Haha. Watched it for the third time and just now noticed that the guy touches the barrel while getting up and burns his hand. Great team.

My favourite part is the way he held the trigger down until he was actually physically thrown clear. Couldn't aim, but by God he was going to keep firing.

Why waste all that energy by mounting the gun on the centerline? This way they can track (in one direction) left to right very quickly!

Russia is really providing great value with its "What air defense doing" meme collection. We've got:

• Oil tank lid flip
• Machine gun merry go round
• More friendly fire than you can shake a S300 at
• Probably more stuff I'm already forgetting

Edit: And I just realized that MG toss guy (or just the MG) is just begging to be put into a shooting stars meme.

Canon Helldivers moment.

Hot damn... This is amazing. Man they are so fucking stupid.

That guy on the left had superhuman response time and ducked with zero seconds warning, yet was still dumb enough to grab the smoking hot barrel.

Alternative with English subtitles.

Basically the shooter also shot the commander 's vehicle and he went vatnik crazy over it, hitting him and telling him to shut up.

https://bsky.app/profile/wartranslated.bsky.social/post/3mqh4rine422m

I haven't paid much attention to where fixed automatic weapons were mounted in the past, but looking at the M2 Browning, it looks like it's mounted with the gun directly in line with the pivot point.

Here's a British 20 mm Oerlikon from WW2. Same thing: the gun is mounted directly over the axis on which the gun pivots.

It kinda seems to me like even if you could manage to handle the weapon's recoil, you probably wouldn't want to have it mounted off-center like that Russian weapon is, since it'd pull to the side when you fire it, mess with your accuracy. I can't really think of any advantage to mounting it the way they have it.

Does kinda make me wonder how common that is.

EDIT: It sounds like this is nonstandard:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DatS7TAK-GO/

Trending: Russian mobile air defense team training with a YakB-12.7 machine gun ended in chaos when the gunner almost k!lled his own instructor.

The reason is surprisingly simple. Someone thought it was a good idea to mount the YakB-12.7 - a machine gun producing roughly 1,400 kgf (about 1.4 tonnes) of recoil force - on a rotating turret where the barrel’s axis is offset from the turret’s axis of rotation.

The YakB-12.7 is the primary weapon of the USPU-24 used on the Mi-24 attack helicopter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YakB-12.7_machine_gun

EDIT2: Or, rather, maybe it is standard in 2026 Russian air defense, but it's not how the weapon was originally intended to be used, is being repurposed.

EDIT3: This seems to show the same weapon mounted on a similar platform, but the position of the ammo box is reversed (on the right side rather than the left, as the operator is facing) and (as you can see at about 23 seconds) the gun is centered on the axis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyjNMKyPO2c

“You see, Vladimir, enemy cannot sneak up behind you if shooting in every direction at same time.”

It gets funnier every time you watch it.

Operational test successful, drones can't kill them if they've already been Swiss-cheesed by the AA gun.

He was riding the trigger.

Just like a squirrel on a spinney bird feeder...

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/nBKb_z4_tGY

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FgDa_cpgHWs