"Machine Gun Assistants?" Topic

So, pondering this for man-to-man, fire-team, and even squad level play.

In many cases, a light machine gunner will have an assistant, who helps carry ammo for the gunner, helps feed the ammo belt into the gun, etc., etc..

In some cases they carry a pistol, but in other cases, they'll carry a rifle, or an assault rifle.

So, in a firefight, should their personal weapon be negated in many/most cases, to assume they're helping feed the machine gun, if the gunner is prone, and firing?

If he's walking/standing and firing, I can see where the assistant might drop the ammo cans, and use his personal weapon, but imagine that would be more rare than aiding the machine gunner to feed ammo to his weapon.

Thinking Cold War M60, MG3, Russian MGs, WWII .30 cals, etc..

Thoughts?

I can't think of many cases where they would ever fire their small arms, rather than assisting the gun.

Exception would be if they are overrun from an unexpected angle ("assault")

For a game, I'd ignore it.

No 2 on the gun there to load and assist in target identification. Keeps his own personal weapon clean!

Tally Ho!

Thanks.

Yea, I figured as much.

Perhaps use own weapon if the MG jams, or while walking on patrol, if not carrying ammo cans in each hand, but in a backpack, instead.

As I recall in the U.S. Army air-cooled .30 calibre MG team, the assistant gunner carried the weapon, the gunner carried the tripod. As the more experienced crewmember, the gunner was expected to effectively emplace the tripod in an emergency. The gunner and assistant gunner were normally accompanied by two ammunition bearers.

On the turn the MG fires, then the asst gunner would not fire a personal weapon.
In regards to servicing the MG with ammo, not all ammo is at their [position when in defense. The gunner would have to leave the position and go to company reserves to get more aMMO.

I've seen games and rules that a MG team is penalized for wounded or missing members. If the No. 2 is using a personal weapon, the Gunner should be penalized if firing the MG if allowed to fire at all.

Likewise brings up magazine fed Weapons like the Bren and BAR. What about their team members and personal weapons?

"What about their team members and personal weapons"

No 2 far too busy keeping the No1 on tgt with fire indication to shoot with their personal weapon.

Tally Ho!

A full Bren team was 3 men – gunner, loader and NCO leader. The gunner and loader carried 6 magazines each, the loader had a rifle somewhere but no extra gear and the team leader, usually a Lance Corporal, had the spare parts kit, cleaning gear and the spare barrel as well as his rifle or SMG. He was supposed to identify targets etc. The other squad members were expected to stow one or two extra magazines as well as their personal fighting gear.

Considering the size of Bren gun magazines, I presume that the loader might find himself quite busy with changing magazines once the lead started flying.

By TOE, full section would carry around 25 magazines for the Bren gun, and when action was imminent riflemen would pass the ones they carried to the gun team.

There might also be a bunch of spare ammo carried, so in case of lulls in fighting some men might find themselves busy with filling empty Bren magazines.

Ok, big difference between a M-60 and a .30 cal.

When I was in the military back in the 80's. The A-Gunner for an M-60 was not attached to the hip of the gunner, feeding ammo into the weapon as the gunner blazed away. A fire team (4 individuals) made up of M-60 gunner, Assistant and two other members. The gunner would carry the m-60 and 300 – 400 rounds of ammo. The A-gunner would carry the spare barrel kit & tools, their m-16 and another 400 – 500 rounds of ammo. The other two members of the fire team would carry their M-16 and each would carry 200 – 300 rounds of ammo for the M-60. The A-gunner and other fire team members would provide cover fire for the gunner while he was moving and reloading. Now if the m-60 was in a static dug in position. If the gunner laid down a fire lane of fire. Then the A-gunner would be next to the gunner feeding the belts into the 60, to make sure there were no kinks or jams. Also the a-gunner would swap out the barrel when they over heated to avoid cook offs. But in the field, the a-gunner was a mule and used their rifle as much as any other infantry person did. Between everyone on the fire team, they would have approx. 1200 – 1500 rounds of ammo for the 60 gunner.

M-60: YouTube link

My step father was an a-gunner for a BAR in ww-II. His unit went in towards the end of the Battle of the Bulge to push the germans back. He said he carried a m-1 carbine, the BAR tool bag and 12 magazines of ammo for the gunner. Members of their squad also carried extra ammo for the BAR. But Donnie said he always stayed with in tossing distance of the gunner. But when they ran low on ammo, it was up to him to fetch more. After three months my step father, his BAR gunner and three other guys were all that was left out of his original platoon. All the rest had either been killed, wounded, captured or had frozen feet.

BAR: YouTube link

For ww2 the bar and to a lesser extent the bren are a bit unusual due to the magazines.
Many bar gunners removed the bipod and used it as a sort of assault rifle rather than a light machine gun.
In which case the clips were usually distributed through the squad and the assistants just became regular riflemen.

Some brens were also used as sort of assault rifles.

Bear in mind that as well as the obvious practicalities of feeding the weapon there's an effectiveness increase.
A weapon operated by 2 or more people tends to be more effective. Whether that is the shared responsibility of killing, the morale plus of huddling up to a friend… or whatever.

You still seem to be approaching this design from bottom up.
Considering a detailed aspect…. then another… then another.
This is a bad way to design any system. ( Which is my day job. )
Top down is advisable.

I don't agree that top down is universally accepted as the way to design a system.

I prefer designing from the bottom up and checking this against what we know of how things worked in practice.

E.g. – the German infantry was more effective early in WW2 – why? I contend it is the fire superiority provided by the MG34 that gives them this edge. I don't like this top down approach which too often seems to take a prejudice and reinforce it.

Most rules make Italians less effective in a manner that borders on racism. If the Italians did badly it was surely due to training, experience, equipment and motivation. Their best units were as good as anyone's after all.

The problem with bottom-up design is that it typically ignores morale, training, and command and control issues. Works OK for naval, air, and maybe for tanks, not so much for infantry combat.

Once you get to the GMPG state (WW2 Germans, later for everyone else), I'd have to argue that the A-gunner is nothing more than an ammo mule with his own weapon.

Top down is almost universally accepted as the best way to start analyse and design within computing. And business generally – systems design is also about manual processes.

You then test your various mechanisms by taking details ( bottom up ) and seeing whether they fit in with what you have.
I doubt many games designers have studied systems design.

There are two main problems with bottom up.
1) It's easy to miss factors things out. Because you never have the "big picture", you just have a bunch of mechanisms.
2) It's harder to get relative effects of things "right". Again, you're looking at each tree separately rather than the shape of the woods.

In games design you will also probably see:
a) A mix of mechanics.
b) Factors attached to the "wrong" thing.

Not that this makes me a fabulous games designer. I make different mistakes.

Let's go through how this translates into the game design process.

The first step should be to think about what you're representing.
That's a company action, platoon or what.
What do you want on your table.
Then you think about major factors.
You want shooting, movement, morale….

As you dig down you would probably consider what fire effect you want from an element.
Do you want different types of section/squad to have different effects?
You come up with some sort of mechanism for this.
They impose pins or kills or a huge bucket of dice or whatever.
You then test whether your design fits real world.
It's at this point the guy who gave a german squad a 1.6 factor ought to plug in squads which have 2 or 1 mg34… and maybe even those that have none. How about all smg or all riflevolkssturm?
Does he just give different factors for these or does he say the german well trained squads get 1.1 for flexible interpretation of orders ( say ) and +.5 per mg34/42.

In fairness I think I am denigrating bad top down design and others have seen the old style bad bottom up design.

What I suppose I'm advocating is a design loop starting at the bottom working upwards then back down again – repeating until you get what you want.

I often find the top down effect can have very vanilla results.

As one who is familiar with design, the key issue is to define practical what you want to achieve. The re al wold is complex and so it's important to decide what you can live without. For instance M/GP sacrificed a bit of infantry detail so that the vehicles were modeled in the same level of detail as the infantry. It is important to understand both the weapon and it's use. My take is that the MG 42 was the main stay of the Germans and to some extent the rest were there to keep it functioning most of the time.

If game scale allows, player decides if crew members assist crew weapon or fire their own weapon. (If it doesn't, forget this conversation.)

Penalize crew weapon for missing crew members.

So, player's choice, but expected result would be crew members only fire their own weapons if the main weapon stops firing (jams, damaged, out of ammo, gunner becomes casualty) or if assaulted or they leave the weapon (rallying after failed morale check, or sent as runner to get ammo).

We always penalize the 2-man LMG teams when they take a casualty, so instead of firing twice per turn (automatic weapon), they can only fire once.

Obviously the player can replace a casualty to regain his full fire ability.

I hope that makes sense :)

I have seen in many skirmish type games no good reason at all for the various MG helpers not to fire their personal weapons.

This is probably because individual weapons (rifles) are massively over-rated and fully automatic weapons are massively under-rated in bottom up designs. Typically you get something like 1D6 per rifle, 4D6 per MG or something.

Up until 1942 the British infantry regs stated that the infantry fire battle was to be conducted solely by the Bren (to win fire superiority), just the same as the Germans did. So essentially you'd just have the Bren and MG34 gunners plinking at each other.

The blokes with rifles are just there to assault (and sometimes provide some close range fire).

So really it should be something like 0.01 D6 per rifle and 10xD6 per MG:)

Good point.

Even if they were shooting, most riflemen were remarkably ineffective ( at anything but very short range ).

Realism isn't necessarily much fun.

"E.g. – the German infantry was more effective early in WW2 – why? I contend it is the fire superiority provided by the MG34 that gives them this edge."

I think the Germans did better because their training was more realistic and they promoted competence. The MG34 could only point one direction at a time and I doubt soldiers would say "That's only a ZB 26, we can ignore it."

Or it could be because their sections carried roughly 50% more ammo than anyone else?

They also had four section platoons, which overall gave them double the amount of ammo compared to e.g. British platoons.