Talk:Sten Machine Carbine

Worst guns in history? Highly inaccurate? It is neither of those things! It's as accurate as pretty much any other subgun of that era, and there are far, far worse designs around.

The bad reputation came from the shoite mags they made.

Every single source I've seen on the Sten says they were could rarely fire off a single magazine without jamming at least once or twice. As a result, British troops usually ditched their Stens for MP40s at the first available opportunity. As for a worse submachine gun...I can't think of anything that can possibly compare to the Ste. The Chauchat, maybe, but that wasn't a subgun.

I thought the Sten's weak point was a feature inherited from Ze Germans, namely the dodgy "let's try squeezing two rows into one" magazine, which was apparently the source of most of its reliability problems. I dunno if the Germans themselves had fixed it by the time the MP40 arrived, but I can't help feeling that the MP40 is as overrated as the Sten is underrated. Then again, it has German Added Awesome which makes it a legend amongst weapons, in the same way that the 88 could easily rip a Chally apart at a range of 18 miles and the only reason we use 120mm cannons is that we can't match German engineering (I shouldn't even joke about that because someone, somewhere will believe it!) - vomit (prattling cont. below)

Actually the magazine for the Sten was a single column design which was prone to jamming (better to leave a few rounds out rather than fill it to the top). Double column magazines are a lot more reliable and it may be worth noting that the magazines for the Sten's replace ment, the Sterling, were both double column and had an elaborate, roller bearing magazine follower in order to reduce the chance of a magazine related stoppage. - pureteenlard

Oh okay, I stand corrected then - I'd thought the design was a double column into one type of thing that caused problems, which certainly sounds iffy (even if it does seem to work perfectly okay in the Browning Hi-Power's mag, which does the same thing) but whatever the method used, I think there's little argument that the magazine was the Sten's real weakness. The Sterling's magazine is certainly an awful lot better, and is if anything over-engineered; but at least it's not going to cause the bugger to jam. Says the guy who only ever got to fire 10 rounds out of a Sterling "because we can't afford any more", further training was having another guy yanking the cocking handle back and yelling "bang". Very Dad's Army. Anyway, I loved the Sterling, which is probably heresy around here, but at least its cocking handle didn't try to rip my finger off like the SLR's! --Vomit 07:12, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

The Browning high power is a double column magazine :-) or, to be strictly accurate, a staggered column magazine.

see and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magazine_(firearms)#Box

I think the Chauchat is always worth a mention whenever a discussion of the worst infantry weapons ever is concerned since it was so monumentally bad: where it didn't totally suck in terms of design, the exceedingly poor quality of manufacture more than made up for it; though astonishingly it still doesn't stop some optimistic revisionists calling it "the first assault rifle". And then there's the M60, in essence a Lewis gun (via the "shock horror, actually not all that good" FG) with an unreliable belt feed, a dodgy trigger and the world's oddest barrel change system, which it took the Septics 50 years to concede was a pile of steaming crap. At least a Sten weighs a lot less. --Vomit 07:48, 31 July 2009 (UTC)