The Vickers .50 heavy machine gun is essentially an upscaled version of the Vickers .303 machine gun. The Mk II which came after the development model was for a short while the standard heavy caliber machine gun and was used as the main gun for armoured vehicles like the Matilda I and Light Tank Mk VI, like the Vickers .303 it would be replaced by the Besa machine gun which also had a variant chambered in 15 mm and was used in the later Light Tank Mk VIC and armoured cars. The Mk III was the first naval variant, it was typically in quadruple gun mounts and while it was this superior to .50 M2HB Browning in single or twin mounts in similar applications it was found that heavy machine guns were less effective against all-metal airplanes of the day, so they would be replaced by the 20 mm Oerlikon which had a similar weight to the Vickers .50 machine gun.
