You and your Rote Armee Fraktion buddies? Aha

Flecktarn Armee Fraktion, the FAF.

I've had the pleasure of shooting your country's finest, the MG42. Also the M60, .50 mounted, and a WWI Maxim water cooled gun. Several full auto rifles as well, but those are my machine gun experiences.

this is because thesnipa is 0% french

mine is limited to the mg3 (which is basically a slightly modified / tamed mg42). and although i'm somewhat jealous of your maxim experience (i'd love to just see that live and in action once, let alone shoot), i'd guess that for someone who doesn't do that on a regular basis, the main difference in terms of your experience is probably not the gun itself, but the mount. i'm sure that my visceral memory results from the fact we exclusively fired it from a bipod. a tripod or vehicle mount would probably have been much less impactful, raw, and impressive.



which ones? my experience is, again, limited to domestic models. a G3, which i spent the most time on the range with, and absolutely loved, and a G36, which was at the time the standard rifle in basically all units.

The MG42 was on a bipod, and along with the Maxim were part of my testosterone fueled bachelor party, along with full auto M16, a Thompson SMG, & AK47. The .50 and the M60 were mounted emplacements on my ship. The thing I remember the most about the Maxim was a paper-feed belt, which just seems like a poor idea in trench warfare. Google however tells me I'm wrong, it's a canvas belt. I've also had a go at the BAR, and my personal favorite, the MP5. For historical reasons, I really want to shoot the stg44.

ya, at least the maxim variants that european nations adopted all had cloth feeding mechanisms - which was an issue as they would tighten when wet, making it problematic for the action to dislodge the cartriges. i'm assuming that's true for all original maxims - but i'm entirely clueless as to what they might use today, maybe there are other materials compatible with those guns, not hard to imagine really. it's such a historically significant weapon (much like the stg44 you mentioned), so for that reason alone it'd be great to shoot one.

as for the mp5, i don't think it's a bad gun, but i think that from a shooting experience point of view, it's rather boring - as expected from an smg i guess. i honestly found the p8 (a modified USP) more interesting to shoot.

by far my favourite was my g3 though. it was somewhat rough but controllable, and surprisingly precise given its reliability, age (mine was from 1967 iirc), and treatment it endured. that's all with a big grain of nostalgia salt, familiarity bias, and extremely limited comparison though (really just g3 and g36 in the battle / assault rifle segment).

Guns are great, everyone should carry one always.

What the hell kind of shitty ass military were you a part of that taught soldiers to blindly follow orders without questioning?