War

During the first half of the 20th century, the worldwide military industry was forced to move away from its traditional production technology. The reason is that the increasing number and scale of armed conflicts has created a great demand for small, reliable and simple weapons.

After World War I, it became clear that the rifle – a soldier’s main weapon no longer meets modern needs. On the one hand, they are simple, reliable in design, have excellent damage and range.

But on the other hand, rifles are large and heavy weapons that are difficult to use in confined spaces; low rate of fire and cannot provide a dense firepower. But most importantly, very few countries have the resources and production capacity to supply rifles to the growing armed forces.

At that time, a panacea was born, the submachine gun. This weapon has qualities that rifles lack such as intense fire at short and medium ranges, light weight and small size.

During the early stages of World War II, each army was armed with one or more models of submachine guns, such as the Finnish Suomi KP-31, the Italian MAB-38, the American Thompson, the Soviet PPD, etc. , those submachine guns are not cheap to manufacture, because the design and technological process have not been simplified.

Therefore, the countries that played the most active role in the war paid much attention to the economic problem of production. Research has shown that it turns out that submachine guns can be much cheaper to manufacture than rifles, allowing countries to start producing the most promising designs on a large scale. . That’s when the era of “mass-produced weapons” began.

This is true not only in terms of materials, but also in terms of production technology, it is important to simplify the design and manufacturing process as much as possible, but not to adversely affect the combat qualities of the weapon. .

The idea of ​​​​applying a new production method in making weapons, such as submachine guns, belonged to German gun manufacturers. The embodiment of this idea is the MP-38 submachine gun, which everyone has seen a World War II movie, at least once.

In the production of parts of the MP-38, precision stamping and manual turning were replaced for the first time by cold stamping and casting. This means that manual processing only needs to be applied to create key components, like the barrel and trigger. This has reduced design costs and also allows production to be carried out even in small workshops.

During the production of the MP-38, the Germans also completely abandoned the use of wooden parts, they were replaced by metal and plastic. The design itself is also simplified to the maximum and does not have many small details, such as the gun without a button to select the firing mode.

Although simple in design, the MP-38 and its successor, the MP-40, are reliable weapons of high quality. It has acceptable accuracy and can be used effectively both at medium distances and in confined spaces (with a folding stock).

Of course, not without flaws. Many experts note that due to the long and vertical cartridge, the MP-38/40 is very inconvenient to shoot in a lying position and that the lack of a barrel cover will cause hand burns if careless.

However, all these shortcomings look insignificant once morest the general successful background of the gun, which meets all the requirements of a mass-produced weapon – reliability, simplicity and low production cost ( there’s more)