Q for Military Historians

runsforcelery wrote:

n7axw wrote:Hi RFC,
I'm struggling a bit with your comparison between the St. Klymans and the bolt action repeaters, particularly if you have to load the bullet separately from the powder. Then you have to place the percussion cap. Even if you allow for a cartridge where the bullet and the powder can be inserted into the gun in the same action, that is a lot of motion that forces your attention away from the barrel and the target to reload.

Whereas by way of contrast, with a bolt action, you move your hand from the trigger to the bolt perform the needed action in less than a second, put your hand back on the trigger, pull the barrel back on the target without removing the stock from your shoulder or repositioning your head from the shooting position.

Dunno. I don't have any experience with something like the Ferguson, but if my visualization of the needed actions for loading are correct, the difference in firing would have to be more than you seem to be suggesting...

Don

It's actually not complicated.

The original Ferguson used an oversized chamber and a round ball which was slightly larger than the barrel bore. The trigger guard was given a half-turn, which dropped the breech plug. The ball was inserted into the breech. A small quantity of powder from either a powder horn or a paper cartridge which had contained both ball and powder was poured in behind. The breech was closed; because of the nature of the breech design, there was no need for the wad a conventional muzzleloader required (and when the powder charge fired it forced the ball into the rifling and ensured a very tight fit). The pan was primed, which could be done either by pouring a little powder from the same cartridge into the pan or by enlarging the inner end of the touchhole so that a smack to the side of the rifle shook powder into the pan. It was then cocked, aimed, and fired. All of this could be done very, very quickly by a trained rifleman; certainly, it could be done far more rapidly than a muzzleloader, and particularly a muzzle-loading rifle, of the time could be loaded and fired. The eventual introduction of the Minie ball changed the equation a bit, since it could be dropped easily down the muzzleloader's barrel without the requirement that it be hammered down the bore as the original German rifles required and didn't require the heavily greased patch adopted by the American lung rifle. The design of Ferguson's breech plug was one of the cleverest parts of the entire rifle. He arranged for it to drop out the bottom of the breech, which meant that the rifle could be easily loaded from a prone position, and the pitch of the self-starting/interrupted screw's threads was designed so that closing the breech actually cleaned the threads cut into the face of the breech, with the scraped-off fouling dropping out through the bottom of the breech the next time it was opened for loading.

Zhwaigair's design is very similar to the Ferguson, except that it's designed to use percussion caps which speeds loading, compared to priming the pan with loose powder, and slows loading slightly compared to what is achievable with a funnel-shaped touchhole, but also provides far more reliable ignition and much greater immunity to conditions of damp. (I should point out here, in addition, that one of the huge advantages of more rapid ignition is reduced and reliable "lock time," the interval between the hammer's fall and the instant the weapon actually fires. Reduced lock time, especially if the lock time is the same from round to round, has a huge effect on accuracy.)

Brother Lynkyn's design is a significant refinement on Zhwaigair's, and it most certainly does use cartridges. In fact, it uses a cartridge identical in concept to that of the Charisian Mahndrayn breechloader, but its rate of fire is somewhat higher than that of the original Mahndrayn and it's far easier and less expensive to manufacture.

Now, please do reflect that I am comparing the aimed rate of fire of this weapon and a bolt-action rifle. There is a distinct difference between aimed fire and maximum rate fire.

The motion path of firing a bolt-action rifle is, indeed, simpler than firing even a Saint Kylmahn rifle. Operating the bolt handle ejects the expended round, chambers a fresh round, and cocks the hammer. The hand then drops and the trigger finger finds the trigger. So the hand basically makes 4 motions (some people might break this down differently): from trigger to bolt handle; lift bolt handle and pull rearward; push bolt handle forward and down to lock; return hand to trigger.

The St. Kylmahn requires 8 motions: hand on trigger pushes trigger guard through half-turn and gravity drops plug, opening the breech (there is no spent metallic cartridge to eject; the paper cartridge, like that of the Mahndrayn, has been consumed); firing hand leaves trigger guard and travels to cartridge; cartridge inserted through back of breech; firing hand returns to trigger guard and half-turn locks up breech plug; firing hand finds percussion cap; heel of hand cocks hammer; percussion cap finds nipple; firing hand returns to trigger. If the firer adopts the same trick that was used by US troops firing the Trapdoor Springfield, the rifleman will hold up to three additional cartridges between the fingers of his left hand in order to speed reloading; otherwise, if he is in a prone position, he'll open his cartridge box and lay it out in the most convenient position. And, by the way, after a few five-days of training, all of these motions become basically muscle memory, to the point that they can be carried out without actually looking at your own hand or the rifle while you perform them.

The hand of a rifleman firing the Saint Kylmahn is making twice as many movements as the hand of a rifleman firing an M96 bolt-action rifle from the Delthak Works, but remember what I said about aimed fire. If all you are doing is essentially to close your eyes and blaze away at a another group of massed riflemen or musketeers at relatively short ranges, the net difference can become time-critical. It would not translate into the M96 firing 2 rounds for every one the Saint Kylmahn fired, but it would probably be close. However, finding the target, aiming, and taking the time to be sure your weapon is steady, you've allowed for range (not a minor consideration with black powder and low velocities which produce significant bullet drop) and windage also takes time. It takes the same amount of time for both weapons once they are in firing condition, but they are a large enough component of the total firing cycle that they reduce the M96's theoretical advantage in rate of fire significantly. So instead of firing 2 rounds while the Saint Kylmahn fires 1, it fires 15 rounds while the Saint Kylmahn fires 10 (an advantage of only 1.5-to-1).

In maximum rate fire — as in your backs are to the wall and you are firing everything you have into the charging mass of close packed spearmen who want to get close enough to kill you — picking individual targets is much lower on your priorities than simply cranking off as many rounds as you can. Under those circumstances, the difference between the M96 and the Saint Kylmahn would become very pronounced (as in possibly even better than 2-to-1). . . at least as long as the M96's supply of charged magazines held out. In practical terms of what a rifleman, as opposed to a machine gunner, is supposed to do with his weapon, however, the opportunities to fire usefully at such high rates will be extraordinarily few and far between.

Most early-generation magazine-fed rifles had a magazine cut off slide which could be engaged to prevent rounds in the magazine from being chambered. The logic was that the rifleman would load single cartridges at extended range, while he was supposed to be taking his time and picking his targets (which would be less wasteful of ammunition), and could always disengage the cut off slide to let him fire some or all of the rounds in the magazine much more rapidly in a situation in which the enemy was closing rapidly on his position.

There's been some mention of the "Mad Minute," which was a British Army firing drill in which the marksman fired as many aimed rounds as possible in one minute. I don't have the best record ever put up in that regard in front of me, but I believe someone up thread cited 38 or so rounds, which sounds about right. That was by a highly trained marksman/rifle instructor, and it should be noted that it was on a rifle range, not on a battlefield covered with smoke and with other people shooting at him. That being said, it is certainly true that the professional, long-service regulars of the British Army who made up the original BEF in 1914 were probably the best trained riflemen — as a body — in the history of the world. They probably were capable of firing as many as 20 individually aimed shots in one minute; they were, however, an enormous exception to the rule of what more typical riflemen could achieve, and it is worth noting that the marksmanship standards of the volunteer battalions — the "Pals Battalions" — of Kitchener's Army which replaced those long-term professionals came nowhere near being able to match those standards. Partly that was because the conditions of trench warfare had come to be seen as placing a decisive premium on volume of fire rather than accuracy of fire, so the replacements for the fallen regulars tended to concentrate on acquiring other skills. An even more telling reason, however, was that it took a long time and a lot of rounds put down range on a rifle range to acquire that slick, smoothly polished professionalism and there simply wasn't enough time to instill that skill set into the new recruits before they were rushed off to charming vacation spots like the Somme.

As I say, the biggest advantage of a breechloader — single shot or magazine-fed — is the firer's ability to get low and stay low, or to reload behind the cover of a convenient tree, boulder, or stonewall with minimal exposure to enemy fire. This both Zhwaigair's design and the Saint Kylmahn provide. The practical and useful rate of fire advantage of the bolt-action, however, really is only about 3-to-2. That's still a hefty edge, probably a decisive one as long as there's anything close to the quality of numbers, but it's also a disadvantage which a sufficiently large numerical advantage can overcome.

Does that make the logic any clearer?