"A heavy machine gun or HMG is a belt-fed machine gun that fires full-powered/magnum cartridges and is designed to be significantly larger than light, medium or general-purpose machine guns. As the name implies, heavy machine guns are typically not man-portable by infantry and thus require mounting onto a weapons platform to be operably stable or tactically mobile, have more formidable firepower, and generally require a team of personnel for operation and maintenance.
There are two generally recognized classes of weapons identified as heavy machine guns. The first are weapons from World War I identified as "heavy" due to the weight and cumbersomeness of the weapons themselves, which prevents infantrymen from transporting on foot. The second are large-caliber (12.7×99mm, 12.7×108mm, 14.5×114mm, or larger) machine guns, pioneered by John Browning with the M2 machine gun, designed to provide increased effective range, penetration and destructive power against covers, vehicles, aircraft and light buildings/fortifications beyond the standard-caliber rifle cartridges used in battle rifles and medium or general-purpose machine guns, or the intermediate cartridges used in assault rifles, light machine guns, and squad automatic weapons. Heavy machine guns also have more felt recoil, compared to light and medium machine gun variants." - (en.wikipedia.org 09.02.2022)
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