| abstract
| - Andrei Korisov was a master gunsmith in Russia, who had taught himself to read and calculate ballistics, and had even managed to move himself from the Streltzi to the service nobility. He was originally assigned to Natalia Gorchakovna's research and development center ("the Dacha"), where he was considered good at his job, but a very irritating person. After explaining that he could not duplicate Bernie Zeppi's up-time .30-06 rifle except as a handcrafted item that would have to be made one at a time, he was assigned to come up with something that could be produced. He came up with the basic idea of having a rifle's firing chamber be a separate part after realizing that the action of a revolver could be described as short barrels rotating into position behind a longer barrel. The initial proof-of-concept test worked, in that the test shot hit its target, but Korisov did not consider that the gap between the firing chamber and the barrel would be too close to the firer's face. This resulted in several people being seriously injured after firing experimental versions of Korisov's rifle. One was even killed when the firing chamber was blown back through the stock. In May of 1632, Korisov had a preliminary version which he called the AK1, but his disregard for the safety of the Dacha's servants, and its effects on them, let Natalia to make plans to send him somewhere else. In June of 1632, he was given to the Streltzi bureau, and through them, to the Russian army; and was set up in what became known as the "Gun Shop". After the "Gun Shop" was established, he continued to work on his rifle design. He originally wanted to have the firing chamber mounted on a gimbal, so it could be rotated up for loading, and down into place for firing, but the gimbals kept breaking. One of his apprentices reasoned that it was quicker to remove a chamber and replace it with a loaded one than to keep fixing the gimbal, and Korisov was quick to see the usefulness of that. In September of 1632, he told his patron, Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev, that he'd finished the AK2. While the army should have gotten the first ones, Sheremetev had them sent to his estates. Largely because Korisov had not realized that the chamber holder had to be attached to something, they were a failure. In the field, the chambers had a tendency to slip out or become misaligned, and when the chambers became misaligned, the guns tended to blow up. By January of 1633, Korisov had produced a workable weapon, the AK3. However, he resented having had to get input and approval from the people at the Dacha. In January of 1634, Korisov met Cass Lowry, after Lowry was assigned to the Gun Shop. Lowry introduced the idea of drop forges, which allowed parts for the AK3 to be made more quickly. It also allowed them to make enough AK3s that they were able to skim some to sell on the side. They also started making and selling copies of Lowry's revolver. After Lowry told him about interrupted-screw breech locks for cannon, he was able to develop a workable breech-loading cannon by working out the number of screw threads that would be needed to hold the breech block when the cannon was fired. By March of 1634, the Gun Shop had already made two of them. He also developed a volley gun design based on the AK3, and a few had been produced by June of 1634. Even the few breech-loading cannon and volley guns that had been produced by June of 1634 were significant in defeating Janusz Radziwiłł at Rzhev.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)