In the game, The drum submachine gun seems to be more powerful than the magazine submachine gun.
Is this historical? If not historical, how can dev do to restore the history?
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ingame they are equal power wise and rate of fire.
irl, having extra drums with you at all time, reload them, carry them , keep them clean, its a pain, its amazing to shoot them on a shotng range, but, having 2 or 3 full bulky , expensive, 71 round mags on your pouches was kinda stupid imo.
also, as far as i remember , they had issues with the drum production rate comparing to a full weapon.
a magasin with half or so bullets, can have the soldier carry more, are easy to pack on the soldier gear, are cheaper to produce , can have less issues and a good magasin, its more than the half a submachine gun needs to be a good weapon.
there are alot of good smg’s. that a simple bad designed or single feed magasine was enough to make them malfunction.
as for ww2, having more soldiers with a weapon/ammo avaiable was far more important than having an expensive 71 round mag that was more expensive, time consumed more to make and the soldier, had way less ammo avaiable to reload in batle.
there is more than how reliable a weapon is, irl costs to produce, how fast can it be produced, how cheap comparing to another model, does the magasine production keep up, does the drum or mag fit more on the military tactics per soldier , how fast can you refill ammo to be ready to atack another point etc…
ppsh didnt cease to be produced, magasin versions and stamped versions like the pps43 were just more simple, cheaper and faster to be produced with the benefit that the soldier could have more ammo on the pouches at any given time with an amazing double feed magasin and not a heavy bulky drum
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What you mean is more powerful? Does it have more ammo in one magazine? Yes! Does it take more time to reload such weapon? Yes! The reason why Soviets created PPS is that they needed cheap, compact and most importantly quick to create weapon. Also PPSH has not been stoped being produced when PPS came to army. PPSH is very big weapon as for submachinegun and PPS is much slower and lighter. Drum magazines were very problematic for soldiers, but most importantly weren’t as cheap as “box” magazines.
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And Ppsh had even problem with drum Mags, most of time they didnt fit. If you lost your “factory mag” you could have end up with mag that woudnt fit your weapon. You have been lucky if you had 2 that worked with your gun. That was a problem that was solved by box mags because they fitted much better.
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i remember reading years ago about that, and the fact that the weapon could perform with alot of mud, snow, diferent temperatures, but the simple drum mag would jam the feeding alot of times
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Yeah, one of wonders of Soviet engineering.
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Historically, the Drum magazines were considered a failure and armies tried moving away from them.
Issues being they where bulky, heavy and didn’t easily fit in guns.
PPSh-41 was notable for having drum magazines that wouldn’t fit in all guns. Meaning that once you found one that fit, you’d have to hang onto it for dear life.
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from personal experience: PPSH is better for cadence and simplicity. PPSH drum magazine is one big problem. I have early variant ppsh with same number drum magazine and other magazines poorly serve or pass. In reality, the soldier obtained a submachine gun with two magazines that were numerically to the submachine gun and tested. the reservoir spring wears out and causes fatigue problems. I personally prefer 35rounds box magazines. I have better shooting accuracy at PPSH in full auto than pps43.
PPS-43 is cheap and simple gun typical for blockade Leningrad. small shooting cadence, lower quality of sheet metal pressing, but unlike PPSH, I never had a problem with the magazine. Reliability higher than PPSH but lower accuracy and durability but I like pps43 because it’s more comfortable for me on reenactment events and with shooting blank ammo I haven’t problems as with PPSH.
But my heart get PPD40 but this is too expensive for war production.
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A big part of the issue with drum mags is that making a spring system that feeds bullets in a circular pattern is a lot more complicated, expensive, and failure prone than a straight feeding one. So feeding issues, jams, etc. are much more common with drum magazines, and its harder to mass produce them. Another issue is that they are somewhat harder to handle, due to their bulk, which makes reloading slower. Finally, there is just a lot of empty space in a drum magazine, which means its actually a lot harder to carry the same amount of ammo in drums compared to box/stick mags, which stack nicely and have very little space not filled with bullets.
As a direct result, while drum mags look good on paper, they are poor performers in the real world. A number of real world militaries experimented with them before and during WW2, but generally abandoned the pattern as the war progressed and never went back. In a video game setting, where all of the problems associated with a drum mag outside of “It takes longer to reload” tend to not be modeled, they come out ahead. My understanding is that whenever military types do use drum mags these days, they only bring one which starts in the weapon. When it comes time to reload, they use simpler magazines.
The drum PPSH here is a later level then PPS\PPSH(box), since we cannot take into account all its problems in the IRL, and a drum with 71 bullets is much more profitable in game conditions.
PPSh magazines even the box ones are single stack, single feed while the PPS magazines are double stack, double feed which means their magazines aren’t compatible to each other. Regarding the drums having issues heard the later versions of the drums are much better depending on the factory but still have drawbacks like the weight
Interestingly the Finns did their M44s which is a copy of the PPS actually allowed to use drums which is something the PPS doesn’t while the Soviets did copy drum magazine before, replacing their own drum magazine with that tower thing used on the PPD-34/38.
This video did show a malfunction with one of the drum magazines used on this GunBusters: PPSh - YouTube
The drum mag PPSh did enjoy success during the war namely in battles like Stalingrad up to Berlin considering the box mag came out much later in 1942 but the Soviets already know the issues of the drum so they tried to fix this later on the war. The Soviets even made the drum mag for the RPK that’s compatible with AKs but they dropped the use of drums on the RPK-74 when they switched to 5.45x39mm which only recently made a drum mag for 5.45x39mm that’s used by the RPK-16.
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PPSH with box magazine was appear in 1942 and fight in Stalingrad.
The Soviets didn’t give up on drum magazines for a long time especially for LMGs with the RPK and only dropped the drum magazine when they adopted the 5.45x39mm which is why RPK-74s don’t have adopted drum mags sure there’s an experimental drum but didn’t go anywhere. Years later, the Russians made a new 5.45x39mm drum mag used by the RPK-16 but they are also developing the RPL-20 which is a 5.45x39mm belt fed LMG.
Not much known about which of the two is better as those are still in development but their experience with the PKM machine gun showed that belt fed is way to go for MGs.
Enemy at Gate got it right, the soviet squads only have 1 bolt action and 1 clip of ammunition. 
What they got wrong is the rest carry PPS/PPSh and PTRS. In 1944-1945, they can have an extra T-34-85 for transportation.