Black Powder and Rate of Fire

Hi Fallsfromtrees,

That certainly captures the essence of my own thought. Hopefully someone will check in here and offer us a better informed discussion.

Don

n7axw wrote:Hi Fallsfromtrees,

That certainly captures the essence of my own thought. Hopefully someone will check in here and offer us a better informed discussion.

Don

In fact if we do the arithmetic, Assume each rifleman uses 100 rounds every day he is in combat, and that he is in combat 10 days/month. I suspect the 100 rounds in low and the 10 days is high. For 500K rifles, that comes out to 500 million rounds/month. Going to be quite a stretch for Edwyrd to get up to those levels of production. In fact, for 1.6 million/month, you can only support about 16,000 rifles at that level of expenditure.

Zakharra wrote:[snipping fore and aft]I'd posit that the guns were not firing continuously for 12 hours. It was likely controlled bursts constantly walking back and forth across the target area.

Vickers HMG has a 450 to 600 rpm rate of fire; 10,000 rounds in an hour means 1000/6, 166 rpm. So the guns weren't firing more than a third of the time on average. (A bit less, actually; 10 guns, 12 hours, a million rounds, they didn't hit the rated 10,000 rounds per hour.) And remember that the Vickers design started using cloth belts; the disintegrating steel link belt was developed for aircraft use and deployed fairly late in 1916. Belts were hand-loaded and re-used, 250 rounds at a time. So the action can't get too hot or the belt catches fire.

Barrels get hot and the lands strip long before the barrel gets actually droopy, to the point where heat's the major determinant of barrel life; you can put a lot more ammo through a barrel as spaced single shots than you can in hundred round bursts. Max-rate fire with a bolt action can easily get the barrel hot enough to brand you and increase the rate of wear, but you won't see thermal deformation.

Black powder fouling will make the thermal problem worse by effectively making the bore smaller. (It can also fill the rifling and make your accuracy dubious. In extreme cases the bullet doesn't emerge.) With a rifle it will force you to clean by making the kick intolerable. Because you have to clean after relatively few rounds (probably less than a hundred), you're never going to see thermal deformation problems.

Barrel change timing for machine guns is about wear, rather than thermal deformation. Since we know there's nickel-alloy armor being produced, barrel alloys aren't going to be a problem.

Best modern practice is cobalt alloy barrels; you need less mass and the thermal performance is better. It's a pity the stuff is such a nightmare to work.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

n7axw wrote:Hi Fallsfromtrees,

That certainly captures the essence of my own thought. Hopefully someone will check in here and offer us a better informed discussion.

Don

In fact if we do the arithmetic, Assume each rifleman uses 100 rounds every day he is in combat, and that he is in combat 10 days/month. I suspect the 100 rounds in low and the 10 days is high. For 500K rifles, that comes out to 500 million rounds/month. Going to be quite a stretch for Edwyrd to get up to those levels of production. In fact, for 1.6 million/month, you can only support about 16,000 rifles at that level of expenditure.

look on the bright side - at 100 rounds/day there won't be much of a cooling problem

Yes. Optimistic. Google "mad minute" which was a British exercise in the pre WW1 era using Enfields. 1 per 3 secs is possible for the general army rifleman population, though.

n7axw wrote:

evilauthor wrote:So Charis is making M96s which are bolt action rifles with 10 round magazines. This should give them a rate of fire of close to 1 round per second (plus extra for changing out magazines). This is an improvement over the original Mandrayn which gets 1 round every 5 seconds which in turn is still better than the original flintlocks which got 1 round every 15 seconds.

So my question is, can you REALLY do sustained rate of AIMED fire with these weapons... when using BLACK POWDER ammo?

Black powder when used generates great big clouds of BLINDING smoke. Descriptions of black powder warfare often describe the blinding smoke banks created by black powder weapons that the parties involved need the wind to get rid of before they can see the other side again. And that's with flintlock muzzle-loading weapons, not faster breech-loading percussion cap weapons.

So if the weather isn't cooperative (ie, not windy and not raining), how much can a Rifleman fire with a Mandrayn, St Killman, or M96 before his own self generated smoke bank makes it impossible for him to find any targets without moving?

For that matter, I can see a Church firing line firing not to hit Charisian troops, but to create impenetrable smoke banks to conceal themselves from snipers.

I suspect your round per second is optimistic at best---nore like a round per every three seconds by the time you get the gun back on target from reload and recoil.

You are right about the smoke. It is, however, a temporary problem. Smokeless powder is on the way.

Don

The following doesn't really relate to the black powder part of the discussion but it apply to the rate of fire discussion. From the U.S. Army FM 3-22.68:

RATE OF FIRE
5-29. Use sustained, rapid, and cyclic rates of fire with the machine gun. These rates enable leaders to control and sustain your fire and to help you avoid destroying your barrel. More than anything else, the size of the target and ammunition supply dictate your rate of fire.
Sustained Fire
5-30. This is the normal rate of fire for the gunner. Sustained fire for the M249 is 50 rounds per minute in bursts of 3 to 5 rounds, with 4 to 5 second intervals between bursts. The M60 and M240B are 100 rounds per minute in bursts of 6 to 9 rounds. The gunner pauses 4 to 5 seconds between bursts. The barrel should be changed after firing at sustained rate for 10 minutes.
Rapid Fire
5-31. For all three weapons, the barrel should be changed after firing at a rapid rate for 2 minutes. This allows an exceptionally high volume of fire, but for only a short period of time. Specifics for each weapon follow:
M249
5-32. Rapid fire for the M249 is 100 rounds per minute in bursts of 8 to 10 with an interval of 2 to 3 seconds between bursts.
M60 AND M240B
5-33. For the M60 and M240B, rapid fire is 200 rounds per minute in bursts of 10 to 12 rounds again with an interval of 2 to 3 seconds between bursts.
Cyclic Fire
5-34. Cyclic fire uses the most ammunition that can be used in 1 minute. The cyclic rate of fire with the
machine gun is achieved when the trigger is held to the rear and ammunition is fed into the weapon uninterrupted for one minute. Normal cyclic rate of fire for the M249 is 850 rounds, M60 is 550 rounds, and for the M240B it is 650 to 950 rounds. Always change the barrel after firing at cyclic rate for 1 minute. This procedure provides the highest volume of fire that the machine gun can fire, but this adversely affects the machine gun, and should only be fired in combat under emergency purposes only.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

n7axw wrote:Hi Fallsfromtrees,

That certainly captures the essence of my own thought. Hopefully someone will check in here and offer us a better informed discussion.

Don

In fact if we do the arithmetic, Assume each rifleman uses 100 rounds every day he is in combat, and that he is in combat 10 days/month. I suspect the 100 rounds in low and the 10 days is high. For 500K rifles, that comes out to 500 million rounds/month. Going to be quite a stretch for Edwyrd to get up to those levels of production. In fact, for 1.6 million/month, you can only support about 16,000 rifles at that level of expenditure.

I suspect that your 10 days per month is too much. From the stand point of ordinance supply, you are always going to have large numbers of troops doing nothing, for example a ready reserve sitting someplace like Siddar City which has some training requirements. Then there are forces like Symkyn's army on the Daivyn as of the end of LAMA making sure Kaitswryth doesn't get ambitious. That only becomes a combat situation if one or the other of them attacks.

Then there is Hanth, BGV, DE, and EHM who are in more fluid situations. But most of their time is spent traveling as they attempt to come to grips with the enemy, not actually fighting. The longest battle we've seen so far was that furbar outside Fort Tairys that lasted about three days which took weeks to set up.

I would be surprised if you were to average out use of weapons in combat over the entire army that it would come to more than three days per month, perhaps not that. Usually the engagements are short and sharp with some units more exposed than others.

So how you factor that in to come up with actual combat expenditures and stay ahead of what is needed in the field would be ordinance supply's job. Right now the supply looks a bit lean, but one would hope that as more and more of the new rifles reach the field that the manufacture could increase accordingly.

Don

n7axw wrote: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

During WWII the US produced up to 1,8 billion (not million) rounds per month. But that definitely includes machine guns - for planes for example, not merely infantry - and perhaps even munition for allies. The article I read wasnt that precise.
Not to mention that there were between 4 and 12 million men under arms and these men were way more mobile, the puny 1,6 mio Charis tries for doesnt sound so puny after all.
War is a lot more about waiting than about shooting, I hardly think every infantryman will have to fight 1/3 of his time as somebody else suggested, especially when they have to actually walk toward each other.

HamsterDesTodes wrote:War is a lot more about waiting than about shooting, I hardly think every infantryman will have to fight 1/3 of his time as somebody else suggested, especially when they have to actually walk toward each other.

From book Pieces of the Civil War:

IV. American Civil War Camp Life: This section might best be summarized by a statement a soldier wrote to his wife: "Soldiering is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror."

HamsterDesTodes wrote:During WWII the US produced up to 1,8 billion (not million) rounds per month. But that definitely includes machine guns - for planes for example, not merely infantry - and perhaps even munition for allies. The article I read wasnt that precise.
Not to mention that there were between 4 and 12 million men under arms and these men were way more mobile, the puny 1,6 mio Charis tries for doesnt sound so puny after all.
War is a lot more about waiting than about shooting, I hardly think every infantryman will have to fight 1/3 of his time as somebody else suggested, especially when they have to actually walk toward each other.

The 17,000 Ladies of the Royal Ordinance Factory #59 produced 700 million bullets and mucho other munitions during 4 years of WWII. The ladies were known as the Aycliffe Angels. It was turned into a housing estate called Newton Ayhcliffe post-WWII. where my brother was born.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROF_Aycliffe