Support Rifle / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page Support Rifle.

What's a "Beaten Zone"?

r_b_bergstrom 29 Jul 2010 00:11

What's a "Beaten Zone"? I've never encountered that term before. I popped over to the wikipedia page on Beaten Zone, but after reading that I don't really understand how or why a support rifle would lack one. Feel like I'm missing something critical.

On a related note, this article could really benefit from someone adding a source or two, so that someone who wants to learn more could go look it up.

Some kind of explanation:

The Colonel 16 Aug 2010 12:24

This is to do with the fact that anything called a 'support rifle' tends to be ineffective for area fire - they generate a relatively low voluem of fire and that which they do generate tends to all end up in the same place - a true machine gun will tend to tend to spread rounds around the point of aim, meaning that it strikes and/or suppresses a much larger area. The area that a machinegun strikes or suprpeesses around the point of aim is what gunners will tend to call the beaten zone.

Not good on the references personally, since I picked most of this up talking to gunners and armourers rather than out of books…

r_b_bergstrom 16 Aug 2010 13:42

Thank you for the clarification.