The Toggle Locks Say a Lot

 The devil in the detail of intentionally bad weapon design. 

Ahoy Spoilers: Don't read this if you haven't played Wolfenstein 2 and you're the sort that cares about going into matters blind.

Wolfenstein 2 came out. It’s a great game and an utterly amazing storytelling experience, and it’s absolutely worth playing, double moreso if you want to see an actual leftist AAA videogame in the wild. Fucking unicorn, this thing, so you can guarantee I’m going to be talking about it for a while. Detail by detail is what a game like this deserves.

You want to talk details? Let’s talk toggle locks. First off, what is one?

It’s this bit. You put the magazine in the gun and then pull back on it and then the gun will shoot. When it shoots, the toggle lock will go back and up like it did when you pull on it, only infinitely faster, and that makes the weapon spit out its spent shell and chamber the next live one from the magazine.

There, knocked that out faster than most internet gun people could on an average day.

Historically, the toggle lock is a stepping stone to better semiautomatic weapons, being one of the first successful and reliable methods of getting a gun to draw and fire rounds from a magazine without any sort of manual action from the shooter. Why they aren’t still around is because they’re incredibly complex, a system with the ultimate refinement of “use as test data in development of an overall better design.” Which is what happened with them, as they were only around for the first few decades of the first generation of modern firearms. Complexity in firearms is bad, because the more parts that have to move in relation with one another, the more places for things to get hitched and stuck together. Mud and dirt exist, and they love getting into guns and making them jam up. While number of parts isn’t the only factor in a reliable weapon, keep in mind a toggle lock has three hinges that have to actuate before the gun’s action can even begin to blow backward and cycle the weapon after each shot. Any one of those hinges alone fails, that weapon’s going to turn to stone in your hand after the first trigger press. Hence why we moved away from them quickly.

Yet, they’re everywhere in the weapon designs of Wolfenstein 2. Why is that?

See? Toggle lock. Toggle lock. And there, inexplicably on a beam weapon, toggle lock.

We throw the lever on our Captain History Time Machine and rewind time back to the days of Hugo Borchardt, inventor, arms designer and something of a proud idiot. I say that because this is a man who throughout his life travelled the world helping to design new and better weaponry, working in the US, Great Britain and Turkey, in addition to his native Germany. In 1893, he with Ludwig Lowe & Co of Berlin formed the Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken, which if you can muddle your way through German, means GERMAN PLACE THAT MAKES DANGEROUS LOUD THINGS. Despite this, and the fact that he was the designer of the first reliable semiautomatic handgun, the Borchardt C93, he was the sort of individual to put his foot down irrationally. Such was the case with the C93, where upon when multiple people came to him asking for revisions to his design, he said “no, it’s perfect” and refused further inquiry.

That’s when his Austrian contemporary Georg Luger stepped in and made this thing, which predates the evil of the Nazis by decades, yet remains a symbol of their base cruelty and idiotic convictions.

If you’ve got a World War 2 vet somewhere in your family's history, chances are good they either wanted one of these or traded one for a ton of smokes.

The Luger P-08 was patented in 1898, first adopted by the Swiss in 1900 and then was taken up by the German Empire in 1904. It was used throughout the first World War and the Interwar Period by the Weimar Republic, known for being extremely accurate and firing the 9mm Parabellum, which was then considered one of the stiffer hitting calibers. Then the Nazis invaded Germany like wasps inside an apple, with a hack painter leading his goonsquad of dumb meatshapes brainwashed on fairytales of racial superiority against a  milquetoast cosmopolitan liberal opposition. Fueled by bile and meth, of which he had endless supplies of both at his disposal, this small man who would forever give the postal worker physique a bad name Frankensteined together an empire that shot smoke and steam out of every missed weld and rust pit, yet still ran due to the zeal of a people made to think that willful stupidity, thoughtless obedience and perpetual peer stress is a model of an efficient society- Fascism: Not Even Once. In doing so, he scraped together a myriad of different guns from different manufacturers into a disorganized pile, one of the many reasons why the Nazis had supply train problems. The other was crystal meth, its tendencies to make people to work 24 hours a day, and how that makes it really hard to catch up with others when you’re one of those people that still needs sleep.

I want to say I’m kidding, but I’m not.

Now, it’d be wrong to say that the Luger was THE sidearm of Nazi Germany, but it was a common one. Among its World War 1 contemporaries were the Mauser C96, which Resident Evil 4 fans will know as the Red 9, as well as its eventual replacements in the Walther P38 and the Walther PPK (yes, James Bond’s pistol). There were also all sorts of other handguns from Austria, Hungary, Poland and even Fascist Spain. Yet there maintained an odd mystique in the Luger, which was one of, if not THE most desired war trophy from World War 2 by basically anyone that could take one home legally. Probably even by a lot of those who couldn’t, frankly. Baroque yet swanlike in its design, it has a mean machine elegance and grace to it. It’s about as close to a Gothic firearm as there exists, barring nobody ever invents a weapon with an integral suppressor that transmutes the sound of a report into Bauhaus’ The Hunger.

Artist’s Rendition.

It’s because of this fascination that the Luger has become synonymous with the evils of the Third Reich, perhaps ironically, because it was the best prize to burst out of a fascist pinata via application of .30 caliber stick and blindfold. The desire for an heirloom that kills, possibly pried from the death-stiffened hand of the sort of dope that could wear a black trenchcoat and a hat with a fucking skull on it and STILL THINK HE WAS THE GOOD GUY, and brought home from a generation defining war could be one reason why there’s so many Luger-likes in Wolf 2.

Yet I’m not convinced it’s only just that. Permit me to theorycraft.

Machinegames, at this point, has demonstrated that these are people that know what they’re doing. Wolf 2 has some uneven gameplay, some things that could have been better realized or integrated to make the gameplay flow together better. But it’s also a game that moves and shoots like it should, a game that makes elaborate sync-kills crunch and splat like they should. The game is fun, and more to the point, the story it portrays is powerful, cathartic escapism with the punch of being near-to-dead-perfect on social issues, and also being completely un-fucking-censored in its portrayal of emotionally crushing and mind-bending sights and sounds. More to the point, it’s a game that understands Nazis, a game that at once casts them as finger-tenting and cackling villains, but also portrays them as the bunch of button down, uptight, boring cookie-cutter people they are. Given the performance of modern Nazis, we know both of these portrayals to be accurate- the former is the latter with its makeup and costume on. 

In every aspect of these two extremes, and everywhere in between, Wolf 2 and Machinegames sink their shots from all over the court like they’re Steph Curry and Larry Bird trying to bridge a generation gap. They got the collaborator who turned his former business partners in as “deviants” because they ousted him for being a dishonest businessman. They got the Klansman telling his underlings to stop bringing up the ‘National SOCIALIST’ meme so they have a chance of being a part of the new regime. They got the sort of boring dick whose idea of correspondence home is “how are the kids?” while he’s on mission in a death squad. They even got the officer whose entire belief system has fallen in itself after he was allowed to learn that all the Nazi supertech is just stolen and bastardized from an order of Jewish scientists and mystics, writing to his dead wife out of desperate need for forgiveness for his ignorance and wrongdoing.

Machinegames gets Nazis. It hates them with every fibre of its being, but it gets them.

So knowing that, it would stand to reason that the folks behind Wolf 2 also knew the Nazis’ questionable history with weapons and their development. See, remember that big disorganized pile of guns I mentioned from before? That was one thing. Another was Nazi Brass’ attitude towards infantry weapon development and small unit tactics. Namely, Hitler’s attitude towards those two subjects. See, Hitler, like pretty much every fascist dick to tack on a bunch of fake medals, thought he was a warfighter on the level of goddamned Gaius Julius Caesar. He wasn’t, and you can in fact trace the turning of the war in proportion with his level of involvement at the strategic layer. Fucking guy attacked a city out of the way of his army’s advance because he didn’t like the name, that’s literally what caused Stalingrad; man was a twitchy goddamned trainwreck of racial paranoia and meth-laced B12 shots, his clearest mind died somewhere on the Western Front. One of the worst ways this manifested was in his obstinence over the Reich’s infantry arsenal. Hitler, obviously bitter at having been made to rot in the trenches without the aid of proper medium range weapons and the assault tactics to use them, sought to deprive his own infantry of the same. Throughout the war, the main infantry weapon deployed by Nazi Germany was a carbine version of the rifle the German Empire fielded in World War 1, the Mauser Karabiner 98k. These were backed up by the MP 38 and later MP 40 submachine gun kitted to noncommissioned officers, which was a natural choice given Germany’s success with the WW1-era Bergmann MP 18 toward the end of that war.

Oh yeah, the Nazis used those too in limited numbers early on. Again, big pile of guns.

Forming the backbone of Nazi Germany’s infantry were mobile machine gun teams, who were at first armed with with the MG 34 machine gun, a more-than-solid weapon that was later replaced by the UTTERLY TERRIFYING MG 42, which basically was every bit as reliable and effective as the MG 34, but with a rate of fire roughly twice as fast, which meant that it’s one of those guns that actually is as messily brutal as media has made it out to be.

There's only a modicum of solace in knowing this thing probably tortured more than a few surviving Nazis with tinnitus after the war.

Knowing all this, you should now know the effective ranges of these weapons. Namely, that the Karabiner could be good anywhere out to 600m without a scope, more if you’ve got a good eye, a good hold and a particularly individually accurate piece. The MGs could go out even further as what you’d call an area weapon, able to hose down and make inhospitable a wide area out to about a kilometre. The MP 40? Good to about 50 meters.

There’s a big gap missing there, and it’s called ‘medium range.’ Which is pretty much what the arsenals of the allies were made to dominate, the US and Soviets with their various semiautomatic and automatic rifles, and the armies of the Commonwealth with the Bren Gun, an overfed hulk of an automatic rifle. Weapons like these gave the advantage in firefights beyond the dimension of a trench or a room in a house, which is what a gun like the MP 40 would be best suited for, but still close enough that you can actually make out your targets, rather than firing at outlines and movement over a half-kilometer away. Turns out not having to take cover after each shot helps in maintaining a base of fire, especially when the majority of your enemy doesn’t have that same advantage.

This was a glaring gap. Yet Hitler, bent on being a real-ass Decider, actively fought the development of new individual weapons. Why? Who knows, maybe he was on one of his occultist kicks after having taken a dose of his ‘Vitamin Therapy,’ started hallucinating Knights of Holy Rome wielding rayguns and wound up impotently furious at the genre mixing. Whatever the case, he was bent on His Weapons being the implements that won His War. Then people realized you can just name your proposals things that they aren’t and as long as there’s a buzzword your idiot boss likes in there somewhere, he’ll rubber stamp it. That’s how an experimental, medium range, intermediary caliber, select-fire rifle became a submachine gun. Which became a Storm Rifle when Der Fuehrer was pleased with the finished product and decided it was his idea to begin with. Which then would more or less be the effective but flawed template for the modern assault rifle. Whatever that is, everyone’s got a different definition these days.

These guns probably seem pretty similar to you if you don't know anything about guns. This is why you should be glad you've never tried to make an arsenal decision with any degree of confidence, UNLIKE SOME PEOPLE.

I remind you that colourful language aside, this actually happened. 

So putting all that together, along with other things that were known with the Nazis and what they thought could be a good use of resources- you know, like land battleships and staff cars that could transform into tanks -let’s bring this into the context of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. This is a world where the Nazis had the juice to push back the forces of a world aligned against them, that could at least hold back the Red Army on one front comfortably enough to conquer the British Isles and United States, as well as push far enough down into Africa to be hold a front in Namibia, at least. 

Powered by technology stolen from peaceful philosophers and thinkers looking for a means to understand creation from the perspective of God, with resources they’re extracting from the world like a cosmic nightmare leech, they’ve got carte blanche to follow through on whatever fool designs an infinitely wealthy ruling class can entertain themselves with. Then they put them in the hands of an engineered-ignorant public that will trust they’re the cutting edge of the cutting edge. That’s the only reason why a shotgun would have three rotary barrels, a side loading magazine and an automatic toggle lock action- because some blowhard jerk with bigger ideas than qualification idea-dumped it on some hapless engineers, whose only way of saying no involved a bullet for insubordination. Then the military-industrial complex takes over and these dieselpunk versions of the Cobray Ladies’ Home Companion find their ways into the hands of assault troops, riot police and corrections officers. It’s the Circle of Life, as dictated by a fascist idiot with a mad hardon for guns that are major lumbar hazards. Not to mention overly complex actions that are easily foiled by mud and dirt. 

And if that’s a choice by Machinegames, I’d just like to say: bravo. And if it isn’t, well, thanks anyway for sending my mind on walkabout.

Bonus: Sometimes Wikipedia is extremely good: