| AG90 is the Swedish designation of the Barrett Light
50, which is known in the US Army as the M82A1. During
Operation Desert Storm, American snipers took out
individual Iraqi soldiers at up to 1600 meters with this
weapon. It is used as a two-man weapon: one man fires the
weapon and the other spots with his binoculars. It is
equiped with a Hensold 10X scope and backup iron sights.
It is a semi-automatic rifle, and is not to be
considered a real sniper rifle. The main targets are not
individual enemy soldiers. It is used to destroy the
enemy's unarmored and lightly armored vehicles, mainly
supply trucks. The weapon uses a 50 calibre round, and is
therefor extremely big and heavy. In the winter it is
therefor transported in a pulk (a man pulled sled). It uses so called multi-purpose ammunition, with a tungsten penetrator and an incendiary load. This round penetrates up to 70mm of armor, and is powerful enough to ignite diesel fuel. Each round weighs more than 10 times as much as a 5.56 round. This gives the weapon a tremendous recoil, and in order to reduce this it is equiped with a muzzel break that redirects the muzzel exhaust backwards to the sides. This reduces recoil up to 65%. The drawback to this is that dust and snow blow up around the sniper, which reduces sight and can give his position away. If firing in fresh snow the spoter has to sit on top of the sniper to be able to see effectivly (this looks rather homosexual, but it works). |
| Specifics: | |
| Manufacturer: | Barrett Corporation, USA |
| Calibre: | 12.7 x 99 mm (.50 BMG) |
| Weight: | 16.0 kg (loaded) |
| Length: | 1450 mm |
| Muzzle velocity: | 830 m/s |
| Effective range: | 1000 m |
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
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