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Tarrif said:
My involvement in this discussion is purely academic - I don't play this game (although it looks interesting). That being said, for a game that *seems* to pride itself on historical accuracy and reality, I'm surprised that it would classify the FG-42 as a rifle since that wasn't it's intended role.
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The correct term in the game is "primary infantry weapon", which includes rifles, submachineguns, assault rifles etc. As the FG42 was issued (AFAIK) as the primary infantry weapon, that classification seems warranted. In the game, a typical platoon with the FG42 would have it as the main weapon (firepower multiplied by the number of men in the squad) with an MG42 as weapon number two and some handgrenades or Panzerfaust as weapon number three and four, filling all available slots.
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Because of the nature of airborne troops they needed to pack a lot of features into a light-weight weapon. It *could* be used as a rifle, but its primary role was to provide LMG support to the squad. The FG-42 is a specialist type of weapon. It could shoot like a rifle if it had to, but could function as a LMG as well. I wouldn't call it a SAW as we define them today - but as many authors have said - the FG-42 was the basis for which many pre-modern and modern SAW's are designed.
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If - and that is the assumption in the game - the FG42 was issued to most of the squad and that squad also had a proper machinegun (MG34/42), it seems hard to justify it as
a "specialist" weapon. I doubt you would have 6 or 7 man firing their belt-fed FG42s from the tripod, another 2 men manning the MG34/42, all supporting the squad leader as he charged the enemy.
Seems to me that with the high number of FG42s in the squad, it would primarily have been used as an automatic rifle, not as a light machinegun. And that is the issue here: The use of the weapon, not its statistics.
If Chuck wants that changed, he should not look at weapons statistics, but at fieldmanuals and unit histories dealing with the organisation and tactics of the units that used the weapon.
Incidentally, we are wasting all this bandwhith on a weapon that is used in four (4) units out of 800-900 German units in the game....
Claus B