History
The Soviet Army began looking for a new heavy machine gun to replace its older SGM and RPD machine guns in the early 1950s. The Soviet Army liked the idea behind the German MG-42; a versatile weapon used on a variety of mounts to perform many different roles. Two Soviet weapon designers were asked to design one weapon each utilizing the same principle.
Testing approved Mikhail Kalashnikov's solution; it was found to be more reliable and cheaper to manufacture than the design of Grigory Nikitin and Yuri Sokolov. Kalashnikov's machine gun became the new standard machine gun, and was named PK.
Nikitin's and Sokolov's design was however not forgotten. It was developed into the heavy NSV machine gun about 10 years later and selected in 1969 as the successor to the DShK/DShKM machine gun. It was accepted in service by the Soviet Army in 1971. The machine gun was also license-manufactured in Bulgaria, India, Yugoslavia and Poland. The Yugoslavian version of the NSVT is called the M87.
Production of the NSV has ended in Russia, and it is currently being replaced by the Kord heavy machine gun. The Russian Army needed a more accurate heavy machine gun, and it has also been increasingly difficult to get hold of spare parts. NSV production was located in Ukraine and in Kazakhstan and was disrupted by the end of the Soviet Union.
Read more about this topic: NSV Machine Gun
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“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)