[4] The tests produced a recommendation of independent six-gun detachments to march with the cavalry, with the guns mounted on carriages pulled by horses.

[6] The DWM and Spandau Arsenal developed the design further, decreasing weight by 7.7 kg, adding a detachable gun shield, an option for an optical sight, and removing the wheels.

[9] At the onset of World War I, Germany developed an aerodynamically refined bullet intended for machine gun use.

This 12.8 grams (198 gr) full metal jacket s.S. (schweres Spitzgeschoß, "heavy spitzer bullet") boat tail projectile was loaded in the s.S. Patrone.

From its 1914 introduction the s.S. Patrone was mainly issued for aerial combat and as of 1918 in the later stages of World War I to infantry machine gunners.

To accomplish that, the MG 08/15 had a short bipod rather than a heavy four-legged sled mount, plus a wooden gunstock and a pistol grip.

"[14] Intended to provide increased mobility of infantry automatic fire, it nevertheless remained a bulky water-cooled weapon that was quite demanding on the crews and never on par with its rivals, the Chauchat and the Lewis Gun.

Deployment in increasingly large numbers with all front line infantry regiments continued in 1917 and during the German offensives of the spring and summer of 1918.

"[14] The designation 08/15 lives on as an idiom in colloquial German, nullachtfünfzehn (zero-eight-fifteen [de], pronounced Null-acht-fünfzehn), being used as a term to denote something totally ordinary and lacking in originality or specialness.

[18] A lightened air-cooled version of the original water-cooled rectangular pattern-receiver MG 08 infantry automatic ordnance, the lMG 08, was developed by the Spandau arsenal as a rigidly mounted aircraft machine gun and went into production in 1915, in single-gun mounts, for use on the E.I through the E.III production versions of the Fokker Eindecker.

[19] The lMG 08s were later used in pairs by the time of the introduction of the Fokker D.III and Albatros D.I biplane fighters in 1916, as fixed and synchronized cowling guns firing through the propeller.

The Parabellum MG14 built by DWM was a lighter (22 lbs) and quite different, air-cooled Maxim system gun with a very high rate of fire (600-700 rounds/min).

The initial model of the air-cooled "Spandau" lMG 08 front-firing cowling machine guns had lost the stocks, grips, and bipods of the infantry MG 08s to adapt it to a fixed, forward-firing mount forward of an aircraft's cockpit, with gun synchronization allowing safe firing through a spinning propeller's arc.

The 105 mm diameter cylindrical sheet metal water jacket used for the infantry's MG 08, an important support member for the barrel, was initially over-lightened with cooling slots, with fourteen rows of such slots completely surrounding and running the whole length of the jacket's circumferential sheetmetal.

[21] The later models of lMG 08 air-cooled machine gun variously "tweaked" the amount of slotting of the barrel by reducing the amount of sheet metal removed from it in minor ways through at least two or three trial formats, and eventually in the final versions produced, had the slotting omitted at the extreme ends of the cooling jacket's cylindrical member, with a 13 cm wide area of solid sheet metal at the breech end, and a 5 cm wide solid area at the muzzle end, giving the resultant gun much more rigidity.

The lMG 08 also retained unchanged the rectangular rear receiver and breech assembly of the water-cooled MG 08 infantry weapon.

[22] The lMG 08 and LMG 08/15 guns were always used on fixed-wing aircraft, as fixed forward-aimed synchronized firing ordnance initially in single mounts for Germany's 1915-16 era Fokker Eindecker and Halberstadt D.II "scout" single-seat fighters, and by 1916 in dual mounts, first appearing on the mass-produced examples of Robert Thelen's Albatros D.I and D.II fighters in late 1916, and singly on German "C-class" armed two-seat observation aircraft for synchronized forward-firing armament.

A device, occasionally fitted to the rear surface of the later LMG 08/15's receiver backplate, told the pilot how much ammunition was left to fire.

As the entire MG 08 Spandau family of German machine guns ejected their empty cartridge cases forward through a round hole in the receiver's lower forward surface, immediately under the aft end of the barrel's cylindrical cooling-jacket (as can be clearly seen on many videos), these cartridge cases were guided out of the aircraft (except on Martin Kreutzer-designed Fokker biplane fighter aircraft, and the Fokker fighters designed by Kreutzer's successor Reinhold Platz) through tubes from under the barrel to the bottom of the fuselage.

In the famous film showing Australian officers handling the LMG 08/15s from Baron von Richthofen's crashed triplane, the Fokker type belt tubes/chutes and empty cartridge trays can be clearly seen still attached to the guns.

Designated MG 18 TuF (German: Tank und Flieger), it was issued in limited numbers in late World War I.

[23] The Type 24 Heavy machine gun, first introduced to the National Revolutionary Army in 1935, designed to replace the original MG 08.

The Type 24 heavy machine gun is chambered with the 7.92×57mm Mauser round, the standard Chinese military rifle cartridge of Nationalist China.

After the Chinese Civil War, People's Republic of China militia and reserve units converted a number of Type 24 HMG into the 7.62×54mmR Russian cartridge.