Skans said:
Theohazard, if you are carrying your own ammo, it seems to me that magazines have the advantage over belts. You can carry the loaded magazines in a box if you want, same as belted ammo. The military can afford to dedicate a person to carrying belted ammo.
Actually, we couldn't afford to dedicate a person to carrying ammo. For most of my enlistment, I never had an ammo man; our three-man machine gun teams almost always consisted of two men. And with or without an ammo man, we always spread our ammo out among everyone in the squad. We carried our belted ammo wherever we could; in our packs, in the pouch it came in, or just draped over our shoulders. And it's fairly easy to carry several hundred rounds of belted 7.62 ammo on your body, ready for use. I definitely wouldn't want to have to figure out how to carry a whole bunch of 100-round 7.62 mags strapped to my body instead.
And if you didn't want to carry the ammo in loose belts, you didn't have to. Our 7.62 ammo came in 100-round belts that were in small cardboard boxes in small green pouches that had a cloth strap. So each 100 round belt had its own carrying strap and pouch (all disposable) if you wanted to carry it that way. That's a much easier way to carry 100 rounds than if it was in an oddly-shaped, bulky 100-round magazine. Here's what those pouches look like:
There's nothing showing the scale there, but trust me when I tell you that that's a LOT less bulky than a 100-round Beta mag for a 7.62x51 rifle:
I'd guess that a 7.62 Beta magazine is about double the size of a 100-round pouch of belted ammo. And it doesn't come from the ammo can already loaded in a magazine and with a disposable pouch with a carrying strap.
Skans said:
Also, linking ammo is much more difficult than loading a magazine. if you ran out of serviceable belts in a firefight but still had ammo left, you'd have to stop and re-link a bunch of ammo!
That would never happen because all our ammo already came pre-linked. Nobody in our whole company was ever issued un-linked 7.62 ammo, so every round we ever fired through our 240s was already linked to begin with.
Skans said:
I suppose you are assuming that all ammo you are using is already linked. Still, the same can be said for magazines.
I doubt the military could afford to issue all machine gun ammo pre-loaded in large-capacity magazines that were quality enough to be as reliable as a belt-fed machine gun.
Skans said:
My point is that from an individual standpoint (not the standpoint of a squad), magazines are far more efficient and practical. I suppose it comes down to how you envision you might be using the gun in question.
The OP specifically mentioned general-purpose machine guns, which are almost always belt-fed. The Marine Corps is transitioning to the M27 IAR (basically an HK416) as their squad automatic weapon carried by their automatic riflemen in a rifle squad, but it's not used in a general-purpose machine gun role because it's not designed for that. The M240B is still the general-purpose machine gun used by the Marine Corps, and it's used in everything from squad direct-support roles to platoon and company-level support.
And the role of a true machine gun like the M240 is very different than the role of a magazine-fed automatic rifle like what you're talking about. Our M240s were deployed in teams and were intended to provide sustained full-auto fire over a long period of time. And it did that by being belt-fed, by firing from an open bolt, by having a barrel that could be switched in a few seconds (at most), and by being extremely large and robust.