Machine gun

A machine gun is the autoloading firearm designed for sustained direct fire with rifle cartridges. Other automatic firearms such(a) as assault rifles & automatic rifles are typically designed more for firing short bursts rather than non-stop firepower, in addition to not considered machine guns.

As a the collection of things sharing a common qualities of military constant mount or a heavy weapons platform for stability against recoils. numerous machine guns also use belt feeding and open bolt operation, assigns not commonly found on other infantry firearms.

Machine guns can be further categorized as light machine guns, medium machine guns, heavy machine guns, general goal machine guns and squad automatic weapons

Similar automatic firearms of greater than autocannons, rather than machine guns.

Modern overview

Unlike semi-automatic firearms, which require one trigger pull per round fired, a machine gun is designed to advance firing for as long as the trigger is held down. Nowadays, the term is restricted to relatively heavy crew-served weapons, able to afford continuous or frequent bursts of automatic fire for as long as ammunition feeding is replete. Machine guns are used against infantry, low-flying aircraft, small boats and lightly/unarmored land vehicles, and can afford suppressive fire either directly or indirectly or enforce area denial over a sector of land with grazing fire. 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 take mostly been supplanted by large-caliber rotary guns.

Some machine guns have in practice sustained fire most continuously for hours; other automatic weapons overheat after less than a minute of use. Because they become very hot, the great majority of designs fire from an open bolt, to let air cooling from the breech between bursts. They also usually have either a barrel cooling system, slow-heating heavyweight barrel, or removable barrels which permit a hot barrel to be replaced.

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. Medium and heavy machine guns are either mounted on a tripod or on a vehicle; when carried on foot, the machine gun and associated equipment tripod, ammunition, spare barrels require extra crew members.

Light machine guns are designed to give mobile fire assistance 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 innovative examples often use intermediate rounds. Medium machine guns use full-sized rifle rounds and are designed to be used from constant positions mounted on a tripod. The 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 for used to refer to automatic weapons with a caliber of at least .50 in 12.7 mm but less than 20 mm. 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.

Machine guns usually have simple iron sights, though the use of optics is becoming more common. A common aiming system for direct fire is to alternate solid "ball" rounds and tracer ammunition rounds usually one tracer round for every four ball rounds, so shooters can see the trajectory and "walk" the fire into the target, and direct the fire of other soldiers.

Many telescopic sight. This led to the number one an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. of .50 caliber anti-materiel sniper rifles, such as the Barrett M82.

Other automatic weapons are subdivided into several categories based on the size of the bullet used, whether the cartridge is fired from a closed bolt or an open bolt, and whether the action used is locked or is some form of blowback.

Fully automatic firearms using pistol-caliber ammunition are called machine pistols or submachine guns largely on the basis of size; those using shotgun cartridges are nearly always mentioned to as automatic shotguns. The term personal defense weapon PDW is sometimes applied to weapons firing committed armor-piercing rounds which would otherwise be regarded as machine pistols or SMGs, but it is for not particularly strongly defined and has historically been used to describe a range of weapons from ordinary SMGs to compact assault rifles. Selective fire rifles firing a full-power rifle cartridge from a closed bolt are called automatic rifles or battle rifles, while rifles that fire an intermediate cartridge are called assault rifles.

Assault rifles are a compromise between the size and weight of a pistol-caliber submachine gun and a full-size battle rifle, firing intermediate cartridges and allowing semi-automatic and burst or full-automatic fire options selective fire, sometimes with both of the latter presents.