Sure you are. Fire sustainability allows for area suppression. When you wear out barrels as quickly as you do with a MG-42, you are not suppressing an area, you are suppressing a point.
Sigh.
Fire sustainability allows for Fire sustainability. With 450 rounds/minute there is close to no suppression of any significant area.
Spraying a 100 meter zone with a RoF like Vickers leads to ineffective fire, and that is simple math. With 100 meter width you will not even cover an attacking company deployed in depth, and even if you spray left and right for, lets say, a given time of 4 seconds to fully exploit ((((muh water cooled fire sustainability)))), you are covering the entire width with...what? 30 bullets?
The slower you move the MG, the lower is the saturation in the rest of your beaten zone , allowing the rest of your enemies to jump up, rush forwad and dive for cover again.
Taking into account the RoF of either Vickers or M1919, you are not getting more than 40 rounds down that width for the given time of 4 seconds. Calculate the dispersion in, and you are getting 0 results, because no enemy is going to stop an attack because of some odd projectiles going his way from 2 kilometers away, but because of intensive fire, and intensive fire that is covering the entire sector to prevent him from moving and thus creating
actual suppression.
Entirely different matter is establishing and staying within a beaten zone, a thing that MG 42 tripod does for you basically with some minimal input, contrary to Vickers and M1919.
Now you can do something totally sneaky what every normal Army does to save ammo and to have more effect: You don’t spray and pray a fixed beaten zone for hours but you engage fire team-sized and above targets after you have forced the enemy to spread out while he is approaching and move caterpillar like in fire team sizes and above. Totally revolutionary and done since horde attacks went out of fashion.
And here is where we run into some of the same problems as above except we save ammo and have more chance of actually HITTING something. First problem with iron
sighted MGs again is the target acquisition, the observation of the effect on target and therefore changing the aimpoint and the target saturation.
Now the enemy as already written rushes from cover to cover and exposes himself, mostly trained is 3 seconds, only a short time and then dives again
down. The 3 seconds don’t come out of the blue, guess what it takes into account the time a gunner needs to: detect, aim and shoot at you.
This is with iron sight on longer distances difficult enough, even with an observer with binocular you will need several bursts to go in to the target that is already in cover again and another enemy unit you don’t engage will at that time jump. A scope reduces this time and enables the gunner to shoot faster and more accurate while the rushing enemy soldiers are still exposed to a certain distance of course since the decreasing velocity of the bullet is an important factor to a point where static beaten zones are better.
The MG 34 fires 15, the MG 42 25 rounds per second, the Vickers 7,5 and the M 1919 10 rounds per second.
If we now take into account the fast poping up target of a squad of 8-10 men dispersed over a width of around 20 meters, which will give you a time target of max 5 seconds
from poping up to vanishing behind cover or camouflage like bushes etc. your average MG with iron sights will have way less time to fire and it will fire with worse accuracy as an MG with scope, the shorte time for target acquisition and aiming will lead to an increased time of shooting until the enemy vanishes.
MG 42 can roughly engage around 20 targets with 5-7 round bursts per minute, even if VIckers and M1919 were capable of engaging the same amount of targets in the same time window, you get a 2-3 rounds per burst.
Utterly ineffective, meaning you have to shoot longer, engage less targets, with smaller hit probability, less suppression and more ammunition consumption.
Saturation (accuracy + fire volume) kills, not spray and pray.
