Sten vs MP40
Вставка
- Опубліковано 27 лип 2022
- This is a table-top review and comparison of two of the most recognizable SMGs of WWII: the Sten and the MP40. We will start by laying out the historical foundation of the two and then move through a point-by-point comparison. Which one would you have carried in WWII?
Photo Sources:
Wikipedia
German War Machines
Britanica
USHMM
wikimedia
guns fandom
MarksmanTV is a registered trademark owned by Marksman Shooting Sports, LLC. It offers its content to its viewers free of charge. Content shared on this channel is distributed strictly for informational, educational and entertainment purposes only. MarksmanTV encourages its viewers to follow all state and Federal laws. Nothing MarksmanTV publishes should be considered as legal advice. - Спорт
The original concept of the MP38/MP40 was to arm the squad leader with a higher rate of fire weapon to support the MG 34/42. The 98K armed rifleman and the sole MP38/40 were there to do that and provide the attacking formation. The battle unit concept early in the war centered around the LMG.
The German version of the STEN was the MP3008 and the magwell was in the vertical position. It used the MP40 magizine.
Irony... Brits copied the Germans, Brits become desperate and make a cheap version, Germany gets desperate and then copies the Brits.
You can also use MP-40 magazines in a Sten, but not Sten magazines in an MP-40. They doesn't fit, they are a little bit wider. I have tried, I own an MP-40 and 4 Sten's. The MP-40 is a BNZ-42 and the Sten's are two Mk2's, one Mk3 and one Mk5.
@@WhattAreYouSaying That's probably because the STEN was originally designed for resistance warfare... to allow using the enemies ammo in occupied territory.
@@WhattAreYouSaying I never knew that. STEN mags were always the Achilles heel. When I had malfunctions with my STEN they were always mag related. MP-40 mags are generally more reliable.
@@babalonkie They probably had that in mind when the Sten was desgined. So they could use captured MP-38/40 magazines if necessary. The Sten magazine was derived from the Lanchester magazine, which was a clone of the German MP-28. It is very likely that MP-28 magazines can be used in a Sten also. Lanchester magazines can be used in a Sten, and the Lanchester is a copy of the MP-28, including the magazine.
Another piece that would be interesting to match up would be the American M3 "Grease Gun." I am a big fn of German arms, and the MP40 is a beautiful piece of equipment. Having said that, I agree with the assessment of the advantages offered by the Sten.
MP-40 for me. At least till the Sterling comes.
Sorry to add a second comment...Allegedly, according to 3 of my uncles who served in WWII, the term "Schmeisser" was due to magazines being stamped thusly on guns that had been captured. It appears that Hugo Schmeisser wanted credit for his contribution of the magazine design...likely a royalty on them as well.
Basically any light engineering firms in Germany were making these; Schmeisser, Erma, Haenel, Steyr and Pfaff (who were - and still are - otherwise famous for making sewing machines)
Schmeisser held the patent for the MP-40's double stack, single feed magazine, while Vollmer held the patent for the telescoping mainspring hosing. Royalties were paid on each gun and magazine produced.
The cheapest Sten Guns were produced in Northern Ireland for 12 shillings and six pence at the time $3 and 6 cents. Also a toy designer and manufacturer one the Lines Brothers helped to simplify the design before it went into manufacture.
Wow …thanks for this great comparison.. I hope this format becomes a regular feature Excellent Stuff …!!!
Both have same rate of fire at 550rpm. Between the two I would go with the Sten for the same reasons you gave. The Israeli Army or IDF manufactured and used the Sten extensively before they developed the Uzi SMG.
Sten for the win!
(MP40 for resale/investment value)
The problem with the magazines was the cost. A complete set of 8 magazines could easily cost more than the actual weapon so they did not put so much effort on the magazines. The Sten is actually the MP28 simplified to the extreme. That explains the similarities like the side magazine and the single shot option.
Great review Chris always wondered about the Stein lot of info thanks for all you do
Very cool review, thanks
Thanks Chris, not everyday to get to see these type of firearms.
Great job and thank you for the history.
Threaded muzzle for a blank firing adaptor for training.
Personally I'm fond of the aesthetics of the sten but both are awesome.
My grandad loved his mp38/40.
Excellent video,as a side note in addition to the Lend-Lease arms that the US provided us with after Dunkirk the American public also made a contribution by donating their own private firearms resulting in the appearance of Winchester,Marlin and Savage rifles and an assortment of pistols and revolvers that were issued to the Local Defence Volunteers aka the 'Home Guard'.
I can only imagine that finding the correct ammunition for such a variety of calibres must have been a logistical nightmare.
Having tried both, the MP40 is MUCH nicer to shoot...
Chris that is a lesson in machine gun 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻☮️ love it 😍
I love the old stuff and when you compare its just good shit
Ok thanks let me know
Excellent video, thanks. I've spoken to three people who had used the STEN in actual combat. 1st person: It was adequate - barely, but you could soon get something better. 2nd person: It was treacherous - it would go off at the wrong time - even if just left propped up against a wall. 3rd person: it wasn't as good as the American or German guns, but, oh yes, it WAS an effective weapon [said with a murderous glint in his eyes].
You made that up though.
@@snowflakemelter1172nah sounds about right. Sten was fucking shit SMG. BUT it did the job it needed to do with an insanely short RnD turn around, as well as speed and ease of production. That was the focus of the sten. Not to be a good gun, to be a quick, cheap and easy gun to make... because of this, it was NOT a good gun. It was good enough... just lol.
@@snowflakemelter1172you mean you think he didn't just run into 3 people who fought with the sten in battle 😂
@@andymaciver1760 when people make up these stories they all read the same , post war myths they read online woven into a fake story to pretend it has authenticity.
There are lots of photos of British and Commonwealth troops in Normandy using battlefield pickup MP40s instead of their "Tuppenny Woolworth" guns.
personally, I would rather have been issued the Gewehr 43 or the Sturmgewehr or the Garand M1 or the FG42, but if forced, it would be MP40, more reliable. Can I choose the M3 grease gun?
The Sten will be forever known as the gun that jammed during the Renard Heydrik assassin !
the Sten will be forever know as the gun of the good that fought the evil that used the MP40
@@DarrenMalin It's nothing but a silly piece of dirt cheap yet somewhat functional scrap...
That's why they carried grenades, and let the bastard expire slowly.
I’ll take the Sten mostly because I own one. Great smooth shooting SMG.
Once heard a strange story about the threads on the mp 40. Supposedly they had a grenade launcher kit consisting of a little cup discharger with rifling about 26mm diameter inside like a flare gun they would fire a blank with a small mostly bakelite grenade. You see the grenades occasionally they're a pointy usually brown bakelite cylinder with precut rifling and pointed nose but The launcher cups ard incredibly rare nowadays
The bolt slams forward after the last round on both weapons. The Thompson M1A1 bolt looks back after the last round is fired.
I want something that goes off when I want it to go off, and doesn't go off when I don't. I love the Sten though, and it could be as reliable as the MP40.
Man, I love this channel! You can say it like it is, Hitler let the entire British army escape...
The Sten might be *easier* than the MP40 for maintenance, but the MP40 is still *easy* to disassemble and maintain. It is also much more accurate and comfortable to shoot, so I always find it weird when people say they prefer the Sten.
Thank you! At last someone with some common sense. The sten was made to be quick, easy, and cheap to produce. It wasn't made to be a good gun. It couldn't be with the main focus of its design brief. Tbh it's a miracle it was as functional as it was considering the speed of its RnD.
@@MrBeardedgelflingIt's basically the 'Lanchester lite', all the working parts are based on a tried and tested design, only the peripheral elements have been changed such as the deletion of wooden Furniture and wire but stock etc. Its flaws mainly centre around its double stack single feed magazine. The Mp 40 had the same issues for the same reasons, only the Sten gets the reputation because of its utilitarian looks, whilst the MP 40 doesn't because of its perception as a German gun, possessed of 'Krut magic' design and engineering etc. In truth both were as crap or as good as each other. If you're looking for the best shooting experience, then the MP 40 wins with its pistol grip and better sights. If you're looking to equip an army as quickly and cheaply as possible, whilst still being effective, then the Sten. Does a short range, pistol calibre gun really need fancy adjustable sights though, the trend there after,seems to have followed the Sten on that one.
@@christskingdomiscoming5964 I guess. Just from all reports of people who shot both, the MP40 pretty much wins unanimously as the better gun to shoot. Making it the better gun. When you start taking into account logistics and manufacturing times and easy, the sten is the clearer winner. And you see the sten get progressively upgrades in its fit n finish as the allies have time and money to do so. They knew it was a flawed gun compared to the MP40.
@@MrBeardedgelfling I agree with most of what you're saying, but you can't judge a guns performance based on 80 year old examples. The Sten was not meant to be gripped by the magazine it was meant to be gripped under the barrel. If you did this in the army you would get chewed out by the sergents. If you look at old photos no one ever fires or carries the Sten by the magazine. The reason being that by holding the gun by the mag it subjected it to all the vibrations of the bolt cycling, causing the mag to buckle slightly in the mag well, affecting the tolerances of the magazine. In a double stack single feed magazine this is not good.
If you watch all the Hollywood movies and absolutely everyone on UA-cam who fires one, then you'll see everyone holding it by the mag. As a consequence todays examples suffer from decades of incorrect use, causing numerous malfunctions, this is then retroactively blamed on poor design/manufacturing. Because the Sten already has somewhat of a reputation in this direction, it is lazily assumed that it was always like this back in the day.
At least with the MP 40 you get an actual pistol style grip and a folding stock, though that stock is wobbly by all accounts.
@@christskingdomiscoming5964 but it is poor design, having that magazine side mounted was not a good choice. We KNOW this to be true, the Germany's knew this, the Americans knew this - both ahead of us in SMG production and R&D at the time (probably still are tbh lol). Don't get me wrong sten did the job it needed to do at the quickest and cheapest way it could but it was compromised because of this. It was not a good SMG it just was good enough, and that's all it had to be. Compare it to an MP40 or even the Thompson it was just lacking. We just copied an older German SMG design with a side magazine because it was better for trench warfare. But WW2 saw little of that compared to WW1. The sten was out of date before it was even made.
Sure it was easier to fire from prone because of the side magazine, but a feature not all that useful in a gun made to quickly sweep though buildings and alike going prone with it would have limited use and function. At the ranges SMG were effective going prone really wouldn't have helped you all that much. Running to good hard cover would be often the better choice. Going prone and returning fire with a rifle at 200+ meters sure that could makes sense but at such ranges an SMG is all but useless, except for maybe suppression - getting people to duck n cover. But magazine capacity and accuracy would make it poor at that, that's what guns like the BAR and Bren were for. And the could reliability hit n kill at that range too which is why they were far better at it. All in all the sten was a good little gun in that very small and unique situation in history. Otherwise it's garbage.
I have had the privilege of fireing both of them in my life and i must say i enjoyed it alot, the only down side was it took longer to load the magazine's then it did to empty them!
Did you go rent them, or did you know someone?
I been thinking about going to a rental place to shoot some of these historic guns.
@@deejayimm i knew a guy, i also knew another guy that had a tec9 and a uzi i got to play with that was fun as well but even back when ammo was cheep it got expensive rill fast
Errors in the design history:
1) The Lanchester was design started in 1940 (not pre-war) and is in fact a reverse-engineered MP28, which was a improvement of the original MP18.
2) The Sten was designed as a way of simplifying the Lanchester and making it cheaper to produce.
3) The British stopped buying Thompson SMGs mainly due to the cost - they needed their money to buy things before Lend-Lease was passed and expensive SMGs were not on the list.
4) The side feeding magazine started with the MP18 using the only available magazine, rather than design one from scratch, which was the snail magazine that fitted a Luger. It was NOT so you could lie down easier!
5) Yes the double stack single feed magazine was a problem that was solved then the British adopted the Stirling SMG as that had a double stack double feed magazine with rollers. It was probably the best magazine ever designed & the Stirling was designed as an improvement on the Sten.
so you are using one of the fancy STENs you should compare it to the Mk3
Sten is the weapon of the good and the MP40 the weapon of evil.
Took UA-cam 5 days to notify me of this video.
Ps. Mp40 in my opinion rules
It looks cool but you know that baka lite was irreplaceable In action
Weren't they both selective fire weapons (semi or full auto)?
Gun nuts galore!
I am currently building a vertical STEN and wish to know what color is the STEN in the picture . .....$100,000 worth of arms on one table !
The Australian Owen gun trumps both of them. Ask anyone who has used all three.
I have heard the magazine between the MP40 and the STEN are interchangeable. True or False?
false.
There are some videos on youtube demonstarting it. The sten mag is much too wide for the mp40, but the mp40 mags might fit certain sten guns, I think.
I prefer the look of the MP4. However, I agree that the Sten is superior as the weapon I would have wanted in the trenches and on the battle field.
Are you high. The sten is probably one of the worst SMG ever made. It was cheap, easy and quick to manufacture and was just good enough to be a functional SMG. As that's what this British need at the time. We did not have the time, money, or resources to make a good SMG after Dunkirk, we just needs a gun ASAP. The sten is what they came up with. It basically did the job, but not much else.
Going prone at the ranges a sten gun is effectively, is almost completely pointless. It had about a 50 m effective range due to how inaccurate it was. Bad sights, heavy bolt, open fire bolt, dismal ergonomics meaning it was hard to aim and control. At the ranges this gun was effective going prone would be a last ditch move. You'd be looking for hard cover, moving quickly from building to building it's a CQB weapon not a battlefield weapon.
MP 40 had the same issues but was easier to control and fire with vastly superior ergonomics, much better sights, and better balance due to the magazine feed from the bottom. The sten design almost exaggerated all the issues of an open bolt SMG, whereas the MP 40 seemed to try and mitigate them.
Absolutely right. I had a lot of time on the range with both, and the sten is as you describe it. A very close range weapon with high probability of mechanical failure. The MP40 is much better designed, of very much higher quality, much more accurate, an excellent submachinegun. Having them both on a table and discussing them is not comparing them. Try them on the range and see the real difference. Compared to an MP40 a Sten is a piece of junk.
The Germans make high-precision engineered goods. They are just to over-engineered for the purpose of war. There is, in my opinion, a cultural emphasis in Germany on over-engineering with quality that exceeds requirements; I am sure that there is a historical basis for this. I am not saying it is a bad thing, but when you compare a Japanese car and a German one, Japan took a lot of help and inspiration in their methodology from Britain in the early 20th Century. You can see how that ethos plays out today when looking at the most reliable cars; that ethos is that simple, elegant solutions are the best route. In effect, Occham's razor. I am not knocking down Germany's engineering; it is really excellent. It is also more complex in some cases than it needs to be.
Gotta love the Germans.
Even when they are building a "cheap" mass-producible gun, it's still over-complicated.
I wonder what it's like to live in a world that cares that much about quality....
I grew up in the US, all our shit comes from China.
They build quality firearms 👍
The Sten safety sucks according to Canadian soldiers who used them. When slinging the gun over your shoulder the safety would release and that was not good for the soldier.
didn't see anything ref in the field
Comparing a cheap piece of functional scrap against a refined Machinepistol...
Strange comparison.
I have the CO2 version of the MP40, maybe they would want to re-do ‘A Christmas Story’ whereby punky boi could shoot his eye out on full auto and smoke all of the striped bad guys in a traumatic, well thought out manner.....just sayin’....
I understand that the Sten gun was used with the resistance troops.
As an "ex" army armourer, I was told years ago... early 1950's that the Sten Gun was originally manufactured to supply the resiistance troops in Europe, cheap to make supplied to the resistance by air drop, and also could use the German P38 and P40 magazines which were available from captured German weapons... Cdn army armourer
Great video - but please brush-up on the meaning of 'Great Britain'.
P.S. If bake-lite is so durable, and awesome, why change to polymer? Cost? I mean, why are we not still using it?
Try firing a mp40 in the prone position.😢
The rule
The British nicknamed the Sten the stench gun. The Sten was purely a cheap desperation weapon. Their Enfield rifles and .303 cartridges here hopelessly obsolete. The Bren machine gun was pretty good though.
How was the .303 Enfield obsolete during ww2. When, like the British, most of the German army used bolt action rifles. The K98. Your talking nonsense.
.303 is 7.69mm with a bigger cartridge than 7.62 NATO - That round hit fucking hard. Performance is almost identical to 30-06 Springfield and only slightly less powerful than the modern 7.62 NATO dispute the NATO round being smaller... Advancement of technology n all.
Sure the 8mm Mauser was a more modern cartridge that things like later 7.62 NATO round utilize, but performance wise in a bolt action rifle .303 performance was on par with it. .303 was rimmed so bad for automatic weapons but in a bolt action rimmed or rimless made very little difference and bolt action rifles made up the vast bulk of guns used by both the British and German forces.
@@MrBeardedgelfling The 303 Enfield was obsolete even before WW1. the British knew this and intended to replace it, but moved to slow and were interrupted by the start of WW1. same thing happened before WW2. The US army at least replaced its bolt action rifle with a semi auto. The initial design intended to use a 7mm cartridge, but Douglas McArthur intervened and insisted we keep the 30.06 that was way too powerful for a semi automatic rifle. Both the US and Great Britain were stuck with military leaders who were pretty ignorant of small arms. The Germans were stuck with Hitler, which was why their infantry continued to use bolt action rifles.
The Enfield rifles obsolete, no way. The rate of fire incredible. 1000 yards target fantastic. At army Base. Sterling not sten, clear a room in seconds.Practice other bases
@@johnturner8383 Don't be a dick you wouldn't clear a room with a AWM it's also a bolt action rifle and went into service in 1996. The right tool for the right job.
Would be like me saying pistols are obsolete because they can't hit and kill a target out to 1000m like the AWM or Lee Enfield can.
Obsolete literally means out of production, no longer used. In the case of the SMLE this is wrong on both counts. The gun is still made and still used. Sure it is out dated, but it still works like any other bolt action rifle and performance is more than adequate to easily kill someone at 1000m with good optics and a trained shooter.
Nooo un pedazo de tubería con miras de herrería no puede ser mejor que un proyecto de ingeniería alemán además el Sten se diseño y fabricó como un arma de necesidad,con unos requisitos de calidad muy bajos
The sten is a pipe
Good information but with soldiers you want the one that doesn’t seem like it’ll blow up on you. Opinion not facts
The mp40 is much better. Better ergonomics, much better sights, more accurete.
The sten is uncomfortable to shoot and the mp40 is pleasant to shoot.
I believe the En in sten was England not Enfield
No, definitely Enfield.
The STEN was so good they the Germans copied it.
Your totally confused & didn’t hear the history facts the MP-18 was the first Submachine Gun built & used in combat
Also the German Gun & Rifle designs were so good that many guns even today took design ideas from German Rifle designs into building other weapons say like the flap on M-16’s that came from the Stg-44 and anyone who tries to not admit that many weapons today got some inspiration from the designs of the German WW2 weapons is misled simply
@@illuminateBeats1He is right though, the Germans copied the Sten as an emergency weapon, though they put the magazine on the underside. The MP 3008. See Forgotten Weapons " German Sten Copy:MP 3008
As a type , the SMG , you'd be right but as a specific model this holds true.
Just a black screen.
The Sten ??????? I knew someone who had one what a P.O.S. !!!!!!!! spring breaks fit and finish sucked etc etc. etc. think of a Brit cars electrical system only worse.. Really Wow. Over the Mp 40 ?? are you for real ???
Imagine a 1000 rnds with broken baka lite...hands be all to h*ll.
I never had any problem with the electrics on Brit cars, or with the Sten.
The STEN was designed to be mass produced In a hurry in order to win a war, " fit and finish" was never even considered, they worked and thats what mattered.
Yank cars are a joke. Their motorcycles are no better. Harleys are loud, underpowered crude things that go round corners like container ships and take a week to stop. Better off forgetting the brakes and just put your feet down. Classic US - BS, image and appearance over function.😂
the most crapful gun of all is the sten
Time to grow up and get a job.