I just think that it would make more sense for a "physics" standpoint and a logistical standpoint, as what carries the energy and limits the ability of guns of causing damage (And thus nullyfying instant health potions) are the bullets.

The ideas is to:
- Keep rifles the cheap long range go-to option, and carbines the mounted variant, just like now, and make their damage the reference of the damage of their calibers.
- Keep pistols as the sidearm they are now, and keep their damage output as the reference of their respective calibers.
- Turn rifle caliber machineguns into a very powerful but heavy + very uncontrollable mess of a beast (Having the damage of a rifle round by each shot comes with the recoil of a rifle by each round!). Lowering the invulnerability ticks after a machinegun hit would help a tad with conveying that force.
- Submachineguns or machinepistols (For now only the MP18) now would be the actually portable and controllable version of machinegun fire, having the recoil and damage of a pistol, just that at a higher firerate.
- Just raise the damage of the AntiTank round to 4 times what a rifle round does now, to keep it in line with its IRL counterpart (13.2mm TuF had 15868 J of energy, and rifle rounds of the time usually are in the 3200~3700 J range)

To compensate, the following things would be added:
- Crafting machinegun ammo now would consume several rifle clips, just like the mp18 magazine consumes pistol ammo (This logic would extend to mechineguns as well). The Lewis gun, for example, would eat 3 steel ingots and 20 .303 clips for 2 clips.
- If you were to hold a gun and stay and croutch behind a block with a transparent block (Like air) on top, as long as you are looking in the direction of the aligment between you and said microstructure and crouthing, you will be heavily slowed down, but recoil would be incredibly mitigated, at the point that you could spray several bursts of mechinegun fire while keeping a carbine-level precision.

Any opinions?