Posted November 18, 2015 1:00 pm by Comments

By Nick Leghorn

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There’s no doubt that the Russians have sent guns into space before. The earlier Russian astronauts carried with them a combination rifle, shotgun, and survival axe that was designed to keep them alive (and out of enemy hands) should they land somewhere other than back in Mother Russia. But while weapons of mass destruction are banned from being placed into orbit, Russia apparently didn’t have any second thoughts about placing heavily armed space stations into orbit during the turbulent 1970’s. And now we’re seeing our first glimpses at the armament those space stations carried.

Thanks to a Russian TV program, for the first time we’re getting a glimpse at the configuration of Russia’s orbital R-23 machine gun.

The machine gun was intended to defend Russian spy space stations in orbit, but in practice that probably would have been massively impractical. The gun was mounted on a single stationary hard point, meaning that the entire space station needed to be rotated in order to aim the gun. And when the trigger was finally pulled, the thrusters on the station would need to be constantly firing in order to counterbalance the recoil …Read the Rest

Source:: Truth About Guns

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