. . . if you give a machine gun a 3-hex beaten zone and make enfilading fire a thing . . .
Waitress, I'll have what he's having,
. . . if you give a machine gun a 3-hex beaten zone and make enfilading fire a thing . . .
You can absolutely pull off single shots with an MG. Probably way more accurately than with a rifle as well. At 200m-ish ranges you can absolutely keep the trigger down and keep the fire on a single target. A GPMG is a 10+kg lump of steel, so even putting 7.62 downrange will barely make it move. All of this as long as it's properly deployed on a bipod of course, shooting it from a hip or purposefully covering a larger area would make sense in the heavy weapons rules context, but saying you can not properly engage single targets is blatantly wrong.Machine guns, in the military definition, don't normally have a semi-auto or single shot setting. (An exception is the M2, which could have a "sniper rifle" mode.) You will always shot multiple rounds per attack and these will throw off your aim against a point target the size of a person. The interaction of the heavy weapons rules with machine guns are good, they just need one more step.
On page 3 of this pdf you'll find info on the beaten zone of the MAG58 at various ranges, assuming flat ground. It exceeds 3 hexes in every case.Waitress, I'll have what he's having,
The problem, as I was pointing out in the post you chose to quote, is that actually implementing rules that reflect proper employment of machine guns in an RPG is just going to make most players think something is not right, so it's best left to tabletop wargaming. If we wanted to get all simulationist about MGs we would have to account for range, elevation, the shape of the ground and so on in deciding the effect of machine gun fire. All this can do is slow down play & that's bad.