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What the hell is a GPMG or General Purpose Machine Gun?
I'm reading a debate where they're making it sound like it's impossible to define.
I'd always thought it was a single gun that could be employed as a light and medium gun with light being from a bipod and medium from a tripod.
Light and medium being defined as roles rather than guns.
In this paradigm, a heavy machine gun is one that does sustained fire; which is just more volume than a medium gun is expected to do.
What makes a heavy gun gets blurred considerably by large caliber guns like Ma Deuce. M2HB doesn't do a lot of volume, really.
In WW2 the US heavy MG was the water-cooled M1917, medium was the M1919A4 and the light role was filled by the BAR. Notice they're all in .30-06?
That's because the role is caliber independent.
That's why an M60 or M240 at the squad level is an LMG, and so is an M249.
An M249 can be mounted on a tripod and employed as a medium gun too; yet it's in 5.56.
The M249 can be considered a GPMG because of this.
It's slippery.
It also depends on the mount. Bipod = LMG. Light tripod = MMG. Heavy tripod/semiAA tripod = HMG.
ReplyDeleteAnd things like the ammo feed and barrels.
It's very sketchy, really.
I generally think of a GPMG as an air-cooled, belt fed gun in a full power rifle caliber 6 5-8mm that can be shoulder fired from a bipod, used on a heavy tripod with t&e and vehicle mounted. For further precision a GPMG on a tripod is "heavy role" and a machine gun in the 12.7 to 14.5mm
ReplyDeleterange would be "heavy caliber".