SSG 82

The Scharfschützengewehr 82 or SSG 82, literally Sharpshooter's Rifle 82, is a rifle chambered in the 5.45×39mm Soviet cartridge built in East Germany at the end of the Cold War for use by East German special police units.

Scharfschützengewehr 82
SSG 82 fiited with a 4×32 Zeiss Jena sight on display in the Waffenmuseum Suhl
TypeSniper rifle
Place of originEast Germany
Service history
Used bySee users
WarsLebanese Civil War
Production history
Designed1982
ManufacturerVEB Fahrzeug- und Jagdwaffenwerk "Ernst Thälmann" Suhl (FAJAS)
No. built2000
Specifications
Mass4.5 kg (9.9 lb)
Length1,080 mm (42.52 in)
Barrel length600 mm (23.62 in)
Cartridge5.45×39mm[1]
Caliber5.45 mm
ActionBolt-action
Muzzle velocity980 m/s (3,215 ft/s)
Feed system5-round detachable box magazine
Sights4×32 telescopic sight with German-style reticle[2]

Very little was known about this weapon and very few examples have been imported into the west, with importer Century International Arms having imported around 600 at the turn of the century.[3] It's known that at least 2000 SSG 82s were made.[3]

The SSG 82 actually has been specifically designed for use in the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) to stop the import of police sniper rifles from non-socialist countries and military sniper rifles from socialist countries.[2]

History

The development of the SSG 82 was done under the watch of Erich Mielke.[4]

When Stasi HQ was occupied by activists, 10 SSG 82s were found and subsequently passed off to West Germany before they were passed on to gun collectors.[5]

Design details
Kleinkaliber-Standardgewehr 150 (Small bore Standard rifle 150)

The Scharfschützengewehr 82 was technically based on the Suhler Kleinkalibergewehr Modell 150 Standard .22 Long Rifle (5.6 mm) caliber small bore competition rifle.[6] This makes the SSG 82 design reminiscent of a European-style small bore competition rifle.

There were plans to have the SSG 82 include a suppressor and a night vision scope, but they were called off.[5]

Barreled action

The heart of the SSG 82 is a cold-hammer forged receiver and free-floating barrel with a semi-bull profile and features a target crown.

The bolt has four locking lugs and requires a 60-degree bolt rotation to cycle the gun.[2]

The safety consist of a sliding safety actuated by rotating a small disk positioned at the right side just above the trigger.[2] The two-stage trigger mechanism displays an adjustable trigger pull of 3 to 4 N (0.7 to 0.9 lbf).[2] The detachable 5-round box magazine is based upon center feeding for maximum reliability as well as precise positioning of the cartridge into the chamber.[2] The magazine release is located on the bottom right behind the magazine well.

Stock

The SSG 82 wooden stock resembles that of the Small bore Standard rifle 150 with a raised comb and a stippled pistol grip and forearm. The butt plate is adjustable for length of pull by adding or removing spacers and height.

Sights

The rifle has no iron sights but is equipped with a 4×32 telescopic sight ("Ziel4/S" 4×32 scope, reticle 1) with mounting rails made by VEB Zeiss Jena (in the original Zeiss plant that was captured by the Soviets at the end of WWII) which is numbered to the rifle and mounted using a quick detachable Suhler claw mountbase.[3] This was a basic model of the VEB Zeiss Jena telescopic sight line as 6×36, 6×42M, 8×56M and variable 1.5–6×39, 1.5–6×42M and 3–12×56M magnification variants were also available. The Zeiss Jena non-M telescopic sight models had elevation correction and focusing turrets and were due to the lack of a windage correction turret corrected for windage by a gunsmith during mounting, hence these sights were dedicated to a particular rifle.

Precision

Internet sources report differing information regarding the attainable accuracy of fire, though the quality of the ammunition used is often mentioned as a very important factor in obtaining good accuracy.

Reports on the accuracy of the rifle range from one hole 5-shot groups to 100 mm (4 in) 3-shot groups and anywhere in between.

Users
  •  East Germany – The SSG 82 was used by the Department XXII of the Ministry of State Security, the Stasi "anti-terrorist service unit". Furthermore, bodyguards and forces of the Ministry of the Interior (MDI) as well as special forces of riot police were armed with this weapon. These service units possessed a high operational-tactical level of training and were intended for the prevention or combating of terrorist attacks, hostage-taking and terrorist attacks on the territory of East Germany.
  • Zgharta Liberation Army (ZLA) – An unknown number of SSG 82 rifles were reportedly used by the Lebanese Christian ZLA militia during the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980s. The rifles were possibly obtained via Syria.
gollark: It could record locally and upload later, though.
gollark: This person apparently reverse-engineered it statically, not at runtime, but it *can* probably detect if you're trying to reverse-engineer it a bit while running.
gollark: > > App behavior changes slightly if they know you're trying to figure out what they're doing> this sentence makes no sense to me, "if they know"? he's dissecting the code as per his own statement, thus looking at rows of text in various format. the app isn't running - so how can it change? does the app have self-awareness? this sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi movie from the 90's.It's totally possible for applications to detect and resist being debugged a bit.
gollark: > this is standard programming dogma, detailed logging takes a lot of space and typically you enable logging on the fly on clients to catch errors. this is literally cookie cutter "how to build apps 101", and not scary. or, phrased differently, is it scary if all of that logging was always on? obviously not as it's agreed upon and detailed in TikTok's privacy policy (really), so why is it scary that there's an on and off switch?This is them saying that remotely configurable logging is fine and normal; I don't think them being able to arbitrarily gather more data is good.
gollark: > on the topic of setting up a proxy server - it's a very standard practice to transcode and buffer media via a server, they have simply reversed the roles here by having server and client on the client, which makes sense as transcoding is very intensive CPU-wise, which means they have distributed that power requirement to the end user's devices instead of having to have servers capable of transcoding millions of videos.Transcoding media locally is not the same as having some sort of locally running *server* to do it.

See also

References
  1. https://modernfirearms.net/en/sniper-rifles/standart-caliber-rifles/germany-standart-caliber-rifles/ssg-82-eng/
  2. P. Hoffmann. "Das Gewehr". Das Scharfschützengewehr SSG-82. ssg-82.com. Retrieved 2016-01-01.
  3. https://www.forgottenweapons.com/ssg-82-the-enigmatic-east-german-sniper-rifle/
  4. https://www.dnn.de/Dresden/Lokales/Forscher-praesentiert-in-Dresden-die-Wunderwaffe-der-Stasi
  5. https://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/vermischtes/article157172890/Eine-Waffe-nur-fuer-die-Stasi.html
  6. P. Hoffmann. "Die Entwicklung". Das Scharfschützengewehr SSG-82. ssg-82.com. Retrieved 2016-01-01.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.