Thanks for the translation and summary, so does the document mention who's developing the rifle? Norinco? or some other institute?
PLA Small arms
- Thread starter Vanguard1688
- Start date
MwRYum
Major
QBU-88 is dubbed in China as "Type 88 shotgun" tells you what a bad rap that thing has. Also, the last few years since the Chinese team fielded the CS/LR4 which uses 7.62mm NATO rounds, and IIRC, in those competitions the organiser/host provide the ammo, so as much as their results can be attribute the the shooter's own skills and craft, performance of the CS/LR-4 can possibly be said on par with the Remington M700 series, the bread-and-butter variety in sniper rifle scene. Now let's see when'd China comes up with sub-MOA optics.
No. By the article it indicates that the R&D is undertaken by other outfits, and no specifics are given. It's more like saying the project has ganered some official blessings, but full-blown project into a practical model it is not - that's because it'll require the rifle calibre got hammered down first, but the official have yet make such a decision.
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
A DMR rifle varries by doctrin but they are supposed to be a range extension for the squad as such they do not generally need to be sub MOA but single or double MOA is fine. Consider that the M4A1 is considered the most refined US Military assault rifle and with a few mods was used as a DMR but offers at best 3 MOA It should be clear that you don't need to shoot olives at a thousand yards for a DMR. the SVD is considered about 4 MOA.
the emphasis on calibre indicates a want of longer range. The likely basis of development will be a beefed up CS/LR4 which is considered 1 MOA which with a 7.62x54R is a fair Sniper rifle.
But isn't the QBU-88 more designed for marksman purposes rather than as a full-on sniper rifle? If so I think that it'll be a bit too much to think that it'll have the accuracy of say a bolt-action sniper rifle.
Thanks for the translations again.
MwRYum
Major
QBU-88 was designed to replace the Type-85 (a medicore copy of the SVD, but back then China doesn't have good idea of what "sniping" mean anyway, not to mention understanding the low-MOA or sub-MOA requirement for even marksman rifle). CS/LR3, as well as venture into match-grade ammo for sniping, is probably the first Chinese effort to design a proper sniping system - that is, according to what the rest of the world consider norm for sniping system, sub-MOA performance sniping rifle paired with match-grade ammo - but that was a commercial effort, not a state-sponsored project. It was only thru limited adoption by PAP outfits than its reputation sip back to PLA outfit...don't know how much shock effect their epic fail in the first participation of international competition, but if you take what the state media said about it, PAP formally establish modern sniping courses to address the shortfall could be said as Chinese first major effort as far as establishment goes.
The million dollar question is, has the establishment sanctioned a proper sniper rifle R&D project? If the rumour about picking the .338LM as the starting point for new sniper rifle is true, then within the next few year we'll hear something.
As for marksman rifle, that's another question.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Ugh, enough of this revisionist history changing to suit your preferred narrative!
The PLA has always placed far greater emphasis on marksmanship than other major militaries because of much of its early existence, the PLA has suffered terrible logistical constraints.
It started life as a peasant resistance movement, and only had what weapons and ammo it could beg, borrow and steal. So they needed to make every shot count.
The PLA also suffered from significant logistical bottlenecks during the Korean War, which is the most significant foreign action it has ever fought in.
All of that bitter experience leaves a strong mark on the collective institutional memory of the PLA.
The even back in the day, the PLA had very high accuracy requirements for the Type81, which continued through to its current Type 95 and 03 models.
The principles of sniping is just the application of ballistics calculations, and being able to accuracy calculate point of impact for a bullet is exactly the same as for a cannon round or tank shell.
It's not so mystical dark art like Hollywood films would make you believe.
The biggest difference is that unlike a tank or naval ship, which would rely on computers, atmospheric sensors and ballistics tables to do all the hard work, a sniper needs to do the maths in his head (although with developments like Aimpoint and smart bullets, even that may become a thing of the past in years to come).
But the thing is, that kind of mental arithmetic and memory requirement favours the Chinese over westerners because of the very different primary education philosophies employed.
In China, school kids do an abcene about of maths and trigonometry as part of their primary education, and would go as far as to memories things like the Pi times tables (I certainly did). While the kind of calculator like mind that sort of schooling develops is of little use in most real life fields, it would be an immense benefit for a sniper.
I would expect them to have memories the most commonly applicable parts of ballistic tables for the guns and ammo they are using, so that when a spotter calls out range, wind and humidity, they instantly know what the hold over/under needs to be to get a bullseye.
In addition to the mental skills, PLA snipers also train to develop physical skills that are simply unheard of for western snipers.
Never have I seen snipers from any other military who could hold their gun so perfectly still you could balance bullets on the barrels while the guns are aimed freehand.
Those are the hard skills that takes years to develop and perfect.
The reason the Chinese snipers did so poorly in the first sniping competition was because the organisers banned them from using their own guns.
It's a pretty archaic and snobby rule that semi-automatics are not allowed in sniping competitions.
The only semi-reasonable reasoning other than patronising snobbery for justifying that requirement is the argument that someone with a semi could potentially cheat easier by plucking off another shot without anyone noticing if he totally missed the target with his first shot.
Both incredibly unrealistic and unreasonable. If you could somehow miss the extra gun shot, what makes anyone think they would be able to suddenly spot fowl play from an extra pull of the bolt action, which would be far more discrete?!
Apply some common sense and deductive reasoning. After coming last in the first competition because they had to use unfamiliar guns with totally different ammo and ballistics characteristics, the Chinese have since pretty much doninated every other sniping event they have competed in.
Does that sound like they Chinese had no clue about sniping and only started looking up the subject after the first humiliation?
The fact that the PLA has snipers of that quality proves that the lack of western-like sniping units is a choice, and not because they couldn't produce snipers.
To understand why that choice was made, and why the PLA is changing its policy in this regard, you need to consider the broader strategic aims of the PLA then and now.
Sniping is a high cost, low impact profession within the military. Everything about the sniper costs significantly more money compared to line troops.
Their guns are more expensive, their optics far more so, their ammo is more expensive, and they need to shoot a lot more often in training to retain and hone their edge.
On the battlefield, especially a fast moving fluid modern, mechanised battlefield, their utility is limited.
In my view, the role and impact of snipers have always been romanticised and exaggerated by popular media and fiction, because it plays so well into your typical hero-centric story-telling format.
Your average reader/viewer doesn't want the reality of war, where the vast majority of soldiers do their level best but only have a minimal direct impact on the course and outcome of engagements and wars.
They want to read about the heroes and modern Knights, which is why snipers and fighter pilots get so much attention.
A sniper could have a huge impact on the course of a battle, but it's extremely rare for such occurrences to happen.
In real life, I struggle to think of examples where battles have turned on the bullet of any sniper taking pot shots from a mile away.
Because of that sobering, objective assessment, the PLA decided mile long sniping wasn't worth the cost to invest in.
Instead, they opted to go the squad designated marksman route, where they gave their snipers semi-autos and embedded them at the platoon and squad levels.
The aim wasn't to pick off that random enemy a mile away taking a smoke break. It's to pick off those two or three hostile who are currently shooting at your troops.
The reason for the PLA showing interest in long range sniping is many-fold
1) there is the obvious prestige element. The PLA top brass likes it when PLA troops win international competitions. When that happens, the discipline in question gets more prestige, and are so more likely to get more support and funding.
2) China has gotten a lot richer as time passes, and the PLA has benefitted from that economic growth. With growing defence budgets comes re-assessments of projects and programmes' viability.
In the past, when the choice was snipers or say, Type99 MBTs, the snipers would obviously loose out. But as defence budget grows and top priority projects gets funding allocated first, the MBTs, SAMs and other top priority systems have already had sufficient funding allocated, and there is still enough money left in the pot, snipers would be far more likely to get the necessary funding now, when they are being weigh against things like tastier MREs or better looking uniforms etc.
3) the role the PLA sees itself performing is changing.
As China and the PLA grows stronger, and as China's international interests expand, the PLA is no longer exclusively concerned on defence of the Chinese mainland, because that objective could already be met without the PLA devoting 100% of its resources to achieve it.
More and more, the PLA is looking to develop an expeditionary military capability, principally as a contingency plan to secure China's collossal OBOR future development initiative.
For expeditionary engagements, PLA forces would expect to be faced with superior numbers of inferiority trained and equipped enemies. Which is very different from a situation where the PLA is defending the Chinese mainland from foreign invasion. Different missions require different tools and tactics.
In that regards, it would pay to examine western recent expeditionary wars and engagements to see what tools worked best for them, and snipers work a lot better in such expeditionary engagements.
The PLA has always placed far greater emphasis on marksmanship than other major militaries because of much of its early existence, the PLA has suffered terrible logistical constraints.
It started life as a peasant resistance movement, and only had what weapons and ammo it could beg, borrow and steal. So they needed to make every shot count.
The PLA also suffered from significant logistical bottlenecks during the Korean War, which is the most significant foreign action it has ever fought in.
All of that bitter experience leaves a strong mark on the collective institutional memory of the PLA.
The even back in the day, the PLA had very high accuracy requirements for the Type81, which continued through to its current Type 95 and 03 models.
The principles of sniping is just the application of ballistics calculations, and being able to accuracy calculate point of impact for a bullet is exactly the same as for a cannon round or tank shell.
It's not so mystical dark art like Hollywood films would make you believe.
The biggest difference is that unlike a tank or naval ship, which would rely on computers, atmospheric sensors and ballistics tables to do all the hard work, a sniper needs to do the maths in his head (although with developments like Aimpoint and smart bullets, even that may become a thing of the past in years to come).
But the thing is, that kind of mental arithmetic and memory requirement favours the Chinese over westerners because of the very different primary education philosophies employed.
In China, school kids do an abcene about of maths and trigonometry as part of their primary education, and would go as far as to memories things like the Pi times tables (I certainly did). While the kind of calculator like mind that sort of schooling develops is of little use in most real life fields, it would be an immense benefit for a sniper.
I would expect them to have memories the most commonly applicable parts of ballistic tables for the guns and ammo they are using, so that when a spotter calls out range, wind and humidity, they instantly know what the hold over/under needs to be to get a bullseye.
In addition to the mental skills, PLA snipers also train to develop physical skills that are simply unheard of for western snipers.
Never have I seen snipers from any other military who could hold their gun so perfectly still you could balance bullets on the barrels while the guns are aimed freehand.
Those are the hard skills that takes years to develop and perfect.
The reason the Chinese snipers did so poorly in the first sniping competition was because the organisers banned them from using their own guns.
It's a pretty archaic and snobby rule that semi-automatics are not allowed in sniping competitions.
The only semi-reasonable reasoning other than patronising snobbery for justifying that requirement is the argument that someone with a semi could potentially cheat easier by plucking off another shot without anyone noticing if he totally missed the target with his first shot.
Both incredibly unrealistic and unreasonable. If you could somehow miss the extra gun shot, what makes anyone think they would be able to suddenly spot fowl play from an extra pull of the bolt action, which would be far more discrete?!
Apply some common sense and deductive reasoning. After coming last in the first competition because they had to use unfamiliar guns with totally different ammo and ballistics characteristics, the Chinese have since pretty much doninated every other sniping event they have competed in.
Does that sound like they Chinese had no clue about sniping and only started looking up the subject after the first humiliation?
The fact that the PLA has snipers of that quality proves that the lack of western-like sniping units is a choice, and not because they couldn't produce snipers.
To understand why that choice was made, and why the PLA is changing its policy in this regard, you need to consider the broader strategic aims of the PLA then and now.
Sniping is a high cost, low impact profession within the military. Everything about the sniper costs significantly more money compared to line troops.
Their guns are more expensive, their optics far more so, their ammo is more expensive, and they need to shoot a lot more often in training to retain and hone their edge.
On the battlefield, especially a fast moving fluid modern, mechanised battlefield, their utility is limited.
In my view, the role and impact of snipers have always been romanticised and exaggerated by popular media and fiction, because it plays so well into your typical hero-centric story-telling format.
Your average reader/viewer doesn't want the reality of war, where the vast majority of soldiers do their level best but only have a minimal direct impact on the course and outcome of engagements and wars.
They want to read about the heroes and modern Knights, which is why snipers and fighter pilots get so much attention.
A sniper could have a huge impact on the course of a battle, but it's extremely rare for such occurrences to happen.
In real life, I struggle to think of examples where battles have turned on the bullet of any sniper taking pot shots from a mile away.
Because of that sobering, objective assessment, the PLA decided mile long sniping wasn't worth the cost to invest in.
Instead, they opted to go the squad designated marksman route, where they gave their snipers semi-autos and embedded them at the platoon and squad levels.
The aim wasn't to pick off that random enemy a mile away taking a smoke break. It's to pick off those two or three hostile who are currently shooting at your troops.
The reason for the PLA showing interest in long range sniping is many-fold
1) there is the obvious prestige element. The PLA top brass likes it when PLA troops win international competitions. When that happens, the discipline in question gets more prestige, and are so more likely to get more support and funding.
2) China has gotten a lot richer as time passes, and the PLA has benefitted from that economic growth. With growing defence budgets comes re-assessments of projects and programmes' viability.
In the past, when the choice was snipers or say, Type99 MBTs, the snipers would obviously loose out. But as defence budget grows and top priority projects gets funding allocated first, the MBTs, SAMs and other top priority systems have already had sufficient funding allocated, and there is still enough money left in the pot, snipers would be far more likely to get the necessary funding now, when they are being weigh against things like tastier MREs or better looking uniforms etc.
3) the role the PLA sees itself performing is changing.
As China and the PLA grows stronger, and as China's international interests expand, the PLA is no longer exclusively concerned on defence of the Chinese mainland, because that objective could already be met without the PLA devoting 100% of its resources to achieve it.
More and more, the PLA is looking to develop an expeditionary military capability, principally as a contingency plan to secure China's collossal OBOR future development initiative.
For expeditionary engagements, PLA forces would expect to be faced with superior numbers of inferiority trained and equipped enemies. Which is very different from a situation where the PLA is defending the Chinese mainland from foreign invasion. Different missions require different tools and tactics.
In that regards, it would pay to examine western recent expeditionary wars and engagements to see what tools worked best for them, and snipers work a lot better in such expeditionary engagements.
MwRYum
Major
So, would it be like all the pre-2000s heavy infantry weapons designs, placed lots of emphasis on "foot mobiles" thus made then too light, but post-2000s due to progress on motorization and mechanisation, designs can be afforded to get heavier and getting on par with the world's standard?
Situation changed, and the Chinese can (more like, forced to) play the Western-bloc games?
Situation changed, and the Chinese can (more like, forced to) play the Western-bloc games?
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TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
LOOK OUT HE"S GANNA BLOW!!
Marksmanship is a Skill Snipping is an Art or Role. Marksmanship is needed for Sniping but not all Marksman are snipers.
Fine But just being an Insurgent doesn't make you an Ace Marksmen. In point of Fact A lot of Insurgents are lousy shots.
SO did the Russians in WW2 More men then Rifles so they just Poured in Humans and hopped the masses would work.
In Theory.
these are Assault rifles for general infantry not Marksmen Rifles. They are intended to engage targets as the main element of the Rifle Squad. A Sniper operates out of the Rifle Squad. a .338LM mag Rifle is not a General infantry rifle It's a Sniper rifle It's a tool for long range engagement of Precision Targets.
For Shooting yes but A proper Sniper is more then just a Trigger puller.
I
Aimpoint makes Reddot Sights the basic principles of a red dot have been available for the last 80 Years. Tracking point makes Computerized gunsights that assist in the calculation of long range shots. Smart bullets work to correct for more extreme variables and assist in "Cleaning up" the shot IE The bullet drifted a few more feet to the left but the laser guidance kicked in and corrected.
I am not posting this tangent as IT's bordering on Propaganda to Rasist
Seriously!
BOGUS!! Standard Practice in Training is to use a Dime on the barrel. just as Hard and widely practiced.
Months not years.
Revisionist. And unrelated. Competitions vary by Host. you are trying to compare competition to actual practice and blending two competitions into one. The Choice of Weapons Would have and should have been known by any team entering. Use of a Bolt action is and remains a standard practice for some competitions. Well others would and do Allow use of Semiautos
.
A PAP team and they have competed well. Yet again I point out the Following fact the Competition we are discussing favorers Law Enforcement and using a straw man argument. If the PAP team knew they were entering they would have know what they could and couldn't use.
It sounds like they had issues and then redesigned there program to better meet the needs of the competition. They also started Tailoring the PAP rifle program to better meet the needs. This happens in competition.
PAP and you know it.
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
Bogus.
The Rifles may seemingly cost more but not enough to make them un comparable if you consider weapons like LMG's
the Optics are pricy but the price of a government buy is lower when compared to civil and are duel role the spotting scope is a versatile piece of equipment the rifle scope is as well.
the Camouflage is modified and available to the PLA. Radios are standard issue.other equipment is standardized. Ammo buys for the military are cheap.
Bogus. If the sniper was only about taking that one Hollywood shot True however Modern snipers are observers and top cover they are a multirole asset.
.
failure to consider the actual function of a modern sniper.
Depends on the Conflict and type of Battle. In Urban or Jungle warfare Snipers are a force to be feared, In open Conflict less so. A Sniper team in Urban can hold down an Enemy Company With a few well placed shots.
Mile long Shots are the Pop Culture Myth your earlier rant was about. Snipers are more then just sharp shooters they are observers and scouts.
Snipers are Seperate from the Squad DMR gunners are part of it They are intended to extend the Range of the Squad
Again In Error. The Function of a Sniper is not to take random Targets but to engage specialized targets. A sniper would prefer to disable and breakdown the Enemy's chain of command or ability to operate by selecting specialists like Officers Radio operators, Heavy weapons, Senior NCO's and even Medics They can also be used to laze for Strikes or gather intel on enemy ground forces.
Again PAP teams have taken the Trophies.
A sniper is a thousand times cheaper then a MBT.
Sounds like Something I would say in a more Ominus Tone
Agreement Especially in cases of Urban. A sniper team is easier to move into position then a MBT and less visble to Air defence then any Drone. It can operate on the ground and direct attack as well as support attack.
And Acceptance. Finally .
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
If we are still talking about the PLA .338 rifle. If It's a sniper rifle and intended to compete vs other modern sniper rifles then it should have an Aluminum block chassis, a Folding stock with some level of adjustment for length of pull and cheek Comb, A set of Rails to mount a scope, A detachable box magazine and threading for a suppressor option.
The Aluminum block based design if the modern standard. It's tough, rugged, and cheap. The Folding stock allows for easy transport in a bag or from a vehicle as well as Air Drop Adjustments allow better tailoring of rifle to human. The Rail is self explanatory. Detachable box eases reloads and Ammo carry. The Threading eases signature reduction of both Audio and visual.
I Suspect it should take it's design influences from the JS762 and JS-FY as Starting a Full Long range sniper program in the PLA should begin as looking into the established program of the PAP.