and SVU teams in the city to use to negate urban cover and deal with the ever-increasing presence of armored hostiles. This would also serve as the 'standard' weapon for SSO operators operating in the city, and an interesting weapon to potentially find on the black market or even in the hands of Manticore because of dead SSO operators.
Description:
- Mass: 4.5 kilograms
- Length: 1020 mm
- Cartridge: 12.7x55 caseless
- Action: Gas-operated select fire (semi and full auto).
- Effective Range (Subsonic): 300 meters
- Maximum Range (Subsonic): 400 meters
- Rate of Fire: 500 - 750 RPM
- Feed System: 30 round detachable magazine
- Optics: Various. Top mounted picatinny rail can take any scope that is mountable on a picatinny rail.
The weapon is built to fire caseless subsonic loads, particularly a caseless 12.7x55 subsonic round with a tungsten carbide armor penetrator. The rounds are relatively expensive, but due to advances in metallurgy since their advent, their production cost has been greatly decreased. Their expense is outweighed by the fact that the rounds impart a lot of energy onto their targets, and as such only a round or two at most is required to put down even the toughest unaugmented human, providing they're wearing body armor and the tungsten carbide penetrator does it's job.
The rifle, naturally features manual safety, magazine ejection and fire selector controls in addition to the preceding all being controllable through the weapon's smartlink interface. As far as fire modes go, the weapon features full auto and semi automatic fire modes. TSIINTOCHMASH highly recommends that those not augmented with muscle lacing firing the weapon on the fully automatic setting make sure to fire in short controlled bursts lest the weapon's recoil affect accuracy.
While the weapon is relatively compact, it is still heavy. Those without considerable training and experience in using the weapon, even if they somehow circumvent it's security features, will find that firing the weapon may not be as easy as it seems. Additionally, ammunition for the weapon comes from a singular source. Those who possess the weapon illegally will find that ammunition costs on the black market might be far more than they are willing to pay. To the troops that use it however, the weapon is well liked, affectionately named 'Borzoi', in reference to a Russian breed of sighthound used for hunting.
Accessories:
- TSIINTOCHMASH 'Smart Grenade' Launcher: A pump action caseless 43mm under-barrel grenade launcher with a 4+1 capacity. Unremarkable except for it's ability to interface with the weapon and it's optic, allowing the soldier to signal a loaded compatible grenade to air burst. The launcher has an approximate range of 300 meters. It features several ammunition types: HE(thermobaric), less-than-lethal (tear gas, rubber slugs), flashbang, smoke, breaching and canister buckshot. The HE round has a kill radius of about 3 meters, with a safe standoff distance of five. The breaching round acts like a breaching round fired by a shotgun. Standard procedure for entry teams is for one operator to breach, and then fire a loaded flashbang grenade.
- Rosboron CCOT-AShM: Rosboron makes a variant of their CCOT optic specifically for the AShM-12.7 rifle, designed to interface with it's grenade launcher for airburst capability. Other than that, the sight is functionally identical to the 'standard' variant. The optic's magnification is typically 2-4x32 given the rifle's range. However, higher magnification optics have been manufactured in this configuration.