Because they become very hot, the great majority of designs fire from an open bolt, to permit air cooling from the breech between bursts. Some machine guns have in practice sustained fire almost continuously for hours other automatic weapons overheat after less than a minute of use. They are commonly mounted on fast attack vehicles such as technicals to provide heavy mobile firepower, armored vehicles such as tanks for engaging targets too small to justify the use of the primary weaponry or too fast to effectively engage with it, and on aircraft as defensive armament or for strafing ground targets, though on fighter aircraft true machine guns have mostly been supplanted by large-caliber rotary guns. Machine guns are used against infantry, low-flying aircraft, small boats and lightly/un armored land vehicles, and can provide suppressive fire (either directly or indirectly) or enforce area denial over a sector of land with grazing fire. Nowadays, the term is restricted to relatively heavy crew-served weapons, able to provide continuous or frequent bursts of automatic fire for as long as ammunition feeding is replete. Unlike semi-automatic firearms, which require one trigger pull per round fired, a machine gun is designed to continue firing for as long as the trigger is held down. JSTOR ( July 2023) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Ī vehicle with a Sumitomo M2 heavy machine gun mounted at the rear.Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section. ![]() This section needs additional citations for verification. Machine guns can be further categorized as light machine guns, medium machine guns, heavy machine guns, general-purpose machine guns, and squad automatic weapons. Many machine guns also use belt feeding and open bolt operation, features not normally found on other infantry firearms. Submachine guns fire handgun cartridges rather than rifle cartridges, therefore they are not considered machine guns, while automatic firearms of 20 mm (0.79 in) caliber or more are classified as autocannons rather than machine guns.Īs a class of military kinetic projectile weapons, machine guns are designed to be mainly used as infantry support weapons and generally used when attached to a bipod or tripod, a fixed mount or a heavy weapons platform for stability against recoils. Other automatic firearms such as automatic shotguns and automatic rifles (including assault rifles and battle rifles) are typically designed more for firing short bursts rather than continuous firepower and are not considered true machine guns. 50 caliber M2 machine gun: John Browning's design has been one of the longest-serving and most successful machine gun designsĪ machine gun is a fully automatic, rifled auto-loading firearm designed for sustained direct fire with rifle cartridges. Top: IWI Negev Bottom: FN MAG (general purpose machine gun) Czechoslovak 7.62 mm Universal Machine gun Model 1959 A. For other uses, see Machine gun (disambiguation). ![]() For the broader topic of all automatic firearms, see automatic firearm. This article is about the specific category of firearms.
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