Vaclav Holek’s first machine gun design for the Czech military was the Praga I, built in 1922 and based heavily on the Vickers/Maxim system. However, it became clear that the military wanted something lighter and more portable, and so the next year he heavily updated the design to this, the Praga I-23 (for 1923). It remains a belt-fed weapon chambered for the 8mm Mauser cartridge, but the locking system has been much simplified into a tilting bolt arrangement. The recoil operation from the earlier model is also gone, now replaced by a long stroke gas piston. Some elements of the Maxim remain in the belt feeding elements, but the overall gun is much more a light machine gun than the mounted heavy machine gun that was his first design.
A total of 40 of the Praga I-23 were ordered by the Czechoslovak military, and they were tested in 1924 (only 20 examples were actually delivered of the 40). The I-23 performed well, but it was again clear that it wasn’t quite what the military really wanted. Holek revised the design again to the model 1924, using a box magazine instead of a belt feed – and that is the gun that continued the path to the ZB-26.
Video on the Praga I machine gun that came immediately before this model:
Many thanks to the VHU – the Czech Military History Institute – for giving me access to this fantastic prototype to film for you. The Army Museum Žižkov is a part of the Institute, and they have a 3-story museum full of cool exhibits open to the public in Prague.If you have a chance to visit, it’s definitely worth the time! You can find all of their details (including their aviation and armor museums) here:
“(…)using a box magazine instead of a belt feed(…)”
This seems… at odds with how full-automatic weapons most often evolved, which was magazine -> belt, for example RP-46. Are other cases when belt-fed machine gun spawned magazine-feed one known in history?
@Daweo,
You have to look at the needs of the user, here. The reason they evolved the guns towards magazine feed has a lot to do with two words: “Wet” and “Canvas”. The belts of the era were just too heavy and unwieldly compared to magazines, magazines were becoming “possible” due to the revolution in consistent precision manufacturing, and if you’d ever hauled around an MG06/18 in the trenches, you’d probably have a reflexive visceral response yourself, contemplating the idea of “belt”. It wasn’t until the Germans came up with the metallic ones that anyone really began to consider putting belts on what might be termed “machine guns for the assault”.
To be quite honest, I’m not sure that there is a “natural evolutionary flow” in weapons. It sure looks that way, but I think a better model would be less biological and more cultural; it’s a conversation between the user, the designer, and the people paying the bills. User says “I need portable…”, designer says “Well, I guess that rules out the MG08/16 belt…”, and the bill-payer says “Here’s the money; see if you can make it work…”
The really disturbing thing from the standpoint of an outside observer is just how chaotic this entire process really is; you want for there to be a clear conception-creation-fielding-use line, but there often is not. This is why iterative design like what SpaceX and the history of US individual weapons from 1960-ish forward looks the way it does; it’s the “desire path” of weapons procurement. Nobody in the US military set out to wind up with the M4 carbine in 2001 as our standard infantry weapon, but there we were. Very little in the way of mindful, cognizant design/thought: Nearly all “desire path”, since the people who should have been doing the conceptualization and actual thinking behind it all didn’t bother, or got everything wrong, as in the M16A2.
It only resembles evolution in the most vague and nebulous manner possible. It’s actually something else that we really don’t have good terminology for, because it happened as a series of misadventures, rather than cold rational thought processes.
If you examine post-WWI German machinegun design, you can make out an outline of something akin to what SpaceX is doing with rockets… Iterative design, with a lot of failure and “not quite right” going on.
Another point that just occurred to me… Note the flow of belt design: Canvas to metallic link permanent belts, and finally the effectively disposable disintegrating link. You started at canvas because the repeatable consistent manufacture of the metallic link was problematic, when you got that to the point where you could do it on a limited basis, you had the German belts, and then once you could churn out disposable disintegrating links reliably… You went to that. It was all predicated on what was possible in terms of affordable manufacturing.
The big thing to look at with a lot of “Why didn’t they do this earlier…?” in firearms manufacture has to do with that intrinsic problem: The rejection rate. If you have to throw too many stamped receivers away, then you need to go back to machined ones, as the Soviets learned. Same with everything else… Repeatable, consistent precision is hard as f*ck to do, and that’s the major secret of it all… And, why we see so many things in retrospect and think they should have been able to do them, only for it to founder on that reject rate in serial production.
As an aside… Contemplate the wonders of the humble M13 disintegrating link: Produced in the billions, yet sufficiently consistent and precise that the damn things are ubiquitous trash everywhere the US fights its wars. We throw them away, just like expended cartridge cases.
If you were to build yourself a time machine, and go back to the 19th Century and propose to some entrepreneurial industrialist that he undertake manufacture of that little chunk of steel, he’d likely laugh you out of his offices, especially when you asked for the quantities necessary to fight a war. You’d be in the same situation as though you were asking for aluminum to use in airframes before the era of affordable electrolysis…
No argument on any of the above.
I have a theory (yes, that’s like an opinion) that the canvas belt came about due to the early Maxim guns. And that they had them because there was already an exemplar, the U.S. Army’s .45-70 cartridge belt;
https://www.ima-usa.com/products/original-u-s-indian-wars-springfield-trapdoor-45-70-cartridge-bandolier-belt-with-100-rounds
Commonly called a “Mills belt”, but in fact that was a specific subtype introduced in 1881. The “Mills” part was the brass buckle, patented by one Anson Mills.
https://www.horsesoldier.com/products/military-accoutrements/48577
Whatever you called it and whatever it was made of (cotton duck, canvas, leather, etc.) it worked. And adapting it from a waist belt holding rimmed rifle ammunition to a feed system for machine guns was apparently fairly simple.
So the original belt feed might just be another example of “embedded technology”, like the shotgun shell or the QWERTY keyboard. It got used, or rather adapted, “because it was there”.
As for the “evolution” of the AR-15 from the original Colt 601 to the M16A2 and finally the M4, check out the October 1967 issue of Popular Mechanics;
https://dn790004.ca.archive.org/0/items/PopularMechanics1967/Popular%20mechanics-10-1967.pdf
There, spread across pages 128 and 129, is basically the M4 as we know it today. It was supposed to be the “improved” version of M16A1 that year, to correct what Army Ordnance deliberately f**ked up about the original AR-15 to avoid it being adopted over their “in-house” M14.
Note the ribbed, round handguard, a feature of the AR-15s from the start. The two-part triangular left-and-right-halves guard was entirely Ord’s idea. The round handguard is made up of two identical pieces, top and bottom, so only one item needs to be inventoried. It’s better than the fragile triangular one in every way. But we were afflicted with that triangular gadget from day one, thanks to Ord.
(I won’t even try to count the ways I’ve seen people try to hold that thing together. Although 100MPH tape was always the default.)
We spent about four decades (1959 to 1990s) with Ord playing games with the basic infantry rifle to try to convince everybody else that they, and only they, knew what it should be.
What we ended up with was pretty much what we could have had from the start, signed, sealed, and delivered, if Ordnance hadn’t been allowed to fiddle with it.
I think that’s called “progress”.
clear ether
eon
In 1896 Hotchkiss patented both the feed tray and the metallic belt. Hotchkiss MGs were offered with the double possibility of being tray or belt fed, even if purchasers, at that time, generally preferred feed trays (but Belgium and Sweden, IE, adopted the belt before WWI). The Hotchkiss tray/belt allowed even a “difficult” cartridge like the 8mm Lebel to be pushed directly into the chamber, instead of being first pulled and then pushed.
For the others, there was the problem of Hotchkiss’ patent, that expired only in 1916. Then, after the war, to have already tons of MGs made for canvas belt, and tons of already made canvas belts.
Eon, interesting stuff in pop.mechanics, this caseless .22 airgun… is it real ?
@ Storm;
Yes, the Daisy VL was real and was on sale from 1967 to 1968. It worked exactly as described. Any expert on Native American artifacts would tell you that it worked on the principle of a “fire piston”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_piston
https://www.instructables.com/Illustrated-amp-Detailed-Guide-To-Making-A-Fire-/
While Wiki identifies it as south Asian in origin, it was used by the Sioux, Apache, and etc. going back to at least the 3rd Century BC.
What finally did the VL in was the fact that certain agencies we must not name here regarded it as a perfect “hit” weapon, as it left no cartridge cases, hence no firing pin marks, etc.
The history of armaments is replete with such interesting “blind alley” developments. The eponymous “air gun” of Col. Sebastian Moran in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Empty House” being another example of a tactically similar arm.
Yes, there really were such things.
https://www.littlegun.info/arme%20allemande/artisan%20u-z/a%20venus%20oskar%20will%20gb.htm
One with a crank was a Kurbelspanner. One with a lever under the stock was a Bugelspanner. The one Watson describes was almost certainly one of the latter. And as you might guess from their names, they were German in origin.
PS- The one in the story was real, according to Adrian Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur’s son. His father owned it. Adrian never knew where he got it from.
Perhaps it was made for Sir Arthur by a certain “blind German mechanic”?
😉
cheers
eon
I went and read that Popular Mechanics article, and simultaneously wept for what we’ve lost, and what they utterly failed to comprehend, back in the day.
Possibly the most significant thing about the M14/M16 transitional era was the functional recognition that the entire thesis of US post-WWII small arms thought was invalid; Popular Mechanics authors and editors either missed that or failed to comprehend that fact, because they did not enumerate it. The factual reality of things was that the M16 recognized tactical reality for an individual weapon, while the M14 was delusionally oblivious to it.
I suspect that a similar conclusion will eventually be reached concerning the M7 NGSW.
The tactical fact-on-the-ground is that an individual weapon needs to be “wieldly”, above all else. You have to be able to do snap shots, and lay down the occasional burst of full-auto dissuasive fire, while maintaining good control of the weapon. This precludes cartridges in the class represented by the NGSW “solution”, and agitates for things in the range of 7.62X39, 5.45X39, and 5.56X45. None of which have been abandoned by the combatants in Ukraine, I’ll point out.
The reality is that the individual weapon is a local security sort of affair; if you want to win your wars, then you need to have your longer-range targets addressed by things that will actually address that which you observe, and everything around that target. This is why the entire ‘effing concept of the “lone rifleman” is such vacuous bullshit: The fact is, an individual weapon is only going to be able to address the singular target observed. That’s inherent to the beast, built-in. The idjit class thinks that’s how you win wars… Which it is not.
The reality is that when you see something out around 800m, that “something” is likely only one of a group; the rest of that group you can’t see. If you want to win…? Then, you need to kill that one guy, and all his friends. That’s best performed not by shooting him and offering up the lesson that exposure=death, but by dropping a nice big burst of fire on top of that entire area, and killing all his “friends” on speculation that they’re there, cowering unobserved around him.
This is the fundamental fallacy of the theories embodied in NGSW. The idjits running our military fundamentally do not understand how modern combat works; their theories are utterly fallacious, in terms of the way small arms work. The individual weapon is strictly for the close-in stuff, the local security and short-range combat. If you’re thinking to use your riflemen to engage individual targets out past about 500m, you’re going to lose your wars. Period. At that range, you don’t shoot at individuals; individual targets of opportunity are merely markers for what should properly be area targets engaged by crew-served weapons that are going to plaster entire spaces the size of city blocks. You do that, and you’re going to win. Why? Because you’re actually engaging the enemy in worthwhile job lots, rather than retail-level random killings. You don’t want one-on-one kills; you want mass murder on an industrial scale. That’s how you win, I’m afraid.
“(…) individual weapon is only going to be able to address the singular target observed.(…)”
This might be changed with development of such weapons as SSRS https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/army-news-2024/barrett-unveils-new-ssrs-30mm-automatic-grenade-launcher-for-us-armys-pgs-program
@ Kirk;
From what I’ve seen of M7 so far, it has the potential to be a decent DMR. That’s it.
A replacement for M4, it isn’t and never will be. Because it’s based on an entirely wrong set of assumptions, as you’ve stated.
Since we already have a selection of DMRs in 7.62 x 51mm, the only thing M7 brings to the table is the new 6.8 x 51mm cartridge, which is (heavy sigh) yet another re-invention of 7 x 57mm Mauser circa 1892.
Most likely it will be followed by a new GPMG/SAW in that chambering. Rather overlooking the fact (as usual- even heavier sigh) that the SAW and the GPMG (support) have two distinctly different jobs, and thus require two different platforms and two different cartridges. No, the “dual performance” feature of 6.8 x 51mm Spear won’t do it.
“One Round To Rule Them All” just doesn’t work. It never has, and it never will.
You can’t fool “Mother Nature”, aka “Gross Physics”.
It would be nice if the people who are responsible for this sort of thing actually had at least some basic knowledge of same.
clear ether
eon
@eon, Daweo,
I find myself wishing that Ian’s software package allowed for a little more depth than it does… Once you bottom out on it all, it becomes really hard to effectively address questions.
For Daweo, I’d like to suggest a gedankenspiel for you: Compare the footprint of the kill zone for any grenade you’re likely to be able to launch from a shoulder-fired weapon; then, examine the footprint for the beaten zone produced by an actual machinegun manned by knowing crew members and controlled by equally knowledgeable leadership…
See the difference? The grenade, cute and supposedly as effective as it is, is still a weapon for addressing an individual target. The payload, once you subtract the weight of the fusing system and factor in the inherent weakness of the human platform firing it, is by necessity pretty damn tiny. It is not an effective area weapon; it is more a tool to enable you to take out an individually identified target that’s kinda-sorta in the vicinity; a means of getting around the inherent inaccuracy of the individual marksman, mostly. It is emphatically not a weapon for taking out your identified target and all his friends in the immediate vicinity, measured in tens of meters or more. For that, you need either support weapons, a squad-sized mortar, or the machinegun everyone seems to refuse learning how to use effectively.
These are all things that we would know, if the idjit class could ever be bothered to actually go out and look at the data they should have gathered, which they never have. Everything that the NGSW program and those 30mm grenades are based on comes straight out of the same set of idjit types that thought the SPIW and OICW were the way of the future. Bluntly put, they do not know how things really work, and that’s mostly because they’ve never bothered to actually go out and observe how things actually go down on the two-way range.
If it were I, the money would be going into better observation and fire control, along with training. I don’t care what weapons you put into the hands of the troops, the real deal boils down to observation and fire direction. Which, sad to say, I think the German mountain troops were doing exponentially better than we were in Afghanistan, where all this “overmatch” bullshit comes out of.
To eon… If the mark of genius is how much someone agrees with you, our little mutual admiration society we have here would produce indications that you and I are, in fact, geniuses.
Because I agree with you wholeheartedly on the NGSW…
I think the whole thing began with noble purpose, and I could get behind it when they were talking about new technologies reducing the soldier’s load. Lighter, more (or, just equally…) effective cartridges would make life so much better for the foot soldier. But, they abandoned that, and now we’re looking at a heavier, less capable, far less wieldly end-product, one that I’m pretty sure was meant to be the ticket into post-military career glory for certain parties…
You want to understand NGSW and a whole host of other idjit-produced military programs, you have to read this and recognize how nightmarishly true it is:
https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/1886817290848444717
That crap, right there, is why idiocies like the NGSW program go through. There is not one indicator out there in the actual battles in Ukraine that the current suite of weapons is inadequate or in need of replacement. There’s no indicator to say that even putting all that money into the next-generation sights is going to make a big enough difference to justify the expense; all the indicators show that drones and drone operations are changing the very nature of modern infantry combat, and that we ought to have teams out embedded in the Ukrainian military to learn all we can from what they’re doing, as well as building out our national capacity for producing drones in mass quantities. The next war isn’t going to be decided by how many tanks and aircraft carriers we can field, but by how well we’ve adapted to the new environment, the one that they’re signally ignoring.
People were telling these assholes about the potential for drones back around 2001; you’ll note that they really did f*ck-all about it, and studiously failed to really develop any of it. We could have had drones running around all our patrols in Afghanistan and Iraq, chasing those assholes planting IEDs. Did we? Nope; that would have broken too many ricebowls, and threatened even more.
The M1A3 tank ought to be more a mobile command center with hangers full of drones, instead of an uber-tank from the late 20th Century.
We’re gonna get that uber-tank instead.
Great info eon! I know about dieseling phenomenon in airguns, but this is up one notch above it.
As for the vintage german (gallery) air guns from ad in link, I suspect they are not of very high power.
Kurbeln crank mech. is certainly a thing I never saw, as well as that conical spring like in garden shears but used as mainspring! Stuff like that could very well be presented on this site.
@ Storm 2;
That was the reason for the double-volute spring in those air guns. They could create much greater tension, faster expansion, and thus much higher pressure than a comparable-sized coil spring.
The little spring in your garden shears is a baby compared to those. They could generate nearly-instantaneous pressures close to 1,500 PSI in the syringe.
The usual caliber of those air guns was either 9mm (.355in) or 11mm (.43in). They usually fired the equivalent of a typical lead revolver-type bullet of the time.
In either caliber, muzzle velocity was generally right on 330 m/s (1,000 F/S)- just under the speed of sound.
Muzzle energy in 11mm, assuming a 225-grain “soft-nosed revolver bullet”, would be about 680J or 500 FPE. By comparison, the .45 Colt 255-grain @ 850 = 412 FPE, the .44-40 WCF 220-grain @ 975 = 464 FPE.
So Sherlock Holmes had every reason to be concerned about Col. Moran drawing a bead on him with an “air gun”. “Noiseless and of tremendous power” was an entirely accurate description of one of those weapons.
High-powered, big-bore air rifles like the modern pre-charged pneumatics in .30, .357, or even .50 caliber are nothing new. They’re just the latest iteration of a very old technology path going back to the 17th Century.
cheers
eon
“(…)building(…)capacity for producing drones in mass quantities(…)”
According to https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2025/exclusive-us-army-101st-airborne-division-develops-3d-printed-small-drones-for-air-assault-operations 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) will be testing 3D-printed drones, in order to We are able to print these systems at a fraction of the cost of traditional models, without sacrificing operational functionality,
“(…)MG06/18(…)”
What is this?
“(…)MG08/16(…)”
What is this?
A typo…
I cannot but agree with Kirk.
Stupid questions: Can the I-23 be redesigned to use a metallic ammunition belt? If so, can it be given the fittings of a GPMG similar in layout to the Madsen-Saetter or the FN MAG? Oh, don’t forget to have a remote trigger device on the tripod along with a periscopic sight…
Those are all things of limited use to the LMG role they were procuring for…
GPMG? Sure; that idea hadn’t been developed, yet.
Great post, sir. Especially the bit about conversation. Actually ‘evolution’ itself is a nebulous concept. We standing at X say we are the ‘goal.’ Actually we are the Vector product of a lot of trade-offs along the way. Beware Whig thinking
We’ve got good language for discussing things like “evolutionary design” in retrospect; what we don’t have is a good way of discussing the process as it happens or as we have hypothesized it ought to be going.
I think the whole of this ought to be framed as “discovery learning”, more than the way we’ve thought of it. I’m not a huge fan of the way we’ve done these things, which tends to drift more towards idée fixe than free and open thought.
If you find yourself rigidly applying the hypothetical techniques of your pre-war notions of what war is like (See: France, WWI–élan as a tactical precept), you are progressing along a pathway constrained by your idée fixe notions instead of openly and freely observing and responding to reality. You can’t impose your ideas and theories on the universe; you have to let it speak first and dominate the conversation.
Ideate these things as conversations, where one side proposes something like the MG08/16, and then reality responds with “Nice try, but not what is needed…”, then the interlocuter suggests the MG13, eventually working to the MG34 and MG42…
It’s not accurately described as evolutionary, this conversation; were that so, the MG42 would have a toggle-lock buried somewhere inside it, vestigial remnant of the lineage it sprang from. You didn’t evolve the mechanism; you evolved how you were using it and the successor mechanisms that were part of the conversation.
Were the process evolutionary, the M16 would have been that Winchester Mini-14 look-alike, not a whole new mechanical system lineage based on entirely different principles. If you look at the “tactical thought/how we’re gonna use this” line, there is evolution in terms of gradual change flowing in from users, but… That’s also pretty questionable. The only people who really realistically dealt with the lessons of WWI were the few visionaries in the Soviet Union and Germany who recognized that the era of the great big honking infantry cartridge were over, and that the dawn of the intermediate cartridge was happening around them. The US has been in denial of this essential fact since that era, and that’s why they went back to the delusional NGSW over-powered idiocy for the individual weapon.
If you followed the loops and whorls of the whole thing, it would look recursive as all hell, with ideas about tactics and weapons living entirely separate and bizarrely isolated existences. Note how the same ideas keep coming back, again and again… Bullpup rifles in the UK, SPIW/OICW idiocies in the US. You could probably find like examples in most cultures and nations around the world.
There’s no real vocabulary for discussing this stuff, so nobody really discusses it at all or studies it. Yet, it exists…
I could argue that all GPMGs today are the descendants of the French Darne M1915;
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/medium-machine-guns/darne/
But odds are that most of the GPMG designers from the 1930s on had never even heard of it.
And of course nobody other than the Germans understood the right way to build and use a tripod under it. And now even they have forgotten that little detail.
IMHO, developed Darne M1915s, with belt feeds, on proper tripods and with crews who knew what they were about, would have been an unpleasant surprise for the Wehrmacht in June of 1940.
But that’s just me.
clear ether
eon
I suspect that you could have lined up the Wehrmacht on one side of a field, the French on the other, had them swap weapons across the board, and once the Germans transferred their command/control tools over to the new vehicles… You’d have seen exactly the same results in 1940 that we saw historically. Hell, the Germans would have probably done even more damage than historically, given the technical edge possessed by a lot of French armor.
The French lost the Battle of France not because of their weapons, but because of their leadership and military doctrine. They didn’t have a GPMG, even though they easily could have, because they didn’t have the tools and institutions to either recognize the requirement or develop one.
Which is the lesson of military failure down through the ages, I fear. It’s not the weapons, it’s the men and the men commanding them. Cultural features are actually far more influential than the material, when it comes to winning wars. Examine the difference between the French infantry and English, wherever they fought each other during Napoleonic times. The Brits ability to calmly pour musket fire into attacking French columns was what did in Napoleon’s ambitions on multiple battlefields, breaking the entire concept of Napoleon’s infantry tactics into red bleeding ruin.
Culture/technique is more important than the toys, although putting inferior tools unsuited to the tactics/operational intent of your troops is a perfect way to lose them all.
“(…)GPMG? Sure; that idea hadn’t been developed, yet.(…)”
Einheitsmaschinengewehr concept was developed by Oberst von Merkatz working at Gewehr-Prüfungs-Kommision no later than 1916, I do not have English language reference, but hopefully machine translator will work correctly enough for you at https://www.maximgun.de/deutschland/mg-16/
Nonetheless, it might not be what Československá armáda was looking for at that time, but few years later they provoked Zbrojovka Brno to develop ZB 50 http://modernfirearms.net/en/machineguns/czech-republic-machineguns/zb-50-eng/ which was so arranged that it could be used either from bi-pod or tri-pod (see illustrations)
Several people had the basic idea; what they didn’t have was an institution like the German military taking the idea up and actually developing on it, then fielding it for full validation. Which was solely a German thing, in our history. I’d argue that they’re the only ones who ever really did so; everyone else has just paid lip service to the idea.
“(…)Can the I-23 be redesigned to use a metallic ammunition belt?(…)”
I do not know, Maxim machine gun could be, as shown by Konekivääri M32-33 https://www.lsb-malta.com/en/articles-news/news/37/a-rare-finnish-m32-33-maxim.htm as suggested by designation it was developed around 1932..1933, so it is interbellum technology.
The metallic belts aren’t really a huge problem for the guns; the production of the belts in sufficiently precise consistency for general issue is the problem. Not to mention, doing it affordably.
One of the big things people miss about the German belt system for the MG34/42 family, especially here in the US, is that the belts were not disposable. They weren’t just “reusable”, either: The damn things were highly valued weapons components, and there were tools included in the armorer’s chests to work on them. In US practice, you rarely reused belts in combat; that was a training phenomenon. I’d have to go back through my references, but from what I recall, the whole “set up belt-reloading station” wasn’t something that US forces expected to do, outside a training range environment. I do recall reading several oral histories of machinegun units where they emphatically stated that use of canvas belts that weren’t factory loaded was to be avoided in combat. Lots of attention paid to inspection of belts and so forth, though.
I forget what the basis of issue was with the German metallic belts, but their entire setup was “loose cartridges in boxes, load belts with handy machines included with armorer’s kits in rear areas/lulls in combat…” Allied setups were usually more “factory packed belts for combat”. The belt-loading machines were more for emergency use than anything else.
As with a lot of German practice, the Allied ability to produce copious amounts of factory-made material made a huge difference, right down to the little things like belts and feed devices.
Practically every canvas-belt-fed MG can indifferently use a metallic belt (see, IE, the Browning M1919). But it can’t use the full advantage of a metallic belt, that’s the possibility, for the bolt, to push the cartridges directly into the chamber, instead of having first to pull them backward, to extract them from the belt, and then push them into the chamber. To be designed from the start to use metallic belts simplifyes the MG’s internals (mind however that not all the metallic-belt-fed MGs work this way. IE the PK extracts the cartridges backward from the belt).
While straight feed simplifies MG it is also less energy efficient, hence less reliable under adverse conditions and also makes weapon heavier, due the need for the longer receiver.
I beg to differ. Apart for the fact that none ever noticed the scarce reliability of the FN-MAG or the MG42/MG3, a pull-push feed has more actions that can go wrong and pieces that can wear/break. Also, if there’s the abstract possibility for a pull-push action to present the round perfectly in front of the chamber, it doesn’t seem it had been ever really used. Even the PK has a feed ramp, so the action is not really shorter than in a straight feed design (compare, IE, the action of the PK with that of the RPD).
None is complaining about MG-3/MAG because they have not tried PKM. Ukrainians consider MAG to be decent, but it needs considerable attention to keeping it clean and belt pulling power lower than PKM, which leads to more problems with guns that were not properly cleaned and/or dirty from use (look how trenches in Ukraine look…).
As for comparing it with RPD… RPD uses 7.62×39, which is much shorter cartridge than 7.62x54R, leading to shorter receiver. If you want fair comparison, look at PKM vs MAG.
Also, from my personal experience I can say that MG-42 is junk compared to PKM. It was revolutionary idea (well, MG-34 was, but MG-42 improved on it), but it was first GPMG, hence it was soon obsoleted, first by MAG, then together with MAG by PKM. While MAG has some advantages over PKM (it is better vehicle mounted gun), MG-42 has effectively none.
Thing is, with double feed extraction of round from the belt is done at peak energy level of the bolt/bolt carrier. Belt pulling is also done on bolt/bolt carrier going back, again at peak energy level. Added to that belt pulling and round extraction will dump energy from the bolt/bolt carrier, while in straight feed this has to be contained by the spring.
When going into battery bolt in double feed has only to push round into chamber.
Now with single feed you need stronger spring and/or longer receiver to dumb bolt energy. On return bolt also needs to push cartridge out of belt, only with the power of the spring. If spring becomes even a bit wonky… problems begin.
To make matter worse, both MG42 and MAG use MG34 feed system where belt is only pulled half the length when bolt is going back, and half length on the back stroke. That means that particular feed will be always inferior to the one on PKM, since again you are only relying on the spring power to do the job.
Again, this has all been noted in the Ukraine, here is interview with Ukrainian weapons instructor about problems with MAG and why PKM is not only best MG in use, probably the best infantry weapons, used as reliability standard to which very few other weapons can compare. Only in Russian, but interviewer, Konstantin Konev is well known weapon engineer with quite impressive resume:
https://youtu.be/ssNRrIN6A6s?si=nByieuUw11ZXEie9
PS. Both Browning and Maxim played with straight feed and decided on two-stage feed. And M73/M219 tank MGs problems started when someone who considered himself smarter than Browning introduced direct feed to those…
All due respect, Bojan, but… I see some issues with what you’re saying about the PK-series guns.
First off, if your design is predicated on having the recoil stroke’s maximum energy used to pull rounds out of your belts for presentation to the loading mechanism, I think you’ve got some other problems you need to be looking at in your belt feed mechanism. The cartridges should absolutely not be that hard to strip off the belt, and if the links are designed such that filth and corrosion can munge things up, you’ve fundamentally screwed things up somewhere along the line. Reusable belts are all well and good, but when “reusable” starts to mean “prone to feed issues”, then you need to be doing something else with it all.
The PK strikes me as an excellent MG, perhaps an ideal one as a man-portable LMG-role weapon. Where I find fault with it is the same place I find fault with the MAG-58; on a tripod or other mount, at ranges beyond 1000m. For that, the MG34/42/3/52 is a superior tool, because the rate of fire matters out at that range. As well as the tripod you’re firing it off of. The PK is simply not the tool I’d want to be using for those long-range fires; rate of fire is too low, and the usual run of tripods I’ve handled for it are not at all up to the precision or adaptability I would want.
They are, however, far superior to anything the US Army has issued since the 1930s, which is the same basic tripod we put under the .30 caliber Brownings. Something I will never, ever understand, but there we are.
The PK is a damn fine weapon, but I do not see it as the “best thing ever” for GPMG features. The MG34/42 family is optimized for use as a heavy MG off a tripod; the PK is optimized for use as an LMG, to my mind.
The real problem here is that the MG is truly a “lost art” weapon; nobody has relied on their machineguns for real infantry support since the WWII Germans, and it shows. Nobody bothers to study and understand what the weapons need to do, or how the Germans solved the problem; they all hit that “too high a rate of fire” thing, and stop… The reality is that that rate of fire was there for a purpose, and it made the German MG teams lethal out to ranges we no longer even try to fight at with small arms.
I suspect that the ongoing “drone revolution” is going to do a lot to strip away all the fire support accessories that the infantry has gotten used to, which may actually lead to a requirement to go back to the MG as a primary arm. I sit here considering what the hell you could do with a good MG team, a solid pre-registered set of targets, and a drone team integrated in with the command and control element. They’d never even see you firing; it’d all be nearly indirect fires. Automate the T&E, and it would be as though you were using command-detonated off-route mines on fish in a barrel…
Uh, no.
The Ukrainians rightly consider the PK better for SAW job and, when you see a MG gunner walking with the infantrymen in Ukraine, he’s always carrying a PK. It’w a simple question of weight.
BUT the same Ukrainians greatly prefer the MAG and MG3 for firing from fixed positions, and gladly show their trences littered with the unbelievable amount of cases those wepons had been able to fire.
Yeah, the pull-push designs pull the ammo for the belt at peak energy. A job the push designs have not to do, because they only pushes them. Extracting ammos from a belt is a more energy consistent job than extracting them from a magazine. The possibility of a link being so deformed to prevent extraction forward is really scarce to make up for the adjunctive complexity of pulling ammos rearward before.
How to pull the belt is NOT linked with how the bolt operates. With push designs you can have the belt pulled in EVERY phase you want. It’s a pure design choice. The designers of the MG42 CHOSE to have the belt pulled half on opening and half on closing because, due to the very high ROF, they wanted to have a smoother movement of the belt. The M60 designers chose to “simplify” that phase, having the belt pulled only on opening (like in the PK) With abysmal results.
As already said, in 1896 Hotchkiss patented the metallic belt. So, without paying them, none could have used it until 1916. At that point there was the problem of having already tons of MGs made for canvas belt, and tons of already made canvas belts for them. So there was the problem of compatibility. Even the MG34 belt was made so that it could be used to feed the MG8. The Push-bolt Hotchkiss Mle 1914 was every bit as reliable ar the Maxim designs, despite having to directly push out of the belt-tray a difficult cartridge as the 8mm Lebel.
Kirk, uber rifle modern next gen weapon should maybe be some kind of grenade launcher that has projectiles that explode in the air, against proverbial drones, like mini Flak 88…
Weight issues will kill that idea dead, dead, dead…
It’s my suspicion that the actual counter to drone attack will be exactly what we’ve done with every other class of new weapon: The battle will be between other drones designed to go after the drones that are targeting the troops, just like with tanks and fighter aircraft.
The way I think it is going to go is that every mobile element will have to be accompanied by “bodyguard” drones targeting anything that might be a threat, whether recon or attack, and that stationary sites will have things like CIWS protecting them. Mobile CIWS systems will likely come into use, but then the battle will be between HARM systems going after their active sensors and spoofing forcing their passive ones to expend ammo unnecessarily.
I suspect that the way we ought to be going is in drastically downsizing and adding sensor systems to the current seaborne CIWS, making their ammo cheaper. 20mm is just totally egregious for drones; you could probably go to a .22 Long Rifle and still take out what you need to.
I do not see grenades ever being the basic weapon loadout for rifleman-class soldiers. As ancillary accessories? Sure; they work a treat. Primary weapon? Nope; you still need bubbas with rifles that can lay down direct fire close-in.
I remain dubious of the proposition that we’re ever going to get enough chemical energetics into even a 30mm grenade “package”. Potency seems to come with increased sensitivity, and if you manage to get around that, then maybe. You’re still going to be limited in terms of fragmentation, however. 30mm will never outdo 40mm, which will never outperform 50mm… Andonandonandon.
As eon pointed out, physics is a thing.
If you can find a copy, look up a book titled “War in the Atomic Age” by Capt. Walter Karig Jr. (U.S. government 1948). Yes, the same Capt. Walter Karig who worked on Victory at Sea and wrote several Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries.
In it, his prediction of a Third World War fought in 1975 revolved around navies composed almost entirely of large atomic-powered submarines, and air forces composed of giant atomic-powered “carrier planes”.
What they all had in common was that they were all carriers of large numbers of jet-powered, unmanned drones, that could function as fighters, bombers, or guided missiles as needed. All controlled by the “mother ship”. none of the drones had any place for a human pilot at all, and so were a lot smaller than even a WW2 P-51. (Keep in mind Karig was thinking in terms of tube-type electronics, too, not printed circuits and microchips.)
The nearest thing to “tanks” were drone miniature subs with retractable caterpillar tracks, about the size of the old Alvin. Forget “island campaigns” as per Iwo Jima; they would crawl up out of the water, onto the beach, en masse and commence firing with machine guns and developed flamethrowers. After they got done with an island, a lot of its sand was fuzed to glass, as were any enemy garrison that happened to be there when they arrived.
The point is that Karig’s “vision” called for very few actual personnel, and those being the operators who remote-controlled the drones, plus the techs who maintained them until they were launched and after they RtB’d- if they didn’t just go off in the enemy’s faces.
It may have been written three-quarters of a century ago, but it’s probably a more accurate representation of what The Next War will be like than anything any more recent author- or “think tank”- has come up with.
(And no, nobody is getting my copy.)
cheers
eon
According to April 1945 issue of Radio-Craft https://paleofuture.com/blog/2023/1/26/this-robot-tank-of-1945-was-a-look-at-the-future-of-war
Up to very recently a remotely-controlled tank was not feasible. Now that television has sufficiently advanced, it becomes a rather simple matter to direct a tank—or a number of tanks—several miles right into the enemy’s positions without sacrificing a single life. These television controlled tanks can be turned into a mighty powerful weapon if produced not only in sufficient quantities but also built to survive battle conditions.
Of course, then as now you have to worry about ECM- jamming.
Hence the autonomous UCAV. The Navy’s pipe-dream that “The F-35 won’t have to ‘dogfight’, the pilot will rather manage a swarm of UCAVs from high altitude a hundred miles behind them” is sheerest BS.
If I’m a TGC and I know that one aircraft is “managing” the drones inbound on my decks, I’m shooting that aircraft down first. See Gog (Ivan Tors Productions 1954) for an early SF film example of how this works.
To be combat effective, drones will need to be autonomous- and smart. Small and hard to hit helps, too. So forget the M3 Stuart-sized “robot tank”.
Say hello to Philip K. Dick’s “Second Variety”.
Then get your ass the Hell off the battlefield. Quick.
clear ether
eon
There’s going to be a certain period wherein the autonomous drones dominate things, and the battlefields will be as lethal as our worst imaginings think they are. Then, some bright light will come up with countermeasures, and it’ll be “game on” again. That’s how this works; historical precedent tells us that every weapon or tactic/operational action that comes along which “…makes war too terrible to contemplate…” is eventually superseded or countered by something else that’s equally “too terrible”.
I wish I could calmly mouth the platitudes about how we’ll finally wise up and learn to love one another without envy or greed, but I’m as human as the rest of you, and I know just how flawed we are. I also have my dark suspicions that any organism rising to sentience is going to be similarly flawed, soooo… Yeah. Keep your powder dry, and your enemies closer than your friends. That’s how you survive: By being the biggest, meanest monkey out there, who can fling the most poo the hardest.
Eon, Deal of the century (chevy chase movie) was (also) so foretelling! Even 40 years ago.
“(…)physics is a thing.”
Which you can exploit for you advantage, c.f. https://guns.fandom.com/wiki/High-Impulse_Weapon_System
“(…)battle will be between other drones designed to go after the drones(…)”
SkyDefense, LLC is offering anti-drone drone https://www.skydefensellc.com/
AND
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ukraine-develops-interceptor-drone-for-shaheds-the-telegraph/ar-AA1sEvZ8
Ukraine is developing a drone capable of intercepting(…)drones.
AND
Anduril is offering Roadrunner-M https://www.anduril.com/roadrunner/ vertical take-off and landing operator-supervised Autonomous Air Vehicle able to rapidly launch, identify, intercept, and destroy a wide variety of aerial threats
IMO, current crop of rifles will be there for a while. Because question is not “Is there something theoretically better?”, real question is “Does it fulfills what personal weapon should do?”.
And it does, being able to do what is effectively point defense/attack capability of the infantrymen.
Because I have to agree with Larry Vickers that as much as we like discuss them, rifles they are largely irrelevant at the army level – you could have issue US army in Afghanistan basic non-scoped AK-74s like Soviets used in their war and no result of the battle would change at all, as long rest of US army did not change.
Yes, there might be few (accent on few) more casualties, but even at plt level there would be no real noticeable change.
Rifles today are basically like swords in late medieval period, everyone talks about them and compares them, claiming that one or other is better on the basis of the slimmest shreds of evidence, while majority of killing was done by other weapons, often far less glamorous than swords.
Bojan said:
“Because question is not “Is there something theoretically better?”, real question is “Does it fulfills what personal weapon should do?”.
And it does, being able to do what is effectively point defense/attack capability of the infantrymen.”
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. They’re running the goddamn validation experiments in Ukraine and elsewhere as we speak, but the idjit class here in the US that came up with the excresence that is the M7 NGSW refuses to make the observation.
The real issue here is that they don’t understand what is going on out in the real world of modern combat, which is the same damn thing that’s been going on since about 1918. Which they keep ignoring.
The individual rifleman is basically a local security element for the real killers, the crew-served weapons and the guys with the radios. Now, the guys with the drone controllers, as well. Thinking that the individual rifleman is somehow a key and crucial element of battle past that point is insane, and not how things are working out in the real world.
Sure, you can have your DMR guys and some half-ass unit-integral snipers, but the real killing past the 400m band is and should be planned to be, the crew-served weapons, the indirect fires, and now the drones. The individual rifleman is just not capable of doing what needs to be done, not and still be able to do what he needs to do close-in.
A carbine-class weapon is the ideal thing to hand an individual rifleman, supplementing him with medium MG fires, organic tools like the Carl Gustav, and everything fire support in general. That’s the way this works; if you’re planning on your riflemen playing Sergeant York or Audie Murphy, you’re delusional and need to be sent away to a nice home in the country, where you won’t have keys to the doors.
The upshot here is that the people we’ve put in charge of our armies are clearly out of touch with reality, and have somehow missed all this. I suspect that a large part of it stems from the fact that the insurgent fight in Iraq and Afghanistan was not “peer-level competition”, and the requisite lessons were not really there to be learned. Still, these people are incredibly obtuse and unobservant. They’re also completely unable to grasp the fact that their own ideas of how to make war are intrinsically flawed; they believe that the supporting arms that their concepts rely on will always be there, and that is sadly apparent as “untrue”, based on Ukraine.
“Czech them out”? Deliberate closing pun?
@Kirk : “The French lost the Battle of France not because of their weapons, but because of their leadership and military doctrine. They didn’t have a GPMG, even though they easily could have, because they didn’t have the tools and institutions to either recognize the requirement or develop one.”
-> Regarding the GPMG : the French did have one ready from the shelf. It only required an order to the Darne company.
https://smallarmsreview.com/the-darne-machine-gun/
Which orders never came…
The French Army, as a cultural phenomenon of those years, exhibits the exact same issue I see all around us to this day: The insane belief in the primacy of “experts”. If you were not a graduate of one of the grande école institutions in French society, you could not possibly know what you were talking about. It was the rule of authority, and you could only get authority through having all the proper credentials, produced by having been run through all the “right schools”…
This mentality is what’s killing our civilization, right now. The little boy who points out that the Emperor is buck-ass naked and waving his wing-wang in our faces is ignored, shouted down, while the “expert” weighs in and says with imperious authority that if you can’t see the clothes, then you’re stupid and unqualified to discuss anything clothes-related.
This is the mentality that buried the French in 1940. It’s also the reason why their economy does not produce, and why they have a problem keeping young French people at home. The “experts” are mostly idjits; just like the products flowing out of the sewers that are our Ivy League schools.
I suspect that there are going to be some rather ugly “learning experiences” in all our futures, thanks to these idjit types. They seem to grow up in flaccid peacetime civilization the way bedbugs and cockroaches do, working their ways in and strangling any sort of pragmatism and objective observation, because the people making such things aren’t of the certified and credentialed “right sort”.
I like the definition of “expert” I once heard from a businessman that had grown his own company from himself to a few hundred employees: “A dumbass with a briefcase who can tell you everything about your business but how to keep it running profitably…”
His kids brought in MBAs to run the place when he died. They’re bankrupt, now.
The Darne didn’t have a quick exchange barrel, something even magazine-fed LMGs usually had at that point. That’s why even the infantry models were more aerial MGs lent to infantry than infantry MGs.
That’s revealing. They had the barebones of a GPMG, but even the designers didn’t think to make the last step to have a complete one.
This all goes back to the fact that they did not have a good idea of what was going on in combat; thus, they did not have even a glimmering of a concept of what they needed in terms of “machinegun”.
The Germans paid attention; they thought, they acted, they iterated designs that eventually produced the MG34/42 family.
I think a lot of the French problem was that they went into WWI with a set of preconceptions and prejudices that they hammered into how they saw what was going on, and how they reacted to actual conditions. Their ideas further influenced the US, which was why we took up the ludicrous “walking/marching fire” idea that the French had already given up on by the time we started training troops…
The real reason the French didn’t have a GPMG going into WWII was that they didn’t have the mental framework or map to even ideate the need for such a thing; their pre-WWI ideas led to things like the Maginot Line instead. The Germans took a far more pragmatic approach, and decided that the way forward was dynamic, the path of the Stosstruppen…
What it comes down to is culture; every culture has its foibles, its go-to solutions. The French, I suspect, were traumatized by two major defeats in the 19th Century; first at Waterloo, and then in 1870. Because of this, they came to a conclusion that what they needed was the “expert solution” that Napoleon initiated with all of his schools. What they missed, unfortunately, was that they were ossifying their social structure more than anything else, and now you need a paleontologist to go digging through their institutions to figure out how things went wrong and how they’re actually working.
The sad thing is, we here in the US have this unfortunate misconception going on about German and French culture; we think the German educational system was this rigid thing of ridiculously stultifying discipline, and that the French were so liberal in it all… We brought over from the French that insane worship of the credentialed “expert”, sanctified by the “right institutions”, and never looked at what was actually going on. The Germans were the pragmatic flexible ones, open to the talents; they even copied the works of the French officer, Captain André Laffargue. His self-published pamphlets were captured in French trenches by the Germans, analyzed, and put into rapid effect. The French command structure? Ignored him; continued with the suicidal frontal attacks that destroyed the French armies and led to the mutinies.
It all comes down to culture. If yours doesn’t allow for clarity of vision, discussion, and synthesis of pragmatic observations…? You’re wrong, and you’re going to lose your wars. And, a lot of lives.
Imagine a war where André Laffargue was listened to by the French high command, and the French actually put his ideas into effect, rather than slaughtering their hundreds of thousands in pursuit of validating their obviously mistaken ideas of how to fight. Which came down to ego, mostly: “We’re right!! We’ve been to all the right schools!!! Look at our diplomas, from all the right places!!! Our credentials are impeccable!!! How dare you question our qualifications to run a war!!!! You are a traitor!!!!!”
You can see the same sort of credulous worship of the “expert” going on all around us, today. It will be the death of civilization; the slaughter of the trenches in WWI was a symptom, and a warning. Not to mention a factor in our further self-destruction.
After the Napoleonic wars, the French military prestige was even higher than the German one after WWII. They had been efeated, yes, but only by coalitions, and after having beaten them multiple times. France was still seen as the leading military nation in Europe.
The rapid defeat in the Franco-Prussian war came as a shock. But it could still be attributed to contingencies.
France prepared for the next 40 years to wash away that shame, and defeat Germany on the field, fair and square. But, in the meantime, Germany consolidated its position as the most industrialized country of Europe AND it had not large overseas territories to disperse it’s efforts. To match its army material-wise was becoming increasingly hard, and you see the first signs of French “wishful thinking” to make up for that (see, IE, the supposed salvific qualities of the “élan” of the French soldier).
WWI had been an hard lesson. Without the help of the allies, it would have ended like the Franco-Prussian war. In the end, Germany lost because it had been strangled economically, not defeated militarily. “worse” the French obtained all that they wanted (even the attempt to prevent Germany would ever recover economically). The public opinion felt they had no reason to fight another war. Especially another WWI-style carnage.
Interwar preparations had been the first time France prepared for a war knowing to be weaker than the enemy. The French knew they could win only in the long run, resisting on the field and waiting for the economic blockade to win for them. Another WWI, but without senseless frontal assaults. A “comfortable” version of WWI. That’s all they could sell to their public opinion.
And that led to even more wishful thinking. There were no contingency plans. Since they needed a static war, WWII would have ben a static war. Since they needed, for their strategy to work, for the Germans to not pass trough Switzerland or the Ardennes, then the Germans passing trough Switzerland was deemed “improbable” and the Ardennes “impenetrable”. And practically all the French reserves had been placed so that they would have been rapidly encircled, or too far to be of any help, had one of those predictions proved wrong.
French cultural maladaption goes back even further, really.
Absent interference from the French Crown and the malevolent aristocracy, there was a solid chance that the Industrial Revolution would have begun in France, not England. They choked that to death under a spate of confiscatory taxes and other measures, which led to Britain taking it all up. Lots of people don’t know that, and it’s an illustrative counterpoint to the idea that “things just happen”. It’s forgotten that the Jacquard loom was a French “thing”, and that there had been an effort at industrialization in France a few decades before it got going in England. The choices made under the French governments prior to the Revolution were horrible; all geared towards centralized static authority… Which was probably why the Revolution happened, and why it got as bad as it did.
After that, France was always on the back foot. Imagine the effect on history had those repressive measures on French industry not been taken, and you had the Industrial Revolution centered in France, not England… The Revolution might have still happened, but it would have been a far different affair.
The French have had this fascination with authoritarianism and “received wisdom” going down the years, and if you look at things through a certain cast of eye, squinting…? You can make it out as a continuing theme, going back ferfreckin’ ever. It’s always the expert, the government, never the organic welling up from beneath. In the British experience, there was very limited “control from above”; it was all chaotic, all the damn time. They basically conquered themselves an empire in a fit of absent-mindedness, with very little planned-from-above oversight or goals. When they did get around to “planning”, by “experts” of course, the whole thing collapsed within a generation.
The Germans, when you look at it, were sort of a half-way house between French overcontrol and British laissez faire. The French ideal in education was that every French classroom, around the world, would be teaching from the same page on the same book at the same time, every single day of the year. The Germans were, despite the image we have of “Prussian rigidity”, a hell of a lot more flexible and pragmatic about it all. The US copied French practices in education, called them “German”, and completely missed the far more liberal techniques and attitudes personified by the von Humboldt brothers who were the actual progenitors of German education.
The lesson that control freaks always fail never seems to strike home, which I suspect stems from the fact that the control freaks always, always seek control of the narrative above all else, and then lie their asses off about everything, covering up their failures.
If you encounter a control freak, the smartest thing you can do in any context is get away from them, and do your best to minimize their impact on your life. You go into a situation with a set of preconceived notions and ideas, you’re doomed to failure. Examples abound everywhere, should you bother to look.
If you watched interview you would have known that MAGs die in trenches because any mud in it = dead MG. PKM takes it much better.
Also, PKM belt, because it is more solid is much more soldier proof and M13 links have been damaged and lead to stoppages.
There are more to it, in the interview he notes all failures he and his soldiers have encountered with MAG.
He is honest, he notes that “with better training it might be better MG”, but PKM already is better, because it will most often work where other MGs (and not just MGs, PKM is probably most realiable weapon overall) fail.