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Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

feedmegin posted:

Maybe I'm missing a joke but Bren guns exist?

It's a reference to the oft repeated myth that the Enfield was so fast to cycle and the British soldiers so well trained in accurate rapid fire that the Germans at Mons mistook rifle companies for MG emplacements.

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Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine

Epicurius posted:

When the war broke out, nobody wore helmets, in any of the big armies. Then, after they realized, "right, shrapnel ", armies started introducing them. The British version was called the Brodie helmets which came into service at the end of 1915.

Right, but why did no one see that? Was airburst not a thing in 1870?

Or was it a matter of helmets being too hot for colonial stuff and therefore not considered for use because of the obvious impossibility of a general European war?

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Nucken Futz posted:

Cyclic RoF is for suckers.

You guys know better!!!!!

There's some evidence that for a burst of a given length, a higher cyclic rate of fire is better.

Argas posted:

The biotruths part of this tries to sound smart but feels like complete poo poo to me.

Empirical studies like The Identification of Objective Relationships Between Small Arms Fire Characteristics And Effectiveness of Suppressive Fire have shown a decent correlation with the energy of a bullet and its ability to suppress infantry. However, silent bullets from an unknown position were found far more suppressive than powerful, loud bullets.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Schadenboner posted:

Right, but why did no one see that? Was airburst not a thing in 1870?

Or was it a matter of helmets being too hot for colonial stuff and therefore not considered for use because of the obvious impossibility of a general European war?

Helmets weren't there to protect you against shrapnel, they were there to protect you from flying dirt clods, rocks, and other heavy debris kicked up by artillery. Their basic construction and use was more or less identical to construction hard hats. IIRC this came out of the assorted conflicts of the 1860s-80s, as artillery matured and you begin to see a lot of secondary debris from explosions. There's something tickling the back of my head about the Prussians in particular noticing a lot of blunt force head trauma during their campaigns against the french, although it might have been the french making the observation.

Either way, a two pound rock kicked loose by an explosion at high double-digit MPH speeds will gently caress your poo poo up, and a glorified construction helmet is exactly what will keep you from dying.

You don't see them purpose designed to withstand shrapnel (and eventually small arms) until lightweight composite materials and kevlar get good enough for it to be possible.

edit: and it's not true that no one had helmets before WW1. The Germans had a hardened leather helmet that wasn't too uncommon. Again, half remembered stuff, but I think that's what might be tickling that prussia connection at the back of my brain.

The Brodie, Adriane, stahlhelm, etc were brought online because of all the head injuries they were seeing from poo poo raining on trenches. Shrapnel was part of that, but just simple rocks was also a big issue.

Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Aug 11, 2019

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine

Cyrano4747 posted:

The Brodie, Adriane, stahlhelm, etc were brought online because of all the head injuries they were seeing from poo poo raining on trenches.

IoT has gone too far.

Although the dirt and stones stuff does make sense: I never understood how a thin-rear end piece of steel was supposed to protect from huge-rear end chunks of it and that's because it wasn't.

Schadenboner fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Aug 11, 2019

Edgar Allen Ho
Apr 3, 2017

by sebmojo
That reminds me of my favourite clip from They Shall Not Grow Old, which was one brit banging his comrade on the helmet with a big wooden plank over and over.

Partially because me and a friend in high school bought a surplus soviet helmet in high school and almost immediately its main use became seeing what would could smack each other in the head with without damage.

It’s bizarre to imagine us in the trenches at that age.

Milo and POTUS
Sep 3, 2017

I will not shut up about the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I talk about them all the time and work them into every conversation I have. I built a shrine in my room for the yellow one who died because sadly no one noticed because she died around 9/11. Wanna see it?

Nessus posted:

How much of the whole "the Germans anticipated the future" poo poo is because A. both sides of the Philosophers the Cold War dragooned a bunch of German engineers and scientists, and B. even when they didn't, they used the German stuff as examples?

I guess to some extent this is unprovable and engineering solutions would tend towards a certain uniformity if you're attacking the same problem with similar materials. However, I think it contributes to an idea that history is a sort of tech-tree sequence as opposed to a series of meandering historical contingencies.

Is that why everybody hates dragoons

aphid_licker
Jan 7, 2009


Pickelhaube doesn't have a liner or suspension system so getting boinked in the head by a mid-sized rock probably still removes you from the battle while your concussion wears off

e: at least it doesn't look like it has one on a cursory GISing

Nebakenezzer
Sep 13, 2005

The Mote in God's Eye

Cyrano4747 posted:

It's a reference to the oft repeated myth that the Enfield was so fast to cycle and the British soldiers so well trained in accurate rapid fire that the Germans at Mons mistook rifle companies for MG emplacements.

Oh, that's a myth? poo poo. I remember reading that one in John Keegan's book on the First World War.

HEY GUNS posted:

i am currently reading about the build up to ww1...from the austrian pov. :ohno:

nobody knew what the gently caress, nobody told anyone else anything, just a complete botch all the way around. then once they get to fighting, nobody knows what the effect of all the new weapons is going to be so they advance shoulder to shoulder. the serbs knew what was up though, this was their third war that decade

edit: also the hungarians had been starving the austrians of military budgets since 1866 because everyone expected the next big war to be austria finally getting tired of hungary's poo poo and tbqh they would have been kinda justified. so austria was terribly financed. the hungarian army was better financed. but still apparently not very good.

Sounds interesting! Also from that aforementioned book, Keegan talks about the Austrian/Hungarian armies as more like army cosplayers, a tradition that none the less was about the only thing holding the empire together at that point.

Pryor on Fire
May 14, 2013

they don't know all alien abduction experiences can be explained by people thinking saving private ryan was a documentary

Nenonen posted:

It's not the Alps, but it's not a parade ground either. In particular the area is not very wide and forest roads are easy to block with felled trees and a nuisance to clear, so concentrating a whole army to go through such area risks some serious traffic jams if the defence proves strong.

Yeah, no. I used to work as a lovely lumberjack, and I'm a tiny weakling and still I can pivot a heavy rear end 80 foot downed tree out of the way by hand easily. Trees are just not that hard to deal with.

feedmegin
Jul 30, 2008

Cyrano4747 posted:

It's a reference to the oft repeated myth that the Enfield was so fast to cycle and the British soldiers so well trained in accurate rapid fire that the Germans at Mons mistook rifle companies for MG emplacements.

Oh that. That's not even the same war though :mad:

feedmegin
Jul 30, 2008

Pryor on Fire posted:

Yeah, no. I used to work as a lovely lumberjack, and I'm a tiny weakling and still I can pivot a heavy rear end 80 foot downed tree out of the way by hand easily. Trees are just not that hard to deal with.

Did you move half a dozen of them while being mortared? The obstacle itself isn't the point, the point is you get to clear it while stationary and under fire.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Nebakenezzer posted:

Oh, that's a myth? poo poo. I remember reading that one in John Keegan's book on the First World War.


Yeah, it pissed me off enough once that I spent part of a day tracking it down. Lemme go see if I can find the write-up I did. The tl;dr is that Barbara Tuchmann used some sources uncritically and without understanding the context and then got cited authoritatively a bunch.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

I should add that it annoyed me as much as it did because there's a certain kind of middle aged old man tea-aboo who just jerks himself raw over it and uses it as part of a larger undeserved glorification of what is ultimately a pretty average at best rifle.

Nenonen
Oct 22, 2009

Mulla on aina kolkyt donaa taskussa
Love of tanks brought a Polish-Japanese couple to wedding trip to Parola Tank Museum

The fiancee works at a Polish tank museum and the bride is a tank model hobbyist.



Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine
LEAVE BARBARA TUCHMANN ALOOOONNNEEE

Seriously though, Distant Mirror is still good, right? :ohdear:

FrangibleCover
Jan 23, 2018

Nothing going on in my quiet corner of the Pacific.

This is the life. I'm just lying here in my hammock in Townsville, sipping a G&T.

Pryor on Fire posted:

Yeah, no. I used to work as a lovely lumberjack, and I'm a tiny weakling and still I can pivot a heavy rear end 80 foot downed tree out of the way by hand easily. Trees are just not that hard to deal with.

What you do is you fell a tree at 45 degrees across the road, then move slightly Pariswards and fell another one perpendicular to it, then repeat until you've got a long mat of interlocking trees that can only be removed by starting with the tree nearest Paris and working backwards.

Then you cover it by fire. And maybe mix in some landmines just for shits and giggles. Problem is this takes time and engineers who know what they're doing and enough infantry to hold it and all of that requires knowing someone is going to try to use this road significantly in advance of it happening.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

OK found it. It was on my laptop:

Any time you dig deep on that MG legend it gets more and more ephemeral the further back you track it. You will find many people pointing to Tuchman’s “Guns of August,” where she cites the memoirs of a soldier named Smith-Dorrien. He gives no solid source for his belief that the Germans mistook their rifle fire for machine guns, which begs the question of how he knew what the Germans were thinking. There is no good evidence that he had special access to prisoners, for example.

The other major source I’ve found on this is the official “History of the Great War based on Official Documents” that was directed by Sir James Edmonds. There are some references to him saying that the Germans were mistaking rifle fire for MG fire. However, these are largely taken out of context. Edmonds goes to a lot of effort to talk about the disposition of the British MGs (they DID have them at Mons) and their effectiveness. The section that people usually talk about has him saying that the Germans were faced with intense rifle fire that they could not distinguish from the incoming machine gun fire. This is important, because just after this he describes how British soldiers were able to neutralize a German MG nest with their own MGs once they determined its location. This wasn’t an instance of the Germans thinking that British riflemen were machine gunners, but of the general level of fire coming from the British lines being such that they couldn’t pinpoint where the MGs were, much to their detriment. This is an important distinction, because it runs counter to the main thrust of the Enfield MG myth, namely that a combination of training and a very fast to cycle bolt action made the Germans actually believe that concentrated rifle fire was machine gun fire. Simply being unable to isolate the location of MG emplacements because of the total volume of fire is something very different from having such a superior combination of man and machine that rifles alone were being mistaken for MGs.

The other really troublesome point as far as these things go is that you find constant mentions in the memoirs of German officers - Bloem and Von Kluck are easy to get online - of the intense fire at Mons that distinguishes between rifle and MG fire. There are a couple of books that come out in the 20s from Germany that seem to play up “machine guns behind every hedge” in the opening stages of the war. I’ve seen these cited as proof that the Germans thought that they were facing an insane number of MGs, and given that the British didn’t have that many it must have been them mistaking the high cyclic ROF of the enfield for MG emplacements. I think this view misses the purpose of that literature and the context in which it was written and published. These memoirs are written in a very heroic manner that juxtaposes that implacable opposition with the heroism of the German soldier making the early advances. I think that they have to be taken as genre literature and that the descriptions of them are less of a true account of the number of MGs at the early battles or German beliefs that they faced an inflated number of MGs and more literary license on the part of patriotic authors trying to write heroic war stories about a fight that was ultimately lost.

Finally, I would also point out that the idea of the ‘Mad Minute’ wasn’t unique to the British, although they were alone in being quite so exuberant about it (the shooting competitions with cash prizes, the well publicized records of extremely fast shooters, etc). The Germans trained to create beaten zones of rifle fire, a tactic that went back to when rifles had the range to be deadly far beyond their aimed accuracy but machine guns were not widely available to lay down that kind of suppressive fire. They even used spotters to determine range and judge the effectiveness, much the same way that forward observers are used for artillery work and that MGs were ranged in at that time. (See Zuber’s “The Battle of the Frontiers” for a good account of this German technique). In fact, it was the relative inferiority of the Enfield at this kind of extreme long range suppressing action in the open fields of S. Africa during the Boer War (the Boers had a lot of Mauser rifles, so the comparison was direct) that was one of the major pushes to replace the Enfield in the years immediately before the war. If WW1 hadn’t happened the P-14 would have replaced it in short order.

Another thing to consider is that the British were not alone in having effective rifle fire when on the defense. The Belgians managed to slow down opposed pontoon crossings by the Germans quite effectively in a number of locations without large numbers of MGs, and in some instances none at all. Rifles of this age were accurate, devastating, and reasonably quick firing. “Mad Minute” aside it is trivial for even an untrained person to put 15 rounds through them a minute with some semblance of aiming. While this doesn't address the myth itself it should be remembered that rifles were deadly enough in their own right at this time and many other forces managed decisively withering fire with rifles alone, especially at the early stages of the war. I think that half the reason that the British became so associated with this feat is that they had such a major emphasis on it before the war that, again, was highly publicized to the public via newspapers etc. even before the conflict began.

In the end I think the Mons MG myth is the result of very intense British small arms fire leading the Germans to have unreliable estimates on the numbers and locations of the MGs, much to their detriment. This had less to do with the super-engineered Enfield Rifle or the super-human abilities of the Old Contemptibles and more to do with the way that the Germans were advancing into interlocking fields of fire and were in a pretty unfortunate situation on that day. I strongly doubt anyone mistook a rifle company for an emplaced machine gun, but the rifle fire was certainly intense enough that it made the location of those MGs difficult to determine. The MG myth is just the exaggeration of a kernel of truth that is far less dramatic than the notion that the British Tommy, coupled with his trusty Enfield, was so skilled at rapid fire that if he wasn’t a replacement for an MG (the iconic harbinger of death on WW1 battlefields) than he and a few of his trusty mates could do a good impression of one. This isn’t to say that British rifle fire wasn’t devastating at Mons - it was - but this wasn’t the unique feat of British soldiers with a uniquely British weapon. It was a product of the way war had developed across the previous half century.

Loezi
Dec 18, 2012

Never buy the cheap stuff
Yesterday, on the way to a family gathering a bit from my home, I quite accidentally stumpled upon a 1700's fortress in the middle of Bumfuck, Finland. As we were in a bit of a hurry I only had time to snap a few pictures. Nevertheless, I felt that this was worth posting about 'cause it's quite well preserved and a neat historical landmark that feels hella out of place.

Following the 1617 Treaty of Stolbovo which ended the Ingrian War between Russian and Sweden, the Swedish eastern borders looked like this:

Ximfel1 at Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0


Things stood kinda still until 1710 when the Great Northern War reached what is now Finland after the disaster at Poltava. Following the fall of Vyborg (fin. Viipuri) in 1710, the Swedes were driven out of Finland by end of 1714. The next 8 years, until the 1721 Treaty of Nystad ("New City") was known locally as "The Great Hatred" (fin. Isoviha) as the Finnish peasantry were subjected to atrocious treatment by the occupying forces. Perhaps 20000 peasants were killed and 10000 taken as slaves, churches were burnt etc. Note that the total population was around 400,000.

The Treaty of Nystad made a significant border adjustment that moved the border further away from St. Petersburg.

Mix321 at Polish Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

In 1741, Sweden tried to reclaim the lost land in the War of the Hats, as it's known in Finnish. I think it's somehow related to War of the Austrian Succession by virtue of the French instigating it to keep the Russians busy or something like that. In any case, the war went tits-up for the Swedes and Finland was again occupied. The occupation was not quite as bad as the previous one and is thus only known as "The Small Hatred". The war ended in 1743 with the signing of the Treaty of Åbo where the border was again adjusted.


Map by Ohto Kokko, modified by Janneman at German Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 3.0
(I expect even the average goon can figure out what dots on the map are Vyborg and St. Petersburg)

In 1773, the Russians figured out that while the cities of Lappeenranta and Hamina (see map above) would probably do OK with their own defences, the crossroads between them in middle of bumfuck-nowhere could use something of a military presence as well even if there wasn't really much of a settlement there outside of a small village. In any case, they built a small'ish Bastion, some 650 x 800 meters, there by the end of 1781. It was called Davidovskaja Krepost and quickly sprung up a small settlement. The locals started calling it "Taavetti" 'cause locals do not give a flying gently caress about your fancy names ("David" is called "Daavid" in Finnish, so you just kinda replace the d's with t's to account for a more... "earthly" pronounciation, chop of the end because bleh at your long names and there you go.)

In 1790's, Catherine the Great took a look at the map, thought longer about the poo poo Sweden had been causing for quite some while and decided that a bunch more fortresses were needed. Starting in 1791, three concentric chains of fortresses were built in what is these days South-East Finland. The Taavetti fotress was designated part of the middle chain and was beefed up at the time with additional defences, with the second round of works lasting from 1791 to 1796. Another part of the middle chain, the Kärnäkoski Fortress has a good Wikipedia page in English so I recommend checking that out.

For reasons somewhat unclear to me, the fortress was decomissiond quite quickly, already being out of service by 1803 according to one source. Not that it mattered, since the 1808-1809 Finnish War resulted in Russia taking over the rest of Finland and setting it up as the Grand Duchy of Finland which would eventually gain independence as the modern Finnish state. The info boards at the fortress itself say it was decomissioned immediately after the end of the war, which would make a bit more sense. The fortress was completely abandoned in 1829 and the buildings in the area auctioned off.

The fortress would see military use again in 1890s, when to local Sharpshooter battalion's reservists started training there and set up a shooting range and a few buildings. This use ended at some undetermined point in time. The fortress was renovated starting in 1960s and completely surveyed at the start of the 2000s, with the inner fortress and a northern bastions restored.

Here are some pictures. There was a children's day of something something going on at the same time we visited so I don't expect the place to be quite as packed during a normal day..


The larger fortress. The parts remaining these days are the inner fortress at the top and the two top-left and top-right bastions along the middle ring of defensive works.


Map of what's remaining.


Ye olde map. Notice how the fortress is literally built on top of the crossroads.


Between the inner wall and the outer walls of the inner fortress (this is going to get confusing...)


Same place, looking the other way.


The view from the right-side wall of the previous picture out of the inner fortress.


Panorama of the area between the two walls of the inner fortress.


What I thought was a small ditch in some of the previous pictures turned out to be pretty deep. Maybe 1.5 meters or so?


The ditch continues around the inner wall of this inner fortress.


Road to one of the remaining outer bastions.


Moving further inside, another panomara. The "canyon" looking part leads outside.


More pictures from the most inner part.


A gate/tunnel leading north from the most inner yard.


Area beyond the tunnel. This is on the very northern edge of the fortress.


Looking along the norhern earthworks. I'd be hard-pressed to even notice then thing if I didn't know it was there.

Quite interestingly, the post-Winter War " Salpa Line" fortifications I mentioned some time before in this thread also run through Taavetti. I'll try and make a longer excursion there later and get some pictures of those more modern defensive works.

Loezi fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Aug 11, 2019

Nebakenezzer
Sep 13, 2005

The Mote in God's Eye

Cyrano4747 posted:

OK found it. It was on my laptop:

Cool, thanks!

Nenonen posted:

Love of tanks brought a Polish-Japanese couple to wedding trip to Parola Tank Museum

The fiancee works at a Polish tank museum and the bride is a tank model hobbyist.





This is adorbs

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME

buglord posted:

How did soldiers handle injuries before the days of pain-relieving drugs like morphine? War seems a lot harder and more hellish when you’re presumably aware of some awful wound constantly. What was used before morphine? Did people carry jugs of super potent alcohol or something with them into battle so they can drink themselves unconscious? Does that actually work?
some period surgery handbooks recommend dosing them with aconite before surgery

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME

Cyrano4747 posted:

Helmets weren't there to protect you against shrapnel, they were there to protect you from flying dirt clods, rocks, and other heavy debris kicked up by artillery. Their basic construction and use was more or less identical to construction hard hats.
i have seen a 17th century fireman's helmet in the museum of london that was identical in shape to a stereotypical 20th century fireman's helmet, including the long curving bit at the back. the difference is it's made of heavy leather.

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME

Nebakenezzer posted:

Sounds interesting! Also from that aforementioned book, Keegan talks about the Austrian/Hungarian armies as more like army cosplayers, a tradition that none the less was about the only thing holding the empire together at that point.
Not exactly. Aristocrats withdrew from the officer corps in protest over...something I forget, but the pay was so low the only people who became officers were people from lower middle class families who thought it might be a step up--so that part of the tradition was removed. It was not a step up. They were all depressed as well because it was impossible to live on the pay, thanks to the Hungarians. Meanwhile by the nineteen teens the various ethnic groups were difinitely disaffected and there were serious doubts about their loyalty in case what everyone thought was going to happen, happened--a civil war against hungary

What keegan might be remembering is that Austrian military thought since Maria Theresa and possibly earlier held that the existence of the state depended first of all on the existence of the army. This is one of the reasons her grand strategy is different from Frederick the Great's--he does not believe the collapse of his army would be an existential threat to him. She does, so her first responsibility is not to win fights, it's to preserve the army.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



It seems like this whole "hilariously underpay your officers" thing comes up a lot in history and it has never been a great idea. I remember reading about how the Continental Congress was so terrified of the idea of a professional officer corps leading a professional army and declaring a dictatorship, that they stiffed their officers and nearly got the army uprising.

Fortunately, the abstract and generic mass economic forces of history without any connection to individual decisions of any kind G-wash talked them down.

Or so I was told.

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME

Nessus posted:

It seems like this whole "hilariously underpay your officers" thing comes up a lot in history and it has never been a great idea.
Austria had no choice; after the Ausgleich, Hungary could veto any of their military budget decisions while funding the Hungarian army well.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



HEY GUNS posted:

Austria had no choice; after the Ausgleich, Hungary could veto any of their military budget decisions while funding the Hungarian army well.
That seems like it was a poor decision. Was Austria doing this to take back control, or perhaps to prove a point, or did they just end up getting hosed over by some dynastic complexity?

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

I don't think it was the Austrians' idea to give Hungarians greater control.

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME

SlothfulCobra posted:

I don't think it was the Austrians' idea to give Hungarians greater control.
it was bismarck's

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME

Nessus posted:

That seems like it was a poor decision. Was Austria doing this to take back control, or perhaps to prove a point, or did they just end up getting hosed over by some dynastic complexity?
germany forced them into it after austria lost a war in 1866

Edgar Allen Ho
Apr 3, 2017

by sebmojo

Nessus posted:

It seems like this whole "hilariously underpay your officers" thing comes up a lot in history and it has never been a great idea. I remember reading about how the Continental Congress was so terrified of the idea of a professional officer corps leading a professional army and declaring a dictatorship, that they stiffed their officers and nearly got the army uprising.

Fortunately, the abstract and generic mass economic forces of history without any connection to individual decisions of any kind G-wash talked them down.

Or so I was told.

I like how Carthage decided to tell the mercenary army that were veterans of a decades-long war, standing right outside Carthage, that actually they wouldn't be receiving their pay. What could go wrong??

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong
Here's a December 1940 feature from a radio/tv magazine on how the US Army was trying to use television for military purposes:
http://www.earlytelevision.org/pdf/Radio-News-1940-12_blitzkrieg_television.pdf

sullat
Jan 9, 2012
IIRC that was one of Benedict Arnold's complaints; he spent a bunch of his own money on the war and then Congress dragged its feet reimbursing him. (The others were that other officers, Tarelton, I think, kept taking credit for his victories and he kept getting passed over for promotion.

After the war, this guy:



Spent a ton of his own money on taking care of veterans, too, because I guess in those days traditionally they were supposed to gently caress off and die after they were no longer needed.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

bewbies posted:

Just about every modern GPMG settled on ~800-900 RPM as an optimal cyclic rate...not as ridiculous as the MG42, but quite a big more than the M1919 or the BAR or the Vickers or Bren or whatever.

I feel this buries the lede on the exceptions including several of the most popular GPMGs of the post-war era, including the FN MAG, PK/PKM, and M60. This in addition to numerous other GPMGs with ROFs in the 650-700 rpm range, such as the Type 62, Type 67, Type 73, FN Maximi, and AEK-999. The most prominent exception to this ~650 rpm regimen is, in fact, the MG42 and its descendants, since they may use the low-ROF bolt...

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

The real impressive thing about the MG42, and the reason it was both made in the first place and had a post war life, was the design and how it was manufactured. It replaced a gun with a ton of milled parts with one that had a ton of stamped parts welded together. A big part of this was the roller delayed bolt, which allows the mechanism to be much simpler. The quick change barrel was also slick as gently caress for the time and helped a lot with keeping over all ( not cyclic) ROF up.

FAUXTON
Jun 2, 2005

spero che tu stia bene

Cyrano4747 posted:

The real impressive thing about the MG42, and the reason it was both made in the first place and had a post war life, was the design and how it was manufactured. It replaced a gun with a ton of milled parts with one that had a ton of stamped parts welded together. A big part of this was the roller delayed bolt, which allows the mechanism to be much simpler. The quick change barrel was also slick as gently caress for the time and helped a lot with keeping over all ( not cyclic) ROF up.

Did they even stop producing MG34s once they got the MG42 into production at scale?

feedmegin
Jul 30, 2008

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

I like how Carthage decided to tell the mercenary army that were veterans of a decades-long war, standing right outside Carthage, that actually they wouldn't be receiving their pay. What could go wrong??

I mean, the thing is, if you don't actually have the money what's your alternative here?

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

FAUXTON posted:

Did they even stop producing MG34s once they got the MG42 into production at scale?

Don’t think so. IIRC they scaled it way back though. I

Jobbo_Fett
Mar 7, 2014

Slava Ukrayini

Clapping Larry

FAUXTON posted:

Did they even stop producing MG34s once they got the MG42 into production at scale?

iirc no, because they couldn't keep up with demand.

But it wasn't obsolete anyways, as the means to change the barrel in the MG-42 made it impossible to use in tanks, so vehicles stuck with the MG-34 til the end of the war, with some exceptions to machine guns mounted outside the vehicle.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

I want to say it was common in vehicle mounts? Like, the interior stuff, like the RO’s gun in armored vehicles. Might have just kept it up for those.

E;fab

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FAUXTON
Jun 2, 2005

spero che tu stia bene

Cyrano4747 posted:

Don’t think so. IIRC they scaled it way back though. I

That's weird, but 100% in character for them.

"We designed a new general purpose machine gun, it fires faster, is cheaper and faster to make, and it can replace our current labor-intensive, over-engineered, slower-firing MG across nearly all field applications"

"Great, let's add it to the lineup"

"sir it's meant to be a repl-oh gently caress it you always do this, wake me up when zhukov gets here"

E: oh, vehicle mounting is probably a pain to retool - ball mounts and whatnot.

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