Submachine Guns
FN P90 at the Range
Having taken a look at the history and mechanics of the P90 yesterday, I’m taking it out to the range today. I wasn’t sure how I would feel about the progressive trigger…
Machine Guns
Submachine Guns
P90: FN’s Bullpup PDW
FN began developing the P90 in the late 1980s, actually preceding the NATO requirement that it would eventually compete for. The idea of the P90 was to develop a weapon for secondary troops to replace […]
Light MGs
L-34 Sampo: Aimo Lahti’s Rejected Masterpiece
Finland’s standard light machine gun going into the Winter War was the LS-26, a gun which did not succeed in field use. It was complex and cumbersome, and Finnish troops quickly replaced it with captured […]
Heavy MGs
Vickers for Interwar Tanks: The Class C/T Machine Gun
The Vickers company developed several versions of the Vickers machine gun for aircraft use during the 1920s and 1930s, but they also worked on armored vehicle versions of the gun in the 1930s. Between 1930 […]
Heavy MGs
The Drama and Mystery of the Goryunov Machine Gun
This guest post authored by Andrey Ulanov. In the minds of Western people, the inhabitants of the USSR may sometime look like ants; a large mass working towards one great goal without personal ambition. This, of […]
General Purpose MGs
DS-39: The Failed Soviet Machine Gun of World War Two
The Soviet Union recognized the need for a modernized machine gun to replace the Maxim, and in the late 1920s Degtyarev began work on a “universal” type of gun. This would be air cooled, use […]
Light MGs
The Long Road to the DP-27
This guest article written by Andrey Ulanov. The Russian military first got acquainted with light machine guns in 1904, on the brink of the Russian-Japanese War. After having tested a few Madsen LMGs, the Army […]
Light MGs
.303 Lewis Gun at the Range
I really enjoy the Lewis Gun, and it’s been a long time since I had a chance to put some rounds through one. This particular example is a Savage-made gun marked USN, and I think […]
Light MGs
Type 97: Kijiro Nambu Adapts the ZB-30 for Japanese Tanks
Introduced in 1937, the Type 97 was basically a copy of the ZB 26/30 pattern light machine gun adapted to use in Japanese tanks and armored cars. The adaptations included mounting an optical sight to […]
Light MGs
Australia’s FAL-Based L2A1 Heavy Automatic Rifle
Many the nations that adopted the FAL (or L1A1, in Commonwealth terminology) opted to also use a heavy-barreled variant of the same rifle as a light support weapon. In the Commonwealth, this was designated L2A1 […]