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> original M2 ...Er. Going and looking at the wiki page... Do you mean the M1921, which was a water-cooled fixed-barrel machine gun that had originally been de

by saulrh 8y ago

> original M2 ...Er. Going and looking at the wiki page... Do you mean the M1921, which was a water-cooled fixed-barrel machine gun that had originally been designed to fire .30-06 and was repeatedly trialed by the military between 1921 and 1937 and rejected for being generally terrible? Or do you mean the version that the military eventually adopted circa 1935 as the M2, which was still water-cooled but not quite as terrible as the other options? Or do you mean the air-cooled variants that were finally developed circa 1940 to put on tanks? Like, I understand the point about the 1911, but even there I have a feeling that if I went digging I'd find a decade of prototypes. There are a lot of patterns out there that people think were first set to paper in their final, perfect form but are actually the result of twenty years of iterative refinement.

huffmsa 8y ago
We're not debating iterative refinement here, it's about what the first wide release was. The CIA guys in Nam loved the early M16 because it came with IMR rounds. Yes the M2 had a few hiccups in development, specifically related to making it mountable in more applications. But it's singular intent to sling 1/2" lead downrange was never compromised.
- saulrh 8y ago
  "A few hiccups" and "never compromised"? It took fifteen years of refinement to make it deployable, then a war popped up and it turned out to be totally useless even in the role they'd intended for it. A gun's "singular purpose" is not to sling lead. It's to sling lead at an enemy, which means slinging lead on a battlefield, and those are far more complex and multifarious tasks than you're making them out to be. The navy ditched it because it turned out to be useless against WWII-tech aircraft. The army was about to ditch it because the water-cooling setup was too finicky and vulnerable and it couldn't be mounted on anything useful. You find the same story in the history of almost literally every piece of weapons technology. There are hundreds of guns out there that are fantastic pieces of focused lead-slinging intent but cost four times as much as the alternatives and are so heavy that you're better off literally carrying two cheaper and less-reliable guns and just swapping when one of them jams. It's the same way with literally any technology. Yeah, Peter Watt had the great idea to condense steam in a different chamber so you didn't have to re-heat the cylinder after every stroke. He then spent twelve years figuring out how to improve the piston seal so this idea actually worked. TCP is simple, right? Literally all it does is transfer packets. Sequence numbers, three-way-handshake, resend unacked, done. Except that we then spent thirty years learning how to fine-tune all the parameters and if you get any of them wrong (TTL, backoff, window length, fast-open) you can't actually transfer any packets. Multipole electromechanical relay: AND or OR. Spring, magnet, connection. Not fast, reliable, cheap, or efficient enough to be an improvement over analog mechanical calculators until almost a hundred years after their invention. I, Pencil: Put graphite on paper. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
  - manfredo 8y ago
    > A gun's "singular purpose" is not to sling lead. It's to sling lead at an enemy, which means slinging lead on a battlefield, and those are far more complex and multifarious tasks than you're making them out to be. The navy ditched it because it turned out to be useless against WWII-tech aircraft. The army was about to ditch it because the water-cooling setup was too finicky and vulnerable and it couldn't be mounted on anything useful. But I think the point the above poster was making is, those deficiencies you listed was due to the obsolescence of continuing to use a .50 caliber round in that role. The M2 fulfilled its role as a .50 caliber machine gun continuously. Sure, it may have originally been designed as an anti-tank gun and by the time it saw major service using .50 caliber rounds for anti-armor was totally deficient. But the guns found other niches like vehicle mounts and aircraft mounts in its lightened version. I think you're indexing a bit too heavily on the fact that water cooling was ditched. Air vs. water cooled isn't an especially large design change - just rip out the water jacket and replace the jacket with a barrel shroud if needed. It's more a trade-off between mobility and ability to sustain fire, and as the battlefield changed an air cooled variant became better suited. The fact that an M2 mounted on a Stryker is nearly the same overall design as the one originally developed for WW1 is still impressive. The only substantive change to how it operates that I know of is the addition of a bi-directional feeding mechanism.
    - saulrh 8y ago
      > It's more a trade-off between mobility and ability to sustain fire, If the design were really the ideal of the perfect tool that only cares about exactly one simple task, these trade-offs wouldn't exist. These items haven't been in service for so long because they sprang fully-formed from the designer's mind with perfect purity of purpose. They've been in service for so long because they were flexible enough to support a literal century of refinement, adaptation, and evolution. The M2 was originally water-cooled because it was meant to be a fixed weapon in emplacements or on ships. They rebuilt it with air-cooling because they needed a gun to put on a tank and it turned out that it was useless on ships. Then they made it fire faster because they needed guns to put on airplanes. Then they added a quick-change barrel system because they needed extended courses of fire. Then they completely redesigned the bolt and chamber because modern machine tools allowed them to use a cheaper, more reliable, and more maintainable design. Then they changed some of the ergonomics to improve mobility and barrel-changing even further. You don't actually want an "original M2". Those were junk, everyone knew they were junk, and it twenty years for them to stop being junk. What the parent is thinking of as the "original, basic M2" is the one with twenty years of adaptations and refinements, and that puts a very neat hole in the entire idea that the pattern was somehow endowed with some kind of lost simplicity. The original M2, compared to the version the OP is thinking of, is just as obsolete and dated as the original iphone is now.

by saulrh 8y ago

huffmsa 8y ago

We're not debating iterative refinement here, it's about what the first wide release was. The CIA guys in Nam loved the early M16 because it came with IMR rounds. Yes the M2 had a few hiccups in development, specifically related to making it mountable in more applications. But it's singular intent to sling 1/2" lead downrange was never compromised.

saulrh 8y ago
"A few hiccups" and "never compromised"? It took fifteen years of refinement to make it deployable, then a war popped up and it turned out to be totally useless even in the role they'd intended for it. A gun's "singular purpose" is not to sling lead. It's to sling lead at an enemy, which means slinging lead on a battlefield, and those are far more complex and multifarious tasks than you're making them out to be. The navy ditched it because it turned out to be useless against WWII-tech aircraft. The army was about to ditch it because the water-cooling setup was too finicky and vulnerable and it couldn't be mounted on anything useful. You find the same story in the history of almost literally every piece of weapons technology. There are hundreds of guns out there that are fantastic pieces of focused lead-slinging intent but cost four times as much as the alternatives and are so heavy that you're better off literally carrying two cheaper and less-reliable guns and just swapping when one of them jams. It's the same way with literally any technology. Yeah, Peter Watt had the great idea to condense steam in a different chamber so you didn't have to re-heat the cylinder after every stroke. He then spent twelve years figuring out how to improve the piston seal so this idea actually worked. TCP is simple, right? Literally all it does is transfer packets. Sequence numbers, three-way-handshake, resend unacked, done. Except that we then spent thirty years learning how to fine-tune all the parameters and if you get any of them wrong (TTL, backoff, window length, fast-open) you can't actually transfer any packets. Multipole electromechanical relay: AND or OR. Spring, magnet, connection. Not fast, reliable, cheap, or efficient enough to be an improvement over analog mechanical calculators until almost a hundred years after their invention. I, Pencil: Put graphite on paper. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
- manfredo 8y ago
  > A gun's "singular purpose" is not to sling lead. It's to sling lead at an enemy, which means slinging lead on a battlefield, and those are far more complex and multifarious tasks than you're making them out to be. The navy ditched it because it turned out to be useless against WWII-tech aircraft. The army was about to ditch it because the water-cooling setup was too finicky and vulnerable and it couldn't be mounted on anything useful. But I think the point the above poster was making is, those deficiencies you listed was due to the obsolescence of continuing to use a .50 caliber round in that role. The M2 fulfilled its role as a .50 caliber machine gun continuously. Sure, it may have originally been designed as an anti-tank gun and by the time it saw major service using .50 caliber rounds for anti-armor was totally deficient. But the guns found other niches like vehicle mounts and aircraft mounts in its lightened version. I think you're indexing a bit too heavily on the fact that water cooling was ditched. Air vs. water cooled isn't an especially large design change - just rip out the water jacket and replace the jacket with a barrel shroud if needed. It's more a trade-off between mobility and ability to sustain fire, and as the battlefield changed an air cooled variant became better suited. The fact that an M2 mounted on a Stryker is nearly the same overall design as the one originally developed for WW1 is still impressive. The only substantive change to how it operates that I know of is the addition of a bi-directional feeding mechanism.
  - saulrh 8y ago
    > It's more a trade-off between mobility and ability to sustain fire, If the design were really the ideal of the perfect tool that only cares about exactly one simple task, these trade-offs wouldn't exist. These items haven't been in service for so long because they sprang fully-formed from the designer's mind with perfect purity of purpose. They've been in service for so long because they were flexible enough to support a literal century of refinement, adaptation, and evolution. The M2 was originally water-cooled because it was meant to be a fixed weapon in emplacements or on ships. They rebuilt it with air-cooling because they needed a gun to put on a tank and it turned out that it was useless on ships. Then they made it fire faster because they needed guns to put on airplanes. Then they added a quick-change barrel system because they needed extended courses of fire. Then they completely redesigned the bolt and chamber because modern machine tools allowed them to use a cheaper, more reliable, and more maintainable design. Then they changed some of the ergonomics to improve mobility and barrel-changing even further. You don't actually want an "original M2". Those were junk, everyone knew they were junk, and it twenty years for them to stop being junk. What the parent is thinking of as the "original, basic M2" is the one with twenty years of adaptations and refinements, and that puts a very neat hole in the entire idea that the pattern was somehow endowed with some kind of lost simplicity. The original M2, compared to the version the OP is thinking of, is just as obsolete and dated as the original iphone is now.