Heavy machine guns rose at the end of 19, but until the end of World War I, most of the heavy machine guns in various countries were mainly based on the principle of Ma Keqin's water cooling jacket. The Austro-Hungarian Empire produced a number of wonderful Skoda 1893 heavy machine guns, delayed semi-free rifles and gravity-fed ammunition.
Maxim machine gun adopts the principle of barrel recoil. In the late1880s, Browning also began to ponder the possibility of automatic loading of weapons. In 1899, he tried to design a gas collecting hood at the muzzle of a lever rifle, which would capture the gas ejected from the muzzle and then push a connecting rod backwards, which could be connected with the loading lever of the rifle, thus turning the manual lever rifle into an automatic loading rifle.
This automatic principle of muzzle gas gathering push rod can be regarded as the earliest gas guiding structure. Of course, it was not mature at that time. However, after Maxim machine gun was sold, Browning found Colt Company, hoping to use this principle to design an air-guided machine gun. At 1892, the product came out. 1893, these air-guided machine guns passed the test of the us navy and were officially installed in 1895.
Let's look at this strange heavy machine gun in principle first. It has a funny nickname called potato excavator. This is very similar to the patent filed by Ma Keqin in 1885. We often hear that the French use bulletproof plates, while the Italians use strange mouse cages to replenish ammunition because of Ma Keqin's patent. Personally, I don't believe this. Patents can be circumvented by some modifications, especially for military weapons. Patents really can't stop people from killing each other.
When the bullet is fired, gunpowder gas is blown out through the air guide hole below the barrel, pushing the rocker, which swings backwards and pushes the gun rack through the connecting rod. (It should be noted here that Browning's early semi-automatic gas collection was at gunpoint. In fact, the early model of M 1895 was also muzzle gas collection, which was later changed to air guide hole type).
The frame opens the offset latch backward, and the latch sits backward and throws the housing. At the same time, the shell-grasping hook pulls the next bullet to the position of the bullet-supporting plate. When the bolt re-enters, the plate rises, and then the bolt pushes the bullet back into the chamber to complete locking and firing.
It is not difficult to see that the whole principle of the M 1895 machine gun is very similar to that of the lever rifle, except that the rocker lever is driven by the air guiding principle, and the rocker lever pushes the gun frame and the bolt through a group of connecting rods.
Because these machine guns were first used by the US Navy, they were 6x60mmSR ship shells, which were small caliber at that time. However, it is precisely because of the small caliber and small projectile mass that this machine gun with gas guiding principle can be adopted by the navy (at that time, Ma Keqin also participated in the bidding, but Ma Keqin's barrel recoil principle needs enough recoil to run reliably, so it is not suitable for 6mm bullets).
These machine guns were later used in the Spanish-American War and later sold to Mexico, Uruguay, Canada, Russia, Spain and Italy. It also appeared in World War I, but the number was small.
Compare him with Ma Keqin. Although the structure is indeed simpler and lighter than Maxine's (gun body 16kg, and it is air-cooled), judging from the use of heavy machine guns at the end of 19 and the beginning of the 20th century, they really do not bear the weight of machine guns for the time being, and Ma Keqin's gun recoil principle is also very reliable, and the fire continuity of water cooling is also better.
Furthermore, the ammunition supply structure based on lever rifle makes the firing rate of M 1895 not go up, only less than 400 rounds per minute, and the swinging lever in front also limits the firing conditions to some extent, so it cannot be used as a single soldier weapon. So at that time, Ma Keqin's pipe withdrawal and water cooling met the current operational needs.