Black Powder and Rate of Fire

Henry Brown wrote:From what I remember, there was a previous British army design which was similar to the Lee-Enfield. It originally used black powder and worked fine. But when the British army switched to smokeless, it experienced problems with the rifling wearing out. This was because of the increased velocity due to the new powder. However, this was a wear issue, not an overheating issue. It's not the same thing, but it does seem to indicate that powder type could be significant.

Zakharra wrote:Another problem with high rates of fire is having a cook-off when loading. You might be able to keep the barrel cool enough to keep a high rate of fire, but the receiver isn't being cooled as much or as fast and it heats up -fast-. It's not worth it if you have a machinegun or gatling type that can fire more than 15-20-30-60 rounds or more a minute and has a barrel(s) that can sustain that rate if the receiver overheats and the bullets are set off by the heat of the receive when it's reloaded.

"The Vickers gun accompanied the BEF to France in 1914, and in the years that followed, proved itself to be the most reliable weapon on the battlefield, some of its feats of endurance entering military mythology. Perhaps the most incredible was the action by the 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps at High Wood on 24 August 1916. This company had ten Vickers guns, and it was ordered to give sustained covering fire for 12 hours onto a selected area 2,000 yards away in order to prevent German troops forming up there for a counter-attack while a British attack was in progress. Two whole companies of infantrymen were allocated as carriers of ammunition, rations and water for the machine-gunners. Two men worked a belt-filling machine non-stop for 12 hours keeping up a supply of 250-round belts. One hundred new barrels were used up, and every drop of water in the neighbourhood, including the men’s drinking water and contents of the latrine buckets, went up in steam to keep the guns cool. And in that 12-hour period the ten guns fired a million rounds between them. One team fired 120,000 from one gun to win a five-franc prize offered to the highest-scoring gun. And at the end of that 12 hours, every gun was working perfectly and not one gun had broken down during the whole period. It was this absolute foolproof reliability which endeared the Vickers to every British soldier who ever fired one. It never broke down; it just kept on firing and came back for more. And that was why the Mark 1 Vickers gun was to remain the standard medium machine-gun from 1912 to 1968.”

isaac_newton wrote:

Zakharra wrote:Another problem with high rates of fire is having a cook-off when loading. You might be able to keep the barrel cool enough to keep a high rate of fire, but the receiver isn't being cooled as much or as fast and it heats up -fast-. It's not worth it if you have a machinegun or gatling type that can fire more than 15-20-30-60 rounds or more a minute and has a barrel(s) that can sustain that rate if the receiver overheats and the bullets are set off by the heat of the receive when it's reloaded.

I cheerfully admit that have no experience whatever on using firearms and probably know as much - but I had noticed this about the Vickers machine gun in its wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_machine_gun

"The Vickers gun accompanied the BEF to France in 1914, and in the years that followed, proved itself to be the most reliable weapon on the battlefield, some of its feats of endurance entering military mythology. Perhaps the most incredible was the action by the 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps at High Wood on 24 August 1916. This company had ten Vickers guns, and it was ordered to give sustained covering fire for 12 hours onto a selected area 2,000 yards away in order to prevent German troops forming up there for a counter-attack while a British attack was in progress. Two whole companies of infantrymen were allocated as carriers of ammunition, rations and water for the machine-gunners. Two men worked a belt-filling machine non-stop for 12 hours keeping up a supply of 250-round belts. One hundred new barrels were used up, and every drop of water in the neighbourhood, including the men’s drinking water and contents of the latrine buckets, went up in steam to keep the guns cool. And in that 12-hour period the ten guns fired a million rounds between them. One team fired 120,000 from one gun to win a five-franc prize offered to the highest-scoring gun. And at the end of that 12 hours, every gun was working perfectly and not one gun had broken down during the whole period. It was this absolute foolproof reliability which endeared the Vickers to every British soldier who ever fired one. It never broke down; it just kept on firing and came back for more. And that was why the Mark 1 Vickers gun was to remain the standard medium machine-gun from 1912 to 1968.”

that didn't seem to have any problems with long, fast firing in the battlefield! The cooling tech seems to be quite simple.

n7axw wrote:

isaac_newton wrote:
I cheerfully admit that have no experience whatever on using firearms and probably know as much - but I had noticed this about the Vickers machine gun in its wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_machine_gun

SNIP

that didn't seem to have any problems with long, fast firing in the battlefield! The cooling tech seems to be quite simple.

Ok, but it does say that one hundred new barrels were used up which would seem to validate Draken's point. Barrels, after all, is what we were talking about.

Don

Randomiser wrote:Don
The barrels were replaced after 10k rounds on average. Could that be a wear problem rather than an overheating one? How long would one expect a Vickers barrel to last? Draken's thesis is that a rifle barrel, firing at less than a quarter of the rate, is going to overheat quickly enough to be a problem in battlefield conditions.

How long would infantry expect to be firing at top rate continuously without a break or lull of some kind? Also I suspect that ammunition supply is going to be more of a problem than overheating if the kind of engagement he seems to be envisaging occurs.

Randomiser wrote:Don
The barrels were replaced after 10k rounds on average. Could that be a wear problem rather than an overheating one? How long would one expect a Vickers barrel to last? Draken's thesis is that a rifle barrel, firing at less than a quarter of the rate, is going to overheat quickly enough to be a problem in battlefield conditions.

How long would infantry expect to be firing at top rate continuously without a break or lull of some kind? Also I suspect that ammunition supply is going to be more of a problem than overheating if the kind of engagement he seems to be envisaging occurs.

isaac_newton wrote:

Zakharra wrote:Another problem with high rates of fire is having a cook-off when loading. You might be able to keep the barrel cool enough to keep a high rate of fire, but the receiver isn't being cooled as much or as fast and it heats up -fast-. It's not worth it if you have a machinegun or gatling type that can fire more than 15-20-30-60 rounds or more a minute and has a barrel(s) that can sustain that rate if the receiver overheats and the bullets are set off by the heat of the receive when it's reloaded.

I cheerfully admit that have no experience whatever on using firearms and probably know as much - but I had noticed this about the Vickers machine gun in its wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_machine_gun

"The Vickers gun accompanied the BEF to France in 1914, and in the years that followed, proved itself to be the most reliable weapon on the battlefield, some of its feats of endurance entering military mythology. Perhaps the most incredible was the action by the 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps at High Wood on 24 August 1916. This company had ten Vickers guns, and it was ordered to give sustained covering fire for 12 hours onto a selected area 2,000 yards away in order to prevent German troops forming up there for a counter-attack while a British attack was in progress. Two whole companies of infantrymen were allocated as carriers of ammunition, rations and water for the machine-gunners. Two men worked a belt-filling machine non-stop for 12 hours keeping up a supply of 250-round belts. One hundred new barrels were used up, and every drop of water in the neighbourhood, including the men’s drinking water and contents of the latrine buckets, went up in steam to keep the guns cool. And in that 12-hour period the ten guns fired a million rounds between them. One team fired 120,000 from one gun to win a five-franc prize offered to the highest-scoring gun. And at the end of that 12 hours, every gun was working perfectly and not one gun had broken down during the whole period. It was this absolute foolproof reliability which endeared the Vickers to every British soldier who ever fired one. It never broke down; it just kept on firing and came back for more. And that was why the Mark 1 Vickers gun was to remain the standard medium machine-gun from 1912 to 1968.”

that didn't seem to have any problems with long, fast firing in the battlefield! The cooling tech seems to be quite simple.

n7axw wrote:

Randomiser wrote:Don
The barrels were replaced after 10k rounds on average. Could that be a wear problem rather than an overheating one? How long would one expect a Vickers barrel to last? Draken's thesis is that a rifle barrel, firing at less than a quarter of the rate, is going to overheat quickly enough to be a problem in battlefield conditions.

How long would infantry expect to be firing at top rate continuously without a break or lull of some kind? Also I suspect that ammunition supply is going to be more of a problem than overheating if the kind of engagement he seems to be envisaging occurs.

What you are sayng does make sense with the barrels although I still wonder how Draken is coming up with his conclusions. It really doesn't go very well with the plot line for Howsmyn to be making repeating rifles that can't be fired faster than single shot rifles without the difficulty he is describing.

As for ammo, from LAMA It sounds like once production is up and going, they will be able to manufacture the stuff faster than it will be used which is the main thing.

Don

n7axw wrote:

Randomiser wrote:Don
The barrels were replaced after 10k rounds on average. Could that be a wear problem rather than an overheating one? How long would one expect a Vickers barrel to last? Draken's thesis is that a rifle barrel, firing at less than a quarter of the rate, is going to overheat quickly enough to be a problem in battlefield conditions.

How long would infantry expect to be firing at top rate continuously without a break or lull of some kind? Also I suspect that ammunition supply is going to be more of a problem than overheating if the kind of engagement he seems to be envisaging occurs.

n7axw wrote:What you are sayng does make sense with the barrels although I still wonder how Draken is coming up with his conclusions. It really doesn't go very well with the plot line for Howsmyn to be making repeating rifles that can't be fired faster than single shot rifles without the difficulty he is describing.

As for ammo, from LAMA It sounds like once production is up and going, they will be able to manufacture the stuff faster than it will be used which is the main thing.

Don

I went back and looked at that section in LAMA. Howsmyn anticipates ammo production at 1.6 million rounds per month for the M96s. The bottleneck there is primer material which they need to increase the production of before cartridge production can increase much more.

That sounds like a lot of ammo, but if you assume 500,000 troops armed with the M96s, it comes out to 3.2 bullets per gun. Tha sounds a bit skimpy to me. Now I realize that they aren't starting out with that many M96s, but its not unreasonable to assume that they will reach that number eventually.

So I thought that I would direct a question to you guys who are more knowledgable than I... If you had the job of producing ordinance for the M96s, how many rounds per day would you have to produce per rifle to know that you are meeting or exceeding demand?

Don