it’s definitely sarcasm lol, full auto weapons, while they did exist during ww1, were extremely rare. meanwhile battlefield 1 has at least 4-5 full auto options for primaries per class barring the sniper class.
The Lewis gun (or Lewis automatic machine gun or Lewis automatic rifle) is a First World War–era light machine gun. Designed privately in the United States though not adopted there, the design was finalised and mass-produced in the United Kingdom, and widely used by troops of the British Empire during the war.
Of course, a lot of soldiers used rifles and mounted machine guns instead.
…during World War I the battlefield was from the outset dominated by the machine gun, generally belt-fed, water-cooled, and of a calibre matching that of the rifle.
Man-portable, single-user automatic weapons were, though, and even of the mounted machine guns, there were only a couple of mounted machine gun crews for every several dozen riflemen.
Very rare at best. And since he's talking about BF1 where every player is running around with things like an "SMG 08/18", arguably one of the best guns in the game, but of which in real life only a few hundred had been produced by the end of the war and which likely didn't even make it into actual service before the war ended...
I think it's safe to say his point is spot on that in the game you are seeing people run around with weapons that were extremely rare to see in real life.
Virtually every British squad ended up equipped with at least one Lewis machine gun, with over 100,000 having been produced. It’s not extremely rare at all. It’d be one of the more common “rare” weapons you’d see. Not every soldier had one but every battlefield would have multiple. It’s strange to act like automatic weapons are a modern novelty lol.
nobody said the lewis gun was extremely rare, you’re ignoring the tons of other automatic weapons that were very rare that everyone in bf1 is running around with. those are what were talking about, not the one specific example of a fairly common one that you keep bringing up.
I could find multiple instances of people saying automatic guns are extremely rare in this thread. This is objectively proven false by the existence of relatively common automatic guns. It’s basically just different skins for guns, to be more cool, and be more fun, and the historical accuracy isn’t compromised too much when there were automatic weapons.
The 100,000 was by late 1917, only half that many existed in 1916, and none existed for basically the first two years. Lewis Guns were also commonly mounted on armored cars and tanks, so there goes several out of the hands of foot soldiers right there early on.
Then also consider only really the British who had them (Americans got them late 1917) and over 65 million men were involved in the first world war.
So they only showed up late in the game, primarily staying with the Brits in a war that involved almost the entire world. So yes, it's very likely the majority of soldiers who participated in the war rarely encountered a non-mounted machine gun. And again this is all being compared to a video game where basically every player has a fully auto weapon so at the very least, by comparison, the rarity was extreme.
To be fair there were air strikes but they were more along the lines of sending some European nobleman’s middle son up in the air in a motorized kite with a random number of wings made of balsa wood and canvas to lob a few hand grenades over the side and maybe take a few shots with their pistol from a mile away while flying one-handed.
Now that I think of it we should only fight wars this way moving forward.
26
u/Flutter_bat_16_ 1d ago
I don’t know enough about warfare or guns and stuff so imma hope that’s sarcasm and nod along lol