[Spoiler] Machineguns

PeterZ
Alas real life means that the thousands of people needed to deign test manjfacure store etc guarantees some berk will flap their lips and...other nations hear about it, lol

Best you can do is have maybe a year or two of tight security provided it's all kept close and not in action
Ie limited production
But to equip all your military...security risks rise exponentially

And, sorry to say this but it's true, a great many squaddies ain't that smart, they NEED a lot of training with more advanced weapons, otherwise, problems happen....
note that at least when the army is being well run...hm yeah lot of caveats there! Lol...anyone with a lick of gumption or skill will be promoted above basic private if possible.
If there is something dumb or dangerous you can do with equipment, it's guaranteed "Private McPeabrain" will try it...which can be really bad with weapons....eeek!

SilverbladeTE wrote:Alas real life means that the thousands of people needed to deign test manjfacure store etc guarantees some berk will flap their lips and...other nations hear about it, lol

It really doesn't matter if the details get out or just a rumor. In OTL, hundreds, if not thousands, of inventors, crackpots, and corporations spent thousands of man-hours trying to develop auto-loading pistols and rifles in dozens, if not hundreds, of places. Some of those efforts resulted in "state secrets" like "Poudre B" and the Labelle rifle. None of them remained secret for any length of time.

If someone is experimenting with auto-loading firearms, they WILL learn about full-automatic operation. It is easier to build a full-auto firearm than it is to limit fire to one round/trigger pull. The only thing Charis can do is to stay ahead of the rest of Safehold and have a better, more effective, select fire weapon in service first.

SilverbladeTE wrote:PeterZ
Alas real life means that the thousands of people needed to deign test manjfacure store etc guarantees some berk will flap their lips and...other nations hear about it, lol

Best you can do is have maybe a year or two of tight security provided it's all kept close and not in action
Ie limited production
But to equip all your military...security risks rise exponentially

And, sorry to say this but it's true, a great many squaddies ain't that smart, they NEED a lot of training with more advanced weapons, otherwise, problems happen....
note that at least when the army is being well run...hm yeah lot of caveats there! Lol...anyone with a lick of gumption or skill will be promoted above basic private if possible.
If there is something dumb or dangerous you can do with equipment, it's guaranteed "Private McPeabrain" will try it...which can be really bad with weapons....eeek!

More than privates needing more training to use and maintain hardware - good hardware allows you to do things you never did before, or could do before. That means lots of field trials under lots of conditions to learn a new device's limitations and capabilities, and integrate it into doctrine.

SilverbladeTE wrote:PeterZ
Alas real life means that the thousands of people needed to deign test manjfacure store etc guarantees some berk will flap their lips and...other nations hear about it, lol

Best you can do is have maybe a year or two of tight security provided it's all kept close and not in action
Ie limited production
But to equip all your military...security risks rise exponentially

And, sorry to say this but it's true, a great many squaddies ain't that smart, they NEED a lot of training with more advanced weapons, otherwise, problems happen....
note that at least when the army is being well run...hm yeah lot of caveats there! Lol...anyone with a lick of gumption or skill will be promoted above basic private if possible.
If there is something dumb or dangerous you can do with equipment, it's guaranteed "Private McPeabrain" will try it...which can be really bad with weapons....eeek!

Theemile wrote:
More than privates needing more training to use and maintain hardware - good hardware allows you to do things you never did before, or could do before. That means lots of field trials under lots of conditions to learn a new device's limitations and capabilities, and integrate it into doctrine.

No argument. However, there is nothing any potential enemy can deploy quickly and in secrecy that will defeat or even seriously inconvenience Charis. Nahrmahn and OWL will get enough of a heads up to prepare. That includes time enough for the entire design to full deployment process.

Deploying the automatic action in any form before there is even a need for it simply increases the already high and getting higher temptation to engage in offensive war. The only argument I can see is if the Visitation was truly Schueler and they want to prepare for a hot and heavy world war.

Daryl wrote:It was only in the past year that I found out about my grandfather's use of a machine gun for an aggressive action in WW1 in the Middle East.

He was a sergeant and machine gunner in our 11th Light Horse (mounted infantry rather than cavalry). Much was made of how they succeeded in capturing Beersheba by a cavalry like charge into the teeth of dug in defenders who actually outnumbered them.

Fascinating!

That action got turned into a film called The Lighthorsemen, with a young Mel Gibson in a supporting role as a combat medic.

Turns out that he, his assistant gunner and a couple of local guides were sent out a day before the charge to a wadi about a mile or so off to the side. They had a Vickers, lots of .303 ammunition, water, supplies and canvas to dig in and be unseen.
Just before the charge was called he commenced dropping in continuous enfilading fire along the defender's trenches. Because of the distance it cleared the front sandbags and landed in the trenches, causing the defenders to take cover.

That bit wasn't in the film.

Military historians had for years debated how an apparently suicidal action succeeded, but it now appears to have been solved.

IIRC, the reason for the move was that embedded German artillery murdered several previous assaults. The Light Horse's strategy was to advance to the point where the defenders would expect them to dismount and attack on foot. Instead, they charged, and the artillery couldn't depress fast enough to target them. They were able to reach and storm the trenches.

Having a heavy machine gun in position to provide covering fire would have definitely increased the chances of success.

He would never talk about it except to say that he was involved, but not in the charge directly himself. I suspect that he was troubled by the number of people he must have killed. So yes, a traditional heavy machine gun can be used for assault.

Assuming you can get it in position, certainly. I'd love to have met and spoken to your grandfather.
______
Dennis

Theemile
Regarding practical experience, feed back, product improvements and creating doctrine for such a new weapons....
Oh hell yes! Agree 100%

As said, it's an extremely big issue to provide a military with a large amount of new weapons
You also need to train and equip armourers to service them.

I don't know how big Charis' infantry and Marines are now, but you can imagine the work involved in supplying 10,000 machine guns or so I assume they'd want if not more! Yikes!

I'd assume at least 4 Bren guns, per platoon, and you need spares in stores
Corporals and NCOs given choice of submachine gun or rifle (need a cool head with them and do come in handy when things get hairy)
Medium and heavy machine guns at brigade level where vehicles can take their weight

Realistic training and then combat will show up issues needing to be changed etc
So best if Charis works on it now, in secret as long as they can, takes many years to work the kinks out of weapon systems....the AR15 went from not very good in Vietnam, to excellent (but pricey/needs very good engineering compared to say an AK47)

Another issue I note is OPTICS
a simple 2x30 scope or similar greatly increases hit ratios, thus well worth it

Semiauto pistols make bayonets mostly redundant and indoors etc are much better than a long rifle

All.of this costs a lot of money but Charis has a good economy

Magazines are the real failure point in portable auto weapons once the action has been refined. They were the downfall of the Chauchat, and the major source of failure on the sten/Mp41 (they shared a mag design) producing enough of them to feed the guns you build is also a major exercise in industrial engineering and logistics.

Theemile wrote:More than privates needing more training to use and maintain hardware - good hardware allows you to do things you never did before, or could do before. That means lots of field trials under lots of conditions to learn a new device's limitations and capabilities, and integrate it into doctrine.

Yep.

The ICA was in continual change throughout the Jihad.

The first challenge was understanding the new possibilities that rifles with socket bayonets offered over smoothbore muskets, and Duke Serabor spent a lot of time thinking that through when Charis was expanding its Marine Corps into something that could invade Corisande.

When Chisholm united with Charis to form the Empire of Charis, the Chisholmian Army became the base for the Imperial Army and Serabor got to work with Duke Eastshare the teach the Chisholmians the new stuff. A critical advantage for the Empire was that the Charisian Navy and the Chisholm Royal Army were accustomed to thinking in terms of established doctrine, and understood that doctrine might need to change. The Chisholm Army officers were happily open to what Kynt had to teach them, because their main interest was getting better at what they did.

(It's kind of a subtext that for other realms, "doctrine" was "The way we've always done things ever since we became a nation" and change essentially didn't happen. Cayleb and Sharleyan and their subordinates certainly did their best to keep their opponents in that state of happy ignorance until the Empire was ready to pull the next rabbit from its hat. )

(And Kynt had had a lot of practice in explaining the new concepts clearly and conveying what the new concepts meant in terms of doctrine. The Chisholmin response was likely "He's a Marine and doesn't know shit about deploying and supporting large numbers of troops on land, but that's okay because he knows he doesn't and we can teach him. He does know all about these new weapons, and they are the shit. We can't wait to deploy with them in combat!")

The other complication is that you can teach new doctrine to recruits going through basic, but spreading the word to folks already deployed can be a challenge. Consider the fun when Eastshare was en route to Siddarmark. He arrived to discover a whole new class of rifle - the Mandrayn - waiting for him, and his old rifles got passed to the Siddarmark Army. Had to find at least a day or so for his troops to get and get accustomed to the new weapons, and understand how they had to change what they did to take advantage of them.
______
Dennis

DMcCunney wrote:

Daryl wrote:It was only in the past year that I found out about my grandfather's use of a machine gun for an aggressive action in WW1 in the Middle East.

He was a sergeant and machine gunner in our 11th Light Horse (mounted infantry rather than cavalry). Much was made of how they succeeded in capturing Beersheba by a cavalry like charge into the teeth of dug in defenders who actually outnumbered them.

Fascinating!

That action got turned into a film called The Lighthorsemen, with a young Mel Gibson in a supporting role as a combat medic.

Turns out that he, his assistant gunner and a couple of local guides were sent out a day before the charge to a wadi about a mile or so off to the side. They had a Vickers, lots of .303 ammunition, water, supplies and canvas to dig in and be unseen.
Just before the charge was called he commenced dropping in continuous enfilading fire along the defender's trenches. Because of the distance it cleared the front sandbags and landed in the trenches, causing the defenders to take cover.

That bit wasn't in the film.

Military historians had for years debated how an apparently suicidal action succeeded, but it now appears to have been solved.

IIRC, the reason for the move was that embedded German artillery murdered several previous assaults. The Light Horse's strategy was to advance to the point where the defenders would expect them to dismount and attack on foot. Instead, they charged, and the artillery couldn't depress fast enough to target them. They were able to reach and storm the trenches.

Having a heavy machine gun in position to provide covering fire would have definitely increased the chances of success.

He would never talk about it except to say that he was involved, but not in the charge directly himself. I suspect that he was troubled by the number of people he must have killed. So yes, a traditional heavy machine gun can be used for assault.

Assuming you can get it in position, certainly. I'd love to have met and spoken to your grandfather.
______
Dennis

There was another film about it, 40,000 Horsemen, filmed in the sand dunes of Cronulla in the early days of WW2 starring amongst other Chips Rafferty but using the real light horse for the charge scenes; my uncle was one of them. The rest of the story was somewhat naf, but the charge does stick in the memory. The director was Charles Chauvel, General Sir Harry Chauvel's nephew; one can presume then that he probably had some inside knowledge although his uncle is not mentioned in the film.

Silverwall wrote:Magazines are the real failure point in portable auto weapons once the action has been refined. They were the downfall of the Chauchat, and the major source of failure on the sten/Mp41 (they shared a mag design) producing enough of them to feed the guns you build is also a major exercise in industrial engineering and logistics.

Very true
Unsupported magazines always get crushed in a bit and cause jams
M1 US carbine was actually a very good weapon provided it had a new magazine and was kept clean
Hence US troops just used new magazines and tossed used ones away!

As said, UK did know better, see Lee Enfield and Bren magazines, stamped, angled metal giving rigidity
If we'd used a rimless round it would have been perfect!
Alas, bureaucracy insisted on sticking with rimmed .303, meh

Sten gun was meant as dirt cheap stop gap weapon due to shortages caused by evacuation from France...so it sucked
Again as noted, it's replacement, the Sterling, is a superb weapon with one of best magazine designs ever for its time and influenced magazines ever after

Now if they had just figured out how to make the Sterling less "lumpy" and give it a comfortable carry position somehow lol!

Yes, better magazines cost and require better manufacturing
Guess which Safehold nation has both?

Intrinsically, side and top magazines have less feed issues, since less concern of spring strength as it isn't fighting gravity
Thus Sterling, Owen and Bren were very good



I wonder if the FN P90 magazine system lends itself to 9mm...or maybe even side mounted for rifle calibres??
P90's own 5.7mm round is I think too finicky (high precision and also advanced projectile and powder beyond norms of WW2 era engineering) for even Charis manufacturing, but 9mm round should be no problem
If the magazine isn't too tricky...modified form of P90 in 9mm with large magazine capacity is another possibility...or maybe for later on?
I can imagine a side mounted magazine for battle rifle and light machine gun...but the engineering and practical issues...? That I don't know
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So, L4 based version of Bren gun (reduced weight though due to smaller calibre), and EM-2 rifle in 6.5mm grendel, Sterling or UZI submachine gun, Browning HiPower pistol in 9mm
DeLisle Carbine and a Welrod pistol in .45 as specialist weapons
Modified lee Enfield mk4, cut down weight with same box magazine as EM-2 as marksman and cold weather(high reliability) rifle
QCB version of .50 Browning
Maybe water cooled guns for defence/vehicles
Maybe a general purpose machine gun like FN MAG for vehicles
And a sniper rifle with a properly balanced ballistic design...uber power does not mean "uber accurate"!
Add.in nitrogen filled optics

And so, Charis is decades ahead in small arms!

Now just need to work on new artillery and armoured vehicles....