After a small flurry of innovative, if fairly inefficient, cumbersome, and expensive, rapid-fire firearms emerged in the 19th century,

in some cases leading to surprising, if usually, quite small-scale military outcomes,

with Gatling guns and maxim-guns providing relatively small forces,

with the surprising-for-the the time power to overwhelm numerically

superior forces with hand crank or recoil-powered barrel spinning that basically turned a normal

weapon into what would become known as a machine gun. After that period, World War I pivoted

global militaries toward what some historians

have called an era of scientific warfare, where research and development became just as fundamental

to the theory and practice of military conflict as marching and marksmanship. By the end of that conflict, every military on the planet

had access to some type of rapid-fire machine-gun model. Most of them were quite large, about the size

of the cannon that were used in relatively recent wars. But these new armaments were meant to fire a great

many small bullets very quickly, rather than firing one large munition like a cannonball or explosive

charge. Consequently, these weapons were incredibly effective, but also had to be lugged into combat on the backs of draft animals or in trucks.

A team of soldiers were required to set up man and maintain them, and they were specialized enough machines that they weren't cheap or easy to manufacture or repair.

At the beginning of World War II, Nazi military scientists decided to start working on a lower

powered firearm round that in essence would scale down the potency of the bullets fired from most rifles at the time,

making them less lethal over long distances,

but easier to use, cheaper to make, and capable of being fired rapidly

and fairly accurately over short distances from more conventional weapons carried by a single soldier.

By 1938, the Germans had a new shortened cartridge, a bullet, basically, that was less powerful

than existing rifle cartridges, but a bit more powerful than what was typically used in pistols

at the time. This cartridge was called the 7.92 curs, and by 1942, the German military had a few

...