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The Vickers machine gun or Vickers gun is a water-cooled.303 British ... The Vickers is a fully automatic belt-fed firearm which is fired from a closed bolt.
Closed-bolt designs are often used in rifles. The improved accuracy of closed-bolt weapons is more desirable, while the poorer heat dissipation is less of an issue for slower-firing weapons. In contrast, open-bolt designs are more often used in automatic weapons, such as machine guns. For fast-firing automatic weapons, heat will rapidly build ...
Most Marlin M1917 and M1918 guns saw use in aircraft as defensive armament—however, as they retained the original M1895 "potato digger" ordnance's closed bolt firing cycle, these Marlin guns, weighing only some 25 pounds (11.34 kg) apiece, [26] versus the standard Vickers gun's 33 pound (15 kg) figure for aviation use, could readily be used ...
Most weapons that were successfully synchronized (at least in the First World War period) were (like the German Parabellum and Spandau guns and the British Vickers) based on the original Maxim gun of 1884, a closed bolt weapon operated by barrel recoil. [13]
There were other Vickers machine guns aside from the regular water-cooled model (known universally as the "Vickers"): the Vickers-Berthier (VB) machine gun used by the Indian Army, the Vickers "K" .303 aircraft machine gun developed from it, and the Vickers "S" 40 mm aircraft gun. An unusual machine gun also made was the Vickers Higson. [6]
Even after reasonably reliable synchronization was available for closed bolt weapons such as the Vickers gun there were reasons for avoiding synchronization. Even the best synchronization gears were liable to failure, and there were special hazards in firing incendiary and explosive ammunition through the propeller arc.
The Vickers class K/Vickers G.O. machine gun is a gas-operated weapon, firing from an open bolt (thus making it non-synchronizable for firing through a spinning propeller [citation needed]) in full automatic mode only. Its gas cylinder is located below the barrel, and a long-stroke gas piston operates a vertically tilting bolt.
It was an alternative to the water-cooled Vickers machine gun made by the same company. [5] The weapon used a gas and tipping bolt mechanism similar to the Bren light machine gun, was air-cooled like the Bren and also like the Bren had a removable barrel.