Ukrainian .50 BMG ‘Straight-Pull’ Sniper Rifle

[BlueBoy69]

This might interest the heavy-calibre girls and guys among us?

 

Someone passed this on to me at work, certainly an advantage of working for Jane’s, as it’s my job to read and write about this sort of stuff!

 

It’s a Ukrainian .50 BMG ‘Straight Pull’ sniper rifle known as the SNIPEX .50 BMG “Rhino Hunter”. Their name, not mine. It’s marketed by the Ukrainian chemical group, Khado, ХАДО in Ukrainian (link).

 

I say the rifle is a straight-pull, but it’s more of a straight-push. As far as I can tell the rifle is (long) recoil-operated semi-automatic, but only in as much as to unlock and push the bolt back after firing a round, it does not reload a round automatically, nor is a magazine present anyway.

 

To operate the rifle the bolt is first pulled back, a round manually loaded and the bolt pushed forwards. The multi-lug bolt operates within a camway within the barrel extension and so is locked in place by the forwards motion. Once loaded and the round fired, the whole barrel and bolt recoil together until some mechanism unlocks the bolt - its movement through the camway I guess - the bolt then disengages from the barrel extension and moves back against a presumed buffering system in the stock. A buffer/recuperator is also present under the barrel, which pushes the barrel/extension back to the normal battery position, well unless a spring is present somewhere that can't bee seen? Once ready, another round is loaded and the process repeated.

 

As this does not reload on firing, and does not even include a magazine, nor would one seem possible to fit without completely redesigning the firearm, I’d imagine this may be legal to use in the UK? Not that I’m sure about this, or if this could be imported into the UK in the first place. Whatever the case, it’s certainly an interesting bit of kit.

 

More details can be found on this Ukrainian website (link), but you’ll need to use Google translate, or something similar. The video links off it on YouTube are pretty instructive too.

[Jager223]

Looks ugly and crude... yet I still kinda want one. It's got a cool WW2 anti-tank feel to it. The price is a little OTT though.

 

"Home sales SNIPEX .50 BMG «RHINO HUNTER» announced on April 10, 2017. The cost of the new rifle 149,500 USD, possible reservation."

[MrCetrizine]

I think the price is a bad Google translate. It's 149,000 UAH which is about £4,500.

[Cardiffplinker]

I had to laugh at the company name, XADO, kind of reminds me of that unfortunate incident when the the Russian Company Gazprom and Nigeria went into the gas business together and name their company Nigaz!!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigaz

[BlueBoy69]

I had to laugh at the company name, XADO, kind of reminds me of that unfortunate incident when the the Russian Company Gazprom and Nigeria went into the gas business together and name their company Nigaz!!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigaz

It's Khado, not XODA by the way, as a Cyrillic 'Х' transliterates as a 'Kh' in Latin script.

 

Useless info for the day, the Russian's use the 'Х' designation for the air-to-surface missiles and it's why the NATO reporting names all started with 'K'. For example the Х-58 (Kh-58) was known by its NATO reporting name of 'Kilter'. Its US DoD designation is AS-11.

 

PS AS-11 Kilter' isn't the missile's NATO reporting name, but the combined US DoD designation and NATO code. It's a common error to call this combination its 'NATO designation', as both the code and name are normally lumped together, but it's wrong none the less.