So around the halfway mark of me subjecting you to my vacation photos I thought I'd do a little roundup of the stuff that won't fill up a thread.
Keeping thing chronological, first out is the Museum of Weapons in Moscow. Which was unexpectedly hard to find, because as I was looking for a museum I came across, well, this place. "Kreml in Ismailowo", Russia as imagine by Las Vegas as imagined by Russia? With a touch of tourist trap I guess. And according to google only known online to Germans.
Anyway, despite not really looking like the place for a museum it turned out to be inside (if you enter from where I took the first photo it's in the near left corner). It's basically the petting zoo form the Great Patriotic War museum scaled up a bit, with Kalashnikov sponsorship. This means that you're free to handle the guns, and while I'd assume that they're deactivated in some way you could still dry fire and such. Ticket price wasn't highway robbery, but the place is definitely in the "we wanna make money" category of museums rather than "we love these things and want to share them with the world".
The condition of the guns was "variable". So if you were hoping to dry fire an MP-40, well, the bolt handle on that one was simply broken off. The safety on the SKS was a bit loose. As in gravity alone would put it in safe if you pointed it at the ceiling and fire if you held it vertically.
I'll try to prune a bit, but if any pic here appears to be very oddly framed it's probably one of those I took to try and document the rigging somewhat. Though how much of that has been changed by various refits since the war...
In addition to not getting rammed/lured on shore/otherwise sunk in some bizarre accident by the Kamchatka the Aurora also managed to make history by firing the blank shot that was the signal to storm the Winter Palace and start the October Revolution. IIRC the preceding mutiny and that would serve as inspiration for the Battleship Potemkin film.
Aurora is a protected cruiser, ie most of it has been armoured to the standards of soggy toilet paper. As a result the piece of metal seen here was pierced at some point leaving the guy in the photo to rely on his uniform to stop a naval gun shell. IIRC the result of that was about what you'd expect.
Awesome thread, thanks. Really like the Aurora pics.
Hey I've got one of those! It fought the Russians in 1904 and fought for the Russians in 1914.
William Young
i've recently been to the artillery museum in st. petersburg and got a few pics not gonna bother dumping the stuff that's been posted before countless times but here's some stuff they recently got out of the basement, like a collection of fedorov prototypes
As I was sorting and resizing photos from other places I remembered that there was a few bits of 16th century arms&armour in the St Basil cathedral (the one by the Rd Square/Moscow International Small Plane Airport) in Moscow, so here they are.
We have a saying here in Sweden, "all ways are good, except for the bad ones".
Also, I have a bunch of photos from that museum in processing as well, but IIRC I never got along very well with the glass cases, so we may end up complementing each other quite well here.
>I never got along very well with the glass cases this, most of my other pics have my face reflecting from the glass (especially the fucking kalashnikov room) so i'm not posting that >ak type 1 production number 1
