Since we’ve been talking alot about small arms balance recently, I would like to talk about this topic from a different perspective.
First I dare to give a bold statement - historically speaking MP40, PPS43, PPSH41, Sten, Thompsons, or basically all SMGs were rather equal in effective power.
You would use those weapons in close range, and could fight reliably up to 100 meters distance.
Ballistically speaking, they all used pistol rounds that had a rather simmilar stopping power.
- ACP - bigger bullet than 9mm, but travelling at a slower speed, so not that much more, or maybe even the same energy being transferred into target.
7.62 Tokarev - smaller bullet than 9mm, but travelling at a faster speed, to again less energy from mass, but more from velocity.
My point being here, that there isn’t much reason to have SMGs in all 5 BRs, when their performance shouldn’t be all that different, but I’ll explain further.
Now lets go on and look at firerate, now obviously there is a big difference in rate of fire between a PPSH and a MP40, surprisingly though it seems that most sources I can find that talk about controllability of those guns, the insane firerate of the PPSH seems not to make the gun less controllable than a MP40.
So it is safe to say that a PPSH has an overall better firepower than a MP 40.
However, still most historians will still claim that both guns were nonetheless rather equally great weapons. Why is that?
Because firepower is just one aspect of a gun.
Reliability for example is a much bigger issue when it comes to performance.
I think that all, MP40, PPS43, and PPSH41 box mag should sit at the same BR.
The Soviets actually didn’t think the PPSH drum mag was a good idea, which is why they moved to stickmags with their later production PPS43.
Drummags were impractical or still are today, for basically 3 reasons:
- Reliability issues
- Ergonomics
- Noise
While it is difficult to add a reliability mechanic to a shooter, the other two points can be added in the form of how much ammo one could carry, a big drum is clumsy, having more than two on your body seems very impractical.
Also if anyone of you ever played painball or airsoft withba big magazine, moving around makes alot of noise, now inagine instead of plastic balls rattling, imagine bullets rattled against the metal of your drum mags. Sprinting with such weapon could be heard 100 meters away easily.
Also reloading such mags takes time, they are heavy and often didn’t even fit all that well.
My point being, that the game balances out SMG BR placement with magazine capacity, while it could also give noticable negatives to drum mags, without putting them too high up the BR list.
In my ideal world you would have BR1 SMGs, with poor accuracy, long reload times
Br2 SMGs that are decent
And BR3 SMGs that perform better than your regular SMGs.
Historically speaking, the Suomi was exceptional because of how controllable it was, same as the Beretta, Drum Thompsons, Drum PPSH, and Kiraly could sit in BR3, but overall shouldn’t perform too much better than the other SMGs.
Higher BRs should be set for Assault rifles.
If a gun in reality came with the fully auto or semi auto option, then the game player should always have the option to set his weapon up to his liking.
