Shipbucket

Issue service rifles made for infantry soldiers to abuse in the field are not "tributes", "one offs", or "specials". A brass stock disc is about as fancy as you'd get, and it would need to have some other function (like providing a base plate for disassembling the spring-loaded bolt a la Mauser rifles) to make any sense.

It is ultimately your call, but it doesn't look good and makes the drawing look odd.

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USN components, camouflage colors, & reference links (World War II only)

Neither are Native American trade rifles and look what happened to those artifacts. But as you say, it is a call. I may brass it up and use it as a cavity cover for some functional reason.

Well it is not light (about 55 kgs all up) Fortunately, aside from the quadpod stand which folds up like a telescoping inverted umbrella and weighs 25 kgs, the actual machine gun has a detachable barrel and stock which means a three man carry: one to handle the three quick change barrel and gas regulator assemblies issued per machine gun, one to tote the operating cyclic and the recoil buffer, and the third guy (or a mule) ports two boxes of ten feed strips (24 rounds per strip) for the man or 5 boxes for the mule.

Altogether, with two riflemen for security, and the three man machine gun crew, an American machine gun section requires five men minimum (and 1 mule).

It is worth it though, for when this contraption is emplaced, it will reach out and kill at up to two kilometers distance.

As the Filipinos will soon discover to their horror.

Why do all the guns from this AU look like they belong in a space film. Very nice work by the way.

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Best regards,

RegiaMarina1939

Thank you.
Because the real Hotchkiss machine guns (rather Benet-Mercie guns) have that weird belong in a space movie look? (At least to me they appear that way.) They don't look "clunky" or like poorly made steampunk, like a Maxim.

If Mister Hotchkiss stays home and Mr. Benet likewise, the "woodpecker" is made in Hartford, Connecticut and not in St. Denis, France.

That is the only reason the US Army would wind up with an air cooled machine gun with a quick change barrel in 1897 in this AU. Because the Hotchkiss Company (In Hartford, Connecticut), buys the patents from Captain Baron Adolf Odkolek von Ujezda of Vienna, who has a good idea (1887), but whose own detail drawings and descriptions are wrong in his English and American patent submissions. Stephen Lawrence Benet; American gunsmith, inventor, and engineer; sees the patents in 1893, goes to the Hotchkiss Company.... and voila, 4 years later, there is this monster.

The first models appear in time for Lieutenant Parker's experimental machine gun detachment to experiment with the beasts.

Hi Tobius.

Maybe, with a brass made pistol grip, maybe some woodwork (but I don't know where, your butt follows the export butt) or an oval left hand grip also in brass (like the french model) your machine gun will got a more vintage like apearence (and the Hotchkiss is a well liked gun, at least for me, very reliable. Of course, the tray is somewhat odd-but completelly functional- but in20 years in can be certainly modernized with a metallic belt ). It can be a long lived machine gun in you au army. Cheers!

Art wise, the last submission is just not very good. I won't speak to the technical aspect of it (seems fine to me) but the artwork is just atrocious. It almost looks like it was drawn using 4x4 pixel blocks. I feel like I'm looking at a 200% zoom version of a regular drawing.

Certainly needs some work!

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USN components, camouflage colors, & reference links (World War II only)

Sorry you did not like it. The gun stacks rather high to get the feed pathways to work.

[IMG]

Well, that is a reworked machine gun. I hope I addressed the major issues. From WW I films, I take it that the French figured out how to use aiming stakes and set up beaten zones for machine gun fire. That explains the left hand ring grip on the back of the Hotchkiss 1914. They used it to sweep the gun left to right and up and down to hose no-man's land within its stops from a gunner's seated position from the St. Etienne type tripod then in use. It also doubled as a charging handle, which in the American AU gun is placed on the left side of the gun and which operates Browning fashion differently from the French version which resembles the Marlin machine gun in principle. The Americans keep the shoulder stock because this is a naval machine gun, not an army gun. The quad-pod can be used on a ship's pitching deck. The shoulder stock is supposed to be the solution the Yanks use to keep that barrel aimed at a point target. They don't sweep so much as aim.

The army picks it up from the navy and keeps the heavy quad-pod. The army under War Secretary Russell Alger is cheap, corrupt, and inefficient. So when energetic able Elihu Root goes machine gun shopping behind Alger's back for the war (in this AU), he buys the gun commercially off the shelf, straight from the Hotchkiss catalog. So new is the gun, that it has not even been weapon-proofed.

That's all right.. General Wesley Merritt will take a dozen to the Philippines, just because they are shipped out to him in San Francisco by accident. Those are supposed to be NAVY guns, but he expropriates them.