A heavy machine gun or HMG is a belt-fed machine gun that fires full-powered/magnum cartridges and is designed to be significantly more massive 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.
