Everyone who gets a Kim Jong Un patch or t-shirt will also receive -100 social credit points in China:
https://www.varusteleka.com/en/product/forgotten-weapons-best-korea-propaganda-t-shirt/81932
https://www.varusteleka.com/en/product/forgotten-weapons-best-korea-propaganda-morale-patch/81954
North Korea has a domestic-production 5.45mm AK, designated the Type 88. Several versions exist (fixed, side-folding, and underfolding stocks) but the most unusual is the one with a unique top-folding stock made to accommodate a huge helical drum magazine. These are seen only with North Korea special forces and Kim’s personal bodyguards, and are clearly valued as propaganda pieces. I am not aware of any footage of one being fired, or of a physical example in Western hands – all we know about them comes from North Korean media. The actual capacity is just a guess, and some serious observers believe that they are not actually functional magazines and exist only for propaganda use.
Thanks to Stuff & Things for their assistance with the video! You can order one of these magazines from them here:
yeah, I had one of those for my Garand. you have to shake it a lot but it fed flawlessly
Comrade Ian is having way too much fun at his job. And he is mocking our Dear Leader. Cut his ration of worms immediately!
Since Stuff & Things have a working 9mm helical drum, I do wonder if the problem with the Calico helical drum is not the drum, but the gun it is paired with.
But how is the S&T design different (or not) from the Calico design?
The Calico feeds downward, which you’d think would be an advantage with a gravity assist.
What no one has proven is that it can be done with a long, tapered rifle cartridge, since no one’s seen the North Korean one fire.
This magazine works by a little Smurf who sits in the magazine and manually shoves the cartridges into the receiver.
this particular magazine was missing the Smurf, so I don’t blame Ian for not understanding it’s function.
Smurf are temperate climate creatures. They don’t do well in the Arizona oven.
Nice one Ian, you had me going there!
Evans rifle, WAAYYY back when. Helical drum in the butt stock, pistol caliber type cartridge, lever action.
I’ve no real opinion on the helical magazine thing. I’ll note, however, that there’s a bunch of stuff out there that can be used to try and understand what is actually going on.
Look at all the North Korean pictures; these magazines are almost always visible in propaganda/publicity shots, carried by the security elements surrounding the Kim family.
Now, if you look at it from the standpoint of “Why?”, you start going down a hall of mirrors; on the one hand, would the North Koreans have fake and/or unreliable magazines on their leadership security team? This seems less than sensible; likewise, if the magazines work, why the hell are they either appropriate to a security detail of that sort, where they’re displayed, and why wouldn’t you keep them concealed so as to keep a hidden edge you could use in case of an actual attack on the leadership?
Secondly, what the hell does it say that these are on display in mostly internal settings, with the surrounding matrix being entirely North Korean? Wouldn’t the necessity for provision of these magazines sort of militate towards the idea that there’s a significant internal security risk, and the leadership has to have a security team that can deliver extremely high volumes of fire on their own people? Otherwise, what’s the point of those magazines?
You could interpret the need for those mags as a leading indicator of regime fragility.
Or, it could just be the sheer “cool factor” of it all, wherein the notable firearms enthusiasm of the Kim dynasty is being expressed yet again, in an odd way.
I’m unaware of any of these magazines that have made it out of North Korea, so trying to figure out what is going on really comes down to looking at pictures and trying to figure out motivations/reasons… The majority of which originate in a somewhat alien mindset and worldview, the one of Kim’s North Korea.
The whole thing is a little bit mad, to my mind: That magazine has got to render the relatively light and handy AK damn near as much a handling monstrosity as your average light machinegun, soooo… What the hell is the perceived rational benefit that outweighs that? I honestly can’t conceive of any, so in my limited view of the issue, that whole thing is ‘effing irrational as hell, making it impossible to analyze from a rational position in the first place.
So… Yeah. Ideal April Fool’s subject matter. I’d wager that a lot of the whole thing stems from the whole “But… But… It looks cooooooooooool…” factor.
My hypothesis is that might be
1. nod to first fire-arm made in North Korea and Kim Il Sung decision w.r.t to magazine of said fire-arm, as https://smallarmsreview.com/north-korean-small-arms-democratic-peoples-republic-of-korea/ describe that
…first weapon manufactured locally was the Type 49 submachine gun, made in 1949. This was a license built copy of the Soviet PPSh-41 or “Pappa-sha.” The North Koreans chose to use the 71-round drums and not the 35-round curved magazines. Speculation is that the ‘Great Leader’, Kim Il Sung, thought the large-capacity drum was intimidating and tactically an advantage. The Type 49 was the main submachine gun of the North Korean army, and they used these extensively during the 1950s Korean War. Their main infantry weapon was the rifle, which was used much more than any submachine gun, but the image of those ‘Burp Guns’ with large drum magazines was so strong, that it became the symbol of the ‘communist intruders’ in South…
XOR
2. aim to demonstrate self-reliance (c.f. Juche) at own magazine design rather than copy of foreign copy
Outsiders trying to “understand” North Korea are doomed to long-term disappointment. And, may well wind up curled in a fetal position somewhere, drooling quietly to themselves about how none of it makes any damn sense…
About the only reason I can think of for one of these magazines is bodyguard work.
Remembering the attempt on Reagan’s life in 1981, the Secret Service detail had Uzis carried in shoulder harnesses under their suit coats. But if they had full-length 30-round magazines in place, the magazine “stuck out” noticeably.
NK does not have SMGs as far as I know, although they probably have Stechkin machine pistols. If they want a more emphatic weapon for protecting the Dear Leader, that’s still relatively concealable, a folding-stock AKSU type would be their most likely choice- except that again, its 30-round magazine is going to be noticeable.
Rather than accept reduced magazine capacity, in this context a helical-drum magazine lying under the barrel makes a good bit of sense. As a bonus, it can be attached by the same method as a standard under-barrel grenade launcher.
BTW, helical drum, or more correctly Archimedean-screw, type magazines are an old story. Look up the .44 Evans lever-action repeating rifle (1874) and the 11mm Werndl Mannlicher M1880 bolt-action. The Evans magazine worked much like the later Calico “drum”, while the Mannlicher had three tubular magazines which were rotated by cam-paths machined into their outer casing, to feed sequentially from each of the tubes every time the bolt was cycled.
There really is nothing new under the sun.
clear ether
eon
The bodyguard detail thing came to mind, the first time I saw one of these…
Followed closely by “What does that say about the strength of the Kim regime, and why are they allowing the visual theatrics of that fact out in the open…?”
Parsed one way, just having those around speaks volumes as to how stable things really are. If you’ve got to worry about having all your security detail armed that way, then your problems with staying in power are obviously pretty damn high. As well, why the hell would you advertise that fact to the world?
Which then leads to speculation about whether or not that open broadcast of weakness is really true, or not…
Hall of circus mirrors, trying to work out what is going on in North Korea. I’m grateful that ain’t my job… I knew a woman who was an intel analyst for that theater, and after she’d left the job and gotten out of the service? All you really needed to do in order to elicit a sort of high mad laughter out of her was to ask some reasonably informed question about the Kim regime or North Korea in general, and it was damn near like a epileptic fit or an exorcism. She wouldn’t ever veer into classified matters, but the open-source crap she’d point at and go “See? See? See?” was crazy enough.
Apparently, the deal where the Kim family kidnapped Japanese civilians and South Korean actresses and directors was only the tip of the iceberg, and for some really insane reasons. US, South Korean, and Japanese intel types went nuts over trying to trace out the how-when-where for the networks doing that, and made some progress. The “why” left a lot of them babbling, and damn near none of them got anything right about it, at all. From what I understand, South Korean counter-intelligence went nuts trying to work out why that actress/director combo got snatched when it did, and there was a ton of effort put into trying to either vet or “clean up” the South Korean entertainment industry that was totally unnecessary…
North Korea is almost entirely past outsiders understanding what is going on, and anyone who tries to tell you they’re at all predictable is nuts. It’s a fool’s game, that…
Kim is into big rockets to show off how powerful his nation is. So why not big magazines? These magazines may well have been an actual attempt that failed. But they are still good for propaganda purposes.
I do wonder if Kim has self-image issues. Just my take in the way he behaves. Maybe he does not feel up to the job and he is trying to compensate. Having large magazines in his security detail might be showing off. I do wonder if there are simpler mechanisms inside to actually feed the rifles, though at normal capacities. Can’t have the security detail totally unarmed.
Somebody at the CIA has to know whether the NK are spoofing everyone of if this is an attempt to try to make the thing work.
Yeah… You would hope.
My experience with matters of “technical intelligence”, particularly surrounding small arms.
Do remember how they cocked-up the entire “What is an AK-47” back in the day. Still goes on… A lot of the problem stems from the fact that the folks up at the national level in security regard small arms as more-or-less irrelevant and do not put any emphasis on either acquisition or analysis.
Which is, again, a reflection of the sad state of American small arms procurement/research. The reality is that what there is of it gets done mostly by civilian enthusiasts, who then get excoriated by “the system” when it comes to where they interface with the government. The example of Larry Vickers comes to mind… Firearms progress in these united states of ours comes mostly from the ranks of cranks, enthusiasts, and monomaniacs. The government? LOL… Nope. Never did, I fear.
Remember, the first AK-74 examples didn’t come from some government agency going into Afghanistan and getting any for themselves; they were perfectly content to get by on speculation and vague sourcing. The first actual AK-74 examples got into the hands of the actual technical intelligence people due to the machinations of the nice people at Soldier of Fortune.
There may have been some examples and ammo that the high-end guys had access to, but… The first real examples got into the tech intel guy’s hands only because of a private initiative.
Or, so I was informed by one of the involved tech intel types down at Fort Irwin. I’ve no idea about the actual details, most of which are likely still classified.
You can work this out strictly from observing what goes on and what gets into open sources.
And, of course, you and I are also a little delusional about how important this arena actually is. I just saw something this morning wherein the research numbers coming in from Ukraine right now seem to indicate an ungodly 75% casualties from drones, and small arms are accounting only for about 14%.
At some point, people are going to be doing the same sort of thing we are doing regarding firearms with regards to drones and the like. Someone might want to start thinking about grabbing the domain “forgottendrones.com”…
That 75% number is mind-numbing, when you consider how long it took for artillery to gain the same sort of ascendancy over other arms… This has all happened within the last five years, from a basis that really only came into existence back during the late 1990s with the rise of consumer-level drone manufacture.
We’re in the midst of a true “Revolution in Military Affairs”, and I can about guarantee you that when the final ramifications finally finish shaking through, the usual suspects in the national-level intel organizations are going to be stunned, stunned and shocked I tell you, at how it all just happened to them…
They pulled this same sh*t back when we were arguing for armored route clearance and MRAP takeup, back in the 1990s. Handwriting was on the wall, if only someone bothered to read it, and they blew the whole thing off with “We don’t intend to get into wars like that…” and then promptly taking us into Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’ll be the same with the recognition that drones now dominate warfare, something we’re not likely to admit until it’s too damn late, and well after a Pearl Harbor or Kasserine Pass moment. It’ll likely look a lot more like Task Force Smith than anything else.
Ha!
every now and then you have to tap the bolt forward, that’s the only issue.
Capitalist’s pitiful conception of revolutionary working class physics never understand Glorious Type 88 Anti-Gravity Feed Ever Victorious Fast-Shooting Gun Magazine People’s Weapon. Heroic 555.4 mm bullet cartridges selflessly leap into Red Star firing chamber to go BANG at Glorious Leader command! How you not know that??? Dumb dumb……
Arghhh, there I was thinking some gun nerd made a replica of the thing. You got me for a minute there Ian. Well, it is an almost-working-replica, so, Shot Show 2026?
I got a weird idea to the question, why only the security detail is carrying this guns and if the magazines could be a fake. Could it be, that the magazines ARE fake and only the security carries them because
a. so only very few people know they’re fake and
b. the security doesn’t shoot the Glorious Leader in best/classic Praetorian fashion?
B
This is just what I was thinking, Egyptian president on parade style, what was his name again…
Then again, maybe hermit kingdom after 50 years actually invented something