/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9386874
For early days of Cold War battle rifles, you would typically be issued like four 20rd magazines as spares to the one in your gun, leaving you with 100rds ready right away, but then the rest of your ammo was issued with clips. I think mainly this was for cost and then weight reasons.

The M14 had a stripper clip guide, and some of the versions of the FAL had an open topped receiver with a stripper clip guide, the idea was less to load one magazine with your clips after they were empty, and more to use the guide on your rifle to refill the magazines you had when you had the opportunity. You don't actually need a breech with a guide on your rifle though, you can attach a small little tab onto a detachable magazine like that which accepts the clips so you can just load the things that way without jamming each of them into your rifle.

That kind of stuff continued some with assault rifles, the Czechoslovakian Vz.58 had a stripper clip guide which you'd use to refill empty magazines with 10rd clips (ones for SKS rifles, actually), and for Americans with the M16 and M16A1 they would be provided ammunition refills which was a green cloth bandolier, containing little paper boxes which had two 10rd clips that you'd use for refilling your 20rd magazines with. That cloth bandolier was real flimsy and meant to be discarded, though a lot of people would use them for carrying additional spare magazines when they could source them.

More solid logistics made this kind of stuff less necessary in the field, there's no problem issuing a guy 5, 6, 7, etc 30rd aluminum magazines of 5.56mm, and there's no problem carrying the stuff. The US Army still uses those stripper clips sometimes, but they get used by dudes in supply depots and armories to refill empty magazines quicker (and I assume drills making someone load clips to discipline them is something that happens), not so much by grunts in out in the field. You can still find them in commercial ammo, also, for some reason.