Red Army Equipment

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The Soviet Union had the largest army of all factions in WWII; this meant that it could pour countless bodies into the conflict, with plenty in reserve to replaces losses (which is exactly what they did). Equipping all those soldier was another matter entirely; Though the U.S.S.R. by this time had an enormous industrial base, arming that many soldiers would still put a strain on the supply chain, and the invasion of Russia had caught the Soviets with their pants down, meaning that they couldn't arm their troops as well as they theoretically could have. Instead they would rely heavily on tried-and-true but outdated designs like the Mosin, cheap-but-effective support weapons, and an enormous number of tanks. Equipment could be categorized as follows:

• Old Designs that were supposed to be replaced, but they already had the tooling ready and made them in mass quantities
• More advanced designs that weren't quite ready yet and made in more limited quantities
• Cheap designs that could be made quickly to be sent to the front lines ASAP
• The occasional truly ground-breaking designs that eventually made it to the front lines.
• Stuff they got via Lend-Lease from when they were allies with Britain and America.

Another thing to keep in mind is the soviet mindset of the epoch. They valued, in this order: simplicity of use, ruggedness/ease of maintenance and efficiency. When you need to equip a massive army of people coming from all over the largest country in the world, that can barely understand one another despite speaking the same language, with most barely having ever operated a car or tractor in their lives, and you need it to do it like yesterday in the shortest possible time; one very quickly can see the appeal of an 'okay' design that is easy to mass-produce, instruct in its usage and that can take the abuse of a poorly-trained user over a perhaps superior one who is only one (or even none) of the three. Yes, there were outliers, but they were often restricted to elite units and produced in ridiculously low numbers compared to PPSh-41's/T-34's/IL-2 Shturmovik's

Small Arms

Rifles and SMGs

The Moist Nugget

• Mosin-Nagant: The average Soviet soldier in World War II was armed with a Mosin Nagant bolt action rifle. A time tested design that had been in service for half a century at that point through World War I and two revolutions (and subsequent Civil War) with a few tweaks. It was a bare bones five-shot gun, but was cheap to make, simple to service, robust and reliable and could put a 7.62×54mmR round through a Nazi at ranges up to 800 meters.
• SVT-40: The Soviets intended to replace the Mosin with the SVT-40 semi-automatic rifle earlier in the 1940s. It was a good rifle, but what held it back was that it was too fragile for the dumbfuck farmers that were using them, and more importantly it cost too much to try and produce during a war in numbers required. Still, more than 1.5 million were made. It was at least on par with the Gewehr 43 (which had systems copied from it), and better than the Gewehr 41, interestingly enough. The Soviets continued to work on the idea of semi-auto rifles and soon after the war introduced the SKS. The SKS was expected to become the rifle component of the AK-47's planned SMG status while sharing the shortened intermediate round with the AK, but upon realizing the AK outclassed it in all ways except simplicitiy the SKS mainly became a ceremonial and export weapon.
• Winchester Model 1895: Yes, a goddamn lever-action rifle. In WWII. In Russia. The Russian Empire had procured a large quantity of them in WWI to make up for shortages of Mosin-Nagant rifles, and the Soviets still had some around for the Winter War. Unlike the vast majority of lever-actions, the Model 1895 was adapted to use stripper clips of 7.62x54mmR, to simplify logistical concerns and overall useability.
• Fedorov Avtomat: a WWI automatic rifle issued in limited numbers early in the war to make up for the lack of infantry-portable automatic weapons, and mostly saw action in the Finnish front where they were used up or destroyed. The Federov was a novel experiment cooked up during the great war and was arguably the first Assault-Rifle, but it had obvious shortcomings. The biggest being using outdated Japanese 6.5mm ammo (Protip: If your rifle needs special ammo that 99% of the army does not use, you're doing ground war wrong), as well as having a 25 bullet magazine that was fed through 5 bullet clips. As a result, it was largely forgotten about outside of Russia and obscure militaria nerds, since it primarily saw service in the Russian Civil war while everyone was trying to kill each other.
• PPD-40: Based on the Finnish KP31, this SMG was made in small numbers before the war. One of Degtyarov's many beautiful designs, it was a nice gun to shoot with. But due to pressing demands during the invasion, the design was simplified into...
• PPSh-41: After noticing how the Finns used this very simple tactic in the close quarter combat of forests and cities of the Winter War, the Soviet war machine poured huge effort into creating easy to use and more importantly easy to make SMGs. And to its credit, the PPSh-41 was pretty damn good. One of its more notable features was a chrome lined bore, which made the gun extremely resistant to dirt and corrosion, and keeping with the standard Soviet adage of 'quantity being a quality of its own' entire infantry battalions were often equipped with cheap and easy to manufacture PPSh-41's, pointed at the enemy and let loose to devastating effect in the urban battlefields of Eastern Europe. Even the Germans loved the PPSh-41, to the point where they had an program specifically for converting captured guns over to use MP-40 ammo and magazines, and manuals were printed and distributed to the Wehrmacht on how to use captured PPShs. Shpagin's SMG however was still not min maxed to be fully simplified for war production. Thus, Sudayev took a swing at making the...
• PPS-43: Deciding that the PPSh-41 could be streamlined even more, the PPS-43 replaced it as it dispensed the wooden stock for a metal folding stock, among other changes that reduced skilled working hours to next to nothing. Otherwise it was mostly the same model, just firing a bit slower and ending up more accurate.

Pistols

• TT33: The Soviets' first automatic pistol, essentially a browning clone in 7.62x25mm Tokarev.
• Nagant M1895: This revolver had been used since Imperial Russia, and at first glance its a very outdated revolver, requiring the use of special ammunition and being required to load and unload each cartridge one at a time. However, thanks to its unique gas-seal mechanism, it is one of the few revolvers that can be suppressed.

Machineguns

• DP27: The DP-27/28 was the distant second best LMG in the war. While it did not have the fire rate or general superiority of the MG34, it it was slightly better than the Bren due to having more shots at an almost equivalent caliber. The Pan magazine made it somewhat awkward and were a pain to reload or carry ammo for. However, its slower fire rate meant that it didn't have to worry about the barrel overheating as much. The Finns captured a ton of them during the Winter war and ended up using them to partially replace their own LMGs.
• Maxim Model 1910: Russia's version of the Maxim gun; it had gained an affectionate reputation as the "Tuchanka," a wagon-mounted MG, and continued to serve as a static emplaced gun that was slightly easier to deploy thanks to its wheel mount and gun shield.
• Maxim-Tokarev: An attempt to convert the Maxim into a more portable gun; the designers remove the water jacket and added a stock. Like most other such conversions, it was still a very bulky gun and wasn't as good as purpose-built light machineguns.
• DShK: Russia's .50 caliber machinegun. Though they didn't make as many as the M2 Browning during WWII, they still made a ton of them during and after the war.

Anti-Tank Infantry Weapons

• PTRD-41: The PTRD was similar to the Panzerbüchse in many ways, but it was a more modern design that retained service throughout the war. Arguably the second best AT-Rifle of the war after the Type 99, the thing was entirely able to kill Panzer IVs without Schurzen. And yes this this is why Panzer IV's did start being equipped with side skirts. Generally that is attributed to making them resistant to shape charges by pre-detonating the HEAT warhead, but nope it was to make them resist this thing.
• PTRS-41: The PTRS was a limited production run version that could fire semi-auto. Grunts didn't like their "fishing rods", however. As a saying went, "Long barrel - short life". It and the ammo were also quite heavy, but this wasn't unique compared to contemporary AT-Rifles.

Misc

• ROKS-2 / ROKS-3: A flamethrower disguised as a standard infantry rifle, as the logic went that enemies tend to target flame troops first. The ROKS is overall a wierd design, as it required the use of a revolver cylinder loaded with blanks at the muzzle, since that was the ignition source for the flames.

Vehicles

Tanks

• T-34: There is a lot that has been said about the T-34. As a Russian tank access to Soviet archives has been spotty at best over the years, and the Russian goverment also propaganda the fuck out of the Great Patriotic War so speaking ill of the tank can land you hot waters at times. What we can see is this: the T-34 was on paper a great design but it was hamstrung heavily by the fact that Stalin ordered as many be built as possible, and that meant the Soviets were perpetually cutting corners like it was crunch time at the circle factory. Combined with poor or inexperienced crews, in a day and age where motor vehicles were not yet standard, and the Soviets took heavy losses. And once some of the training issues were solved the Germans started to roll out there big cats and upgunned tanks and tank destroyer so losses were still high. By 1943, with the introduction of heavy German Tiger and Panther tanks (the latter being made in direct response to the T-34) the tank was mostly outdated, Updates such as putting an 85mm gun on it kept it in viable until the end of the war. On paper this tank is STILL being used by some nations and there are scattered reports of them showing up in the Russian invasion of Ukraine!

Airplanes

The Soviet Airforce (VVS) suffered a lot during the first months of Barbarossa, loosing a lot of skilled aviators and ground personnel.

Fighters

• Polikarpov I-15 'Chaika'
• Polikarpov I-16 'Ishak'
• Yakovlev Yak-1
• Yakovlev Yak-3
• Yakovlev Yak-7
• Yakovlev Yak-9
• Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-3
• Lavochkin-Gorbunov-Gudkov LaGG-3
• Lavochkin La-5
• Lavochkin La-7

Ground Attack

Side-note: most of the fighters above were recycled into ground-attackers when an improved version/model came out, but due to pretty much hitting their jackpot almost straight away the soviets had very few different models of straight-up designed ground-pounders.

• Sukhoi Su-2: an early attempt at a dedicated ground attack plane. Not really successful, but it paved the way for further development and launched the career of Pavel Osipovich Sukhoi. He then drew up an improved version, the Su-6, but it lost the acceptance trials to...
• Ilyushin Il-2 'Shturmovik': The Flying Tank. The Beast. The Black Death. The most produced combat airplane of all times with over 36.000 built. If you look at the epoch's literarure/propaganda, this was an absolute monster able to turn entire Panzer divisions into molten slag from above. The reality, however, needs some nuance. On paper, the IL-2 was only a so-so design: slow, not very maneuvrable, heavily armed and armored but only able to take on a modest payload of bomb or rockets. Decent for the job of dropping some high-explosive death on the invading Sauerkrauts and occasional interception of bombers/transports if no fighters were available, but not much else. So, why does it epitomizes the apex of soviet production of the time? Simple, remember what we said above: ease of production, ease of use, ruggedness. The IL-2 delivered all three in spades. It was a (realtively speaking) easy and forgiving airplane to fly which meant pilots could become proficient on them rather quickly, it could take some absurd amounts of punishment and remain air-worthy, and it could be manufactured in huge numbers easily. Ergo: it was the perfect plane at the perfect time for the soviets, and the small payload and overall so-so if not poor accuracy of its weapons mattered very little in the end where they could throw 30, 60, or even 120 airplanes at a given target and still have some in reserve just in case. As Good Ole' Joe once said: quantity has a quality of its own!

Bombers

• Polikarpov Po-2 'Kukuruznik'
• Petlyakov Pe-2 'Peshka'
• Petlyakov Pe-8: A soviet B-17 analogue, (in)famous for both carrying a fuckheug 5-tons bomb and performing the soviet analogue of the Doolittle Raid on Germany. Strategic bombing wasn't a priority for them in WW2, though, so only around a hundred were built.
• Yakovlev Yak-2/Yak-4: a twin engine light bomber. Not great, but it earmarked Alexander Sergeyevich Yakovlev as a worthy designer, which eventually led to all the fighters above (and more after the war).
• Tupolev Tu-4: What you saying, comerade? American B-29? Nyet, nyet, this is genuine Soviet airplane made for dropping of glorious proletariat atomic bombs on capitalist swine heads! Joke pretty much says it all: Soviets got their hands on 3-4 B-29's that force-landed in their territory after bombing Japan and just copied them. Only real differences are the soviet-vintage engines and defensive guns (NS-23 autocannons instead of Ma Deuces).

Misc

• RS-82 Air-to-Ground missile: Soviet scientists had an interest in rocketry in the 1930s and this was a byproduct. Simple rockets were put on aircraft wings and fired off in the general direction. They were a really nasty suprise to the IJA at the Battles of Khalkhin Gol and they'd be the bane of the German Army on the Eastern Front. Accuracy was really bad, but they were cheap and anything they did hit would feel the pain.

WWII Topics
History:	The World Wars
Allied Powers:	United States of America(Equipment) - British Empire (Equipment) - Soviet Union (Equipment)
Axis Powers:	Nazi Germany (Equipment) - Fascist Italy (Equipment) - Empire of Japan (Equipment)
Minor Powers:	China - Ethiopia - Finland - France - Hungary - Norway - Poland - Romania
Games:	Advanced Squad Leader - Axis & Allies - Bolt Action - Flames of War - Ostfront