Today, Korobov's orange submachine guns are one of the brightest "attractions" in every sense of the Tula Museum of Weapons. The sight of visitors is attracted by TKB machines not only with their color, but also with an extremely unusual design. Especially when you know that the main weapon of the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century was the Kalashnikov assault rifle, devoid of all sorts of frills. What went wrong in the history of TKB?
Over the years, many myths have formed around the assault rifles of German Aleksandrovich Korobov. The main one boils down to the fact that short-sighted generals and swaggering party members, of course, buried a unique project almost in its infancy just to keep it out of the Soviet army bullpup. In fact, there is no conspiracy theory around TKB. The machine gun had a chance to get into service, but from the very beginning the project was mostly experimental. It was aimed not so much at creating a fundamentally new weapon, but at finding new solutions that could be applied to existing models. Including the introduction of bullpup in Kalashnikov.
However, the main problem that German Aleksandrovich tried to solve was the high mass of weapons. The AK-74 may not weigh a centner, however, the smaller the better. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, gun designers were desperately looking for ways to shed weight on rifles by introducing plastic. It must be said that although great success has been achieved in this area in recent decades, research continues to this day. The TKB-022 assault rifle and some other models created by Korobov are not just orange. This is the Soviet plastic AG4S, well known to many men, primarily for those same orange magazines for the AK-74.
The second important direction of German Alexandrovich's work is the study of new types of weapon layout. And first of all, the bullpup layout, which was gaining more and more popularity in the second half of the last century. It never took root in the Soviet Union, however, Korobov's developments were used, including when creating the OTs-14 Groza, which was born in 1993. So the work of Soviet designers was not in vain. So, for example, it was German Korobov who managed to achieve a reduction in the size of weapons using the bullpup layout in the USSR.
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As for TKB-022 specifically, it did not suit the Soviet army with its characteristics. The fact is that the passport data of the 022nd and the actual test results were quite different. Formally, the machine was almost three times more accurate than the AKM when firing from an unstable position, and also required 35-40% less labor in production than the same Kalashnikov! However, at the same time, Korobov's design also had chronic diseases of a critical nature.
For example, a number of interesting solutions for the sake of reducing the weight and dimensions of weapons did not allow the 022 to work normally and smoothly in the field, outside the walls of the laboratory. The machine gun was too complex and whimsical to handle, which made it unsuitable for a mass army. If the Soviet leadership were "less conservative", then most likely the experience of using TKB-022 in some Afghanistan would benefit the development of the entire bullpup research project. However, in this case, such an “experience” would have to be paid for not only with public money from the budget, but also with the lives of Soviet soldiers.
In continuation of the topic, read about why the lewis machine gun was such a thick trunk.
Source: https://novate.ru/blogs/050622/63194/