Again you're not understanding my point: it's not that they were not good enough per se, rather that they were staking out a position between a belt few weapon and a lighter autorifle which made it less desirable than say a 6.5mm caliber autorifle for squad use. A belt fed Bren (or ZB-26) at platoon and company led would have been a highly effective weapon for it's role. It is telling that the Germans wanted to do that with the MG42 by the end of the war: relegate it to a special platoon weapon and equip rifle squads with only assault rifles.
For both of these the priority for the infantry in all likelyhood (sp) was a primary service rifle..
But the military logic is inescapable for all nations apart from the USA. WW1 showed that in terms of combat effectiveness machine guns trump rifles by a big, huge, beautiful margin. Therefore the first priority (for everyone apart from the US) was to get adequate machine guns in generous numbers and worry about the rifles in any spare time and with any leftover money.
While that was going on, if bolt-action firepower was inadequate and semi-auto rifles were on the back burner the quick and easy solution was to hand your barely-trained conscript a sub-machine gun to point in those directions a machine gun wasn’t pointing, and go back to worrying about more machine guns. That turned out to work well enough and at no point was an auto rifle the answer to a question anyone other than the US & fallschirmjäger were asking. Even the US seemed to realise that with M1 rifle and M1 SMG their need was for better machine guns, not auto rifles.
Unless you have 20/20 foresight or are desperate to leapfrog (and willing to gamble) it’s probably only when you have good machine guns AND good submachine guns AND OK semi-auto rifles all in respectable quantities that you get to questions about the next level, which is the MG + assault rifle. And compared to that any auto rifle in any mainstream military cartridge is pretty poor, so if you are going to adopt a fancy new cartridge, intermediate in an assault rifle is pretty much the only way to go, unless the Ordnance Board are involved.
If your heart is set on an auto rifle plus LMG, then a lightened cheapened BAR plus one of the developed pseudo-MG BAR versions in your choice of common caliber is probably about as good as you can get without ASB. Robust, reliable, well-developed, plenty of parts and training commonality, your choice of (bigger) box or even belt fed MG depending on how you spend your R&D budget. But it’s not a very practical or realistic choice for anyone, IMO. And while it would be a very strong combination to take into (and probably through) WW2 they would eventually be kicking themselves for heading down a blind alley.
Steyr Schwarzlose 1905-18
Caliber: 8x50R
Muzzle velocity 2000 feet/sec
Cyclic rate: 4-500 rpm
Delayed blowback
20kg [44 lbs] + tripod 19.9kg [43.8 lbs]
A fine example of those
delayed or locking bolts I mentioned which make the mass of the bolt largely irrelevant and benefit in no way whatsoever from a telescoped bolt.
Well in theory a wrap around bolt would add to chamber strength, and direct gasses forward in the event of a ruptured case, etc, but very minor benefits.
That’s true enough, but the bolt on a Mauser rifle, moisin-nagant, MG42, Bren, AK47 or whatever can manage all of those things perfectly well without being wraparound. Handling pierced primers and separated case heads is a basic safety feature of most competently-designed firearms since 1890 or thereabouts, while I’m not aware of anyone using a telescoped bolt in anything other than a plain blowback weapon. There
must be some examples though, because every imaginable thing has been done at least once in firearms. And then again backwards, and a third time in .22LR.