As with all general-purpose machine guns, tripod and vehicle mountings offer a higher degree of accuracy and control than when used on a less stable bipod. The PK machine gun, firing short bursts from a bipod, as a light machine gun has the following accuracy of fire: a mean deviation of at a range of , at , and at . The Russian and other European militaries use a circular error probable method that assumes a 50% hit probability (R50) and cannot be converted and is not comparable to US military methods for determining small arms accuracy. When the R50 results are doubled the hit probability increases to 93.7%.