A Ukrainian drone has claimed a very old prize: a Russian M1910 machine gun—a type that first appeared in, you guessed it, 1910.
But it wasn’t just any M1910. The machine gun the first-person-view drone blew up seemed to be a Finnish modification of the basic M1910 that made it more reliable in brutal battlefield conditions.
A video that circulated online on Saturday depicts an explosives-laden FPV drone barreling toward a Russian bunker somewhere along the 600-mile front of Russia’s 22-month wider war on Ukraine.
A still-frame from the drone’s video feed clearly shows an M1910 machine gun poking from the bunker.
It appears that these guns ended production in 1945, however, “there are thousands of them in store in basically pristine condition.” And they are still extremely useful weapons even today, so this isn’t quite a case of “dragging obsolete weapons out of storage.”
Just as there’s apparently still thousands of new-in-box lend-lease M1928 submachine-guns in storage. I’d wager a lot of large countries have similar stockpiles, especially places like Russia that can absolutely afford to just dump shit in random places.
Another example, the US M2 .50 cal machine gun, was designed in 1918 and has been in service from 1933 to present.
The M2 is slightly different in that it’s been actively kept in service (like the mg3 or the m3 Carl Gustav), which the Maxim hasn’t been (that I know of). Plenty of other old weapon systems have been, though.
Yeah, until humans develop skin that can handle machine gun fire, they’ll always be effective at what they do. Maybe a newer model will be more comfortable to fire, accurate, deadly, effective against armor, portable, reliable, etc, but even in 1910 they made them effective enough to prevent people from swarming in their line of fire until someone takes them out.
Precisely. And since these machine guns use water cooling, they might even be the most effective weapon for the job, period. That way they can fire for an extremely long time.