A good invention by the Nazis

An MG-42 firing demonstration at Dellwood Park in Lockport, Illinois on 8 September 2013 bythe  5th Company GrossDeutschland.

The MG 42 (shortened from the German Maschinengewehr 42, machine gun 42) is a 7.92×57mm Mauser general purpose machine gun designed in Nazi Germany and used extensively by the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS during the second half of World War Two. It was intended to replace the earlier MG 34, which was more expensive and took much longer to produce, but both weapons were produced until the end of the war.
The MG 42 has a proven record of reliability, durability, simplicity, and ease of operation, but is most notable for its ability to produce a high volume of suppressive fire. The MG 42 had one of the highest average cyclic rates of any single-barreled man-portable machine gun: between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred rounds per minute, resulting in a distinctive muzzle report.
The MG 42’s lineage continued past Germany’s defeat, forming the basis for the nearly identical MG1 (MG 42/59), chambered in 7.62mm NATO, which subsequently evolved into the MG1A3, then the Bundeswehr’s MG 3. It also spawned the Swiss MG 51, Zastava M53, SIG MG 710-3, the Austrian MG 74, and the Spanish 5.56mm Ameli light machine gun, and lent many design elements to the American M60 and Belgian MAG. The MG 42 was adopted by several armed organizations after the war, and was both copied and built under license.
The MG 42’s high rate of fire resulted from analysis which concluded that, since a soldier typically only has a short period of time to shoot at an enemy soldier, and muzzle rise quickly threw initial aim off, it was imperative to fire the highest number of bullets possible, in the shortest time possible, to increase the likelihood of a hit before the recoil overcame the inertia of the gun and pushed the aiming point upwards. The disadvantage was that the weapon consumed exorbitant amounts of ammunition and quickly overheated its barrel, making sustained fire problematic.
Thus, while individual bursts left the weapon as highly concentrated fire at twelve hundred rounds per minute, the Handbook of the German Army (1940) forbade the firing of more than 250 rounds in a single burst, and indicated a sustained rate of no more than three hundred and fifty rounds per minute to minimize barrel wear and overheating, although the excellent quick-change barrel design helped a great deal. Burst limits are typical on non-water-cooled automatic weapons, and slower-firing Allied guns such as the M1919 also had limits; they fired at a slower rate, but lacked a quick-change barrel, and so the operator had to limit his fire to a few hundred rounds per minute to allow the barrel to cool between bursts.
Due to the slower firing rate, this led to a longer period of time spent shooting, but a roughly equivalent total number of rounds fired. Operationally, the MG 42’s main drawback was that it could consume ammunition at such a high rate that it was very difficult to keep one firing during offensive actions, because ammunition had to be carried forward on a continuous basis. This was a problem at the end of the war with inexperienced German troops' good fire discipline was a must, and the level of training that the German infantry was receiving was poor.

Rico says he's still hoping to mount a dummy one on the sidecar of the Ural that his stepson Scott has yet to purchase...