The set contains No. 2 MG42 early version. One can be made with the power cover up. It has the front sight and rear sight raised. The second has the front sight down and the rear sight up. There are 6 bipods in three different positions: open, closed and closed vertical. Finally, there are four ammunition boxes: two with the handle up and two with the handle down. these items were entirely designed from scratch and highly detailed as in our company's style. MG42 early The MG 42 (short for the German Maschinengewehr 42) was a 7.92 mm caliber Mauser machine gun developed by the war industry of Nazi Germany and entered service in 1942. It flanked, and partly supplanted, the older MG 34 in almost all German army departments, although both weapons were produced until the end of the war. The MG 42 immediately showed itself to be reliable, durable, simple to build and easy to operate, but the feature that most impressed was the enormous cadence of fire it produced. The weapon featured the highest possible firing cadence for single-barreled portable weapons, which ranged from 1,200 to 1,500 rounds per minute. Mass production began in 1942, under the designation MG 42. The factories in charge of production were Grossfuss, Mauser-Werke, Gustlof-Werke and other smaller factories. Production during the war was over 400,000 units (17,915 in 1942, 116,725 in 1943, 211,806 in 1944, and 61,877 in 1945). The most remarkable feature of the weapon was its impressive volume of fire, double that of the American BAR and British Vickers. The weapon was so fearsome that the U.S. Army devised films to help soldiers overcome the trauma of encountering such a weapon in combat. At such a high rate of fire, the human ear could not distinguish the individual shots being fired, and the weapon seemed to emit a continuous whirring sound that earned it the nicknames Hitlersäge (Hitler's chainsaw) or "Hitler's ripper." Despite the high firing rate, the weapon's manuals instructed soldiers not to fire sustained bursts of more than 250 rounds to avoid dangerous overheating of the weapon. The high firing rate was achieved to maximize the chance of hitting enemies in case the target exposure time was very low. The problem with this feature was that the weapon grinded ammunition at a dizzying rate, making reloading frequent and increasing the risk of overheating. The first version of the MG42 was produced from 1942 to mid-1943. The main differences from the later version were the loading lever, which was made either of metal or bakelite, and the flame arrester, which had a slightly different design.