Mosin-Nagant M1891 Avtomat
MOSIN-NAGANT M1891 AVTOMAT. (See also, RIFLE, RUSSIAN FIREARMS.) The original Mosin-Nagant rifle may be one of the most difficult - bordering on the impossible - bolt-action rifles to modify into a fully automatic firearm. No sane engineer would even consider such a thing, and the design of the Mosin-Nagant Avtomat clearly indicates that its creator was an adept, if mentally unstable person. It would have taken extraordinary gunsmithing skills to modify the Mosin-Nagant in this way, making it one of the rarest automatic weapons of its time. As such, it never gained traction among conventional military forces, going to far against the grain of contemporary military theory, and was never mass produced. The Avtomat improves upon the original Mosin- Nagant design primarily with the addition of a gas driven receiver. A larger cartridge drum magazine that can be reloaded five at a time or individually, should one have fewer than five cartridges available. The speed of fire can cause the weapon to overheat, as such the barrel has been modified for cooling.
Interview with John Victor
Author: F.W.B. Volunteer
Single sheets. Typewritten transcription. 8 x 11 in.
5/5
I barely escaped the Night with my life. Powell was still alive, but I'd burned his arsenal, and had with me his journal. Sometimes, you just stumble into your target.
I couldn't read it. The first half was delirious scrawling. Most was our own alphabet, some Russian, and some in characters beyond my comprehension.
But, the second half was covered in highly detailed, intricately drawn plans. Metal parts with dimensions carefully labeled: lengths, circumferences, diameters and depths. Different screws and angular plates marked. It all tied in, somehow, to a larger blueprint. I suspected then that this wasn't in fact Powell's journal. More likely, his gun smiths. The plan spread over many pages, each narrow one containing a tiny section of the whole. On each page, arrows protrude in the four cardinal directions, showing on which page the picture continued. But the pages weren't numbered or marked in a way I can understand. I wish I had it now, it was a work of art.
What I could understand were the words "Mosin-Nagant" and, hastily underlined, the word "Avtomat."l was struck by the coincidence, that I was carrying the very same rifle. Now that I'm wiser, I know something had transpired to deliver this to me.
Yuri was the one to put it together. Had the blueprint in his head. I helped where I could, but he was a master with lathes and saws, bringing together new elements as according to the strange design in the journal.
Our working relationship was as profitable as it was brief. With the rifle done, we tested it briefly in the woods. One squeeze of the trigger, the mechanism juddered violently, threatening to burst apart as every crack sent a bullet downrange. I'd fired a Maxim Gun before, but this lacked that one's elegance. It was crude, but it worked. Something told me, this was a sign of things to come
