Comments by "Anders Juel Jensen" (@andersjjensen) on "Beltfed Madsen LMG: When the Weird Gets Weirder" video.

  1. Small Danish entrepreneurial thinking, of the time, in a nutshell. The less retooling the better. But janky unreliable crap is unacceptable too so complexity becomes an art form. It's funny, though, that if you look at the design philosophies that made Danish furniture all the rage in the 50s you still see the same thinking, but in reverse: To avoid complicated tooling there was an enormous focus on making simplistic shapes look clean, harmonic and deliberate. And it paid off, as it sparked an entire industry of small volume, but rather pricy, functional ornaments that sell internationally and retain their value very well.
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  2. Strangely enough that was the saying of the famous Danish jewellery thief Carl August Lorentzen. He wrote it over the entrance to his 18 meter long tunnel out of prison, that he escaped through on Christmas eve 1949.
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  3. Metal sections. The kind with the little "finger tab" that attaches to the extractor rim.
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  4. It was already done and in production by the time the krauts got their hands on it. The only difference between the Danish Airforce version and the Luftwaffe version is the barrel shroud because the Luftwaffe wanted compatibility with their existing mounts.
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  5. The belt holds the cartridge by the thick part with a little "finger tab" that extends down to the extractor rim of the case. So there is no strain on the bullet at all. Bullets aren't crimped in, in the usual sense, but the brass is formed slightly undersized, so when the bullet is forced in you effectively have "a crimp" because brass is elastic and want to return to it's original shape. As for why: The least amount of retooling possible. These were small volume production guns, so the tooling represented a massive upfront cost.
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  6.  @KungFuHonky  Oh... on pure momentum alone. I had not considered that. I don't know if any machine guns do that sometimes, but the Madsen doesn't. It was mechanically complex, expensive and slow to manufacture, but was considered very reliable.
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  7. The only difference between the Danish Airforce version and the Luftwaffe version is the barrel shroud. They wanted compatibility with their existing mounts, which is a rather trivial change.
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