AT-Rifle Team

The AT-Rifle team is a unit in Flames of War availble for the German army to recruit. In reality, German AT-rifles were largely an ad hoc collection of captured equipment, outdated weapons, or typically overengineered weapons that were introduced just too late to be relevant in the battlefields of WWII.

IRL

The Origin of the Anti-tank rifle starts in the battlefields of WWI. See, there were these big fat MEHTAWL BAWKSES called armoured cars, which the Germans and allies hated very much. Early attempts by both sides to make standard infantry rifles work as At-rifles range from interesting but overdone to laughably terrible. By the time even the kinks in these weapons had been ironed out, the Germans brought up their own solution: Just manufacture a dedicated rifle that only shot armored vehicles, the Mauser M1918

While it had a good chance of breaking the user's collarbone if shouldered incorrectly and produced a ton of noise, the design was surprisingly effective. The design was relatively straightforward: combine the idea of a bolt action rifle and a breech loading cannon, strap it into a system that can be fired from the ground, throw a big fucking round into the gun, aim at a tank, and turn the occupants into mush. After the end of the war, AT-Rifle development slowed, with very few actually being developed outside of Poland, Britian, Germany, the USSR, and Finland. The most likely weapons you'll be looking at on these models is the Panzerbuchse 38, a renamed Mauser M1918, and Panzerbuchse 39, a version with a slightly larger round, but otherwise had no real changes compared to his daddy the 38.

In spite of this, the PzBs both shared the traditional German weapon problem of being way too complex to operate reliably on a battlefield. Its mechanical system was incredibly complex, which slowed production and made maintanence a pain in the ass. Worse was that the dirty commies and the British had both taken a look at the idea, laughed, and made them into 5 shot bolt action versions. Once the allies discovered the AT-rifle was irrelevant against heavier armor, they simply replaced them with M2 browning machine guns and developed Bazookas and PIATs to deal with heavier armor.

In spite of its shortcomings, they were retained until 1944, when armor technology had exceeded the ability for the AT rifle to remain relevant, and was completely phased out in favor of more powerful weapons such as the Panzerfaust and Panzershrek, or where converted to fire rifle grenades. Today, the AT rifle concept is still in service as an "anti-material rifle", which is really just a cheaper alternative to chucking a guided missile at a target like a truck or car.