Why did MGs get so much better?

[FAI]

Originally posted by Bastables:

Germany and Japan used it as well "BREN" or ZB derivatives.

As did Chinese forces deployed against the UN in Korea.

Taliban is apparenttly using them to. But then again it's Afghanistan. There's proabbly some marks man with a Ottoman musket running around shooting at people there.

But Germany quickly ditched the ZB in favor of MG42. For the Japanese, they later found out that their ZB variant was more versatile in jungle environment.

In Afghanistan, maybe not Ottoman musket, but the Enfield was quite popular there.

[Bastables]

But gosh darn it it'd be damn romantic if some chap was wandering around with an ottoman musket and a kyber knife.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by FAI:

But Germany quickly ditched the ZB in favor of MG42.

Germany didn't ditch a damn thing, that was their problem. They couldn't produce enough for themselves, hence the slave labour, and hence the reason for keeping so many different kinds of captured and foreign weapons in service. Second line troops, security forces (necessitated by their totally insane treatment of civilian populations in Eastern Europe which guaranteed large partisan populations, not a hard thing to encourage in Yugoslavia to start with as we've recently seen), and other low-priority formations (stomach battalions and high-numbered Waffen SS divisions whose racial makeup made them suspect) all got non-German equipment out of necessity. If Germany actually "ditched" anything I'd be surprised. And once the Army, Waffen SS, Luftwaffe (which, insanely, had its own private army competing for scarce resources, including small arms for its several parachute, field and "armoured parachute" divisions) and security forces had their needs fulfilled, there were the Police Battalions, einsatzgruppen, KL staffs, criminal police and other assorted SS minions lining up to get weapons...

The list of captured weapon types at the Ludendorff Bridge garrison in Remagen alone is revealing; I don't think they had a single German-manufactured support weapon to their name.

The use of small cottage industries meant that even types adopted as standard would differ from factory to factory, either appreciably or not.

The capture of the Bergmann factory, for example, meant that the Waffen SS got a nice influx of SMGs whereas in early campaigns, SS units saw squad leaders armed with bolt action rifles out of necessity.

In Nazi Germany, "official" replacement of an item was on paper only.