I know and I agree. That’s why I said that English nomenclature isn’t good - it’s imprecise, terms like “long” or “short” are subjective, and today, bullpup firearms kinda fly in the face of that distinction. That’s why in general it is said that an assault rifle must fulfill those three requirements:
be full auto or select fire,
be fed from interchangable magazines,
fire intermediate cartridges.
How? It’s not the caliber that matters, it’s the muzzle energy. Standard issue .45 ACP has a muzzle energy of under 500J, just around 480. The .30 Carbine menwhile leaves the muzzle with an energy of slightly over 1300J. So I’d say there’s a difference.
Yet US forces said that they had issues to kill enemy infantry, especially if they wear thicker cloths. And whenever the twos are compared (Thompsn vs Carbine), the Carbine was usually “just” better at range (in terms of accuracy) and accuracy, weight and production capabilites. Maybe the worse kinetic energy was somehow absorbed by automatic fire mode and rate of fire in terms of man stopping power (at least in broad overview). I dont really know I admit. At the end the US were horrible at statistical data collection (at least compared to other nations like the Germans).
The whole .30 Carbine was bouncing of off North Korean witer jackets is a myth, and a rather dumb one. It’s just about as true as The ping of the Garand could alarm enemy that we were reloading and they could charge and kill us with bayonets.
The truth is that either these were misses, or those shots went through the winter jacket but next to the person inside thus not hurting him.
Yes and no. "Bouncing off would be also the wrong term here as the case was that some bodies were found with .30 bullets which didnt (seriously) wounded/ penetrated the soldier itself but got stuck in the cloths.
As far as I know the problem with the .30 not “penetrating” the cloths deep enough to wound, kill or stop the enemies “mostly” happened under the settings:
The enemy was on a distance where the .30 was in general less powerful (iirc it was past 200-250m where the stopping power was noticable worse)
As mentioned before the enemy has to wear those required cloths
It was winter/ very cold (where ammunition in general performs worse unless they are specialized for the winter)
But then there are also other circumstances which coud explain those foundes bullets (.30 already penetrated something before, the .30 ricocheted or the penetration angle was too weak to penetrate deep enough).
Well, the .30 Carbine definitely wasn’t the best choice at 250m (but the .45 ACP was worse at that distance as well), but when it comes to penetration, there is couple of videos on YT with people testing the M1 Carbine against a thick bunch of clothing at some distance, and it went right through. One of them tested it against the same bunch of clothes, but soaked and frozen (because some version of the myth stated that commies were notoriously wearing frozen coats in combat… Fudd lore never stops surprising me), and against a level IIA vest. And it zipped right through as well.
As for the damage itself, at longer distances, when it had not much more energy than a pistol round, it would be perfectly possible for the bullet to penetrate the body, stay there and not do much damage. But at shorter ranges, it’s stronger than the .357 Magnum (the same caliber, so I think that the energy comparison fits here).
It’s also a myth that the commies were just abused for human waves… those good memes aside.
The point was rather that this event where the .30 is not penetrating good enough to wound or kill seems to happen mostly during winter. Guess this did not happen a lot during summer etc.
Anyway yeah. My statements about the .45 were just wrong.
I personally think that balance is more or less fine right now. I don’t want people having 9 man FG squads but I don’t think there is a great way to fix without setting a bad precedent for the devs. I think that having them (FG42/M2 carbine) as engineer only weapons solves most of the problems and has two other benefits.
1: The devs don’t have to mess with to campaign levels because the FG42 and M2 carbine are unlocked on engineer squads anyway.
2: A change like this may encourage peaple to build more things (sandbags, ammo boxes, rally points) to help the team.
That is one way of doing it, and definitely the easiest one when it comes to not rearranging campaign levels. And if they would go one step further and change the uniforms, squad names and descriptions for Axis Engineer II and Sniper III squads in Normandy and Axis Engineer II and Radio operator II squads in Berlin for paratrooper ones, it would be good enough for me.
OK, you got me then. According to the US Army, the M2 Carbine isn’t an assault rifle. Although again, it really is all about what nomenclature you use. If you take into consideration maximum range, then it isn’t an assault rifle, if you don’t, it is. I live in Poland and we differentiate weapons according to the type of ammo, not the length (so rifle and carbine technically mean different things here than in English nomenclature), so here everything that is fed from detachable magazines, is full auto or select fire and shoots intermediate ammo is considered an assault rifle. So that’s why I was calling the M2 Carbine an assault rifle.
Another thing is that everywhere I looked it is stated that the maximum effective range of the M2 Carbine is 300 yards, so again, it’s up to sources and nomenclature that one uses.
