Now Wikipedia (among others) gives an approx wartime production of 9000, which roughly lines up with the in-game value of 40 a week (giving about 8000 in the historical time-frame) but i have yet to find a proper primary or academic source for this number, and I'm increasingly convinced that this number must be under the historical production value.
i have yet to find any hard production numbers, but here's what i've pieced together--
The book Soviet Cannon gives the following totals for DShKs in use:
Code: Select all
start 1942-----720
mid 1942-------1947
1943-----------5218
start 1944-----8442
These numbers would mean at least 7700 guns were produced in the 2 year period from 42 through 43. To give a massively conservative extrapolation, let's ignore losses and any 1941 production. With 16 months to go, assuming a conistent production rate, we get an additional 5100 guns, for a total of 12800. Now I suppose you could claim that, assuming late war production did not expand, a lot of those 44 and 45 guns went to IS2s and ISU152s, bringing the total back to around 9k. But that still ignores losses and 1941 production, so i think it's safe to say that this book heavily suggests a larger production total than currently in game.
next up, I stumbled upon a blog post on topwar .eu that claims the soviets lost around 10,000 "heavy machine guns" during the war, representing 21% of total production. This gives an eye-watering total of 47,600 DShKs produced, which feels... optimistic compared to any other number i've dug up (the dshk was the only large-caliber mg produced by the soviets in quantity afaik, and maxim production completely dwarfs this number, so it can't be a combination of those two). Let's just call that an upper bound.
The only primary source i've come across is a series of monthly production plans for artillery and small arms on the Russian presidential library website. I gather these are production goals rather than actual production quantites, so i wasn't too sure how optimistic these figures are compared to reality. Here i've compiled a series of monthly goals for the DShKs alongside the 37 mm AA gun and the 122 mm m-30 howitzer, to provide a comparison against a couple of other guns that were produced throughout the war. unfortunately, the archive doesnt seem to have any monthly plans past july of 1943, but here's what i have so far:
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12.7 mm % of 37 mm % of 122 mm % of
in-game in-game in-game
In-Game 172 322 322
Jan-42 175 102% 250 78% 320 99%
Apr-42 500 291% 260 81% 330 102%
Jul-42 700 407% 330 102% 400 124%
Jan-43 1100 640% 430 134% 420 130%
Jul-43 1250 727% 475 148% 440 137%Once again, it's not impossible that the Soviets were just really optimistic with regards to their production figures, but that doesn't feel super likely to me given the figures for other weapons and the repeated increases over time.
And lastly, from a logical point of view: the Soviets were happy to remove DShKs from the rifle divisions early on when production and stocks were still low-- why would they bother adding them back to a TOE that they knew they could never dream of filling out? Either Stavka was wildly over-optimistic about production of this one specific gun, or production did in fact ramp up (or the listed TOEs are wrong i suppose).
Overall, while i can't really estimate a new value for in-game production at the moment, i feel fairly convinced that the current number is too low.
Otherwise, is there something obvious i'm missing? The smoking gun, of course, would be some actual primary-source production figures, and if anyone has some leads on that or any other relevant sources, i would be happy to see my claims confirmed or disproved!
...and accounts for potential surplus at game start.