AHC/WI: Germany reverse engineers Entente weapons/artillery

It seems that the holdups with FN were because of Colt not wanting to sell them the licensing rights, and FN dragging their feet in general. The Poles only took about a year (depending on what month they started making their own technical package) to produce a few prototype guns, and somewhat longer to produce workable guns. Still, if Germany decided to reverse-engineer some captured Meunier carbines to 8 mm Mauser starting in mid-1916 (when they were first used, and presumably first captured), how long would it be before they could start fielding rifles?

A good gunsmith hand building a few working tool room examples would probably take months, then it takes a few months to convert from say American Fine threads to UNF threads then building a production ready gun with all the thousands of measurements laid out would take a lot longer. Even drawing up Blueprints could take a team of experienced Draftsmen months. Then the manufacturer has to spend a few months making their first working production sample then the Army has to test it and it might have to go back to the factory because say the wrong steel was used for the Receiver and it failed after 3,000 rounds. Then there is a few months more whilst a production line is built or converted then there is a few months whilst the Army trains the men in its use.

Its probably much quicker to use the original weapon as an inspiration. Much like say the Sten which was knocked up and in production very quickly because the MP18 gave the designers a head start in knowing what worked, saving a lot of time re-inventing the wheel.

After WWII the British tried to build a working copy of the StG44 and failed miserably the Germans were masters of sheet metal stamping (and were less worried about the weapon lasting 20 years of service) something which British industry had a lot less experience of. It was found that simply getting a car manufacturer used to making body panels and getting them to make a stamping mould and banging out a receiver was not possible. This wasnt a unique British problem every country who tried stamped metal guns postwar failed, witness the problems the Soviets had with the early stamped AK47 recievers.
 
It's notable that nobody made very serious efforts to break the trench deadlock by introducing a better infantry rifle.

Instead, all the combatants learned to incorporate more and heavier artillery with better fire control methods; unit-level weapons suites including light machine guns, rifle-grenades or grenade throwers, mortars, flame throwers and infantry guns; and improved close combat weapons such as trench shotguns, hand grenades and SMG.

Keeping infantry from being slaughtered by MG and artillery while advancing was addressed with some success through improved section tactics and the introduction of tanks.

The bit they never solved was the need to rapidly and responsively displace artillery, reserves and supplies forward fast enough to maintain the strength of the attack and achieve a proper breakthrough.

The Meunièr rifle cannot substitute for any of the factors listed. No single weapon can. No combination of weapons, unless accompanied by proper doctrine, can have decisive effect.

What Germany (and the Entente) needed was a better learning curve. They needed to more rapidly grasp the requirement to abandon the "line of ubiquitous riflemen supported by field guns" concept, and to substitute an integrated, heavy artillery / infantry weapons team method.
The exact models of weapons used won't matter nearly as much as adopting the methodology itself.

Each of the combatants has the capacity to implement these new methods using indigenous weapon designs. Some are slightly better than others, but all will work tolerably well.

So IMHO the notion of reverse engineering foreign weapons is a blind alley. The real question is, how to get any particular Army to recognize the true requirement, rapidly develop doctrine for it, and field indigenous weapon systems suited to implement it.

The nation that does these things successfully, and significantly earlier than its opponents, acquires a real advantage.

Historically, though, all the combatants fumbled their way along at broadly similar rates. By 1918, all but the AEF had reasonably effective methods, although the French were handicapped by the losses they'd already suffered. And the AEF was at least learning pretty quickly...

The Germans, IMHO, had a somewhat faster learning curve, but they weren't dramatically ahead, and they faced serious material and manpower disadvantages.
 
I wrote this idea with the impression that Germany would still introduce better weapons, this thread would just have to do with their equipment and industry. I was writing a challenge earlier to run the German economy from 1916 efficiency enough to last into 1920, and one of the ideas was to retool factories along American mass-production methods and identical master drawings. I was just thinking that Germany might want to switch to producing better weapons while they were at it, and that some of those weapons could be reverse engineered (or at least based on) captured Entente weapons that the Germans found superior. For example, if Germany tests split trail artillery like the 75 mm Modello 11, and decides they want a similar artillery piece, Germany would have nothing comparable in production or development. Would they be best served by copying the Modello 11 as closely as possible and putting an FK 16 barrel on it, or by designing a new gun almost from scratch?
 
The Mp3008 was a cheap and nasty rip off of a gun that was a cheap and nasty rip off of the MP18 and made a Sten look like it was hand made suit by a Saville Row tailor

The Lisunov Li-2 was a license built DC3 with some changes to suit Russian metric fittings and winter use, first built in 1938 in a factory built with US help.

The Mikulin M17 was a licence built BMW V1 with some changes to suit first built in 1930 in a factory built by the Germans.

Apart from the horror that was the MP3008 I cant see that anything matches the OP.

The Germans copied the Russian 120mm mortar.
The Germans copied the cavity magnetron
The Americans tried to copy the German MG151
The Germans copied the bazooka
 
Its probably much quicker to use the original weapon as an inspiration. Much like say the Sten which was knocked up and in production very quickly because the MP18 gave the designers a head start in knowing what worked, saving a lot of time re-inventing the wheel.
If it's faster and it still provides weapons with all the advantageous features of the Entente weapons (in this case lightweight split trail carriages for artillery, simple and reliable long-recoil semi-automatic rifles, and modern, simple, lightweight mortars), then I suppose that would work fine.
 
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