Comments by "Crazy Eyes" (@CrizzyEyes) on "Secret Briefing: The Pedersen Device" video.
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This weapon fired a sort-of intermediate cartridge, almost a pistol cartridge. As he says in the video, it only has 1300 ft/s of muzzle velocity -- that's not very fast, it's good for a pistol round though. Very sufficient for close range trench warfare.
The M1 shot .30-06, which was a large hunting round. It will put a man out of the war pretty much anywhere you hit him, and at any range you can see. Additionally, when top brass plan a war, they see men as a resource, not as individuals. It's ruthless, but necessary to win a war. The only thing worse than sending a man to die is letting his death be in vain, so it became a vicious circle of sending in more men to make sure that they could win. Which is why they prioritize making equipment which is cheap and effective over expensive gadgets that may or may not make the average infantryman last that much longer. 8 rounds per en-bloc clip is sufficient, especially with a quick and easy reload. Additionally, .30-06 is heavy. It's a lot harder to carry a 40 round magazine of .30-06 rounds (which would be too massive to fit in anything but a full-sized machine gun) than a 40 round magazine of those short .30 caliber cartridges used in the Pederson device. Finally, simplicity is a virtue in itself, and the M1's simplicity ensures its reliability. Complicated devices like the Luger are harder to maintain.
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Well, there were high-capacity hand-held weapons in World War 2. The easiest example that comes to mind is the PPSh, based on the Finnish KP/31 submachinegun. They were frequently issued with drum magazines that held over 70 rounds and fired 7.62x25mm Tokarev, which probably would have been roughly comparable to the .30 caliber Pederson round you saw in the video (although, they may have some unique characteristic that separates them, I don't know much about these specific rounds).
High-capacity magazines are generally less reliable at the time, due to imprecise machining. For example, the PPSh-41 came standard issue with two drum magazines when it was first issued, then later on the Soviets changed it to 35-round box magazines because each drum magazine had to be fitted for a specific gun, and they had matching serial numbers. If you had to trade magazines with a comrade, they may or may not even fit your weapon properly. Very bad for logistics.
Virtually all of the concessions towards "worse" or "more primitive" firearms and technology you see in WW2 is simply for ease of production and logistics. Another thing to consider is that WW2 was the first war which was studied and analyzed in-depth by researchers, and they found that men only willingly shot at the enemy roughly 25% of the time (regardless of nationality), because this was before Skinner and behaviorial training which could teach soldiers to kill on a reflex. It could be that commanders knew this before researchers did and therefore had relaxed standards for how much firepower the average soldier had.
On the subject of .30-06's advantage against unarmored opponents, I would say that the stopping power or destructive force compared to a round like the .30 in the video is significantly higher. The big difference that matters is, getting shot with the .30 would put you out of the battle and maybe out of the war. Getting shot with a .30-06 will definitely put you out of the war, whether it's because you've died, or because it's a "million-dollar wound" (a wound which renders you unfit for service and gets you sent home). Pistol-type rounds are small enough and have low enough energy that they frequently just damage flesh without causing serious injury even in unarmored people, if they are not placed well -- think about how many times .50 Cent got shot with 9mm rounds, for example.
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