About the Japanese tanks rear (or side) MG

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(Boring introduction)

I’ve been investigating about why Japanese tanks had that apparently ‘pointlessly’ placed MG at the side of their turrets, it is not facing the rear where enemy infantry could climb and neither is so useful if you can only protect one side from the enemy, but apparently their use was different.

(The point)

A P P A R E N T L Y ™ those MGs had a second use:

  1. The commander/gunner (since tanks like the Ha-go had a single crew member in the turret) had to rotate the turret 120° degrees

  2. Grab the MG and shoot to infantry

Since they usually faced hopeless infantry armed with nothing but bolt action rifles it wasn’t a problem to rotate the gun since its HE shells lacked effectiveness against wide formations because of the little ammount of filler (except for 57mm shells) and the main weapon was reserved for fortified positions.

Why not to install a coaxial MG? Because there was not enough space, their cannons were too big to fit a not very ergonomic gun in the same side of the turret, so this is the solution they came off with.

So, what do you think before posting a suggestion? Should that MG be useable or it should remain was what it is?

  • Yeah, why not
  • I don’t think it’s necessary
0 voters
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Some soviet tanks have this as well. I voted yes. We need to start using every part of the buffalo.

Not to hijack thread but It would be nice to have ai use these and hull machine guns when the player is focused on a different crew member. They could easily be set to open / hold fire with the existing aggressive / passive squad behavior commands.

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