Curiosity: What do people think an "Assault Rifle" is?

Mess Room
22

When the DoD replaced the M1 with the M14 as GI, the Navy didn’t want to pay for new shoulder rifles that don’t really serve much purpose to a sailor.

They instead tried to convert their old M1 Garands to fire 7.62x54 NATO with a chamber plug but the plugs kept coming out. They tried several different ways to get away with El Cheapo, but they eventually bit the bullet and paid Remington to make them new 7.62x54 barrels.

It was still a lot cheaper (and obviously much more reliable in hindsight) than the M14.

They changed the barrels and called it a day.

23

None of that is relevant to the classification of an Assault Rifle though.

Going back to the Rapier example, every sword designed for thrusting is not a rapier, although that is a Rapier’s function.

24

IMG_4699

25

To set it apart from lighter LMG and beefy smgs

Because giving a frontloading musket the automatic fire option is nearly impossible and my guess is that stripper clips and belt might not feed properly with the reduced recoil to operate the loading mechanism (but i am not a gun guy so i could be wrong) or just not practical with the cqc aspect of the weapon.
Detachable mag might not be strictly needed but it is a standart for basicly all firearms now. Internal mags like the trenchmags from ww1 that you couldnt really reload are a bit out of date and got agains the cqc role too.

Again probaly not needed but to long and it would become cumbersome for cqc butto short and it would become useless at range. So you might say it is needed for the assault rifle role.

But then again some weapons blurr the line between many designations and nothing is made in concret as it might evolve over time and diffrent definitions treat the same weapons diffrently as there are many things one could tinker with to break each definition if it were set in stone.

26

I am a gun guy. The first rifle I killed a squirrel with from the top of my grain bin was our M1C when I was 8.

They ARE strictly needed, though. The class of rifle copied the form and function of the StG 44 because it worked FANTASTICALLY WELL at its goals and everyone copied it.

In typical World War 2 position assault tactics, there are x number of roles.

+Soldiers need to provide mass suppression fire to prevent reinforcement of the position(light machine gunner)
+Soldiers need to provide base fire to pin enemies (battle rifles)
+Soldiers need to perform maneuvering fire in order to advance the assault team (carbines)
+Soldiers need to spray the position in very close proximity, kill all the occupants, and take it.(shotguns and submachine guns)

The battle rifles were too big to be considered “maneuverable”, the carbines didn’t have the proper energy transfer to have stopping power in base fire , the submachine guns only had effective stopping power if you were within pistol range. Through real WW2 battle experience and analysis, it was determined that the design parameters of the battle rifles were obsolete for modern warfare in the hands of a standard rifleman, the carbines’ adaptability to being able to provide well in close cover as well as maneuvering made them indispensible tools and the submachine guns didn’t have as much punch as they were thought to have (they fired pistol rounds)

So the “assault rifle” was designed as the “One Rifle to Rule Them All.”

(Talking US; not Germany for this)
+Assault rifles have a carbine weight and profile for effective maneuvering fire. (Replaces carbine)

+Assault rifles have detachable magazines and full auto/burst capability for effective infiltration (Replaces smg, which also has detachable magazines)

+Assault rifles have semi-auto capability for effective base fire support at combat range (Replaces battle rifle)

+Assault rifles have an intermediate cartridge to optimize to all desired parameters. A “full sized” round produces too much recoil and reduces accuracy in full auto. The M1 carbine .30 round doesn’t have stopping power to full combat range, the greasers and Tommies typically fired .45 ACP (pistol ammo) and when you upsized their caliber, you’d aim for Texas and hit Oklahoma. They weren’t designed to operate with larger rounds.

This is pretty set in stone. We literally call them “assault rifles” instead of “machine carbines” because of the StG 44. Stürmgewehr means “Storm Rifle” in German, with storm as a gerund. It’s more “To Storm Rifle” or “Rifle to Storm with” aka: “Assault Rifle.”

I hope this helps

27

Well, I’ll be damned! Army must have miscalculated the ration and had to raid the Generals’ crayon stash to keep the troops fed that week. This must be the high point in Army scholarship. :grin:

28

But the list of swords categorized as rapiers are all (paraphrasing the category) “swords with good thrusting capability that can’t cut anything.” You don’t start describing the individual components of the sword as a means for defining it.

I’m going to be a bit pedantic for a moment (and hopefully you’ll understand my position better)

You keep bringing in descriptive attributes of assault rifles as if they are defining characteristics. The description is identifying (all rifles which have these characteristics ARE in fact assault rifles) but are not defining (it is possible to create a rifle with all these described attributes and have it be something other than an assault rifle) Rapier is defined as “the category of dress sword which is good at thrusting and bad at cutting” and an assault rifle is defined as “a rifle that performs equally well in all squad infantry roles which are needed to assault a fixed position except for mass suppression.”