Studying Soviet weapons is fairly easy if you live in Russia, know Russian, and have access to a library. Studying, for example, English or German weapons may be more difficult, but there is a lot of information about them on the Internet. But to study Japanese weapons …
Japan is one of my favorite countries, but they actually produced far fewer weapons than Germany or the USSR, so every Japanese prototype weapon is valuable. As far as I know, Japan didn’t have belt-fed machine guns ( Hotchkiss-type hard tape doesn’t count).
Today I came across an interesting picture of one of the pages of the book 「世界兵器図鑑 ＜日本編＞ GUN」, it looks very much like a tank version of the MG 17. Germany supplied grenade launchers and machine guns for Japanese designers to familiarize themselves with. I think it would be great if Japan could get a belt fed machine gun in one of the events, but I’m afraid I have too little information, can anyone give more details about the MG 17 in Japan? At the very least I don’t really understand what kind of machine gun belt was used in Japan itself.
