This Belarusian 30mm automatic grenade launcher from BSVT looks like a prospective Star Wars prop.

It is based on Russian Baryshev experimental grenade launcher and features some improvements over the latter. Particularly, the use of polymer and titanium parts allowed the designers to decrease the overall weight by 20%, down to 8 kilograms (about 17.5 lbs). The launcher will probably be adopted by the Belarusian special forces units.

The most significant achievement of the designers is perhaps the possibility to shoot the launcher full-auto off-hand. It is possible due to some sort of special bolt design which significantly decreases the felt recoil. According to the designers, the recoil feels like that of a 12 gauge shotgun. Considering that the launcher shoots 30x29mm VOG-17 grenades (and other types of grenades of AGS-17 and AGS-30 automatic grenade launchers), they must have done a pretty good job in recoil mitigation department. The launcher feeds either from a 29 round belt or from magazines of 3 or 6 round capacity.

As you can see in the above image, this grenade launcher is close in dimensions to the Pecheneg machine gun … it is even shorter…

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2017/06/21/belarusian-30mm-handheld-full-auto-grenade-launcher/

  • @[email protected]
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    37 months ago

    How is this aldready forgot ? As there seems to be nothing bad about it in your review ?

    • @FireTowerOPM
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      27 months ago

      I imagine this type of weapon isn’t more popular because 30mm belts probably are not fun to carry around.