I finally have a Panzergrenadier platoon in front of me...

...and I can't for the life of me figure out how to base the suckers.

According to the vignette I read (Ostfront book, pg. 36) I'll be using 4 guys to a stand for 8 man squads. But I was wondering if I could model one stand as a MG team and another stand as a Rifle team and call the whole squad a Rifle/Mg Team Squad without folks griping. A vignette in the main rulebook (pg. 67, the small rulebook from Open Fire!) indicates they are rifle/mg teams in order to streamline gameplay and it's a representation taken as opposed to literally including separate teams and keeping track.

I wanted to model them in a more literal fashion but I did not want to have a huge conflict with how my stuff is based.

Also: Are some of the Gunners in the blister using their ammo loaders to hold the bipod legs up as they fire or am I just seeing to much into the posture of the machinegunners that are kneeling and their matching ammo carriers?

To answer your second first, your reading too much into the models I think.

As for your first question, I don't think alot of folks will care, just so long as you count ALL of them as the same. Basically, if they are all supposed to be R/MG teams, then count them all as that. Platoons in FOW generally don't mix infantry types (save for anti-tank and mortars) so you should be fine, so long as it's 4 guys per stand.

Each squad had one MG42 in it. A squad consists of two stands or sections. In the term rifle machinegun squad the machinegun part refers to the one MG42 per squad. In a Machinegun squad each section had an MG42 that meaning two MG42's per squad. So that said, of the six infantry stands in your platoon 3 will be modeled with MG42's and 3 will not. My Italians are the same as are all squads labeled Rifle/Machinegun. Its assumed that if the stand modeled with the MG42 is eliminated the other stand picks up the MG42. Retaining the ROF 2.