Em2 adoption

[yulzari]

An interesting point about Bolt/ Firing pin complexity.
Stripping down the Bolt on a Bren Gun, and remember the Taden was essentially a Bren modified for Belt-Firing, was a nightmare. And the Bren is considered to be one of the best LMG's ever constructed. Its reputation for reliability and effectiveness is noteworthy.
So much so that there were two levels of maintenance and cleaning, one done by the troops and one done by trained Armourers. A Bren's bolt had so many fiddly small parts that had to be reassembled exactly that it was beyond the ability the average soldier.

Just because a weapon has a part that is the metaphorical equivalent of a Rubik's Cube does not mean that it will not be effective or Soldier Proof.

Sometimes soldier proof means keeping their inquisitive little digits out of the complicated bits. If it is all buried away it may not have been intended to be cleaned in the field anyway. Viz your Bren bolt bits. Only for armourers as it only needed access if something broke or wore out in which case the gunner had no way if fixing it anyway so stop them playing with it.

What is evident on many of the 19th century guns I have had through my hands is that previous owners have done them no good at all by giving way to the urge to take them to pieces to see what was inside. Often followed by loosing small parts. The best were those who sat untended in some dingy and dirty military dungeon covered in filthy storage grease.

 

[acrsome]

Had a Springfield M1A in .243
That was sweet. Lot less recoil(about 50%) that 30-06 or 308, much flatter shooting.

A number of companies make AR10 clones in .260 Remington, and I find those damned interesting (my 6.5mm fanboyism rearing it's head). I have a bolt gun in .260 already and it's a really fun shoot- external ballistics similar to .300 Win Mag, yet light recoiling- less than .308 by a significant margin.

An interesting Pod is that if the .276 Pedersen round had been adopted for the Garand rifle pre WW2 would we have seen an EM2 type rifle chambered in this round or would the British have developed their own bespoke round as they did in OTL?

Yes, here is what I said earlier:

Ok, .276 Pedersen then. It's pretty ballistically similar to .280, and Made In America. One of my personal fanboisms is the US adopting the Garand in .276 Pedersen as God and the Infantry Board intended. In addition to making the Garand even more awesome, we might still be using the cartridge today. At the muzzle it's not terribly ballistically different than a modern 6.5mm Grendel- I'm not sure about the performance at range, though. Anyway, have the US adopt the .276 in some capacity and that could easily be a universally-adopted cartridge for NATO that would be very appropriate for the EM-2.

Having just read up a hell of a lot during this thread, I've been thinking about exactly this scenario and I'm pretty close to being able to write such a TL. Or rather, I could certainly write the gun porn version of such a TL, but my grasp on political implications in NATO, etc., is shaky. I might have to have a stout butterfly net so I don't do something incomprehensible.

In my vision, the US still wouldn't adopt the EM2 but would have a .276 version of one of the M14 prototypes. Most of the rest of NATO would have a .276 FAL, and a only select few would adopt the EM2. And yes there would be hella teething problems with the EM2.

 

[marathag]

So much so that there were two levels of maintenance and cleaning, one done by the troops and one done by trained Armourers.

See Browning M2HB and setting headspace&timing. Not everybody could do it right

 

[fastmongrel]

I can see two problems with the Pederson round

No1 it was designed to work well in a Toggle locked weapon that had a comparitively violent extraction and had quite a taper on the case compared to most rounds. Is this going to cause any problems with MG feed.

No2 Its basically the same size as 7.62x51 I dont have any case volume info but they look very similar.

I dont think theres any advantage

 

[sonofpegasus]

Sorry missed the earlier post so well and truly Ninj'd.
I wonder how much effort the guys at Aberdeen Proofing Ground made to ensure that the EM2 and FAL were properly set up, cleaned and lubricated (was there a technical team from Britain and Belgium? It is also very obvious that none of the trials rifles match up to the in service Garand which had of course been completely de-bugged and I suspect were specially selected 'Pattern Esxamples'

 

[fastmongrel]

Stripping down the Bolt on a Bren Gun

I wasnt a Bren gunner we had the 7.62 L4 conversions we were trained in its use and I did fire the L4 a fair bit. I cant ever remember needing to do anything other than the most basic field strip and clean they were clean guns with very little fouling though I dont know if the .303 Bren was as clean.

 

[acrsome]

I can see two problems with the Pederson round

No1 it was designed to work well in a Toggle locked weapon that had a comparitively violent extraction and had quite a taper on the case compared to most rounds. Is this going to cause any problems with MG feed.

No2 Its basically the same size as 7.62x51 I dont have any case volume info but they look very similar.

I dont think theres any advantage

Well, similar to the .280, there were several iterations of .276 Pederson. The initial one- and the one used in the rifles that the Infantry and Cavalry Boards recommended- was much closer to an intermediate round than the later iteration which had the case volume increased significantly. (Admittedly, like the .270/.280, it still wasn't really intermediate.) In fact the later cartridge base was similar to that of the .30-06. That later one is the one you're thinking of that was getting nearly as powerful as 7.62mm, but AFAIK there weren't even ever any rifles made for it- the decision was made to go with .30-06 before that could be done. I could be wrong on that, though. I think this is all mentioned earlier in this thread.

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if this was all part of the effort to kill off the .276. The Ordnance Corps could then say "Well, if the this .276 is really just as powerful as the .30-06, and no longer has all of the advantages that the Infantry and Cavalry Boards loved, why not just keep the .30-06?" And MacArthur agreed.

So if a .276 was ever going to be adopted IRL, yes, it probably would have been that overpowered version. But we're talking about fantasy gun porn, here, not reality.

I know less about the case taper and machine-guns. It's certainly not especially more than other tapered cases I've seen (it would need a curved magazine though) and tapered cases are generally considered to increase reliability in self-loading rifles, at least regarding extraction. This is one reason the 7.62x39 is tapered, and the RPD wasn't known to have problems AFAIK. But regarding the finer points of MG function, I claim a moderate amount of ignorance. I can speculate that it might lead to belt kinking...

 

[Obergruppenführer Smith]

Incidentally:

A recent video of Ian disassembling and firing EM-2s. Haven't watched them yet, but figured I should post for our mutual benefit.

 

[marathag]

I know less about the case taper and machine-guns. It's certainly not especially more than other tapered cases I've seen (it would need a curved magazine though) and tapered cases are generally considered to increase reliability in self-loading rifles, at least regarding extraction.

Less taper than 303, and that worked fine with MGs.

 

[Obergruppenführer Smith]

4.85mm rifle: