>Squad Automatic Rifle
>20 round magazine
What were the Americans thinking? How was this supposed to be effective? Don't get me wrong, aesthetically it's one of my favorite guns but it always seemed impractical to me. How many rounds of ammo or magazines did the operator have to carry? Post BAR pics, vids or stories
Other urls found in this thread:
youtu.be
quora.com
twitter.com
It's a world war I gun designed for the same niche as the chauchat t. all my forgotten weapons knowledge, those monitor rifles are neat though
It was better than nothing.
>How was this supposed to be effective
in ww1? as being gun decade ahead everything else, fucking lmgs of that period had 20 round mags most of the time
>How many rounds of ammo or magazines did the operator have to carry?
says in first link if youd be so kind and ask google, we have threads for your cancer
It was first put into service in 1918. Look at it's contemporaries and their magazine sizes, portability, and the fact that most infantry of the time were using bolt action rifles.
>hey guys let's take a gun made back in the day of five round internal mag bolt action rifles and judge it by the standards of today when 30 round box mag full auto guns are standard and the support guys get belt fed machine gun which no one had even thought about back then
>WWI
>No belt fed MGs
So close yet so far.
I read.something about the Japanese fearing the bar gunners more than the HMG gunners because the BAR was more mobile, and they never could determine where placement was.
The BAR is neat because as far as I know, it was the only gun actually designed for walking fire. Its ergonomics are designed for hip firing while slowly advancing with a bunch of other guys.
>The BAR is neat because as far as I know, it was the only gun actually designed for walking fire
The BREN is even more neat and was far superior at walking fire
But was it actually designed for walking fire?
Not that one man could carry and operate all day and shoot aimed from the shoulder
That wording of that post seems to imply any sort of belt fed, as opposed to the more portable ones of today.
>Squad Automatic Rifle
Nope. That wasn't what it was supposed to be at all.
>Vickers Gun - over 100 lbs combined weight, 3-man crew, deployed at the company level
>BAR - 20ish pounds, 1-man crew, deployed at the squad level, could fire and maneuver
You don't see the advantage of having a conventially laid out auto-rifle in the squad in an era where everyone had bolt-action rifles? Even in WW2, with the Dinner Plate 28 and Bren around, it was still the best gun to fill it's niche.
I don't know why idiots have to make this topic every week
The Bren and the DP were significantly better guns; the WWII era BAR was significantly heavier than it needed to be for what it offered.
It was a rad as gun for marching fire tactics, once you try to shoe horn it as an actual dedicated LMG it's pretty lacking compared to later contemporaries.
Would have made a great counter sniper in certain situations, couple Nam vets I charlt with have described some times they would have really benefitted from having one. But fuck carrying it far outside of the wire
Apparently you can respond to my post twice and still not read what I was saying there; being that in general there were belt fed machine guns during WWI. Because the post being replied to is worded in a way that can be taken generally.
The Browning Automatic Rifle, if we're talking about the Second World War (which is what I assume, since that's where its faults really start to show,) is the result of American lethargy. The gun is antiquated by the Second World War, this can't really be argued. However, even then, just about everyone else who was using a derivative of the BAR had a much better, and more modernized, version of the weapon.
>open bolt
>precision fire
Saw a full giggle one on GunBroker a few weeks back for $8k. Had to resist going to the bank to get a loan for that thing.
You right smug anime faggot, I was conflating the BAR and that HCAR counter assualt rifle thing together in my mind
only 8k what were you thinking not buying that one and flipping it ?
He didn't want the Omega Man hunting him down for it?
wut
Here is something to think about: The original WW1 BAR was in full and semi. Imagine if they kept that and simply mass produced them into WW2. America would have had beat every other country to the assault rifle punch if they just focused on making the bar lighter and reliable over those 20 years instead of making it a "light support machinegun"
no
the BAR is quite inherently heavy as fuck
even with the lightest everything it's still gonna weigh a lot more than a Garand due to that massive receiver and the locking design
The M1 Carbine had way more potential for being the first American assault rifle, hence those M2s with the giggle switches in Korea
As ever, the reason the US army got stuck with that piece of shit is that somebody on their Ordnance Board was a crayon eating retard who didn't like Lewis guns.
Lewis gun weighs 30 pounds though
Lewis is a faggy ass name anyway
The Lewis is actually a functional LMG though.
DP couldn't be easily shoulder fired and had stupid pan mags that were slow to reload and awkward to carry. I'm also fairly sure that the Soviets didn't even use it at the squad level, it's more of their 1919/MG-42/Vickers equivalent where it was atrociuously suited for that role. The Bren you could make an argument for and it'd probably win most categories except for the fact that top-feed mags and offset sights aren't very ergonomic. I just don't understand why the BAR gets shit on by people that mislabele what it was actually used for, but no one ever ever says anything about the fact that most Kraut infantry didn't have any squad-level suppression weapon or that both the Bongs and Soviets didn't have an air-cooled belt fed in significant numbers.
I still don't understand the point you're trying to make. Are you Implying that because the BAR existed, that the US didn't have any belt feds in WWI? Because it used both Maxims and Vickers the same way everyone else did.
That was kind of how you did a light machinegun back then, 20 or 30 round detachable box mags.
See Zb.26, 20 rounds of 7.92mm Mauser, and the Bren, which derived from it, 30 rounds of .303 British, these were considered rather excellent for their era.
If it was belt-fed, it would probably not be used as a light support weapon.
Just fire very short bursts, ideally while someone else complimented your bursts (so two LMG gunners could be fairly effective, taking up slack from each other while the other reloaded, and stuff like that).
The Lewis Gun, with its much roomier pan magazine, was considered, but some higher up person fucking HATED Lewis for some reason, and insisted the US Armed Forces go with the BAR instead of the Lewis Gun.
Looking at the Russian DP28, it had a fairly roomy pan magazine as well, but it wasn't without problems, and it had this poorly thought out design detail where the recoil spring was fit around the barrel, fine for a small caliber handgun, REALLY bad for a full powered machinegun. They would change this eventually.
>Don't get me wrong, aesthetically it's one of my favorite guns but it always seemed impractical to me
Thing about that is that around WW1, when it was adopted, it was more practical in general, lighter and more dependable.
For WW2, Ordnance decided to bolt a bunch of useless shit onto it and give it a rate of fire selector. The former added a bunch of weight (to an already fairly heavy gun) and was of questionable utility, and the rate of fire reducer liked to break sometimes, and was bothersome to fix, as well as having no reason to exist.
Putting a bipod on the BAR was a good idea, but the bipod they put on the A2 was just really fucking bad.
An inherent flaw to the BAR itself was its magazines, they were kind of flimsy and not 100% dependable. Not to Chauchaut degrees, but they weren't rock solid.
>20lb rifle with a full-power cartridge
>"assault rifle"
assault rifles are designed to be effective in close combat by definition
>hence those M2s with the giggle switches in Korea
The M1 carbine was originally designed to be a select-fire weapon! They cut that feature out because they wanted them produced as quickly as possible :(
Bruh in WWII it was doctrinally used as an LMG; that's why we stuck on the goofy bipod and the mag funnel.
As an LMG it is not so great, it was a kludge of a gun being forced into a role it wasn't designed for.
The same applies to the Thompson, it didn't make it to the trenches and hovered around until America decided it needed guns again and bought them in great numbers. It was expensive and heavy and outclassed by other SMGs.
It's strange how they were the first to adopt as standard a semi auto rifle but the rest of their small arms stayed rooted in ww1 development until war actually started
Nothing practically portable.
You had """portable""" machineguns, complete with fucking water jackets, but it wasn't until 1934 when the first practical GPMG was developed.
Nevermind that you had shit like canvas belts and metal feed strips in most beltfed guns in WW1, shit which was just barely practical for a stationary emplacement, and was just woeful if you tried to be mobile.
now that you mention it, that is indeed quite strange
The post I replied to seemed to imply that there were no belt feds at all.
eh, not that weird.
Kind of the same problem the French have traditionally of adopting new systems too early.
We had things that worked and no pressing need to make them better or cheaper for decades because we didn't need all that many of them, and then we needed a whole lot of them and that's what we already had available.
Part of that was that the US Army didn't actually have all that much in terms of budget by that time.
They made the leap to a semi-automatic battle rifle, but that was kind of it for a while.
Initially the M1 Rifle could very well have been chambered for the new .276 Pedersen cartridge, which was a good performer and well liked, but adopting it for rifles would mean losing ammo commonality with machineguns and marksmens/snipers rifles.
If they wanted to adopt the .276 Pedersen cartridge, they would very much have had to build an all new ammunition stockpile, trial for some other new rifles, and trial for new machineguns, something they just couldn't afford to do.
Thus they settled for adopting the M1 in the .30-06 cartridge, the US Army already having enormous stockpiles of M2 Ball from WW1, and this letting them share ammunition with their other rifles and machineguns, as well as have ammunition commonality with other branches, like the Marines.
You basically had General McArthur stepping in and putting his foot down, saying it doesn't matter how amazing the new cartridge is, because that's money they just don't have, and the M1 will still be really good in .30-06 (which it was).
Squad Automatic Weapon
Automatic Rifle
Light Machine Gun, Those are the categories the BAR fell under. Pick one tripfag
Current bid != reserve
or it was like an OOW Postie
A automatic rifle is not a light machine gun. Read a book. Preferably one more advanced than Yurtle the Turtle.
it’s lighter than almost any other machine gun of the time, fires a nice (and plentiful) round, has an alright rate of fire, and is practical to fire either from the shoulder or from the hip
compare it to its contemporaries:
chauchat - abomination
MG 08/15 - still meant for a 4 man crew, also weighed 40 fucking pounds
Madsen gun - slightly bigger magazines at 25-30 rounds, admittedly just as good as the BAR but wasn’t produced in .30-06 so the US would have had to buy ammo or get it custom produced which would be even more expensive
Many countries without the budget to produce an LMG proper would disagree with you, tripnigger
And they ended up phasing them out pretty quickly to be replaced with the M60 or the FN MAG depending on hwo it was so
>w-well, once you stop talking about the time period relevant to the thread they stopped using them
the FAL isn't relevant to the time period of the thread to start so
>the period of time in which countries used automatic rifles as SAWs
>irrelevant
>what is an HMG?
>What is an MMG?
>what is an GPMG?
>what is an LMG?
>What is a SAW?
Are you retarded?
The thread was specifically about the BAR brophesticlese.
And yeah, everyone who used them only used them for a very brief period. They were never popular in Europe, and they were supplanted by the MAG or the M60 in Canadian/ANZAC service pretty goddamn quick.
The L2 and the C2 are footnotes
Then you must've not read a dictionary or the definition of machine gun tripfag
>A machine gun is a fully automatic mounted or portable firearm designed to fire bullets in rapid succession from an ammunition belt or magazine, typically at a rate of 300 rounds per minute or higher.
If its going to be an interwar "assault rifle" its better to be heavier than lighter desu, the controllable FA battle rifles didnt show up till post war sans fg42.
It has a 20 round mag because a 30 round one in 7.62 is way too large to work from a prone position.
Only way around that is to have the mag on top, and look how fuckhuge those are.
WALKING FIRE.
I'm quoting the implications of
>the support guys get belt fed machine gun which no one had even thought about back then
in that post. Or did you not read it?
A decade after I started browsing here and I still don't fucking know what != means even though it's barely used anymore
>an LMG proper
Oh, so then there IS a difference? So I'm right then, they aren't the same thing.
Is not equal to.
It's a coding thing
The fact is everyone with beltfeds used them in a largely HMG or MMG role except for the germans.
Nearly everyone else used box magazine machine guns at the squad level.
>ordnance department decided
>either request a new weapon and waste money
or
>make do with what you got.
The M1918A2 was pushed into a role it wasn't the best suited for, but still did well in nonetheless. Save for burning out the barrel from extensive use and the utter garbage bipod, it did the job.
samefag
I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing the wording that seems to say "WWI had no belt feds". If that post had said "light and single man portable belt feds" that'd be something different, now wouldn't it?
Heston loves BARs. A lot.
Exhibit A that tripfags should be blanket-banned from Jow Forums
>A automatic rifle is not a light machine gun
In WW1? Yes it was.
