End of the day Saiga is what you can get as a civilian from the same production line with minimal construction changes.So is more relevant than your random Ar parts you could find around various vendors.  Even if they were selling at the loss AK did not come to 100mio copies by being expensive to make. As far as i follow the Russian MIC and how they finance the losses is generally by state-owned banks writing off loans. 

If you follow the sales MIC makes. MOD purchases keep the lines running but are not that profitable. foreign sales are the moneymakers and everything costs way more than MOD is paying.

Saiga M3 EXP01 costs cca 330$ , sporter model like on the pic above cca 260$ , TR3 = AK12 clone cca 760$ on Russian market i guess it's all just to keep employees working while losing money.The private 49% stakeholder must be thrilled. 

I am not aware of the contract value for 150.000 AK12/15  they are delivering but have doubts they are paying 1000$ a piece for them and selling for 760$ MSRP(Kalashnikov Web shop) to Civilians .

AK prices going UP in eastern Europe, besides Russian guns taken of the market, has a lot to do with the arms buying spree to arm the 'moderate beheaders' in Syria and various factions in other ME wars

to the best of my knowledge Russian MoD pays close to US $1000 for an AK-12 with spare mags, sling and cleaning kit

also my estimate is that gov't purchasing prices for mass-produced small arms which are also available as civilian rifles (AK/Saiga, Vityaz/Saiga-9 etc) are about 20-30% below MSRP.

Yeah, it was essentially just to keep factory workers fed and keep the plant from closing and being scavenged.

I don't know about the stepped chamber thing being specifically for any real purpose though. The real problem with that era of gun history is that there was, by volume, 95% BS to 5% real information out there.

I've been surprised unpleasantly so many times to find out that things we thought we knew just aren't anywhere close to reality.

It can be better now if you're extremely selective about your information sources, but even now we're starting to see a disturbing rise in pure FUD.

It sucks, but it is what it is.

Right. There were multiple reasons why AK's were first cheap for awhile and precisely zero of them had anything to do with AK's being cheap to produce.

I miss those days...

Hunting down $169 parts kits and etc to build your latest mutant!

Told ya so.

Thanks Max

One of my sporting shooter/gunsmith friends, mods for IPSC. In competitive IPSC shooting  DI ARs run circles around anything with piston including ARs with pistons. so will see if sort of DI AK can keep up

Kalashnikov would be proud!

What does the bolt carrier group look like in those?

I'm very interested in what it looks like because I've had some similar ideas.