Quote:
Originally Posted by swaghauler
The rating of 1 would be for older M2HB guns like the one on my HEMTT that was built in 1942 and still being used in 1993. Those guns have a ROF of 4 and require the gun to be manually headspaced and timed with EACH barrel change. If you shoot more than a belt or two in rapid succession, the gun would begin to lose its timing as the barrel heated up. In my experience, you can usually get through a 100-round belt with no issues but after the second belt, things begin to get "interesting." The M2 is certainly not as bad as the MK19, but the older guns can be very unreliable.
The older AN/M2-M3 air-cooled aircraft-mounted guns have a ROF of 8 and a rating of 3. The airflow these guns receive greatly reduces their heat buildup (despite their rate of fire).
The new Army M2A1 and Navy mod1(?) .50 Caliber Machineguns built by Ohio Ordinance with the non-reciprocating barrel (the action and barrel actually reciprocate together) with fixed headspace and timing and the Quick-Change Barrel (QCB) would have a rating of 5 and their ROF increases to 6.
Also, remember that the Dependability rating only tells you WHEN to check for a performance reduction during a firefight. The weapon's WEAR VALUE actually determines what the outcome of that check is, AND changing the barrel resets the rating back to "0."
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OK, I was just making sure. I find it interesting how different experiences people have. In all my deployments (03-4, 07-8, and 09-10) the old M2 (only the first deployment did I check the date stamp on it and it was a WWII era gun) was the most dependable with the M16/M4 a very close second. The Mk19 was the worst by far, it never got even a half a belt before it jammed up on us. Now I do have to say that keeping the M2 running was much more complex, and if you did not know what you were doing it could cause lots of issues, but having spent most of the first have of my time in armor before transferring to EOD I had a good grasp of the M2, but lots did not (there were lots of reports of issues, and in almost every case that I saw it was operator error).