China announced its 12.7mm Duplex Ammunition

Chinese Weaponry Equipment Group, also called as China South Corporation, in October opened its newest Type DVD06 12.7mm Duplex ammunition through its one owned publication. This monthly publication introduced that the Type DVD06 12.7mm Duplex was developed since 1996 and finally pass the final designation examination in December 2006.

Chinese people admitted that the development of Type DVD06 is arose by Russia's AP series 12.7mm Duplex ammo, which was demonstrated on Abu Dhabi IDEX1994. At that time, QJZ89 12.7mm heavy machine gun just entered PLA. The duplex ammo will definitely upraise the hitting rate and firepower.

Type DVD06 Duplex cartridge includes front bullet, rear bullet, casing, propellant powder and primer. The size of type DVD06 is 147mm length and 140g of weight and its appearance are same with Type 54 12.7mm cartridge. After contrastive testing, Chinese experts believe that their Type dvd06 12.7mm duplex has better performance than Russian AP-I duplex series (see below table 1).

	Russian AP-I ICL Duplex	Russian AP-I-T ICLT Duplex	Chinese DVD06 Duplex
bullet weight (front/rear, g)	31/31	31/27	32/36
muzzle velocity (front/rear, m/s)	735/680	730/700	750/700
pressure chamber(M pa)	304	304	294
spread in 300m(cm)	≤50	≤50	≤45
Armour piercing performance	Penetrates 5mm rolled homogeneous armor @ 100m		Penetrates 20mm RHA @ 100m Penetrates 7mm RHA @ 1000m

DVD06 duplex ammunition can be used in PLA present type 89 12.7mm heavy machinegun, Type 85 12.7mm AA gun and type 88 coaxial machine gun for MBT machine gun. And dvd06 duplex ammo also can be fired in recently developed Type QJK99 12.7mm air machinegun, which can be installed on light helicopter for low altitude close air support.

The manufacturing of small arm ammunition is always considered as massive production in Chinese Military Industries. Under the theory of "Ammunition Generalization" for great consumption in ground combat, PLA has no interests on developing special functional or match-grade military ammunition.

Without high-precision ammo, China's Type 79/85 and Type QBU88 sniper rifles still cannot reach the spread level of Russian SVD (table 2).

	Type 79/85 rifle	Type QBU88 rifle	SVD
Spread @ 100m	4.81moa	4.10moa	2.06moa
Spread @ 800m		5.06moa	4.51moa

PLA's small arms are usually manufactured in limited 2-3 factories, which cannot raise a competing market and hardly enter global market. Chinese manufactures prefer to trace and copy foreign products and promote them to PLA. The DVD06 Duplex Ammo is a typical example. China's ammo R&D, however, is in a low level.

From 2006-2007, China has introduced some large caliber 12.7mm sniper rifles and organized domestic manufacturers to participate the sniper rifle competition in third-world countries like Pakistan, but failed for mediocre ammo.