Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Staten
Now, the Volks. I could tell it was a VolksMp because the mechanism was the same as the Sten, but the similarities ended there. Every part was perfectly fitted, rounded and finished. The folding stock fell smoothly to the shoulder, and the sights seemed decent, even with posibilites for adjustment...
|
First thing, foreign languages for that tad of flavor are good, but correct spelling would also be good.
Second, what you consider as worth of praise is actually worth of condemnation, in my own opinion, of course! The whole point of Sten-like guns was to churn them out by the hundreds of thousands, and any refinement only lenghtened the man-hours needed for each piece. The Sten was cheap and ugly and unrefined _on purpose_. The same goes for the US M-3 or the Soviet PPS-43, but neither came as cheap as the Sten.
Now, if the Volksmaschinenpistole you saw was identical to the Sten in the mechanism (i.e., it did not feature a magazine on the side, but on the lower part), then it's not the Mauser MP 3008 but the real all-out copy, the Gerät Potsdam... and Hans-Christian (p. W:IC63) tells us it cost $1,800 (!!!). Just 180 times more than the Sten. In other words, an abysmal failure from a production-effort point of view.
Of course, the point of making real copies might have been to let Werwolf men to look like Allied soldiers - but in that case, the actual captured Stens would have sufficed, and making a _better_ copy would have actually defeated that purpose, too, if a MP had a chance of seeing the gun from up close.
Several pre-war submachine gun models looked nice, like the Beretta 38A or the MP 28. But the point was not having nice SMGs, the point was having plenty of them. Apart from looks, even accuracy was a waste of time for a weapon that would be used in bursts at very close range - if the gun you saw had adjustable sights, that's another wastage. Reliability _should_ have been a must, and Stens lacked that, too... but production came first.