The machine gun was one of the most feared weapons of the First World War. Machine guns are guns that have the capability to automatically reload a new bullet and fire without interruption for an extended period of time. Machine guns used some of the expanding gas from the explosion used to propel the bullet out the barrel to load another round into the barrel. This meant that each shot would load the next shot, and this action could be repeated very quickly. Some machine guns could fire almost 300 rounds per minute.
This very heavy rate of fire produced some problems with the design of machine guns. Every time a gun is fired, a large amount of head it produced. Normal guns don't have a high enough rate of fire for this to cause a problem, but with a rapid-fire like a machine gun, keeping the barrel cool became a problem.
Different companies tried different ideas to keep the barrel cool. One of the more successfully designs involved a water-cooled jacket, with the barrel surrounded with water that circulate a constraint stream of water around the outside of the barrel. These system still didn't work all that well, and it was common for most machine guns to overheat withing five minutes. This factor limited most machine guns to short bursts of fire only, so that the barrel wouldn't overheat.
These cooling system just added even more weight to an already heavy gun. These guns are not the portable machine guns of today. They were heavy, bulky, and needed to be mounted on something sturdy to absorb the recoil and keep the gun steady.
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