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Another new item, this is a Russian Dyakonov rifle grenade. This grenade and Laucher were developed in March of 1916, the subsequent trails went very well and the impressed General Brusilov immediately requested 40,000 launchers and over 6,000,000 grenades to be fabricated in December of 1916. From what I have been able to gather on this grenade and system was that while production was ramping up, the revolution broke out and production was halted, so it's unclear if these got to see any use. The launcher was kept in inventory updated and modified in the 1920's and was in use up till early WW2 when it was replaced with a more modern system. The grenade was cylindrical with a pointed nose, and there were 2 versions, a smooth body and a segmented body. The grey painted nose indicated a TNT filling. The grenade is 115mm long, and weighs 350g. Last 2 images show the rifle with the grenade launcher and bi-pod (source, internet).

Found this image on the internet, showing how the rifle grenade system worked for the Dyakonov.

I also have an EK2 with markings on the smaller ring. It's a 1939 version, so I don't know if it would be the same story as the earlier crosses, but it seems like some makers did add additional markings to the smaller ring. I'll post some pictures below. Depending on how it catches the light, the mark on the smaller ring looks like either a fragment of an X, a kind of misshapen M, or some kind of ohm symbol, but like I said it's extremely hard to make out. I posted it to another forum because the makers mark on the main suspension didn't line up with the font of that maker, and I had concerns about its originality...it's stamped "4" which would be for Steinhauer & Lück, but the style of the 4 doesn't look like any of theirs I've seen. The consensus there was that the cross looked original, and might actually be from maker "24" who were apparently known to have mis-struck or faint 2's on some makers marked examples. They also shared some other examples from that maker with additional marks to the smaller ring as well. I would be really interested to get people's opinions on this cross here, but if we agree that this one is original, it would certainly seem like there are genuine examples out there with marks on the smaller rings.

Thanks everyone! And thank you for the reference links! I don't have any postcards with german machine guns, but I have quite a few postcards written by belgian frontline soldiers. There are definitely a few interesting ones among those. I checked the headstamps of the cartridges again and they're all 1918 dated. I thought they were 1916 and 1917, but apparently I remembered that wrong.