Who would win

Roman legion because the MG42 would eventually run out of bullets or be outflanked.

Mg42
A very small amount of people ever died in battles, it was like 80% routing
And s gun would make the romans rout

>>69483
They could siege it.

>>68659
9 Sextillion Hawks

1 trillion lions, easily

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>>68659
> Ceasers face when

>>68659
A 1000 US Army marines

>>68659
how much stacked up shields would i need to stop the bullets

>>70391
300

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>>68659
>A Roman legion

>Up to 6,000 soldiers

>A single MG-42

C'mon, m8.

>>70493
In an open field I'd still give it to the machine gun.

All you need to do is terrify the front line and the rest will fall back behind them. It kinda depends on how used to having their buddies explode in gore the Roman legions were.

>>70619
That is literally the worst case scenario for the MG. You would want a choke point so when you reload the legionnaires would trip over eachother. If it were an open field all they have to do it flank it and the battle is over.

The romans would win in every circumstance except an absolutely perfect setup for the machine gun for this context, like if the terrain was completely open and flat.

A single gun is still a single gun. You can't fire it in several directions at once. You can't even pay attention to all directions at once. Meanwhile a few thousand dudes can come towards you from all directions.

>>73465
If your soldiers have only ancient era weapons it would be easier to flank a single machine gun if the terrain had a lot of cover instead of being flat. The choke point thing would be great but only if you could absolutely guarantee that they all have to go through it for some strange reason, which seems very unlikely seeing how their enemy is one singe machine gun.

>>73780
I think I see what your saying about the flanking but by choke point I mean an area sealed off in all directions except for something like a narrow pass, something where flanking would be absolutely impossible without managing to flood the area

>>73892
The problem is that if your force is only one machine gun you have no way to guarantee that the romans aren't going around the narrow pass somehow. There's nobody covering other avenues of approach for you, you're just a single machine gun.

>>68659
Legion is made of people and gun is made of gun so people win because gun don't have people

>>70619
You're retarded buddy. Your complete ignorance of basic warfare knowledge doesn't help either.

Even if the Romans weren't heavily armored with the best armor of their era, a single MG probably couldn't take down 1000 naked Romans (An open field even gives the Romans the advantages), let alone 5000 or 6000 armored Roman troops. This thread is also retarded.

>>74103
He's right if you ask me, actually. An open field gives the best chances to the machine gun, since the machine gun's only strength is that it obliterates every roman it hits. So it has to cover all directions around itself. If it's not an open field the romans can sneak up on it and kill the gunner instead.

>best armor of their era
Wouldn't do shit even to stop modern rounds. In fact, it might just make the wounds worse by forming shrapnel.

A single lucky shot could punch straight through the roman shields, and then continue to pass through several armored breastplates, killing their wearers, before stopping.

>>74237
>forming shrapnel
Next youre gonna say it could take out 6 legionaires at a time through ricochet.

>>74945
That would be silly, but a single round could definitely kill several dudes if they were positioned so it would go straight through them in a line. You know, if they were in a shield wall formation for example.

>Nobody in this thread understands heavy mg tactics
In ww1 they figured out if you try to shoot directly at an advancing enemy line you're liable to hit only 1/20 or so targets with simple mowing pattern. If, however, you place the my to the side of the formation you get a much narrower and target dense area. This increases your kill ration to about 1/3. An open field would be the worst possible situation. The only chan the mg has is if you have terrain like thermopolae or a doorway where there is literally one avenue of approach through which the entire legion is bittlenecked. Otherwise the legion would simply charge and close the gap before you could even kill a hundred of them

>>75122
I'm pretty sure all of those tactics were made under the assumption that the advancing enemy has firearms of their own.

I mean if you brought a machine gun back to 50 BC or whatever it would probably freak the Romans out so much that they would run away. But if they knew what to expect, or were ready to fight to the death, they could close the distance pretty easily and then it would be over.

>turtle formation
Gets fucked up completely.

>archers, siege weapons
Actual threat.

>cavalry
Questionable if the horses get scared off by the machine gun. If they don't, then cavalry is a decent threat.