Kazarogkai wrote:A rather conventional maxim gun chambered in a .50 cal bullet, minus the addition of a somewhat conventional pistol grip and trigger similar to the M1917 BMG. Could it work out ok? More specifically I know that such a thing is theoretically possible since Ive actually heard of examples with even bigger bullets but I want to know if I one could keep it under 150 pounds counting the water, ammo, and tripod and two would it still be able to reasonably serve as the principle Battalion level HMG for an infantry battalion in the interwar-WW2 era. Just thinking it would be a somewhat decent infantry support weapon along with acting as a sort of low level AA weapon, atleast in theory.
The reason for asking honestly is because at the time the Kaza made use of a .25 cal bullet which while performing it's role admirably they considered in their HMGs as a little under powered relative to their rivals after experience fighting in WW1 against the British and their allies. Hence what was originally only meant to function as and was inspired by the Germans 13mm MG08 in an AT/AA role ending up replacing their older .25 cal MMG as their main MG. At least that's the story I'm going with for the most part.
Thoughts?
It should be, although the maxim machine gun was a bit less advanced than the later browning machine guns. The .50 caliber round was actually designed to be almost proportionately identical to the .30-06, but scaled up, invented specifically for use in the new machine gun made by browning at the time, based on the original M1919. So it should work in the maxim machine gun given that it was designed specifically to work in autoloading machine guns, and the .30-06 worked just fine in the maxim. A weight of 150 pounds seems reasonable with a tripod and is not that far off from the browning. It's a basic recoil operated design, so to my knowledge there's not much that can go wrong with it.