/vr/ - Retro Games

>>3705746
It's made out of steel tubing and stamped sheet steel, which was a common way of making SMGs from WW2 up until like the late 90's.

The idea with the Sten was that it would be really easy for a factory to put together many of them really fast, because they just lost a whole lot of shit at Dunkirk so they needed subguns yesterday, Tommyguns were really expensive and the US Army soaked up near all of that production.

Now, since the design is simple and can be made with tubing and sheet steel, it could also easily be produced in small workshops with basic tooling and materials, even a bikeshop could produce most of the parts.
Part of the idea would be that the people of Britain could help pick up the slack with production, but also that it would be a weapon which would be easy for resistance fighters around Europe to put together on their own.

So depending on who made it, they can actually be rather nice (and really, they're not that hard to make properly as long as you know basic machining and metal working, just follow the instructions).
The magazines are really the weak point of the design though, the feed-lips are sensitive and can easily be damaged (hence why you're not supposed to use the magazine as a grip, because it can be damaged), and the springs are initially quite stiff, meaning it's annoying to load (especially since it's a single-column feed), but they wear out fairly fast, so you eventually have to start downloading the capacity to keep it working, from 32 to 30, to 28, to 26, etc, until it would just shit itself completely.

Generally what would be done by the British Army was that they'd load up and fire off an entire magazine, if the magazine didn't work, they'd just throw it out rather than have it end up on the field somewhere.

The gun itself is really not that bad, it's a completely generic open-bolt blowback gun, if you were to modify and convert the gun to take say, Uzi magazines (or maybe Glock magazines), it would run like a top.