Type 17 rifle
| Type 17 rifle | |
|---|---|
| File:Type 17 rifle.png Type 17 in its rifle, carbine, sniper, and short rifle forms. | |
| Type | Bolt-action rifle |
| Place of origin |  Menghe |
| Service history | |
| In service | 1918–1964 |
| Used by | Federal Menghean Army Imperial Menghean Army |
| Production history | |
| Designer | Jŏng Sŭng-yong |
| Designed | 1915-1917 |
| Manufacturer | Insŏng Arsenal |
| Produced | 1917-1945 |
| Variants | Type 17 carbine Type 17 sniper rifle |
| Specifications | |
| Weight | 4.18 kg (9.22 lb) |
| Length | 1,288 mm |
| Barrel length | 772 mm |
| Cartridge | 7.5×60mm Menghean |
| Action | bolt-action |
| Rate of fire | ~15 rounds per minute |
| Muzzle velocity | 750 m/s (2,460 ft/s) |
| Effective firing range | 100 - 2500 m sight adjustments |
| Feed system | 5-round internal magazine |
| Sights | Iron sights |
The Type 17 rifle (Menghean: 17식 보총 / 一七式步銃, il-chil-sik bochong), also translated as the Type 17 Infantry Rifle and sometimes known among Menghean soldiers as the Three-Band Rifle (삼선총 / 三線銃, samsŏn-chong), is a bolt-action rifle developed in Menghe. It was the successor to the Type 04 rifle designed thirteen years earlier, and incorporated a number of functional improvements. The Type 17 served as Menghe's main service rifle up until the middle of the Pan-Septentrion War, when the Type 40 short rifle was introduced. Simple, durable, and accurate at long range, it was well-regarded among front-line troops who used it, though the quality of Menghean-made rifles fluctuated over the course of its production period.
Background
The Federative Republic of Menghe's first standard infantry rifle after reunification was the Type 04. Modeled on the successful Gewehr 98, it was a fairly modern design for its time, built around the proven Mauser bolt action. The Type 04 was fairly rugged, and attracted few major complaints from the Federal Army, but it did have its share of drawbacks. In dusty conditions, it had a tendency to become jammed with dirt and sand, though in this respect it was not appreciably worse than any other service rifle of its time. It had also been designed around a round-nosed cartridge, and while Menghe had introduced spitzer ammunition in 1911, conversions of the Type 04 lagged behind schedule.
Faced with these shortcomings, Major-General Jŏng, the chief designer at the Insŏng Arsenal, began an independent design study to produce an improved bolt-action rifle. Rather than aiming for optimal performance or weight, he focused on what he identified as the Menghean military's key design needs:
- Ease of manufacture and maintenance.
- Ruggedness against rough handling.
- Resistance to the elements, especially dust and water.
- Accuracy at long range.
- Safety in the event of a burst cartridge.
Equally notable are the traits and qualities Jŏng did not prioritize. While most other major militaries had spent the early 1910s slogging through the mud and trenches of the War of the Sylvan Succession, Menghe spent them patrolling the western steppe against bandit incursions, occupying colonial territories taken from opposing powers, and fighting Siyadagi guerillas in the First and Second Mountain Wars. Menghean soldiers did storm coastal defense forts in Qusayn and Occitanie, but these were exceptional battles rather than daily occurrences. Faced with this experience, Menghean Army planners continued to believe that long-range engagements would dominate the future of warfare, at least around Menghe's borders. Consequently, at the same time that many other militaries were introducing "short rifles" or infantry carbines for greater ergonomics in trench engagements, Menghe continued to prioritize full-length rifles to maximize effective range on steppes and mountains. In fact, the production-model Type 17 was slightly longer than the Type 04 it replaced. Menghean military planners remained fully satisfied with this state of affairs until the late 1930s, when combat experience in the Pan-Septentrion War and especially in urban battles around Maverica underscored the importance of a universal short rifle for the infantry.
Development
Major-General Jŏng began formal design work on the new rifle in 1915. He incorporated a number of features from the Type 38, which he had handled and tested during a visit to Dayashina the previous year. For some time, he even considered importing the Type 38 outright, but he was never satisfied with the 6.5×50mm cartridge's performance at the long ranges then considered likely on the central Hemithean steppe. Instead, he optimized the rifle around Menghean 7.5×60mm spitzer ammunition, aiming to achieve an effective range in excess of two kilometers. Jŏng also incorporated some of his own changes to the design, including a smaller safety knob and a more conventional firing pin. The result was a uniquely Menghean design, littered with foreign influences but not a direct copy of any specific weapon or action.
Once the Insŏng arsenal had a large enough batch of prototype rifles, they sent them to the Menghean Army for testing and evaluation. At this time, the Army had no formal requirement for a new rifle, as it had only recently produced enough Type 04s to supply all front-line units. Yet after much persuasion, and some impressive demonstrations of the rifles' ability to function under inclement conditions, the Army's upper leadership relented, accepting the Insŏng design for service as the Type 17 infantry rifle. As with the Type 04 before it, this designation was a reference not to the Gregorian calendar, but to the number of years since the reunification of the Federative Republic of Menghe in 1900.
Design
Like both the Type 04 and the Type 38, the Type 17 used a Mauser-style bolt, extractor, and disassembly system. As on the Type 38, however, the third locking lug was removed in favor of a reinforced base to the handle. The safety was also of Jŏng's own design: a cylindrical cap, narrower in diameter than the Type 38's safety but functionally similar. A protruding tab on this cap extended vertically upward when the weapon is safe, blocking the sight picture to make it clear to the operator that the weapon cannot fire; to remove the safety, the operator had to turn it 90 degrees to the left. Internally, the Type 17 had fewer gas-diverting features than the Type 38 or even the Type 04, but remained a relatively safe weapon by contemporary standards.
The rear sight used a tangent design rather than the fold-up leaf sight on the Type 04 and various Dayashinese rifles. It was zeroed at 100 meters, and ran in 100-meter increments out to 2500 meters, a rather optimistic feature for a weapon with no magnifying scope. In theory, a squad or platoon armed with Type 17s could use them in volleys against a group of enemy personnel in the open, at least as suppressive fire. The front sight was a simple post, with no hood or sight protector, except on the cavalry carbine.
The most distinct carryover from the Dayashinese Type 38 was the use of a large dust cover over the top of the receiver. This covered the entire action when the bolt was closed, keeping dust, water, and other debris away from the bolt and magazine. Cycling the action would pull back the dust cover, leaving room for spent cartridges to eject and allowing the operator to feed in new cartridges or stripper clips. Major-General Jŏng viewed the moving dust cover as an invaluable feature for operations in the Central Hemithean Steppe, and insisted on its inclusion in the production rifle despite the added weight and the distinct rattling it produced.
The Type 17 rifle was produced alongside the Type 17 bayonet, a slightly modified version of the Type 04's bayonet. The main difference was the use of a longer blade with a more tapered tip. Once the bayonet was mounted, the full weapon had an overall length of 1.7 meters, slightly taller than the average Menghean soldier. Major-General Jŏng believed that this quality would give the user an advantage in hand-to-hand combat with another bayonet-armed soldier, and an added edge against charging cavalry.
Variants
Type 17 cavalry rifle
Like the Type 04 before it, the Type 17 came with a shortened carbine variant, designated the Type 17 cavalry short rifle (17식 기병 소총 / 一七式騎兵小銃, il-chil-sik gibyŏng sochong). It had an overall length of 988 mm and a barrel length of 504 mm, shorter than the Type 04 cavalry short rifle before it. Fairly unique among carbines, however, it also retained a bayonet lug, and was issued with the same Type 17 bayonet. In theory, this allowed dragoons and other mounted troops to engage more effectively in hand-to-hand combat after dismounting.
Type 43 short rifle
Introduced relatively late in the war, when Menghean forces were already in retreat, the Type 43 was intended to save resources and streamline the production process. It was shorter than the full-size Type 17, though not as short as the cavalry carbine, putting it at about the length of the Type 40 short rifle. This was partly intended to make the weapon easier to handle, but the main objective appeared to be saving wood and steel. Similarly, the Type 43 omitted the moving dust cover entirely, even though officers and troops had evaluated it favorably in hostile conditions. There were few other simplifications related to the safety and bolt, but overall the Type 43 was more closely related to the Type 17 than it was to the Type 40, allowing production lines to retain most of their existing tooling.
Type 17 sniper rifle
Introduced in 1935, the Type 17 featured a 3x magnifying scope centered over the barrel. This addition was performed at only one factory, the Insŏng Arsenal itself, and was applied selectively to weapons that exhibited above-average precision in factory trials. The placement of the scope necessitated a curved bolt handle, also added at the factory, and prevented the use of standard stripper clips. Instead, the operator had to manually load new cartridges one at a time.
Service
The Type 17 rifle entered production in 1917, and it soon became the most widely used rifle in the Menghean armed forces. When the Type 40 rifle became available in 1940, the Menghean Army considered ending Type 17 production, but decided to keep the main production factory at Insŏng in full-scale operation as its tooling and assembly line were already running at peak efficiency. The Insŏng arsenal switched to Type 43 production in early 1944, but it effectively ceased production in 1945 after the firebombing of Insŏng. By this time, however, rural workshops were already producing further-simplified Type 43s, and as such it is hard to place a definitive end date on the weapon's production.
The quality of Type 17 rifles varied greatly over the course of the twenty-eight years that they were in production. Early models from the late 1910s through about 1937 were very well-made, as the milling equipment used in their manufacture was imported from Ostland. Compared with contemporary Menghean infantry weapons, they were machined to fairly precise tolerances, though certain parts were still left loose enough to function if blocked by dirt or sand. In 1937, with the war's escalation, the Menghean Army expanded production by opening a new arsenal in Chŏnjin. Chŏnjin rifles were built with domestic equipment, and were generally a bit rougher, though still perfectly functional in the early war.
It was the last-ditch rifles produced after 1943 that produced the greatest problems with reliability. Many Type 43s were made in rural workshops, albeit not on the same scale as the Type 45 mobilization rifle, and were produced to very low quality standards in order to put out as many as possible with only the crudest tooling. Additionally, even in the early war, many Type 17 rifles were hand-fitted in the final stage of production, and as such if a bolt and receiver with different serial numbers were mismatched by Allied forces or Menghean repair staff, the resulting weapon would tend to jam more easily.