SVD

Even Rambo prefers the SVD.

In Fiction

Appearance

Straight, long golden hair , fluffy tail, cat ears, flat chest and nylon stockings. Everything an operator could ever ask for.

Personality

Calm and collective. Sometimes too serious. A big sister character. Only speaks in Russian. 

In Real Life

History

In the late 50's, the Soviet Military ran trials to decided that they need a new Sniper weapon that will replace the 1891/30 PU Mosin Nagant. The Soviet military arms bureau required a semi-automatic sniper rifle that performed better than 1.6 MOA to be fit for military service. Yevgeny Fyodorovich Dragunov, a designer at Izhevsk Armory submitted a rifle that proved to be the most accurate and reliable out of all the rifles proposed by the participating constructors. The mass production started in 1963 and the rifle continues to be improved to this day.

Users

The Draguov was used by many Easten Bloc States behind the Iron Curtan, and was rumored to be used during the Vietnam War. Many variants of the SVD exist, such as the Polish SWD-M, the Chinese Type 79, and the imperfect Iraqi Al Kadesiah.

Performance

The SVD is a semi-automatic rifle with a magazine holding 10 rounds of the 7.62x54R cartridge. The rifle is a squad support rifle meant to, by doctrine "Extend the squad's effective range to 600 meters" as a lighter alternative choice instead of a PKM or PKP. The max effective range is around 800m, the maximum range being the promised 1300m. The rifle sports adjustable iron sights, but is usually equipped with a 4x fixed magnification PSO-1 scope. In the 1980's the new 8x PSOP scope was widely used in Afganistan, Chechnya, and Georgia guaranteeing accurate shots well past 800 meters. Modern sniper loads are known to pierce body armor and increase accuracy to sub MOA levels due to some modification in the neck and bullet lengh. The barrel changed from 1:9 to 1:12.6 rifling. The rifle became more accurate for 152 grain loads proven to have better power and velocity retention, and use with surplus ammunition at 147 grains did not negate performance as bad. To this date the SVD is the lightest 4 foot long semiautomatic rifle in existence.

United States handloaders have the materials to send a 7.62x54r bullet well past 3kft/s and over 4k Joules of energy near maximum case pressure levels of 52k PSI. Russian modern military sniper loads still have only under 2.7k ft/s and 3.3k Joules.

Cost

$12000-$20000 in the US because of import restrictions.