Machine-guns: light, medium, heavy, or sub?

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now it's come to my attention that a lot of you out there are a little bit hazy on the details of the differences between light machine guns medium machine guns heavy machine guns and submachine guns and I was once myself and so I'm here to help now in world war ii i'm going to use world war ii as an example by the way but everything I'm going to say goes beyond World War 2 but it's what I'm most familiar with in world war 2 all the various major warring nations had to answer one question what is the standard rifle round that we're going to issue all our troops standardization is very important if you're going to fight a big war for logistical reasons and they all came to roughly the same conclusion they had to think about how accurate need it be how powerful or stopping power what caliber it should have and all that so forth and if they made that the caliber is too big they'd be really heavy too difficult to carry and you wouldn't be able to carry so many and the recoil will be terrible it would hurt a lot and it would affect accuracy but if you made it too small then it wouldn't be as powerful perhaps would have the range stopping power and so forth and they all came to roughly the same conclusion which was somewhere around 0.3 of an inch the Americans actually used 0.3 of an inch which they called 30 Cal because they're Americans the British used point 303 and Germans use 7.62 millimeters which is exactly point three of an inch I know you thought the world was a metric but you were wrong so you may think that the Americans and Germans therefore had compatible ammunition and they'd be able to capture a load of ammunition and using their own weapons but actually no because there are two ways of measuring caliber in a rifled barrel you've got those grooves and you can measure to the inside of the rifling or the outside of the rifling and yes they had different methods and so even though they were the same caliber they weren't the same caliber and this meant that if you did load the wrong sort of bullet into your gun and you fired it it could do quite a mischief to your gun so they had all sorts of dire warnings to not do that anyway a light machine gun fires that rifle round one because standardization is useful and because also that's just the sort of the power that they wanted from a light machinegun so if you were a british infantryman for instance in a section you would have your rifle and in your pouches on your chest you would have a couple of Bren gun magazines with 303 rounds it and when it was your time to go forwards you might open the pouch take out a Bren gun magazine hand it to your Bren gunner who would then be in a better position to give you lots of covering fire and then you could get in with a bayonet grenades and do your job but if you got cut off you still have that other Bren gun magazine with you and maybe oh you could take the bullets out of that and resupply your own rifle they weren't they were compatible and that was a really useful thing so a light machine gun fires rifle rounds that's one of the things that defines it light machine guns were as their name suggests light the best example is perhaps the British Bren gun you could pick it up you could run with it you can fire from the hip you could fire it from the shoulder aiming it much like a rifle in the case of a Bren gun you could actually also fire it on single shot but that doesn't define a light machine gun and it was designed for use in the section usually at the front of the barrel it had a bipod and you would put that on the ground and lie down or get down into a slit trench and use that to rest the barrel and fire at your enemies giving your rifleman in your section covering fire so a light machine gun is designed to be used within a rifle section and then you pick it up and run forward to the next location and give covering fire to your rifle into the next bit and the next Call of the street or whatever so you have to be able to pick it up run for with it reasonably quickly and deploy it again quickly and start firing and all the ammunition for it you had to carry with you so that's a light machine gun so what's a medium machine gun well a medium machine gun also fires rifle rounds and generally speaking armies tried to contrive things so it was the same rifle round there's a light machine gun again for supply reasons now a medium machine gun is on a tripod of big heavy stable tripod and that would quite often be dug into the ground and weighted down with the sandbags and so forth so it's going nowhere and then you mount the medium machine gun on that tripod medium machine guns were pretty much invariably belt-fed with belts would say children and 50 and they would have a team of guys bringing ammunition to it instead laying in stores of ammunition so you'd have loads of ammunition ready and you wouldn't be able to just pick up this thing and run with it though they're quite big and heavy they're not designed for keeping up with the infantry to the degree that a light machine gun is but they are still firing rifle rounds so the classic example of the medium machine gun would be say the Vickers but also the maxing or maximal or the browning 30 Cal has used by the Americans so you've got a gunner you've got this loader and you've got a team of people supplying supplying ammunition and you could fire sustained very accurately and slightly more powerfully than a light machine gun because it's mounted solidly on a base that's going nowhere you don't take power out of each out of each if you hold a light machine gun to your shoulder and shoot it pushes you back a little bit and just like if you threw it fits or a heavy bouncy ball at a brick wall it'll bounce back quite powerfully if you throw that same bouncy ball at a thin sheet of plywood that's got a bit of give in it yes it will bounce back but not as powerfully a lot for solid brick wall so similarly bullets coming out coming out coming off a tripod that is really solidly fixed in place will be that little bit more powerful as well as more accurate and you can sustain the fire you can keep going and so that's the battlefield role of a medium machine gun so you medium machine guns we set up in in fortifications machine gun nests places that are not expecting to have to move the machine gun quickly of course medium machine guns could be moved forward and set up during a battle and were but they're not as convenient and they're not section machine guns a section would have a light machine gun medium machine guns had their own specialist machine gun units with their own crews and guys whose job was to take the whole thing down pick up the tripod fall it sticking on their backs run with each little bit of the gun and then as a team find somewhere to put it and set it all up again and they will often have surveyors who would measure ranges to things and they would have perhaps Toronto polls planted out in preparation in the field out there so they knew exactly what range the enemy was at so they could they could look on their tripod and look at various marks to to get greater accuracy for range so that's a medium machine gun so what a heavy machine gun well heavy machine gun is similar to a medium machine gun of it it's also requires a mount a tripod or or something maybe it might be mounted on the top of a vehicle and what makes a heavy machine gun heavy is that it does not fire rifle rounds it fires bigger rounds and again all the nations went through the process of deciding on what their heavy round was going to be and again they all came up with roughly the same thing which is about half an inch caliber so there's a big bullet and so running about you can't carry very very many of these really you need vehicles to carry these things around because they're so flippin heavy if you want to carry large numbers of them heavy machine guns had significantly greater penetrative ability and in World War two you could use them for taking out light tanks things like half-tracks for instance were not bullet proof not actually the word even bullet proof to a medium machine gun but they certainly were not bullet proof to a heavy machine gun heavy machine guns were really very effective and the 50 Cal that the Americans used in World War two is still in use today it's a weapon with some of the longest history of continuous use in the world so that's a heavy machine gun they're really big they're often put on aircraft as well for shooting other aircraft out of the sky so that's what a light machine gun a medium machine gun and a heavy machine gun so what's a submachine gun well a submachine gun is below machine gun it doesn't fire rifle rounds it fires some ammunition that is smaller than a rifle round by and large they fire pistol rounds one of the most common calibers is nine-millimeter so for instance the the Schmeisser or mp40 or mp38 machine pistol or submachine gun that the Germans used five pistol round that you could also perhaps put into something like a Luger and the the nine-millimeter would also fit into a British Sten gun for example so a submachine gun doesn't fire rifle rounds but the calibers not the only thing so for instance a tommy gun actually fired at 0.45 caliber so it's actually in terms of the thickness that the diameter of the bullet is actually greater but the round was overall much smaller the cartridge was much smaller it was much lower power if you put a rifle a rifle round into something as compact as a submachine gun you will not be able to fire it accurately just I mean they do that a bit anyway if they tend to gather about and point the ceiling if you're not careful but if you try that with rifle rounds the recoil would be extremely difficult to control if you want to fire rapidly with a small handy thing a submachine gun you don't want to use rifle rounds so they used something akin to or actually pistol rounds so there you have it

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Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 709,597

Rating: 4.9484205 out of 5

Keywords: machine, gun, machinegun, machine-gun, LMG, light, medium, heavy, MMG, HMG, sub, sub-machinegun, submachinegun, SMG, types, weapons, ww2, WWII, world war, two, differences, categories, guns, battle, shooting, rifles, bullets, rounds, ammunition, calibre, caliber

Id: ivYlHU0Zi-I

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2016

Reddit Comments

Is lindy beige actually a moron?

Saying that the bullets will be more powerful for being from a tripod?

Is this a joke?

The level of difference between the two would be virtually unmeasurable.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/SmokeyUnicycle 📅︎︎ Mar 03 2016 🗫︎ replies

10 minutes on machine guns and not one shot of a firing machine gun. Curious indeed.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/tylerdoubleyou 📅︎︎ Mar 03 2016 🗫︎ replies