Well, the RoF is reduced to 1200 for the MG3 and 850 for the MG74, also the wood parts are switched to plastics. Both are chambered in 7,62x51 NATO. The later-produced MG42 got chromed barrels or so and did not overheat as much as the former ones.
A skilled team can switch the barrel in ~3-5 seconds, so the timeframe for the assault is not that great. ^^

Not that great, but better than what you'd get with Water-Cooled MGs as long as their belts held out.

Sort of like how the Japanese figured out when the Garands were out by that distintive PING they make?

He was an old school tinkerer/inventor actually, I believe he started out as a draftsman and tool and die maker. He did invent some dental prosthetics though, also smokeless powder and a chain link bicycle drive plus a bunch of other stuff. He was from Sangerville Maine orginally the next town over from where I grew up.

One of the big advantages the M-16 has over the AK-47 is ammo weight you can carry about twice as much ammo for weight with the m-16. That's not just important for the individual soldier but for your supply lines. Fewer kilos of ammo means more food, fuel, medicine, and mail on your supply vehicles.
Amateurs talk tactics.
Dilettantes discuss strategy.
Professionals know logistics win the war.

The "Ping" only happened if the Clip (Which stayed in the rifle until empty), hit something hard on the way down, from what I understand. M1-Garand shooters confirm/deny?I remember hearing about the Viet-Cong calculating how much a person had to carry down to how many tins of sardines in order to carry enough ammo.

Now, what's the advantage of the M-16 over the AK-74? (OK, other than the M-16 itself being lighter weight?).

Note: I often go gun nutty at times with all this stuff, but know that wars (Old skool ones at least) are won or lost on logistics. I was reading about the fights that happened between Patton and Monty over supplies and figured out what was going on behind the scenes pretty damned quick in my head. Grandpa drove truck in the war, except when he was hiding under it (Or fixing the engine, as we later found out from his records. He never said anything about that part for some reason.).

You have to change the barrel on all MGs doing sustained fire. Otherwise they melt.

It's not just the gun that's lighter the big advantage of the M-16 is the Ammo is lighter. The 7.62x39 is about 50% heavier then the 5.56x45. The 30rnd clip for the AK also weighs a ton. You can carry about twice as much ammo in loaded clips for the same amount of weight with the M-16.

yeah, but the ak74 fires 5.45x39mm ^^

Which drops like a stone at ranges beyond 200m..
Not that much jungle fighting happens past that, but it matters a good deal out in the mountains and sand.

Minor Quip:The M-14 is not a bolt action, you're probably thinking of the 1903 Springfield that was in service until the end of the Vietnam era.

Another minor quip: M2 was designed in 1918, and was first produced in 1921. The M2HB version was produced in 1933.

I think it something like 10 M-16 clips (200 rnds) weigh only a bit more then 3 Ak-47 clips (90rnds) According to US military philosophy a trained soldier should get about as much use out of an assault rifle loaded with a 20rnd clip as one with a 30 rnd clip in most situations. So by that wisdom your troops arn't just carrying twice as much ammo it's more like three times the ammo.

Of course in RPG's even the most inexperienced newbi has near perfect fire discipline and doesn't seem to mind carrying around huge guns with double extended magazines all day. As long as it means he doesn't have to spend an action to reload. Then again your going up against things that have to be shot a lot more then once to get them out of a fight. Trolls, drones, dragons, surprisingly hardy and dedicated nightwatchmen.

IIRC, with the Garand, it does got PING! when you're out. It's been a while since I fired one. It only holds 8 rounds anyway, so...


The big advantage of the M-16 over the AK in my opinion is effective range. I can hit a plate out to 600 yards with the M 16, but not with an AK pattern rifle. So what it means is that in a long range engagement with open terrain and especially involving infantry formations, the M 16 can wave and laugh while hitting the AK guys, and the AK guys can't effectively strike back outside of a certain range.

Yeah, it's that heavy AK bolt warping the barrel (No, seriously, saw a slow-motion version of an AK firing. The barrel TWISTS when it fires.).

Of course, the two weapons are designed on different ideas. Assault Rifles are Rifles (Sort of) that can be Light Machine Guns (Sort of).

The M-16 is designed to be a rifle first, and a LMG second. Accuracy over suppression.

The AK is designed to be an LMG first, and a rifle second. Suppression over accuracy.

There's also the fact that the AK is so easy to use a child can do so. (And they do.). Can the M-16 make that claim? Would it want to is the next question.

Finally, the M-16, being light weight due to aluminum and polymer furniture, isn't so good in CQB, is it. The AK? Steel and wood, worst case, you can use the damned thing as a club and put a load of hurt on someone. Also better for bayonets.

But I'm heading back to WWI with talking about bayonets.

Back to magazines, I wish we could get a statement about the M22/M23 family if their mags are interchangeable, along with the AK-family in Shadowrun. Also, the Ares Alpha/Beta/Sigma series of rifles, same deal?

EDIT: Hey, does the M22/M23 family have a AR-Version as well, like the M-16 family has the AR-15?

The sound is mostly the product of the clip hitting the ground, but it doesn't take a hard surface for the sound and it does make a bit of noise leaving the rifle as well. Here's a good video I dug up of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2RtWXU0lJg

Kinda hard to hear on a battlefield I'd bet, but yeah, it's a "Oh drek, outta ammo" bad sound!

Funny story, GI's learned that the garand's clip ejection caused the enemy to figure the guy was out of ammo and poke his head out to get a shot off. GI's started carried empty clips to toss to get the enemy to poke their heads out and rather than getting a shot off, the enemy got their heads shot off.

Kalishnakov designed a gun for close work that simple people could use that required very little maintenance. For in closde fighting in the golan Heights the Israelis proved the Uzi was better than the AK. The M-16 is not so simple but it works far better at longer range. From talking to friends who were in Iraq they said the biggest problem they had in training the locals was the idea of accurate aimed fire. They were addicted to the pray and spray school of marksmen ship made easy by the AK despite the fact that american marksmanship proved out almost every single time.

when the french were in Chad in the late 20th century against Lybian incursions they were stunned by how many 'fights' were packs of men loaded into jeeps rushing at each other shooting wildly and hitting nothing. A few passes at French positions with the european troops aiming fire disauded them from going any where near french posts for much the same reasons

Well M-16s are nicknamed the Mighty Mattel. Made with all that plastic, light weight and a manageable recoil, it's kind of like a toy gun. Snow-fox is right though the M-16 is a professionals gun. It's optimized for a technical and well trained military. The AK was built around an entirely separate design philosophy.

Not to mention the "Power Level" that was actually the sight adjustment for the few people that bothered to use it.

I've heard from both US and Canucks finding so many permanently set to 300-metres.

When it comes down to it, it's the right tool for the right job.

But, yes. One (or three) good shots are better than thirty bad ones.

Which is why we need a military career Barbie complete with customizable SOPMOD M4 and different camo outfits and LBEs for various mission requirements.

You mean the rear leaf sight? It actually makes a difference how you adjust that thing. I keep mine set to 100, and not P, for most of my activities, but the hilarious thing is that you can adjust it for distances that are well out of the effective range of that rifle. I guess those values are mostly for group suppression fire.

Well, according to some insurgents a fellow I know talked about, it's the setting for how many infidels you will kill with your rifle.

BTW, firing from the hip, holding the barrel down with his off hand to try and keep the muzzle from raising too high. I've barely held a longarm and know better.

Hell, these are the people that held off the Russians with accurate fire from WWII British BOLT-ACTION RIFLES! Just goes to show what happens to discipline when full-auto is introduced, eh?

Are you talking about the Lee-Enfield again?

I thought they used whatever they can get their hands on (Mosin Nagant mainly)?

During the 80's the mujadeen used a variety of weapons, lee enfields being one of the most common. They were supposedly good marskmen cause the cost of bullets made it so they needed to make every bullet count. The influx of AK-47s came from the egyptians, and Chinese (iirc). Most of this was purchased via Saudi Princes "donating to charities", and the CIA. Read up on a book called Charlie Wilson's War. It was basically the U.S. us doing to the USSR, what the Chinese and Russians did to us in Vietnahm. The AK-47 was more readily available than the Nagant, which by the 1980's was probably in a warehouse designated for a 5th line unit that also include T-34s.

Of course.Yes, but it was famously the Lee-Enfield. Even made a comic about that fact (Titled ".303", so it's hard to find, damnit!).

They got those because there were a lot of them around that area for other people to sell them that dated back from WWII usage (From India and Africa mostly), as well as parts of the Middle East that were affiliated to the British Empire/Commonwealth that had them in bulk as well.

Communist Russia, less so. But there were a lot of Mosin-Nagants as well, as those things are damned near everywhere!

Either way, they had good rifle discipline as mountain troops. But, give a full-auto, and suddenly the "Bullet Hose" effect comes into play. The part I don't get is that Dad and Grandpa knew how to use sights properly (And you had to use the sights on a Bolt-Action!), why the hell did it suddenly turn into a Phaser-Like "Power Meter"?

The SMLE's were probably surprlus smuggled in from Pakistahn. Once the Afghan's had AK-47's they could resupply from the Soviets adding other issues to the Soviet problems that the AK using Vietcong didn't give the Americans in 'Nam.

interestingly listen to Arlo Guthrie's 1995 "When a soldeir makes it home" which draws analogies between the two wars.

To hark back to the 5.7mm rounds for the P-90, the blue tips are 40 gr 'V-max' rounds normal brass tips at listed as 27 gr "lead free bullets. in gmae terms probably the difference between normal rounds and ap (and yes I know the lbue tips are not ap in RL but it is a difference in bullets that most games are not going to going, mabe the old 1et ed max power rounds.

Likewise smaller rounds like the .25 can come in legal hollow tips, that expand out when they hit, sacrificing penetrating power for increased damage as kenetic energy transfers to the target. That was the original EX rounds were-not EXPLODING as much as bursting to create bigger holes- and yes I had guys htinking there really were little bomb rounds. oy

I explained explosive rounds as having a bit of gunpowder in a hollowpoint with a detonator tip. Shaped charge to defeat armor, but the bullet had no penetration (The flimsiest material in the way set off the round.).

EX-Ex rounds used higher grade explosives.

For my non-gun nutty group, it worked well enough as an explanation, and they didn't think they were shooting grenades any longer.

SMLE is a great rifle to talk about.

Yeah, it is. And with the Longarm Registry dead, it might be purchasable in Canada again.

Too bad they butchered the old girls with the magazine laws, stipulating that rifles can only hold 5-rounds. Luckily, a number of gunsmiths made 5-round magazines for SMLEs, so Canadians didn't have to suffer "Cripple Clips" for the most part.

I can't believe you guys didn't get a specific exemption for SMLEs, as I'm told Australia did.

The SMLEs and similar were largely locally manufactured by individual gunsmiths (locally being in Pakistan iirc). Pakistan has some amazing gunsmiths who can reproduce virtually anything.

I've always wondered where these guys got their barrel boring and threading machines. They didn't get WWI era US surplus as those were not really exported. They likely didn't get the WWII era us surplus as these were much bigger and wouldn't really work out in anything but a modern industrial shop. And other than that such tools would be dang expensive, and of course hand threading or boring a barrel is impossible.

Aside from rather porous borders, I strongly suspect they made a great many of them. It's not like John Wilkinson just ran down to the shop to pick up his, after all.

Really? Remember that rifling was first done in the late 1400s or early 1500s. I suspect that they didn't use CNC machine tools to do it.
Here is how you could do it on the really cheap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ws7wklMoL0 (Sorry about the background "music")

The point being made, I'm told that often there is no rifling.

In reality I'd expect that there are shops in a back alley that make the barrels if you pay for a high-quality gun. It's not rocket science, though there is a capital investment required. I've read that there are about 10 barrel makers in all of Europe (UK included) but many hundreds in the US.

http://www.riflebarrels.com/articles/barre...ifle_barrel.htm
http://www.border-barrels.com/articles/bmart.htm

How much of Australia lives in places where a rifle would be handy to survive?

Most of Canada is in Urban areas near the US, where the Police and Military keep us safe from the scary 'Mericans. Northerners, like myself, OTOH, know that the wolves are at the door. Literally at some houses.Machining equipment isn't that difficult to make or even mass produce, especially if you know how. And in the 1900s there were books upon books on how to do it.

The machine shop equipment I had at my high school was well over a century old, damned near indestructible, and, according to my Father (A Machinist), capable of manufacturing rifles and pistols with the right types of metals. Those, of course, were never stocked. (We used soft metals to keep the parts lasting longer and cut down on costs.).

The hard part isn't the tools, it's the trained personnel to run them. And if you're willing to take a quality control hit, those are easier to find/train.

Wouldn't the Pakistani army have the facilities to make/repair SMLE's ? It was a British colony in WW2 and it would have been their standard rifle at independence. They would not have wanted to import all their weapons.

It was part of India briefly before independence as well, so the britsh might have left those machines with India. However, if any were in pakistan after that is a big ? All in all I'd say that there are or were so many SMLE's running around after WWII that they could be bought for pretty cheaply. Simial to the AK-47, you can get those for like $40 a piece in the Somalian arms market.

Side note on the AK-47's, not all are equal due to the fact that producers, materials and tolerances varied significantly amongst the countries that produced them.

Yeah, whereas the SMLE was almost always well made, unless it was a knock-off from somewhere else.