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[Y E O N N E]

Koniving, on 29 March 2018 - 04:43 PM, said:

Much like an Assault Rifle could be anything from an M16, to a SCAR-L, to an M416, to an AK-47, AK-74, AN-94, G36, L85 (Love this gun btw), etc.. Okay those are pretty similar feed wise so lets look at SMGs. Like the SMG could be an MP5, MP7, UMP-45, P90 or my personal favorite, the M960, and feed differently enough that a blanket statement can't cover them all.

Not a good set of examples.

An assault rifle is defined as a select-fire weapon firing a medium-powered cartridge. An SMG is defined as an automatic weapon firing pistol cartridges. Machineguns are automatic weapons firing anything more powerful than a pistol cartridge up to around 20mm, when there is a rather fuzzy transition over to cannon classification.

The only real leeway here is what set of standards you define the cartridge with, but that's where range comes in. The entire logic behind the assault rifle is that it lets you have the firepower of a machine gun across the most expected ranges in combat, which is typically up to 300-450 meters. Beyond that and you start needing more exceptional marksmanship to be effective, so medium-powered cartridges are meant to be effective and accurate roughly up to this distance, while full-powered cartridges have historically been engineered to remain effective and accurate out past 800-1000 meters. Pistol cartridges are lucky if they retain potency and accuracy out to 200 meters.