Why no Gatlin gun?

Forgive me for being an ignorant of 19th century military tech. But why when charis technology is at 1890 ish do they have no gatlin gun? i could imagine it would b handy in battle when infantry is advancing against an out numbered charis force.

I know there r other threads on machineguns i just didn't want to derail them with my Q.

Alistair wrote:Forgive me for being an ignorant of 19th century military tech. But why when charis technology is at 1890 ish do they have no gatlin gun? i could imagine it would b handy in battle when infantry is advancing against an out numbered charis force.

I know there r other threads on machineguns i just didn't want to derail them with my Q.

It is not really correct to say that "Charis technology is at 1890", or any other specific year. Charis' technology level cannot be directly compared to history. For instance, Safehold's level of hygiene has been nearly 1900 since the Day of Creation. Agriculture, too, has been quite advanced from the beginning, lacking only powered vehicles to make it 20th century-levels. In some things, Charis is far more advanced than in others. So it is impossible to assign any historical year to the technology level of Safehold or Charis.

As for why there is no gatling gun, I am sure that other more expert people can give better answers. But I would say because of two things. They have only recently introduced cartridges, which are necessary for any kind of machine gun. Cartridges still are not all that widely distributed, and manufacturing is still ramping up. And those cartridges are still black powder. So there has not been, up to this point, any reason to produce a crude gun capable of chewing through their inadequate supply of cartridges faster than they can produce them. The second reason is that, pretty soon, they will be able to skip right over the gatling gun. The time period when a gatling gun was the epitome of technology was very brief in history. On Safehold, it would be too brief to even bother with.

I think I remember a thread where it was concluded that the original Maydrayn cartridge was not strong enough to be used in a Gatling. The new M-96 cartridge would be. But it is just entering service and production of it is still not fully up to speed. There has been discussion on other threads that Charis might run short of ammo for the M-96, based on the production numbers given in LAMA.

The secondary reason is the original Gatling was not as good a weapon as people seem to think. It was heavy and it was mounted on a wheeled cartridge. Because of this, the Gatling has about the same battlefield mobility as a light piece of artillery, say a 6 pounder or so. More importantly, it can't be fired from a prone position. The Gatling and it's crew are exposed to artillery fire and sniper fire.

I think Charis would be better served to skip the Gatling and go straight to the Maxim or something like that. The Maxim is lighter than the Gatling, is man portable, can be dug into a defensive position more easily. Finally, the Maxim *will* run on black powder. The Maxim predates the world's first smokeless cartridge by several years. It was originally designed and built to run on BP rounds.

SWM I understand what alistair is asking, while every subject of technology is at a different year and sometimes even at different level of comprehension, he is asking specifically for the war making ability.

The war technology that charis is using is close to 1890 couple of decades earlier or later, but the one point you need to remember is that industrially they are nowhere close to what several nations on earth had at that same time, a gatling gun requires a massive ammount of ammunition, and the industry of charis is quite possibly not able to produce that much extra, remember that charis needed to deploy with the new rifles ahead of schedule because of the sword of schueler, so charis for all intents and purposes is fighting with limited resources, the US, germany, britain and several other nations who could make the gatling, had around a 100 years or more to develop some robust industry, charis started developing new industry less than 10 years before they are launching this attack.

Lots of things that are quite possible to build, they are not being built because it is not practical, yeah charis can make a tank but the steam engines and the ammount of steel necessary is an expense that is too much for a machine that its not going to be reliable, same happens with the gatling, if charis had some time right now (2 or 3 years) that they do not need to fight the war with the church and can dedicate to expand their industry and their research, charis could start projects like the tank and gatling and maybe even planes, those projects are going to be a waste of resources at the beginning, but after you get the concept and show it to the people you can start going and making stuff that is better, and with the help of owl you can skip 1 or 2 generations of advances with each new design.