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Technically, Isandlwana. Granted the Zulus are mostly not using guns but the ones they have are muskets and stuff, and the British do run out of ammo.
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May 2, 2024 10:50
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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. That wasn't the fear. If you carry a certain amount of ammunition per man, and they expend it all, they won't be able to fight at all. There were multiple times in the American Civil War where troops had this problem (it was, IIRC, a big part of why Burnside's men were so sluggish at Antietam), and was also a periodic issue for skirmishers in other armies. Equally important, if your army gets into a big fight and expends all their ammo while winning it, they're going to be useless until resupplied. Which means that if enemy cavalry should interdict your supply wagons long enough for the enemy to reform, resupply, and reinforce, they can come back and massacre you. Ammunition is heavy, and bulkier than you might think, especially in the quantities needed for an army. The Union had 90,000 men at Gettysburg. Subtracting cavalry, artillery, etc let's call it 70,000 infantry (not sure if that's accurate, but it is a reasonable enough figure for this thought experiment). Give each man a double load of ammunition for his rifle-musket, which would be 40 rounds. That means that, for infantry rifles alone, you're committing 2.8 million rounds of ammunition, all of which had to be hauled via horse-drawn wagon. Now, instead of a rifle-musket firing 3 rounds a minute, you give them a breechloader that can fire 6. To support the same fire rate you now need to give each man 80 rounds instead of 40. That would now be 5.6 million rounds just to give each man a battle load. Fit the rifle with a packet-loaded magazine. Now your rifle fires 12 rounds a minute. What does that do to your supply network?
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May 2, 2024 11:12
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And of course if you are holding 40 rounds and fire 3 a minute then that's 13 minutes of combat. We know engagements obviously lasted much longer than that so either soldiers were getting constantly resupplied or they weren't blazing away at each other at full capacity all the time, or a mixture of both.
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May 2, 2024 11:38
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BalloonFish posted:Is this why the British were so insistent on having a magazine 'disengage' (don't know if that's the fully correct term...) feature and the capability for single rounds to be chambered from above? The pre-WW1 SMLEs had this and even the first Webley semi-auto pistols did. Yep, pretty much the exact same logic. That's also present in the German Gew 1871/84. (and it's called a magazine cut-off). You also have them on the American 1903 and a bunch of other guns. Alchenar posted:And in fact Prussia was repeatedly validated in its decision to preference artillery modernisation over small arms. Artillery was super successful for them, but they were REALLY worried about small arms. The development of smokeless powder by France and the release of the Lebel 1886 caused an absolute loving panic in Germany and led to a crash course of development to produce the Gew 1888. There was also a lot of angst about the accuracy of rifles in general. Fangz posted:I think it's more that you have industrial mass production of ammo, and trucks and trains to constantly resupply the men, as opposed to hand made cartridges and being mostly reliant on what the army can carry with them plus a few carts etc. This is mostly what it boils down to. The concerns were much, much more founded in militaries where they were fighting at the end of a long colonial supply chain, as opposed to a relatively short distance from European rail heads.
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May 2, 2024 13:02
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Yeah but the difference between the Gew 1888 and the Karabiner 98 is not actually that great (I'm treating all the interim model upgrades as useful but nothing on a par as the transition to semi-auto action rifles), particularly in the context of what happens to artillery in the same period. You transition to smokeless powder and a 7.92mm round and you are basically okay for the next 50 years - a better rifle is nice but it won't actually fundamentally change the price of anything. Over the same 1870/80-1940 period however if you aren't buying the latest artillery thing at least every ten years then you are absolutely hosed if you have to fight someone.
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May 2, 2024 13:22
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Alchenar posted:Yeah but the difference between the Gew 1888 and the Karabiner 98 is not actually that great (I'm treating all the interim model upgrades as useful but nothing on a par as the transition to semi-auto action rifles), particularly in the context of what happens to artillery in the same period. You transition to smokeless powder and a 7.92mm round and you are basically okay for the next 50 years - a better rifle is nice but it won't actually fundamentally change the price of anything. Over the same 1870/80-1940 period however if you aren't buying the latest artillery thing at least every ten years then you are absolutely hosed if you have to fight someone. If we're talking small arms we really, REALLY need to be clear on what era we're talking about. The major freakouts in Germany about rifles were in the 1870s and 1880s. You're right that the Gew88 -> Gew98 move isn't as significant, but that's also something that takes place in the early 20th century. You're right that artillery advances were crucial, but my point is that the Germans weren't making a conscious decision to focus on artillery. They were very concerned about all of it. Also, just to nitpick, there are some pretty huge differences between the early generation smokeless powder cartridges and the latter ones. The move to the Spitzer bullet was pretty big and forced everyone to redesign their ammo and, in some cases, their rifles. That's a big part of why the Gew88 ended up cycled out, although there was an update program to make it comparable with the new ammo. Then you've got cases where the old cartridge is just anemic compared to what gets adopted later on. .30-40 Krag vs. .30-06, for example. There is a LOT of angst about this with rifles that ends up being a little misplaced (the brits really wanted to dump .303 because of its performance in the Boer wars, then WW1 happens and they can't) just because the combat ranges contract more than people thought they would, but it still matters for things like LMGs where your max effective range is more important.
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May 2, 2024 14:14
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Cyrano4747 posted:There is a LOT of angst about this with rifles that ends up being a little misplaced (the brits really wanted to dump .303 because of its performance in the Boer wars, then WW1 happens and they can't) Wait, what was wrong with it? it took 50+ years to overcome the inertia of it.
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May 2, 2024 14:40
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Without the war they probably would have gotten around to it, but stuff like this always gets delayed for cost reasons because the benefits are very small and the costs are very large. Look at the replacement of 8mm Lebel, the NATO 7.62x51 standardization, the more recent post 5.56 debates in the US army, etc. There was a push to replace it with the .276 Enfield, which solved the .303's main problems. It had better ballistics and was rimless, so it would feed from a magazine with fewer issues. It had issues of its own, mostly related to a bad propellant, that caused fouling and wear. Let's assume that these problems are solved and you end up with roughly a 7.5mm Swiss GP11. You now have to design a new rifle and new automatic weapons to fit the cartridge. You have to produce a new propellant for the round. You have to reengineer your small arms production plants to fit the new round. You have to design new conveyances for the new round. Your millions of pounds of stockpiled .303 ammunition are now going to be waste and you will have to replenish those stocks quickly. This isn't like modern day where the soldier's rifle is (close to the least) expensive part of their equipment, either. This is a point in time where the rifle and its accoutrements are a fairly significant portion of the cost to equip a soldier, and you're talking about making millions of the things, with peace time budgets, to replace perfectly acceptable rifles. edit: if your question was "what is wrong with .303" it's ballistically non-competitive at range with peer cartridges (important in an era where everyone was a bit obsessed with rifle marksmanship at range) and more importantly it's rimmed so it has complex box magazines and just generally stacks poorly. (the other approach is to use a pan magazine which has its own problems) KYOON GRIFFEY JR fucked around with this message at 14:59 on May 2, 2024 |
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May 2, 2024 14:54
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Comstar posted:Wait, what was wrong with it? it took 50+ years to overcome the inertia of it. It was a very, very early smokeless cartridge that started life as a black powder cartridge for the Lee-Metford rifle. The Lee action isn't nearly as strong as later guns built with a better understanding of what smokeless was capable of, and really falls more in line with things like the Krag. There was a lot of dissatisfaction with the performance of British guns during the Boer Wars, with a general feeling that they were badly out ranged by Mausers. Note that the Boer wars were pretty unique in having some extremely long range engagements due to the terrain. The conclusion at the time was that the .303 was under-powered compared to more modern cartridges like 7mm and 8mm Mauser, but it likely also had to do with quality control problems that the British were having in rifle manufacture. Either way, the decision was made to move on to a new gun, the Pattern 1913 Enfield, which used a more modern bolt locking system that could take a modern, rimless, full pressure smokeless rifle round - .276 Enfield. But in 1914 some rear end in a top hat shot a duke and all of a sudden it didn't seem like such a great idea to roll out a totally new gun AND a totally new primary rifle and MG cartridge. So they put the P13 on hold and started making P14's, which were just P13s chambered in .303, all while continuing production of SMLEs. Fast forward a few years and the Americans get in the war and now they need a bunch of guns AND they're already manufacturing P14's for the British military. So they make a few changes over there, chamber the P14 into .30-06, and that's how the US makes the m1917 for a few years and ends up using more of those in combat than m1903s. They're good guns too, really nice action, and they handle .30-06 with aplomb. Anyways, that's how a bunch of Brits being envious of German rifle cartridges ended up with Americans carrying a British designed rifle for a few years. After the war England was flat assed broke so getting all new rifles was totally out of the question. A few years later they're finally starting to think about getting a new rifle, probably something semi-auto this time, then a dick with a bad mustache starts poo poo again so that goes out the window and they keep trucking with the Enfield.
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May 2, 2024 15:00
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I was reading about Project Hula, which I hadn't heard about, and it made me wonder how military leadership viewed the alliance with the USSR. I know Patton was vocal about it, but were there misgivings from the beginning? I know that there's always been a lot of anti-communist sentiment since, well, communism was invented, so how contentious was Lend-Lease? The inter-war period is a big black hole in my historical knowledge so anything pertinent about US-Soviet relations leading up to, during, and immediately after the war would be interesting. In a nutshell: when did the US military leadership decide that our next big geopolitical foe was going to be the USSR?
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May 2, 2024 15:03
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zoux posted:In a nutshell: when did the US military leadership decide that our next big geopolitical foe was going to be the USSR? 1917, but you have to get rid of the Nazis first.
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May 2, 2024 15:27
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Ammo was the major factor that killed the Fedorov Avtomat. The Red Army was all for it, but Soviet industry couldn't handle the introduction of a new type of ammunition. The conclusion was that if you can't make it in 7.62 you can't make it at all. Funnily enough, you see them in service as late as the Winter War, I guess with Tsarist era ammo. I wonder if it would have been possible to make a similar design work with 7.62x25, but at that point all they had was 7.62x38 Nagant and the submachine gun designs for that cartridge are wild.
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May 2, 2024 15:37
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Ensign Expendable posted:all they had was 7.62x38 Nagant and the submachine gun designs for that cartridge are wild. 
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May 2, 2024 15:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:After the war England was flat assed broke so getting all new rifles was totally out of the question. A few years later they're finally starting to think about getting a new rifle, probably something semi-auto this time, then a dick with a bad mustache starts poo poo again so that goes out the window and they keep trucking with the Enfield. Then after that Bad Time, they try again to introduce a smaller, rimless high-speed round and a modern semi-auto rifle, develop both round and rifle, officially introduce them as a standard issue and then sacrifice both on the altar of NATO standardisation and trans-Atlantic diplomacy and never put either into full production. Britain basically spent 60 years wanting to replace .303 and never being able to.
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May 2, 2024 17:30
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BalloonFish posted:Then after that Bad Time, they try again to introduce a smaller, rimless high-speed round and a modern semi-auto rifle, develop both round and rifle, officially introduce them as a standard issue and then sacrifice both on the altar of NATO standardisation and trans-Atlantic diplomacy and never put either into full production. The fact that we could have gotten FN FALs in .280 British and didn't is something I will always be bitter about.
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May 2, 2024 17:37
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Cyrano4747 posted:Oh please do go on. I want to hear about some fucky nagant cartridge SMG designs. There are a few that I know of.  Tokarev's 1927 carbine. The initial prototype showed good results when compared with the MP-18 and a small batch was ordered for testing. Various sources give 300-600 produced in total with some mobilized to fight in Finland, but I've never seen a photo of this.   This is the Degtyaryev design developed in 1929. He essenetially took his infantry machine gun and miniaturized it. As you can imagine the result was too complicated and not very reliable. One of the biggest problems was the feeding, which jammed because of the cylindrical nature of the rounds. Allegedly rounds with crimped or cutoff casings and round nosed bullets worked well. An order for 500 was made, but I don't know how much of it was fulfilled. By this point the army had already identified the 7.63 Mauser caliber as a much more promising direction for pistols and submachine guns, so all further work was done using this ammunition, including Degtyaryev's next gun that evolved into the PPD-34.
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May 2, 2024 17:40
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Or hell, to extend that line of thinking, the Garand was originally designed for .276 Pedersen, but there was a late change ordered by a certain US Army Chief of Staffed named Douglas MacArthur because he thought switching out the existing .30-06 stockpiles would be cost prohibitive. .30-06 was more or less the basis for .308 which more or less became 7.62x51 aka 7.62 NATO and dominated western small arms development until 5.56 came along. There's an alternate history where we got a flat shooting, 7mm intermediate cartridge in the 50s. loving dugout Doug. 
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May 2, 2024 17:41
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This is wonderful. That Degtayryev mag
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May 2, 2024 17:43
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Dumb non-gun guy question : what’s the deal with drum magazines not being commonly used by militaries? I know how they work, they’re not crazy complex, but they seem* generally pretty rare for military applications while uncommon but much less rare in civilian applications. e.g. the Thompson sub-machinegun. Is this a descendent of the ammo debate upthread or is it drum magazines being too fiddly for field-use or…? *to me, an idiot who could be wrong
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May 2, 2024 17:59
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They're big, they're heavy. Their weight means they are more likely to misalign slightly and misfeed. Submachine guns generally don't want to be firing 50-70 rounds in a short time anyway since they are not ersatz machine guns no matter how much people want them to be. IIRC at least the Soviets had an issue mass producing the drum mags so it was easier to give one guy 6 stick mags rather than two drums (more realistically just one). Plus when you lose one mag which happens you're down to 5 mags instead of one. Drums can be good for machine guns but at this point a belt feed is a lighter and better option.
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May 2, 2024 18:04
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stick mags also pack better and are easier to make
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May 2, 2024 18:09
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Drum magazines for weapons designed for a box magazine are a lot more mechanically complicated than box magazines, since the follower has to go both around the circle then up through the magazine well. Since you love pedantry, the Degtyarev shown doesn't use a drum magazine but a pan magazine, with the rounds oriented radially instead of axially and the feed is on the flat face. Pan magazines are lighter and more ammo dense than drums but still not as much as box magazines.
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May 2, 2024 18:56
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Reloading a drum is also usually a lot more complicated than reloading a box magazine: it frequently requires using a tool, partially disassembling the magazine, or both. They can require winding, rather than using a simple spring to just push rounds in one direction. In short, a drum is a big pain in the rear end for militaries. The only drum magazine I can think of that saw any kind of widespread military use is the Suomi/PPSh mag, and that is a very good drum that was still only in use for about 10 years. When the Soviets adopted it, it wasn't even really their primary magazine. PPShs would be issued with a single drum and a bunch of stick mags: soldiers were expected to start a fight with their drum but only reload with sticks. As noted, the magazines of both the Lewis and DT machine guns aren't drums, they're pan magazines, which are a lot simpler. They rely on the gun mechanically indexing the entire magazine and pulling cartridges from it rather than a coiled spring pushing cartridges in a big helical pattern. Even those went out of style pretty quickly because it turns out that boxy objects are a lot easier to carry than a giant stack of pie plates or LPs. EDIT: My real stumper of a question is why Hotchkiss-style strips never saw wider adoption. They seem pretty ideal for crew-served guns and have a lot of advantages over early belts. Modern disintegrating belts obviously make them obsolete, but every time I watch a video of a Hotchkiss running I think those strips are just so spiffy. You can store them in boxes, they provide basically infinite fire, they don't have any springs to bend or cloth to decay, they're cheap as poo poo to manufacture, they just seem really good. FishFood fucked around with this message at 19:38 on May 2, 2024 |
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May 2, 2024 19:27
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Drum mags are pretty complex for what they are. In addition to weight, reloading, etc., they are comparatively fragile opposed to 'metal/plastic box', 'straight spring', and 'follower'. Just my basic-rear end STANAG magazines I have no problem with dropping them if I fumble them into the dump pouch or I don't have anywhere to put empties. I don't own a Beta-C, but the times I have fired one, you sure as gently caress weren't dropping it and slapping a new one in. There are a bunch of parts on that that I can only imagine how hosed they would be if you accidentally bent or cracked them.
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May 2, 2024 19:54
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To add to drum mag chat, they're also a lot more complicated and expensive to manufacture. You can make a box mag out of four parts: 1) mag body. Single piece of sheet metal stamped into a box shape and welded down the edge 2) mag follower. Single piece of stamped metal. 3) mag floorplate. SIngle piece of stamped metal. 4) mag spring. Meanwhile here is a PPSh drum mag, loaded, but with the cover removed:  You've got loving clockwork bullshit in there. You have to weld the magazine feed column to the mag body itself. You have multiple moving parts. You have that internal spiral divider. It's no bullshit to say that you could make a functional model of a box mag with tape, some scissors or a knife, and beer cans in about half an hour of loving around. I did this once sitting in a bar to illustrate a point about something. A drum mag is just a poo poo ton more complex. Complexity means you make fewer of them, and they're more expensive. Meanwhile box mags are cheap enough that, even though you shouldn't throw them away when you reload, if you do it's not exactly the end of the world. The only time I can really think that a drum mag is considered desirable from a military perspective is when you want assault troops having a poo poo ton of ammo right up front. Stick mags can get really unreliable if you make them too big, and the controlled feed of a drum mag fixes that problem, assuming that having 30+ rounds on tap is a priority. Someone already mentioned soviet SMG squads in WW2 being issued with a drum mag to start the party and stick mags to reload from, but both Luger and MP-18s with drum mags were popular with German assault troops during WW1 for basically the same reasons. edit: drum mags are also way more prone to a malfunction if you get them dirty, and cleaning them is way more of a pain in the rear end. Cleaning a box mag boils down to "drop it in a bucket of water or something, iunno"
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May 2, 2024 20:03
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Xiahou Dun posted:Dumb non-gun guy question : what’s the deal with drum magazines not being commonly used by militaries? I know how they work, they’re not crazy complex, but they seem* generally pretty rare for military applications while uncommon but much less rare in civilian applications. e.g. the Thompson sub-machinegun. Is this a descendent of the ammo debate upthread or is it drum magazines being too fiddly for field-use or…? Look at how much of a pain in the rear end the PPSH drum mag is to reload https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gskGqf5vLUk
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May 2, 2024 20:07
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Thank you! Highly informative!
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May 2, 2024 20:12
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FishFood posted:
If the strip is bent at all the gun jams, and that's a pretty fiddly little bit of tin that you're lugging around the battlefield. Belts don't have that problem. It also hampers your rate of fire pretty significantly. You're going to need the loader to be johnny on the spot slapping a new one in, and keep in mind that you can blow through that thing in a couple of seconds of sustained fire. Meanwhile with a belt your loader is just there to help it feed and be ready with the next one when you run out. The bullets are also all right out there in the open and exposed to whatever dust and debris happens to be floating around. Even just as a curiosity for a gun collector I wouldn't want to operate one of those on a windy day in an area with sand, for example, because you might risk your every expensive toy ingesting some grit. Now think about an active battlefield where artillery is throwing mud and poo poo everywhere. Basically it's a lot of the problems of belts with a lot of the problems of boxes and none of the advantages that either offer. That said, it's still better than hopper-fed LMGs like the Japanese Type 11.
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May 2, 2024 20:12
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Drums were popular with tankers since the extra weight didn't matter and they didn't get exposed to the elements as much as an infantryman would. That being said the PPS was much more popular due to the folding stock. Trying to climb out of a narrow tank hatch with a PPSh pressed against your body is not a pleasant experience.
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May 2, 2024 20:18
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The first version of Suomi, the M/26, had a unique banana magazine with 36 round capacity This was replaced in M/31 with a couple of different drum and box magazine designs with different capacities. The problem with the drum magazine was that if something in reloading process went wonky, you'd have a nice little jam at hands. Just imagine having to clear this in the middle of a gun fight:  Fortunately, we have finally found out the ideal submachine gun feeding system:  You may not like it, but this is peak performance.
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May 2, 2024 20:26
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Nenonen posted:The first version of Suomi, the M/26, had a unique banana magazine with 36 round capacity I don't know much about the suomi, but I'd be shocked if they didn't replace that with a drum because of feeding problems. Any time you get a severe bend in a mag like that feeding gets funky, fast. Doubly so if there is even the slightest chance that dirt or other debris might get into the mag.
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May 2, 2024 20:29
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:seriously this is just an absurd misreading and misunderstanding of A-H's demands, its mind boggling The Sleepwalkers is, from what I've read, pretty absurd overall despite its high reputation.
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May 2, 2024 20:38
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Nenonen posted:
The Red Army discovered that concentrated gunfire at a range of 300 meters will often make or break an engagement. The long term solution was of course to make the 7.62x39 round but in the short term one solution was a belt fed 7.62x25 LMG. It was built and tested but I don't think it worked out.
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May 2, 2024 20:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:Or hell, to extend that line of thinking, the Garand was originally designed for .276 Pedersen, but there was a late change ordered by a certain US Army Chief of Staffed named Douglas MacArthur because he thought switching out the existing .30-06 stockpiles would be cost prohibitive. And given this was in the middle of the Great Depression but before Hitler was sufficiently alarming for a majority of Congress to up the frankly minuscule Army budget for everything that isn't things that fly, he was right. Like of all the mistakes MacArthur ever made, keeping .30-06 is by far the most defensible.
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May 2, 2024 20:42
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Nenonen posted:
My train of thought: wow a belt fed mp5 how badas--hold up that's not 9mm 
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May 2, 2024 21:10
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:The Sleepwalkers is, from what I've read, pretty absurd overall despite its high reputation. The book's own preface notes that the standard thinking about WW1 tends to dismiss Serbia's part in starting the war and ignores the historical context of the region, Serbia's behavior, Austria-Hungary's history of behavior in the region, and the other powers' interests in southeast Europe. The Sleepwalkers tries to focus on the question of how did an assassination in that region spark a general European war, what circumstances and history and diplomatic maneuverings lead to the assassination, the response to the assassination, and how that escalated into a world war. I do know from online reviews that it's faced a lot of criticism for how critical it is of Serbia's and Russia's actions in the region versus traditional thinking, and for being uncommonly even-handed towards Austria-Hungary's role in events rather than taking it as a given that A-H was a dwindling power on the way out as the course of history went.
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May 2, 2024 21:32
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:And given this was in the middle of the Great Depression but before Hitler was sufficiently alarming for a majority of Congress to up the frankly minuscule Army budget for everything that isn't things that fly, he was right. Like of all the mistakes MacArthur ever made, keeping .30-06 is by far the most defensible. Yes, but it annoys me, personally, and is therefore not only clearly wrong but the greatest mistake he ever made.
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May 2, 2024 22:19
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Xiahou Dun posted:Dumb non-gun guy question : what’s the deal with drum magazines not being commonly used by militaries? I know how they work, they’re not crazy complex, but they seem* generally pretty rare for military applications while uncommon but much less rare in civilian applications. e.g. the Thompson sub-machinegun. Is this a descendent of the ammo debate upthread or is it drum magazines being too fiddly for field-use or…? The replies touch on this, but context on the size of a drum magazine is illustrative. A stick magazine for a Thompson is something like 16"x 3"x 5" and holds 20 rounds. The smaller of the two drum magazines is (if the information I'm seeing is correct) 78" in diameter and holds 50 rounds. This means you can comfortably fit five sticks (holding a total of 100 rounds) in the same space as a single drum. This ignores that even the empty weight of the drum is considerable and that you can split your stick mags into different pockets to more comfortably carry the load.
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May 2, 2024 22:47
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:And given this was in the middle of the Great Depression but before Hitler was sufficiently alarming for a majority of Congress to up the frankly minuscule Army budget for everything that isn't things that fly, he was right. Like of all the mistakes MacArthur ever made, keeping .30-06 is by far the most defensible. Did the US have enough .30-06 ammo and rifles to arm their full forces or would they had to go to manufacturing crunch right at the beginning of war? It feels like armies have always too few rifles and it's impossible to convince peace time governments to pay for full required amount. I suspect it would be much easier to convince government for the need to replace all the rifles with the hot new ammo, then just put the old rifles and ammo in cosmoline and let rear area troops clean them up. Before you would have 20% of needed rifles, now you have 40%. Having two types of ammo is of course a huge logistical hassle, but is it bigger hassle than the manufacturing crunch. No army has ever managed with only a single type of ammo. A second type of ammo is a hassle, but it feels like all the extra types after that are diminishing hassles. Similar issue seems to be when armies use a lot of money to upgrade old weapons to new ammo, just so they can safe a little bit of money compared to brand new weapons. Just take a lesson from Nepal, use all the money for new rifles and store all of the old ones.
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May 2, 2024 22:56
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Gnoman posted:The replies touch on this, but context on the size of a drum magazine is illustrative. A stick magazine for a Thompson is something like 16"x 3"x 5" and holds 20 rounds. The smaller of the two drum magazines is (if the information I'm seeing is correct) 78" in diameter and holds 50 rounds. This means you can comfortably fit five sticks (holding a total of 100 rounds) in the same space as a single drum. This ignores that even the empty weight of the drum is considerable and that you can split your stick mags into different pockets to more comfortably carry the load. I wouldn't trust anything that said the drum had a diameter of about 2 meters, tbh. Are those numbers actually for cm and not inches, and you just typod the diameter?
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May 2, 2024 23:11
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