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Using rifles were sow because you could only shoot one caliber whereas the machine gun shoots hundreds of rounds per minute. They speculate that the machine guns may have ended the war sooner because the machine guns could kill multiple men at a time vs the rifle, where it can only kill one person at a time. The number of casualties grew once the machine guns came into play. Plus, with a rifle, you have to aim. With machine gun, you can just spray it across and you'll probably kill people in front of you because of all of the rounds.

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They realized that the machine guns were better on the offensive than the defensive and quickly drew up some new fighting strategies. Many people tried to build better guns to no avail. One of the early copies was 12 kg. It was still considered too heavy and bulky for advancement. In 1918, they came out with one that were as light as 9 kg. Even though they were lighter, ammunition was still a problem. Then they began to mount machine guns onto aircrafts in France and Italy. Then they began to mount them onto warships and machine guns took off.

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Maxim had originally offered the gun to Britain but they turned him down. And what does Germany do? They go and make their own machine guns. They had around 12,000 in uses. The French and the British had only hundreds.

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There were two ways to cool them down. Water and air cooling. When they ran out of water to cool them down, they have urinated on them before as well. Besides the heating issue, they did tend to jam often especially when they began overheating. A machine gun could be worth anywhere from 60-100 rifles together.

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Machine guns dominated the battlefields of WWI. The 1914 machine guns were usually positioned on flat tripod, and required a gun crew of 4-6 men. They were supposed to be able to shoot 400-600 small rounds per minute but there were some inconsistencies. They would overheat very quickly and were inoperative without any cooling mechanisms. They were shot in short bursts instead of sustained bursts.

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It has been called "the weapon most associated with the British imperial conquest".

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For those of you that don't know, an automatic gun is a gun that that fires bullets in rapid succession for as long as the trigger is pressed.

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Hiram Maxim was an American-born British person who invented it in 1883-1884. It was the first recoil-operated machine gun and no external power was necessary.