Machine guns are normally used against unprotected or lightly protected personnel, or to provide suppressive fire. Machine guns such as the M2 Browning and MG42, are of this second kind. Other sears stop the firing pin from going forward after the round is locked into the chamber. Machine gun. Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible). Unlike semi-automatic firearms, which require one trigger pull per round fired, a machine gun is designed to fire as long as the trigger is held down. Noun. Most modern machine guns are of the locking type, and of these, most utilize the principle of gas-operated reloading, which taps off some of the propellant gas from the fired cartridge, using its mechanical pressure to unlock the bolt and cycle the action. Whether modern, industrial man is less or more warlike than his hunter-gatherer ancestors is impossible to determine. In 1777, Philadelphia gunsmith Joseph Belton offered the Continental Congress a "new improved gun", which was capable of firing up to twenty shots in five seconds; unlike older repeaters using complex lever-action mechanisms, it used a simpler system of superposed loads, and was loaded with a single large paper cartridge. Colonies.-v.3 Foreign states", "United Service Journal: Devoted to the Army, Navy and Militia of the United States", "Abridgments of the Specifications Relating to Fire-arms and Other Weapons, Ammunition, and Accoutrements: A.D. 15881858]-Pt. To understand how machine guns work, it helps to know something about firearms in general. Motorized Gatling guns are capable of the fastest firing rates of all, partly because this format involves extra energy being injected into the system from outside, instead of depending on energy derived from the propellant contained within the cartridges, partly because the next round can be inserted simultaneously with or before the ejection of the previous cartridge case, and partly because this design intrinsically deals with the unwanted heat very efficiently effectively quick-changing the barrel and chamber after every shot. Alternative spelling of machine gun; Verb []. machine-gunner n. Rotary guns are less prone to jamming than a gun operated by gas or recoil, as the external power source will eject misfired rounds with no further trouble, but this is not possible in the rare cases of self-powered rotary guns. The last major mounting type is one that is disconnected from humans, as part of an armament system, such as a tank coaxial or part of an aircraft's armament. Alternative spelling of machine-gun. Light machine guns are designed to provide mobile fire support to a squad and are typically air-cooled weapons fitted with a box magazine or drum and a bipod; they may use full-size rifle rounds, but modern examples often use intermediate rounds. [20], In 1854 a British patent for a mechanically operated machine gun was filed by Henry Clarke. Information about machine gun in the AudioEnglish.org dictionary, The design's key features were machine loading of prepared cartridges and a hand-operated crank for sequential high-speed firing. Define machine gun. (Firearms, Gunnery, Ordnance & Artillery) ( tr) to shoot or fire at with a machine-gun. Modern machine guns are commonly mounted in one of four ways. A machine gun. The design required fewer crew and was lighter and more usable than the Nordenfelt and Gatling guns. A.D. 18581866", "Provisional Specifications Not Proceeded with", "HyperWar: The Machine Gun (Vol. Maxim also introduced the use of water cooling, via a water jacket around the barrel, to reduce overheating. Some modern vehicle machine guns used linkless feed systems however. Squad automatic weapons, which fire the same (usually intermediate-powered) cartridge used by the other riflemen from the same combat unit, are functionally light machine guns despite their different designation. The weapon featured mechanized loading using a hand crank linked to a hopper above the weapon. machine' gun" Pronunciation: [key] a small arm operated by a mechanism, able to deliver a rapid and continuous fire of bullets as long as the trigger is pressed. machine gun: see small armssmall arms, firearms designed primarily to be carried and fired by one person and, generally, held in the hands, as distinguished from heavy arms, or artillery. .. Click the link for more information. In 1831 a machine capable of firing 500 rifle shots a minute was devised by a French mechanic by the name of Hamel. [29], Also in 1870, the Bavarian regiment of the Prussian army used a unique mitrailleuse style weapon in the Franco-Prussian war. Delivered to your inbox! As better materials became available following the First World War, light machine guns became more readily portable; designs such as the Bren light machine gun replaced bulky predecessors like the Lewis gun in the squad support weapon role, while the modern division between medium machine guns like the M1919 Browning machine gun and heavy machine guns like the Browning M2 became clearer. Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. The action is very similar to that of the revolver pistols common in the 19th and 20th centuries, giving this type of weapon its name. 'All Intensive Purposes' or 'All Intents and Purposes'? 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. Suddenly, machine gun bullets were fired and Michaela fell to the floor. The M60 is a machine gun which while fired continually causes the screen to violently shake which is a nice touch. He then leapt fifty feet into the air to avoid the machine gun fire from the SWAT team. Because they become very hot, the great majority of designs fire from an open bolt, to permit air cooling from the breech between bursts. During the Vietnam War, Carlos Hathcock set the record for a long-distance shot at 7,382ft (2,250m) with a .50 caliber heavy machine gun he had equipped with a telescopic sight. (a) As used in this part, machinegun means any weapon that shoots, is designed to shoot, or can readily be restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger. An externally actuated weapon uses an external power source, such as an electric motor or hand crank, to move its mechanism through the firing sequence. The soldiers machine-gunned a crowd of defenceless villagers. Machine gun, automatic weapon of small caliber that is capable of sustained rapid fire. He was so impressed with the weapon that he purchased 10 on the spot for $1,500 apiece. Also called complex machine. Firing round by way of a firing pin or striker (except for aircraft medium calibre using electric ignition primers) hitting the primer that ignites the powder when bolt reaches locked position. A machine gun is a fully automatic mounted or portable firearm, usually designed to fire bullets in quick succession from an ammunition belt or magazine, typically at a rate of several hundred rounds per minute. Congress requested that Belton modify 100 flintlock muskets to fire eight shots in this manner, but rescinded the order when Belton's price proved too high.[11][12]. The Russian PK machine gun is an example. The French government showed interest at first and while they noted that mechanically there was nothing wrong with Steuble's invention they turned him down, stating that the machine both lacked novelty and could not be usefully employed by the army. The term personal defense weapon (PDW) is sometimes applied to weapons firing dedicated armor-piercing rounds which would otherwise be regarded as machine pistols or SMGs, but it is not particularly strongly defined and has historically been used to describe a range of weapons from ordinary SMGs to compact assault rifles. noun. Noun []. machine + gun. .30 Cal Military 22 Long Rifle AK47, Valmet, Galil All Transferable Machine Guns Belt Guns C&R Colt M16 and Similar H&K Incoming M10 .45 ACP M10 9mm M10, M11, Uzi, Sten, Sterling, and Smith & Wesson 76 M11 .380 ACP M11 9mm Other Post-May Sales Sample Pre-May Sales Sample Smith & Wesson 76 Sten Sterling Thompson Uzi Heavy guns based on the Maxim such as the Vickers machine gun were joined by many other machine weapons, which mostly had their start in the early 20th century such as the Hotchkiss machine gun. A submachine gun, abbreviated SMG, is a magazine-fed, automatic carbine designed to fire handgun cartridges. Sustained fully-automatic firearm used for suppressive fire, This article is about heavy firearms used for suppressive fire. machine gun-- (a rapidly firing automatic gun (often mounted)) => automatic firearm, automatic gun, automatic weapon-- (a firearm that reloads itself and keeps firing until the trigger is released) Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of verb machine_gun See Rev. machinegun (plural machineguns) . Raw materials. Heavy machine gun is a term originating in World War I to describe heavyweight medium machine guns and persisted into World War II with Japanese Hotchkiss M1914 clones; today, however, it is used to refer to automatic weapons with a caliber of at least .50in (12.7mm)[1] but less than 20mm. Although subdivided into "light", "medium", "heavy" or "general-purpose", even the lightest machine guns tend to be substantially larger and heavier than standard infantry arms. Send us feedback. Machine guns are used against infantry, low-flying aircraft, small boats and lightly/unarmored land vehicles, and can provide suppressive fire (either directly or indirectly) or enforce area denial over a sector of land with grazing fire. What does machine-gun mean? These weapons were still powered by hand; however, this changed with Hiram Maxim's idea of harnessing recoil energy to power reloading in his Maxim machine gun. Perhaps the earliest examples of predecessors to the modern machine gun are to be found in East Asia. What made you want to look up machine-gun? Cycle is repeated as long as the trigger is activated by operator. Machinery.-v.2. This weapon was also hopper-fed and never went into mass production. [30], The first practical self-powered machine gun was invented in 1884 by Sir Hiram Maxim. Definition of machine-gun_1 noun in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Test Your Knowledge - and learn some interesting things along the way. Early machine guns were often water-cooled and while this technology was very effective, (and was indeed one of the sources of the notorious efficiency of machine guns during the First World War ), the water jackets also added considerable weight to an already bulky design; they were also vulnerable to the enemies' bullets themselves. This was a repeating cannon fed by a hopper which fired its charges sequentially. Machine guns usually have simple iron sights, though the use of optics is becoming more common. a combination of simple machines. Aircraft-mounted machine guns were first used in combat in World War I. The Allies had no equivalent system until 1916 and their aircraft suffered badly as a result, a period known as the Fokker Scourge, after the Fokker Eindecker, the first German plane to incorporate the new technology. This page was last edited on 11 December 2020, at 23:11. Manufactures. 'Nip it in the butt' or 'Nip it in the bud'? sub-machine-gun - WordReference English dictionary, questions, discussion and forums. The machine guns can be banned outright based on function (because they are machine guns) or they can be banned/partially-banned based on features. vb, -guns, -gunning or -gunned. 16880. Accessed 13 Dec. 2020. The continuous nature of the rotary action, and its relative immunity to overheating allow for an incredibly high cyclic rate of fire, often several thousand rounds per minute. First World War combat experience demonstrated the military importance of the machine gun. English [] Etymology []. The interwar years also produced the first widely used and successful general-purpose machine gun, the German MG 34. [14][15][16], In 1847 a short description of a prototype electrically-ignited mechanical machine gun was published in Scientific American by a J.R. Nichols. These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'machine-gun.' The weapon was made up of four barrels placed side by side that replaced the manual loading of the French mitrailleuse with a mechanical loading system featuring a hopper containing 41 cartridges at the breech of each barrel. machine gun synonyms, machine gun pronunciation, machine gun translation, English dictionary definition of machine gun. In the early and mid-19th century, a number of rapid-firing weapons appeared which offered multi-shot fire, mostly volley guns. Another early revolving gun was created by James Puckle, a London lawyer, who patented what he called "The Puckle Gun" on May 15, 1718. Medium machine guns use full-sized rifle rounds and are designed to be used from fixed positions mounted on a tripod. However, these were still manually operated. Almost any gun is based on one simple concept: You apply explosive pressure behind a projectile to launch it down a barrel. b. Most ordinary Americans can't tell the f*cking difference between a real machine gun and a semiautomatic As a class of military kinetic projectile weapon, 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 recoil. [24], In France and Britain, a mechanically operated machine gun was patented in 1856 by the Frenchman Francois Julien. According to the Wu-Pei-Chih, a booklet examining Chinese military equipment produced during the first quarter of the 17th century, the Chinese army had in its arsenal the 'Po-Tzu Lien-Chu-P'ao' or 'string-of-100-bullets cannon'. How to use a word that (literally) drives some pe Test your knowledge of the words of the year. The higher the rate of fire, the more often barrels must be changed and allowed to cool. skyde med maskingevr; meje ned med maskingevr. The key characteristic of modern machine guns, their relatively high rate of fire and more importantly mechanical loading,[3] first appeared in the Model 1862 Gatling gun, which was adopted by the United States Navy. A general-purpose machine gun is usually a lightweight medium machine gun that can either be used with a bipod and drum in the light machine gun role or a tripod and belt feed in the medium machine gun role. II. Early solutions, aside from simply hoping that luck was on the pilot's side with an unsynchronized forward-firing gun, involved either aircraft with pusher props like the Vickers F.B.5, Royal Aircraft Factory F.E.2 and Airco DH.2, wing mounts like that of the Nieuport 10 and Nieuport 11 which avoided the propeller entirely, or armored propeller blades such as those mounted on the Morane-Saulnier L which would allow the propeller to deflect unsynchronized gunfire. Medium and heavy machine guns usually use tripods. I/Part III)", The REME Museum of Technology machine guns, United States Marine Corps Squad Advanced Marksman Rifle, United States Army Squad Designated Marksman Rifle, Mitrailleuse Gatling modle APX 1895 (1895), 8mm Lebel smokeless powder cartridge (1886), Du Temple high-circulation steam engine (1876), Current French infantry weapons and cartridges, Schiebecher as 43M rifle-grenade launcher, List of equipment used in the World War II era, SMLE No.1 Mk III* & Lee-Enfield No.4 Mk.I, Starstreak SAM (shoulder launched or 3-shot multiple launcher), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Machine_gun&oldid=993686475, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles needing additional references from August 2020, All articles needing additional references, Articles with unsourced statements from December 2013, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Pulling (manually or electrically) the bolt assembly/bolt carrier rearward by way of the cocking lever to the point bolt carrier engages a sear and stays at rear position until trigger is activated making bolt carrier move forward, Loading fresh round into chamber and locking bolt. They also usually have either a barrel cooling system, slow-heating heavyweight barrel, or removable barrels which allow a hot barrel to be replaced. While technical use of the term "machine gun" has varied, the modern definition used by the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute of America is "a fully automatic firearm that loads, fires and ejects continuously when the trigger is held to the rear until the ammunition is exhausted or pressure on the trigger is released. [17], In 1848 an Italian by the name of Cesar Rosaglio announced his invention of a machine gun capable of being operated by a single man and firing 300 rifle shots a minute or 12,000 in an hour after taking into account the time needed to reload the 'tanks' of ammunition. Another is a tripod, where the person holding it does not form a "leg" of support. 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