Judging by the flames and smoke whipping out of the chamber, it looks like she is in danger of cooking-off entirely.
Modern machine guns brag they are supposed to be able to fire for at least 30 minutes on auto with no risk of misfires in combat. She must have been shooting for an hour here to get the barrel that hot.
Judging by the flames and smoke whipping out of the chamber, it looks like she is in danger of cooking-off entirely.
Modern machine guns brag they are supposed to be able to fire for at least 30 minutes on auto with no risk of misfires in combat. She must have been shooting for an hour here to get the barrel that hot.
Barrel heat has more to do with rate of fire than anything, a sustained fire with a GPMG like the PKP or M240 is 100 round a minute you would want to switch barrel, if cyclic (as fast the weapon will fire) you would want to do so after a minute. Depending on the barrel type you can end up with a red hot barrel in about less 2 minutes on cyclic.
Judging by the flames and smoke whipping out of the chamber, it looks like she is in danger of cooking-off entirely.
Modern machine guns brag they are supposed to be able to fire for at least 30 minutes on auto with no risk of misfires in combat. She must have been shooting for an hour here to get the barrel that hot.
PKP is probably one of the worse options for sustained fire tbh. They had to give it a near pencil barrel and basically cut down on mass anywhere else they could to get the light weight that's bragged about in regards to the weapon.
It's light, mobile, and basically can't do the things you want an MG to do for sustained contact. You've just gotta have a certain amount of thermal mass and surface area for cooling, along with robustness of the working parts.
PKP is probably one of the worse options for sustained fire tbh. They had to give it a near pencil barrel and basically cut down on mass anywhere else they could to get the light weight that's bragged about in regards to the weapon.
It's light, mobile, and basically can't do the things you want an MG to do for sustained contact. You've just gotta have a certain amount of thermal mass and surface area for cooling, along with robustness of the working parts.
You are not entirely correct on PKP being not suitable for sustained fire. It has an in-built air-cooling mechanism which provides constant flow of air between the barrel and the casing, thus allowing it to fire more frequently than most GPMGs out there and not overheating. Apart from air cooling it also has an increased barrel surface area for better heat dispersion.
EDIT: You were probably thinking about PK or PKM, which had this issue and required to change barrels quite often. PKP was designed with this problem in mind, so it avoids the same fate