Starting with the smashing of Dunkirk

Chapter 34 Submachine guns and light machine guns, as long as they work.
Lelouch's first stop after returning home was Thuringia to visit the Bergman firm, and this was not a random choice.

Because he knew that this company had made a huge contribution to the German army's project to convert heavy machine guns into light machine guns, and later made great achievements in the field of submachine guns.

Lelouch's desire to form the Storm Commando Team necessitates the development of lightweight automatic weaponry, a crucial element he cannot ignore.

Moreover, these are the most difficult and slowest to produce results among the projects Lelouch is working on this time, so they naturally need to be dealt with first.

"Captain Lelouch, Captain Immelmann, you are both very promising young men. You are only in your early twenties and you have already become captains. You will definitely become generals in the future."

The owner, Emil Bergman, greeted them very politely and led the two to sit in the back of a Benz sedan, while he himself sat in the passenger seat.

After getting into the car, Lelouch was very polite and got straight to the point: "Mr. Bergman is too kind. No wonder His Highness the Duke told me to come see you first thing after returning home."

I'll be in trouble with you these next few days. The 6th Army has some military equipment needs and we'll have to rely on Bergman's strong support.

"But don't worry, as long as we can make what His Highness needs, future orders and profits will definitely not be a problem."

Bergman: "Serving the Empire is what we should do. Shall I take you to your lodgings first?"

Lelouch glanced at his watch. He had been on a six-hour flight early that morning, and it was only early afternoon. "Captain Immelmann has been on a six-hour flight. He needs to rest. I slept enough on the plane. Let's talk business after lunch."

Bergman couldn't help but admire Lelouch's dedication, so he made a last-minute adjustment and arranged for the company's technical backbone to also attend the welcome luncheon.

Demacia is a culinary wasteland; people aren't particular about food and drink, so lunch was simple and just held in the company cafeteria. A few dishes were added specifically for the VIP guests, such as baked pork knuckles and beef tartare.

In such situations, the key is to take the opportunity to make connections and discuss serious matters.

Lelouch generously devoured a baked pig's trotter all by himself and also met two famous designers at the dinner table.

"This is Louis Schmeisser, our company's technical director, and this is the famous designer Hugo Schmeisser."

"Nice to meet you." Lelouch said, wiping his hands as he raised his glass and clinked glasses with the two men.

After a brief encounter, Lelouch realized that the company had a very strong family-run atmosphere and a typical authoritarian decision-making style.

The owner, Emil Bergman, is the nephew of Theodore Bergman, the original founder.

Even in the technical field, the two designers, both surnamed "Schmeisser," have the final say.

Historically, Louis Schmeisser Sr. had to retire in 1916 due to old age and illness, and his son Hugo Schmeisser succeeded him, subsequently developing the MP18 submachine gun.

The fact that even the heads of technical positions could be "hereditary" is unimaginable in later research and development companies, but it was quite common in Demacia in the early 20th century.

Mauser, Siemens, Porsche—many families, including fathers and sons, or even grandfathers and grandsons, are technical experts.

Lelouch didn't have time for a long introduction, so after toasting, he steered the conversation to the topic of automatic light weapons:
"I've heard that your company has been researching the lightweight modification of our country's automatic weapons since the start of the war. Are there any recent developments?"

Because the term "submachine gun" didn't exist at that time, and the first submachine gun in history wasn't invented until a year and a half later by an Italian, Lelouch had to use other terms in his discussions.

The Demacian army was indeed slow to make progress in the lightweighting of automatic firepower at first.

Their MG08 heavy machine gun is a very sophisticated and easy-to-use machine gun. Its range, accuracy, and reliability are all superior to those of the Vickers heavy machine gun from Burkina Faso, and its rate of fire is also comparable.

However, it is simply too heavy in terms of overall weight - the Vickers heavy machine gun weighs only 40 kilograms, while the MG08 can reach an astonishing 65 kilograms!

The two gun bodies differ by 8 kilograms, while the tripods differ by more than 20 kilograms—the MG08 uses a quadruped, which weighs a full 37 kilograms!
Of course, this quadruped was excellent, giving the MG08 unparalleled accuracy and stability at the time. No matter how much fire you did, you couldn't feel any recoil. However, it was just too heavy. This meant that it could only be used for positional defense and was completely unusable for mobile offensive operations.

The German army's "low attack, high defense" characteristic can be largely attributed to the inconvenience of this heavy machine gun.

After the war began, various companies, including Mauser, DWM's parent company, DWM's Karlsruhe subsidiary in the Duchy of Baden, and even the current Bergmann company, tried various lightweighting transformation plans.

Among them, Bergman AG should be considered the most advanced.

However, it was only November 1914, and old Schmeisser was still somewhat unsure of himself when faced with Lelouch's inquiry.

He quickly explained, "We've done our best. The Empire's previous heavy machine gun design was a bit off track, focusing too much on absolute firepower for positional defense and sacrificing mobility. It's not easy to reverse that all at once."

We also considered building a new light machine gun, modeled after the Danish Madsen, but that would require a lot of rebuilding and would take at least a year or two. If it's just a lightweight modification of the MG08, a few more months should be enough, but I can't guarantee exactly how much lighter it will be.”

Lelouch: "No rush. Tell me first, how much progress have you made in the four months before the war started? How much lighter have you made the heavy machine guns?" Old Schmeisser couldn't remember these technical details all at once. After all, he only had two more years until retirement, so he gave his son a wink.

Hugo Schmeisser quickly chimed in: "The MG08 weighed 65 kilograms before the modification, of which 28 kilograms were the gun body and 37 kilograms were the quadruped. To convert it into a light machine gun, the quadruped could be discarded. I temporarily developed a bipod that weighed only 3 kilograms, which reduced the weight by 34 kilograms."

In addition, I made some simplifications to the gun's structure without affecting its performance, which can reduce the weight by about 3 to 5 kilograms.

I currently have two options. One is to continue using the water-cooled light machine gun, which weighs 27 kilograms.

There's also an air-cooled version, which involves removing the water jacket and replacing it with a porous metal tubing, reducing the weight by another 5 kilograms to 22 kilograms. However, the structure of the air-cooled exhaust tubing still needs gradual testing and optimization; currently, heat dissipation efficiency cannot be guaranteed—because the Empire has never tried air-cooled machine guns before, everything has to be learned from scratch, drawing lessons from foreign designs.

Lelouch stroked his mustache, pondering for a moment.

He knew that, historically, Bergmann had helped improve the MG08/15 light machine gun based on the MG08 heavy machine gun. But without anyone intervening and giving it a push, it would take more than six months to pass testing and a year before it could go into production.

The 22-kilogram light machine gun, although two-thirds lighter than the 68-kilogram one, is still too tiring to carry and fight.

Moreover, machine gunners had to carry at least one ammunition belt. In this era, full-power ammunition was used. The Mauser 792 bullet weighed 15 grams, and with the cartridge case and propellant, the total weight was more than 20 grams. A two-hundred-round ammunition belt would weigh 5 kilograms.

After pondering for a while, Lelouch proposed two solutions: "We can take our time to further optimize the barrel cooling structure. I have some machine gun lightweighting research and development data that I previously seized from Billy King Lewis Company. You can refer to it; it might save you some trouble."

As soon as Lelouch spoke, Hugo Schmeisser's eyes lit up; he clearly knew Lewis, a fellow professional in the field.

With his information, we can learn from each other, identify gaps in our knowledge, absorb others' strengths, and improve our own research and development progress and quality.

What he didn't know was that, historically, before the fall of Billy King, the Lewis Company had escaped the German encirclement with the King and his cabinet, and then went to Britannia, where they helped Britannia finalize the Lewis light machine gun in 1915.

In this life, it can be considered a butterfly effect caused by Lelouch. The German army eventually surrounded and annihilated the remaining forces of the Biligin in Ostend, preventing the Biligin from breaking out on a large scale.

Although a high-end weapons designer like Lewis was certainly a high priority, he escaped the encirclement aboard the Linxian-class light cruiser along with the King and the Cabinet.

However, in that chaotic and war-torn environment, many of Lewis's assistants and peripheral technicians would certainly not have been able to get tickets to escape, and much of the relevant technical data was later captured by the German army.

When Colonel Lister's 16th Infantry Regiment entered Ostend and accepted the surrender of the Belgian army, the other officers were busy collecting valuables. Only Lelouch thought of sorting out whether the Belgian army had any military industrial data worth capturing. As a result, he actually managed to find some personnel and blueprints.

Of course, all of this was later reported to his superiors, and this time it was His Highness the Duke who approved his request to bring it to help Bergman Corporation accelerate its research and development. It would also be a good opportunity for Lelouch to build some personal connections.

This feeling is like when Liu Bang entered Xianyang, everyone else was busy "taking wealth and women," but Lu Xiu, like Xiao He, first looked for maps and books.

As Lelouch spoke, he took out several blueprints from his personal files and pushed them in front of Hugo Schmeisser.

Hugo Schmeisser unfolded the document and examined it for a while before beaming with delight. He then gave Schmeisser feedback: "With these things, the development and production progress of the MG08/15 can be accelerated by about six months. It can be finalized by the beginning of next year and mass-produced in the first half of the year! Moreover, I estimate that it can be two or three kilograms lighter than if I designed it myself."

"Finalizing the design by early next year... that's within two or three months? As a mature weapon, this timeframe is acceptable. However, right now I need a small batch of samples that I can obtain within a month and put into actual combat testing. Is that possible?"

Hugo Schmeisser hesitated, "A month? If we process it directly with machine tools and reduce costs by not making stamping dies, it's possible. But the cost will be relatively high. It's fine as a research and development sample."

Lelouch waved his hand and said, "You could have made it much simpler—I see that the holster for your air-cooled machine gun is still a perforated round tube. This kind of thing is too difficult to manufacture. You might as well just make it a folded square tube!"
This is a holster, not the barrel itself. Does it really matter if it's round or square? As long as it can dissipate heat, that's enough! Besides, as a test sample, the ventilation holes on the square tube don't need to be so fine. The holes can be slightly larger and fewer in number.

To ensure that in complex combat environments, if any mud, sand, or clods of dirt get stuck in the ventilation holes, soldiers can simply stick their fingers in and remove them. If you make the holes so close together, thinner than a fingertip, you won't be able to perform simple maintenance on the battlefield.

Lelouch casually pointed out several areas for improvement, all of which focused on reducing costs, increasing production efficiency, and enhancing battlefield maintainability.

These improvements are not hard to come by—most military enthusiasts know that the later MG34 general-purpose machine gun was actually more sophisticated than the MG42, but it was more expensive, harder to produce, and harder to maintain. The MG34 used a precise round tube air-cooled holster, while the MG42 used a square tube, which could be directly made by rolling and stamping thin steel plates, greatly reducing production costs.

Historically, the air-cooled holster for the MG08/15 was originally intended to be a round tube, but with Lelouch, these detours of "striving for perfection" were no longer necessary.

On the battlefield, the heat dissipation efficiency of square tubes and round tubes is almost the same, but the production cost and battlefield maintenance are greatly improved. Isn't that wonderful?

Hugo Schmeisser listened to his advice with mixed feelings of joy and worry.

He could certainly see that Captain Lelouch's method could reduce costs and increase reliability, maintainability, and ease of production...

But Hugo Schmeisser was still a little confused that the military-industrial enterprises of the mighty Demanian Empire were no longer striving for excellence, but instead pursuing cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

Hugo's father, Schmeisser the Elder, was completely baffled. He immediately retorted, "Captain Lelouch! Our Bergman company has always produced only the finest products. How can we produce shoddy goods just to save money?"

(End of this chapter)