Machine Guns - Forgotten Weapons

Spoils of War: A 1907 St Etienne Full of Bullet Holes

February 15, 2016 Ian McCollum 19

The 1907 St Etienne heavy machine gun is a really neat gun mechanically, but I can’t shot you that today because this one is jammed together from the 7 bullet impacts that rendered it unusable […]

RIA: MP3008 Sten Copy

February 4, 2016 Ian McCollum 71

The MP 3008, aka Gerät Neumünster, was one of two German efforts to copy the British Sten gun. The first was the Gerät Potsdam (“gerät” meaning device or project; basically project code name), which was […]

US troops in the Pacific Theater with 1903 Springfields and a 1919A4 machine gun

Vintage Saturday: Combined Arms

January 23, 2016 Ian McCollum 37

I have seen this image described as being from both Burma and Okinawa – not sure myself which (if either) is correct. The array of armament present is interesting, though – a 1903A3, a 1903A4 […]

The World Standard Maxim Gun

January 20, 2016 Ian McCollum 14

From 1887 onward, the gun Hiram Maxim was producing was what he called the World Standard. He had finally perfected the machine gun design to his satisfaction in 1887 and with this design in hand […]

Extra-Light Maxim (1895)

January 15, 2016 Ian McCollum 26

One of the relatively few successful competitors to the Maxim in the early days of the heavy machine gun was the Col Model 1895 (aka, the Potato Digger). When it was adopted by the US […]

Video Q&A #3: What-Ifs and How-Comes

January 13, 2016 Ian McCollum 46

I initially figured these Q&A video would be a fun little side note, and I have been a bit taken aback by how popular they became…and so they keep getting longer. This one clocks in […]

“Transitional” Maxim

January 8, 2016 Ian McCollum 16

When we last left Hiram Maxim, he had perfected his very first machine gun – the world’s first practical machine gun, really. However, while his gun worked well, it was not yet a design which […]

Maxim "Prototype" at the Royal Armouries in Leeds. Note the absence of the rate-of-fire control arm in this version...

The First Maxim Machine Gun

December 30, 2015 Ian McCollum 31

I am going to start an intermittent series of posts on the various different types of Maxim machine guns over the next few months – there are a whole slew of them, and I have […]

Military Thought (USSR): Some Points on the Status and Development of Small Arms (1965, English translation)

A Soviet Look at Cold War Small Arms Development

December 29, 2015 Ian McCollum 77

I have covered various elements of small arms development during the Cold War more than a few times – usually involving the contentious process that led to the 7.62mm NATO cartridge being adopted, and the […]

Sidewinder SMG Photos

December 23, 2015 Ian McCollum 44

The Sidewinder is a rather unusual submachine gun designer by Sidney McQueen in the mid 1960s. His objective was to create a weapon which could be fired one-handed with the firepower of a submachine gun […]