![]() ![]() Unlike the Lanchester, however, the Sten was designed to be as cheap and easy to produce as possible. The design they came up with shared many design elements, such as the side-mounted magazine, with the Lanchester (an earlier submachine gun design that was essentially a British copy of the German MP28). ![]() Major Shepherd was the inspector of armaments in the Ministry of Supply Design Department at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, while Turpin was the Senior Draughtsman of the Design Department at Enfield. The design of the Sten gun is credited to Major Reginald V. And so, the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield was commissioned to design an alternative submachine gun. As a result, the Thompson, while it was an effective weapon, simply could not be produced fast enough. However, Thompsons were time-consuming and expensive to produce, being anywhere from $70-200 per unit. At the time, the British had been purchasing large quantities of Thompson submachine guns from the United States. The British military had suffered great materiel losses during the evacuation at Dunkirk, and needed a submachine gun that could be quickly manufactured to help resupply their armed forces. The Sten was created during a time of desperation. ![]() The Sten gun served as the basis for the later Sterling submachine gun, which replaced the Sten in British service until the 1980s, when it and all other submachine guns were replaced by the SA80 family of assault rifles. All models of Sten gun had a simple design and a very low production cost, making them effective insurgency weapons for resistance groups, and they continue to see usage to this day by irregular military forces. Turpin, and the "En" stands for the Enfield factory. The word "Sten" is an acronym, and was created from the names of the weapon's chief designers: the "S" comes from Major Reginald V. They were used extensively by both British and Commonwealth forces throughout World War II and the Korean War. The STEN, or Sten gun, is the name given to a family of blowback-operated British submachine guns chambered in 9×19mm Parabellum. ![]()
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