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What are the top ten guns of all time. List your rankings and explain why you placed each gun where it is. Try to limit to man portable weapons.

1. The Browning M2 0.50 cal Heavy Machine Gun--One of the best heavy weapons in history and still in service since it was introduce in the '30's. This weapon was used for many functions and was the primary weapon for all US aircraft til replaced by the 20 mm gatling gun.

2. The Maxim Machine Gun--This weapon litarly had the power to stop entire armies in their tracks and is the main reason for the exsistence of the Western Front of WWI. Sold heavily to both sides of that war and was one of the most feared weapons in history.

3. Browning 0.30 cal Water Cooled Machine Gun--One of the Preimier medium machine guns of the US army and was relatively portable. Could be carried by a crew of 2, 3 with an ammo feeder. Esential to many US battle of both WWI and WWII.

3. Thomson Sub Machine Gun--the gun known for being used by the gangsers of the '30's and was one of the first sub machine guns. It came too late for use in WWI but was used heavily in WWII.

4. The German MG 42--One of the fastest firing machine guns ever built as was very portable. Heavily used in all theatres of WWII.

5. MP-40--The legendary German sub-machine gun. Small light and very portable. Fired small pistol round maing it possible to carry a large ammount of ammunition into combat.

6. AK-47--The most reliable gun in history and was produced in staggering numbers by the Soviet Union and handed out like candy. These guns are everywhere and are able to fire after taking an insane amount of abuse. Any idiot can opperate an Ak-47.

7. Browning Automatic Rifle--The favorite gun of Clyde of Bonnie and Clyde fame. A very portable and accurate gun with full auto capability firing the standerd rifle round used in the '06 Springfield and the M1 Garant. Gave small squads available heavy firepower when a large machine gun was not practical to be carried.

8. Lewis Gun--The small heavily portable light machine gun used by the British in WWI. Was mounted on most British combat aircraft as well. Very versital and very heavily used on the Western Front.

9. The M1 Garant--The first Semi-automatic rifle used by an army in combat as it primary issue weapon. One of the best combat rifle in history. Its only major downside was its distictive sound it made then it had just run out of ammo.

10. The German Mouser--This gun was so good that after facing them in the Spanish-American War, the USA built and issued out a near copy(the '06 Springfield) of the weapon. This weapon was used as the primary combat rifle, or a near copy, by almost every Western army.

Feel free to make a list of the top 10 worst weapons if you wish. As for me I will simply list my top one in that category.

The French Chauchat --This is easily one of the worst designed Guns ever built. this gun was not worth the metal it was made of. Due to Shoddy manufacture technics the gun's parts could not be interchanged with another gun of the same design. This means that once a gun was damaged there was no way to make two broken weapons into one working weapon. Because of its open magazine, it was prone to jamming under battlefield conditions.

First off there are a few I disagree with. Yes the MG-42 was great, was it super-great? No, it was a nice square support LMG with a great rate of fire and a nice-recycle time. The Ma-Duce can stay in number one but I'd prefer the AK in the number 2 slot, only the most widely use machine gun can beat the most widely used assault rifle.

The point of this thread is for you to post your own top ten lists.

You do not have to agree with my rankings. But i would Like for you to at least explain why you put each gun where.

FYI I am considering the Browning .50 cal about the biggest, or guns of similar size, gun you can get away with calling man portable.

Also do not include Grenade Launchers or RPG's only weapons firing bullets.

There's a problem then, this is the history forum, not the Isolder74's top picks forum. The History forum contains mostly facts. Top Ten Generals would be a worthy thread if you wanted to hash out who would belong on such a list.

If you want a nice safe thread go to normal Off-topic and post "what's your top ten gun list". I'm sure we have such a thread in Off-Topic somewhere.

Meanwhile here in History, if you want a list, a semi-quantifiable list of the best ten guns(All-Around? Usage? Production? Merits?) we can hash that out in here.

Otherwise off to off-topic this thread will go.

Mr Bean wrote:Meanwhile here in History, if you want a list, a semi-quantifiable list of the best ten guns(All-Around? Usage? Production? Merits?) we can hash that out in here.

I thought that was what I was trying to do.

In chronological order:

M2 .50 caliber machine gun
Maxim gun
Gatling gun
AK-47
M1 .30 caliber rifle (Garand)
Dreyse needle gun
MP18
GLOCK 17
M1911 .45 caliber pistol
Walker Colt

These weapons were chosen on the basis of length of service, influence on the battlefields, and influence on later designs. (Note that the Gatling gun is still used 150 years after the end of the war for which it was designed, although the ones used now have an electric motor to spin the barrels, not a hand crank.)

As for the worst gun ever, I submit the Nambu Type 94, a weapon more dangerous to the shooter than it is to the target.

The MP-40 was a piece of shit, it definitely doesn't deserve a place amongst the best guns of all time. It's iconic because it looks do characteristic, meaning that if you want the audience to be absolutely sure the evil guys are Nazis, you give them MP40s. But otherwise, it jammed easily, was inaccurate and poorly machined.

My list?

1. AK-47, for the influence it had on world affairs. There is no other gun that's more iconic. Anybody can recognize a kalashnikov, and it was one of the greatest tools of the USSR's foreign policy.

2. The M-2 for being the best heavy machine gun ever made

3. The 1898 Mauser - the AK-47 of the industrial era.

4. Any rifled artillery piece for being king of the battlefield

5. The Colt M1911 and other similar Browning-based pistols

And since I hate top 10s, that's it

EDIT: Oh, and the Pepesha!

As amoral weapons smuggler Nicholas Cage said, the AK-47 is featured on the flags of friggin' countries. It's become an integral and symbolic part in the never-ending revolutionary struggle between freedom, tyranny, and dickery in Third World shitholes all over the world.

And according to Wiki:

The proliferation of this weapon is reflected by more than just numbers. The AK is included in the flag of Mozambique and its coat of arms. It is also found in the coat of arms of Zimbabwe and East Timor, the revolution era coat of arms of Burkina Faso, the flag of Hezbollah, and the logo of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. "Kalash", a shortened form of "Kalashnikov", is used as a name for boys in some African countries.

Goddamn Libertopians.

I would have to look it up, but the first back-loading rifles/muskets. These revolutionized warfare and made gun loading a much, much faster affair. The guy whom invented it was supposedly able to break out of an impossible tactical situation yet his invention was rejected due to conservatism.

The Dreyse Zündnadelgewehr certainly belongs on that list because of the impact it had.

However, the Nr. 1 spot belongs to the one that started it all: The Arquebus.

Best-

The Colt .45 Model 1911A1
The Sturmgewehr 44
The AK-47 and myriad derivatives
The Tannenberg Hand Cannon
The Martini-Henry Rifle, Model of 1871
The Sharps Military Rifle (why we call people sharpshooters...)
The Brown Bess ("Land Pattern") Musket
The Borchardt Model C-93 (strictly on the grounds of innovation)
The M-14/M1-A1 Family (love mine, love it, love it, love it...)
The GyroJet Pistol and Carbine

Worst-

The Lebel 1892 Revolver (I own one - OMFG! amazingly poor design)
The Breda M37 Machine Gun
The Chauchat Mle 1915
The Nambu Pistol (all models, really)
The Hakim Rifle (a poorly-made AG-42 derivative)
Colt Model 1895 "Potato Digger" Machine Gun
Japanese Type 11 Machine Gun
Mle 1909 Light Hotchkiss Machine Gun
M1941 Johnson Machine Gun
The GyroJet Pistol and Carbine

Hahah, seeing the gyrojet in a 'worst' category sure is great since everyone going RAR! over the gyrojet sure is annoying...

I've handled gyrojet pistols and carbines.

They have a pretty high cool-factor if you're into that sort of thing, but in fact the hardware is kind of crudely made, they don't point very well, and finding ammunition is a major bear.

and I still don't know what "RAR" actually stands for, but I've become comfortable with that.

I think he didn't the Gryojet because it was good: he listed it because it was innovative, hell, inventive. It is something completely new and technically quite a breakthrough, even though it would be bloody useless in the battlefield. I am pretty sure that with enough motivation, you could make it at least as good as a pistol, better even for special circumstances (google "Deathwind").

The Gryojet was pretty innovative in my opinion and I think it does deserve a special mention. After all, its incredibly more simple in design and complication.

Zixinus wrote:I would have to look it up, but the first back-loading rifles/muskets.

I believe you're referring to the Ferguson rifle. It's main problem was that it requires more maintenance than a breech loader, and if it's not properly maintained, reliability SUFFERS GREATLY. Also, the Wikipedia article on the weapon says this:

Roughly two hundred of the rifles were manufactured by four British gun firms, Durs Egg being the most notable, and issued to Ferguson's unit when its members were drawn from numerous light infantry units in General Howe's army. The only large battle in which the rifles were used was the Battle of Brandywine, in which Ferguson was wounded. While he recuperated, his unit was subsequently disbanded. It was disbanded because the unit, Ferguson's Rifle Corps, was running out of officers and men, being killed and wounded in action at a greater rate than most units, since, as a light infantry unit with a special role, they were in combat, and on the front lines, more often than most soldiers. The rifle corps, while far ahead of its time, cost Britain more in hard-to-get officers and men than it gained at that time by its demonstrably much greater firepower. Officers of the day were used to thinking in terms of firepower as manpower, not rounds on the enemy per unit of time per soldier, thus it was far ahead of its time. General Howe held no especial bias against rifles other than against their expense, and of the wastage of officers in an army that was forever shorthanded.

Ferguson's men went back to the light infantry units they had originally come from, and his rifles were eventually replaced with the standard Short Land Pattern Musket. The surviving rifles were apparently put in storage in New York. Their subsequent fate is unknown.

The two main reasons that Ferguson rifles were not used by the rest of the army:

* The gun was difficult and expensive to produce using the small, decentralized gunsmith and subcontractor system in use to supply the Ordnance in early-Industrial Revolution Britain.
* The guns broke down easily in combat, especially in the wood of the stock around the lock mortise. The lock mechanism and breech were larger than the stock could withstand with rough use. There is no military Ferguson left without a horseshoe-shaped iron repair under the lock to hold the stock together where it repeatedly broke around the weak, over-drilled out mortise.

However, despite an unsubstantiated claim that one of the actions was found at the battle site of Kings Mountain, South Carolina, where Ferguson was killed in action, the only piece of a Ferguson ever found in America from a gun used in action is a trigger guard found in excavations of a British army camp in New York City. The only connection the Ferguson rifle has with the Battle of King's Mountain is that Patrick Ferguson was there.

Experience with early modern replicas, made before the proper screw and thread pitch of the breechblock were rediscovered, seemed to indicate that while reloading was rapid, it seemed to be necessary to first lubricate the breech screw (originally with a mixture of beeswax and tallow) or else the (replica) rifle would foul up to the point of needing cleaning after three or four shots. However, through the research efforts of DeWitt Bailey and others, the properly made reproduction Ferguson rifle, made according to Patrick Ferguson's specifications of the 1770s, can fire beyond sixty shots.

Kanastrous wrote:Worst-
<snip>
Colt Model 1895 "Potato Digger" Machine Gun

The Wikipedia article did not mention severe problems with it in service; I'm assuming this means its reliability isn't noticeably worse than its contemporaries. Why did you list the Potato Digger among the worst?

Zixinus wrote:I think he didn't the Gryojet because it was good: he listed it because it was innovative, hell, inventive. It is something completely new and technically quite a breakthrough, even though it would be bloody useless in the battlefield. I am pretty sure that with enough motivation, you could make it at least as good as a pistol, better even for special circumstances (google "Deathwind").

The Gryojet was pretty innovative in my opinion and I think it does deserve a special mention. After all, its incredibly more simple in design and complication.

Yup; best for innovation and sheer coolness, worst for execution and sheer impracticality.

Sidewinder wrote:The Wikipedia article did not mention severe problems with it in service; I'm assuming this means its reliability isn't noticeably worse than its contemporaries. Why did you list the Potato Digger among the worst?

Marines who served in WWI reported having to prepare their machine-gun positions by digging a small trench under their emplacements, to allow protruding mechanical parts freedom of movement, and to prevent them shoveling dirt, mud, etc into the mechanism.

A weapon that lays that sort of obligation on its crew seems like a candidate for a "worst" list, to me.

That's true but at least it does work even when shoveling dirt that it is still useful on the battlefield. This was one of Browning's first attempts at making a machine gun and it says a lot that he didn't simply steal the mechanism of the maxim and came up with something on his own that worked.

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the pepper box under a list of worst guns yet.

*shrug*

either I have to dig a trench under my weapon to offset a set of design flaws, or I don't. If I have to shoot a bunch of oncoming Germans on a tight schedule, the originality of the engineer's design is not really likely to be on my mind so much as the ease-of-use of the weapon he produced.

*edit - I imagine that the potato-digger was originally expected to be fired off a tripod or carriage, and that protruding parts weren't a problem until troops started mounting the weapons low-to-the-ground to reduce their silhouettes. Whether or not Browning should be criticized for having failed to foresee that, is something else.

When the Potato Digger was designed everyone still mounted machine guns primarily on wheeled artillery carriages, so its swinging arm was no issue. It was only during and after the 1899-1902 Boer War that everyone realized this was an incredibly bad idea and switched to low slung tripods. The total production run of the Potato Digger was only around a thousand guns as I recall, you can find plenty of other machine guns with worse mechanical problems which saw far wider service.

Virtually every Italian machine gun from the 1920s through the 1940s comes to mind.

Kanastrous wrote:Best-

The Sharps Military Rifle (why we call people sharpshooters...)

The M-14/M1-A1 Family (love mine, love it, love it, love it...)

Couple thoughts on your list that I'm otherwise generally in agreement with. For Sharps I think it was tuly a forward design but for that paticular era I think I'd rather go with the Spencer, paticularly the Spencer Carbine. It was the first truly effective cavalry weapon giving enough weight of fire to offset the lack of heavy support. Moreover it represents the first effective mass produced military weapon utilizing rimfire catridges. Simply put the Sharps was a good design but for innovaiton and usefulness I think the Spencer is a better representative of the era.

As for the M-14 fuck no. You get two basic options wood stock which sucks for combat anywhere with either heat or humidity OR you go fiberglass which means the fucker gets muzzle heavy. Yes its nice and accurate but it also kicks like a bitch so putting two good aimed rounds on a target just isn't getting done. For the modern combat environment it may defeat some armor protection where a 5.56 wouldn't but it also is going to punch straight through something where a 5.56 has a better chance to tumble. Neither the -14 or the -16 represents a real solution to the problem of a good intermediate ranged intermediate catridge personal weapon. Whether you balme it on the age of the root design or the nature of the cartridge (7.62 NATO is not the right choice for the standard issue rifle) the M-14 cannot be on the "Best" list. Now that being said the M1 and M1 Carbine I could see but NOT with the inclusion of the M-14.

CmdrWilkens wrote:Now that being said the M1 and M1 Carbine I could see but NOT with the inclusion of the M-14.

Actually, the M-14 is actually a further development of the M-1 Garand. You may not know it, but we actually placed orders for for a lot of T20E2 Garands, which was a M1 modified to accept BAR magazines and with a select fire capability -- the end of the war in 1945 killed it's development.