Did the technology required to manufacture assault rifles exist

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>>32047257
>Did the technology required to manufacture assault rifles exist during WW2?

No.

>>32047257
refer to the guide mate, its the sticky

The technology to create Assault Rifles existed since WWI, if not before. The reason why they weren't widely adopted is because of doctrine that demanded long range precision from every rifleman. Once Germany finally realized that Fritz and Jerry don't really shoot past 300 yards all that often the Assault Rifle was born. The Soviets caught on to this rather quickly while NATO (read: 'Murrika) thought that intermediate cartridges were fake and gay, which is why they didn't adopt them for another generation.

The idea of intermediate cartridges didn't come along until the late end of the war.

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>>32047257
The soviets produced a few million of these by the early 50's. The west were still using battle rifles for decades after because they were convinced that big bullets were better. The UK in particular believed that giving full auto weapons to riflemen would waste ammo, so they stuck with semi-auto battle rifles until the mid 80s.
It had nothing to do with manufacturing, you can make an assault rifle with exactly the same materials and processes as any WW1 era rifle or machine gun.

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>>32047257
Thats a T65 OP

>Tfw Wolf is gunna bring in T91s soon
>tfw no T65s never ever

>>32047336
How did they figure out to make it switch semi/full auto though?

>>32047343
Depends on the weapon, but select fire weapons existed prior to ww1. Assault rifles are very simple machines, the reason that they too so long to be adopted is because people thought that either the lower powered ammo required to make the technology work would be a bad idea or that full auto rifles for infantry was unnecessary.

When they reckoned that an average ivan in panic would dump an entire mag in the general direction of the enemy. That's why the semi auto setting in the AK is at the bottom.

>>32047328
If long range precision was important, why didn't they move from the bolt-action rifles to semi autos on a larger scale? Was a reliable semi-auto action that hard to design back in the day? It seems like if you could just copy the AK's long stroke piston, you'd be halfway there.

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>>32047465
> Was a reliable semi-auto action that hard to design back in the day?

Reliable semi-auto designs already existed at the time, but they weren't designed to chamber in the high powered ammo that most armies thought was necessary for combat. Coupled with the fact that most of the primary combatants already had a shit load of bolt action rifles and the factories to build them, it was deemed wiser to spend the manufacturing resources on developing more useful things like vehicles.
Keep in mind that designing, manufacturing and training all take lots of time, so issuing your troops with the 2 million bolt action rifles you have lying around is much more attractive than trying to re-equip and retrain all of your infantry in the middle of a war, especially if the rifle takes a different type of ammo compared to your other standard issue weapons.

>>32047553
Additionally in wartime it's essential to cut costs and maximize the entire output. If you can outfit 100 soldiers with bolt action rifles for the price to outdit 10 soldiers with select-fire you're sure as fuck going to want the 100.

More bullets = more money. Look at the amount of ammunition used per kill in WWII vs what was used in the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns

>>32047594
and those figures are?

>>32047553
>>32047465
Take the SVT-40 that you posted for example, it was a good gun, overall better than the mosin but took something like 4 times the man hours to make it, and by the time the germans were knocking at the door and youre just pushing conscripts onto the front line you need a gun you can make in no time at all

They wanted most of their troops carrying the SVT-40 but production limits and shortage of resources necessitated them dropping production hence why post 42 SVT40s are much rarer than 1940/41/42