Machine Guns - Forgotten Weapons

P90: FN’s Bullpup PDW

July 2, 2021 Ian McCollum 62

FN began developing the P90 in the late 1980s, actually preceding the NATO requirement that it would eventually compete for. The idea of the P90 was to develop a weapon for secondary troops to replace […]

L-34 Sampo: Aimo Lahti’s Rejected Masterpiece

June 30, 2021 Ian McCollum 39

Finland’s standard light machine gun going into the Winter War was the LS-26, a gun which did not succeed in field use. It was complex and cumbersome, and Finnish troops quickly replaced it with captured […]

Vickers for Interwar Tanks: The Class C/T Machine Gun

June 25, 2021 Ian McCollum 19

The Vickers company developed several versions of the Vickers machine gun for aircraft use during the 1920s and 1930s, but they also worked on armored vehicle versions of the gun in the 1930s. Between 1930 […]

The Drama and Mystery of the Goryunov Machine Gun

June 16, 2021 Ian McCollum 32

This guest post authored by Andrey Ulanov. In the minds of Western people, the inhabitants of the USSR may sometime look like ants; a large mass working towards one great goal without personal ambition. This, of […]

DS-39: The Failed Soviet Machine Gun of World War Two

May 26, 2021 Ian McCollum 40

The Soviet Union recognized the need for a modernized machine gun to replace the Maxim, and in the late 1920s Degtyarev began work on a “universal” type of gun. This would be air cooled, use […]

The Long Road to the DP-27

May 9, 2021 Ian McCollum 28

This guest article written by Andrey Ulanov. The Russian military first got acquainted with light machine guns in 1904, on the brink of the Russian-Japanese War. After having tested a few Madsen LMGs, the Army […]

.303 Lewis Gun at the Range

April 25, 2021 Ian McCollum 13

I really enjoy the Lewis Gun, and it’s been a long time since I had a chance to put some rounds through one. This particular example is a Savage-made gun marked USN, and I think […]

Type 97: Kijiro Nambu Adapts the ZB-30 for Japanese Tanks

April 22, 2021 Ian McCollum 35

Introduced in 1937, the Type 97 was basically a copy of the ZB 26/30 pattern light machine gun adapted to use in Japanese tanks and armored cars. The adaptations included mounting an optical sight to […]

Australia’s FAL-Based L2A1 Heavy Automatic Rifle

April 21, 2021 Ian McCollum 47

Many the nations that adopted the FAL (or L1A1, in Commonwealth terminology) opted to also use a heavy-barreled variant of the same rifle as a light support weapon. In the Commonwealth, this was designated L2A1 […]

The Swedish m/21 BAR in 6.5x55mm

April 15, 2021 Ian McCollum 38

Sweden was a remarkably early adopted of the light machine gun, for a nation not involved in World War One. Looking over the designs that existed right after the war, Sweden opted to purchase 700 […]