Machine Gun

Lore & Background

As a class of military kinetic projectile weapons, machine guns are designed to be mainly used as infantry support weapons and generally used when attached to a bipod or tripod, a fixed mount or a heavy weapons platform for stability against recoil. Many machine guns also use belt feeding and open bolt operation, features not normally found on other infantry firearms.

Reader's Guide

Unlike semi-automatic firearms, which require one trigger pull per round fired, a machine gun is designed to continue firing for as long as the trigger is held down. In a military context, the term is used to refer to relatively heavy crew-served weapons, able to provide continuous or frequent bursts of automatic fire for as long as ammunition can be fed. In non-military contexts, it is broadly used to refer to fully automatic weapons generally, regardless of caliber or form factor.

Machine guns are used against infantry, low-flying aircraft, small boats and lightly/unarmored land vehicles, and can provide suppressive fire or enforce area denial over a sector of land with grazing fire. They are commonly mounted on fast attack vehicles, armored vehicles, and on aircraft as defensive armament or for strafing ground targets. Although subdivided into 'light', 'medium', 'heavy' or 'general-purpose', even the lightest dedicated machine guns tend to be substantially larger and heavier than standard infantry arms.

Heavy machine guns are either mounted on a tripod or on a vehicle; when carried on foot, the machine gun and associated equipment require additional crew members. The term heavy machine gun originated in World War I to describe heavyweight medium machine guns, and persisted into World War II with Japanese Hotchkiss M1914 clones; today, however, it is used to refer to automatic weapons with a caliber of at least 12.7 mm, but less than 20 mm.

Did You Know?

• The first successful machine-gun designs were developed in the mid-19th century.
• The key characteristic of modern machine guns, their relatively high rate of fire and mechanical loading, first appeared in the Model 1862 Gatling gun.
• Hiram Maxim's idea of harnessing recoil energy to power reloading led to the Maxim machine gun.
• Many heavy machine guns, such as the Browning M2 .50 BMG machine gun, are accurate enough to engage targets at great distances.