• CandyPants@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    10 months ago

    As a guy who dabbles a lot in black powder guns… My guess is that it was very rare to make it through a full cylinder without a malfunction

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      10 months ago

      Yeah it makes me think of a gatling gun. Something that had a good idea of where things could go, but the execution wasn’t quite yet there and if you fired it for too long the barrels would melt, so it didn’t have a large impact on warfare.

      But it’s interesting seeing the early ways people tried to improve the fire rate of guns.

      Then Browning came along and made the gatling gun obsolete and improved on the revolver’s semi-auto fire, too.

      • FireTower@lemmy.worldOPM
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        10 months ago

        We take it for granted now but the idea of using the recoil or gas pressure from a cartridge to cycle a gun is genius.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          10 months ago

          Horribly brilliant.

          Though to be fair, it wasn’t Browning’s fault military commanders didn’t realize they needed an entire new set of tactics and strategies to do war while machine guns exist. Though WWII wasn’t much better than WWI for total deaths since machine guns are always meat grinders, even if your officers aren’t trying to feed them with calvary charges. They’d been using machine guns in Africa for a while yet still thought that horses would play an important role on the battlefield rather than moving them all to logistics, and millions paid with their lives for it.

          There are a bunch of modern weapons that are pure genius that humanity has suffered because of. Artillery, bomber planes, and nukes are other examples. It’s actually kinda ironic: nukes are the only weapon that increased offensive capabilities drastically while actually accomplishing the goal of reducing deaths from people willing to go to war. At least so far; it would only take one bad day to change that entirely.