MP40 or Vigneron magazines in a Lanchester

[Bruce_in_Oz]

"I'm not quite happy with the assertion that the STEN was designed to take MP40 magazines "

Was not the Lanchester a "highest form of flattery" of the German MP-28, itself an "upgrade" of the old MP-18?

If this is the case, the Lanchester was "designed" to take a clone of the MP-28 magazine, not the MP-38, which came ten years later.

Furthermore, if the STEN were required to take magazines "already in production" that could only mean the Lanchester / MP-28 type.

Anyone have ALL of the various mags (and / or guns) close to hand?

[tankhunter]

.......... exactly Dann! Like using existing magazines in the new Sten. Especially when your boss (Shepherd) only allowed you a month and £5 to go away, design and produce the SMG that you'd shown him as a paper draft the week before.

So in that Context Pete, it would seem like the gun was designed around the mag. & not a mag to fit the gun!... usually, it's the other way around! I cant imagine that happening with something like the EM2. Have you seen the Mags for them? I wouldn't want to try to make one!

The fact that German Mp.40 Mags fitted & used in an 'Emergency', is purely coincidental then? But work they do, in examples I have tried & fired in the past. When at the time, Sten mags were not to hand.

[Peter Laidler]

Have I seen an EM 2 mags.......... Are you kidding Tankie? We had boxes of the various sorts and calibres in the cellar, some numbered to the trials papers and others numbered to rifles and others in the white and.......

As for the Sten........ It's no use going over and over again and reinventing it. Facts is facts. He had £5 and a month paid absence to put his sketch designs into life. The mag had to be the one that was already in production BUT shorter so that it could be carried in the new 37 pattern pouches. And incidentally, produced at a rate of 17 per Sten produced so with 4.2 million Stens made, there should never ever be a world shortage in my humble opinion. That MP mags fit is by dint of coincidence of ancestry. And to be fair and looking from the bleedin obvious point of view, Britain in 1940/41 wasn't exactly brimming over with MP40 magazines.

The rest they say, is history, a bit like designing the Mk5 to take some of the readily available No4 parts