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That's because I was stupid and didn't actually sanity check the numbers I was getting. The source I was looking at used ' but obviously should have used ".
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May 2, 2024 23:16
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Cyrano4747 posted:, but both Luger and MP-18s with drum mags were popular with German assault troops during WW1 for basically the same reasons. Were these smgs? Were automatic firing smgs even a thing in wwi? Obviously machine guns were a thing, but were there reliable automatic weapons that were brought on assault along with rifles/trench guns?
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May 2, 2024 23:22
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The MP18 was the first SMG, entering service in 1918. Before that assault troops used long-barreled Luger semiautomatic pistols with drum magazines for extra close-in firepower.
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May 2, 2024 23:25
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It's worth pointing out that magazine issues were a major source of failures for early SMGs. A SMG magazine has to shove rounds into the mechanism and keep up with the rate of fire, or it will jam. The MP18 had the drum mounted above the barrel, so it had a bit of help from gravity. The "Artillery Luger" was meant for semi-auto fire only.
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May 2, 2024 23:47
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all this talk is making me want to play Battlefield 1 again.
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May 3, 2024 00:39
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Re: Drum chat, back when I was a teenager I had the chance to handle a reenactor's M1928 Thompson at an airshow, and reloading the drum mag was an absolute pain in the rear end. Just to get it out of the gun you had to hold the bolt back, hold the mag release, and slide the drum out sideways, a task that felt optimized for people with three hands. Also, going back to this post: Chamale posted:Was there any battle ever where two closely-matched sides fought, and the side with slower-firing guns won because their enemy ran out of bullets? It seems like an absurd scenario. I guess an early-20th-century general without the benefit of hindsight might argue that an army with slowly-firing guns is just as good as one with repeaters, and it's easier to keep it supplied. There's no specific battle where you'll find historians shaking their head and going "If only they hadn't used faster-firing guns and wasted all their bullets!" but RoF concerns were certainly an issue up to and including the 20th and 21st centuries. In Vietnam, for instance, an issue with the M16 was that troops would fire their weapons on full-auto and waste a huge amount of ammunition, which was one of the reasons why the M16A2 swapped the full-auto capability for a limited 3-round burst. Even today, most soldiers are trained to only use semi-auto fire outside of specific circumstances.
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May 3, 2024 00:51
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How did innovations in guns and such disseminate, in the 19th-early 20th centuries? French invention of smokeless powder was mentioned a bit ago -- wouldn't that kind of massive breakthrough be the kind of thing they'd want to keep a state secret? Was it all too much of an interconnected/interdependent world to let that happen?
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May 3, 2024 03:04
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Koramei posted:How did innovations in guns and such disseminate, in the 19th-early 20th centuries? French invention of smokeless powder was mentioned a bit ago -- wouldn't that kind of massive breakthrough be the kind of thing they'd want to keep a state secret? Was it all too much of an interconnected/interdependent world to let that happen? With the powder specifically, there was no way to keep it quiet for very long that the French had it, and a lot of people were working on the problem. Within three years of French introduction there was more than one competing propellant on the market. For the rest of it, a lot of the modern rifle concepts were already being trialed in blackpowder guns, and enough companies were trying to get major military contracts with those that keeping things secret was not happening. That's why the French Lebel is infamously not a very good rifle and the accompanying round is not a very good round. The French basically rushed it into service as soon as the powder was ready in the hopes of gaining an advantage, but the state of the art in rifle making quickly passed beyond it. It might be easiest to think of rifles in the 1870-1910 period as bascially the same setup airplanes found themselves in from 1910-1950 or computers in the 1960-2000 period. An endless sea of new improvements that rapidly obsoleted what came before.
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May 3, 2024 03:17
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