Historical, Alternate History, Modern Era or Future Tech, Weapons, Vehicles, Equipment and Tactics

@Zepv

You don't ask an easy question. You've got 7 main variables. Size of the guns, rate of fire, accuracy of the spotters, weather, fortification design, Retaliations from the defenders, and desired level of fortification reduction.

Size is obvious, bigger guns do more damage but keep in mind that a low velocity 155mm howitzer is far more effective than a tank killing 75mm even if the 75mm has more muzzle energy.

Rate of fire is also obvious.

Accuracy of the spotters and the weather gives you your hit rate. Precision only matters if you're trying to do something specific like break a particular wall or gun site. Other than that your main concern is rangefinding. The D-Day bombardments mostly flew over the sea wall rather than reducing those beach bunkers.

There are entire treatises on fortifications and I really don't feel like explaining it all. Sufficient to say that large, spread out systems are hard to blast into oblivion.

If the enemy can take out your guns faster than you can take out theirs then you'll never get anything done. Obviously, but keep in mind a daring sortie can also take out your artillery as well a well aimed counter barrage.

Finally, you need a clear objective in mind. If you just want to silence the guns then you could do that in an hour with luck and good intel. If you're trying to reduce it enough to capture you might take weeks or months. See Battle of Verdun. If you're trying to level them entirely then you might take the better part of a year.

Thanks for the reply.

Century Eye, perhaps the other country could drop some assets valuable to the attacking country to cause an equal or greater amount of damage. Does the attacking country have it's country supported by selling gold or oil? Release reserves of gold or oil and drive down the prices in retaliation.

In the 1500 to 1700's would it be possible to have a musket with a break open action like a double barreled shotgun? If you wanted to increase the range of the muskets, how powerful could you plausibly make the paper cartridges and how long could the musket barrels get?

In the case of a special type of infantry unit, would it ever be possible to make the musket long enough for the infantry square to function like a phalanx at close range?

edited 11th Jul '17 5:56:16 AM by zepv

People were just getting the hang of muskets by the late 1600s so I would say late 1700s.

You've also got a conceptual problem. Breach loading weapons need a metal cartridge in order to complete the seal. If you don't have that you'll have hot gasses leak out the breach every time you fire.

No they don't, it's perfectly possible to design a breach loading weapon that creates as close to a perfect seal when the breach is closed as any metal cartridge (although it takes supremely precise engineering). It's actually the other way around: If you have a metal cartridge, you need to make the weapon that uses it load from the breach to get a complete seal, because the end of the metal cartridge needs a rim (or headspace, something that prevents it from being loaded through the muzzle in any case) on the end to keep it from falling out or at least moving away from the firing pin as you move the rifle into a ready position.

No the real conceptual problem here is that any paper-cartridge-and-ball using weapon would have to be muzzle loading because the idea of a paper-cartridge-and-ball configuration is that you pour the gunpowder in the cartridge down the barrel, then put some wadding and the ball in and tamp the whole thing to get it all near the firing pan. If you tried to load it from the breach, you'd have to drop the bullet into the breach first (which would fall out the front of the barrel), put some wadding in the breach (which by it's very nature and design would block off the breach) and then pour the powder into the breach (which would just drop out of the front of the barrel, like the ball, if there wasn't a piece of wadding blocking it from going into the breach at all). And then you'd still need to turn it around and tamp it down through the muzzle (except all you'd be doing is tamp a piece of wadding with a little bit of gunpowder stuck to it more firmly into the breach).

So yeah, that might explain why no one's ever bothered to design a breach loading rifle that forms a seal on its own until the advent of modern caseless ammunition using solid propellant.

edited 11th Jul '17 11:12:33 AM by Robrecht

Thanks for the feedback

I was thinking more along the lines of a modified break open action. You open the barrel like with reloading a double barreled shotgun. Instead of the whole barrel swiveling away in one part the barrel swivels into two parts. You could think of the closer part like a really short musket and load it like you would any musket. The part of the barrel closer to your body has a roughly pistol length barrel, allowing your soldiers to more easily reload longer barrels. You open the rifle as you would a double barrel shotgun. Load to gun's closer part as if it were an extremely short rifle then move the distant part of the barrel back into place before firing.

As for the seal would you be able to use rubber to improve the seal? Might not be perfect but I suppose it would be better than nothing. It looks like a break open action would decrease the efficiency of the gun by allowing some gas to escape the seal but would it be worth it for a longer barrel? Might you be able to compensate for loss of gas by increasing the cartridge size?

The Chinese had the lightning and mother-and-child arquebuses among other designs. As for slightly anachronistic designs, the Hall Rifle somewhat approaches your description. The Ferguson better matches your timeline, but its action is even more different.

As for the gas leakage—if your faction is full of crazy people, they could compensate by tactical preferences for close-quarters combat and ambushes. (I would double-check that assertion with the more experienced posters here, but its what I did).

edited 11th Jul '17 6:28:22 PM by CenturyEye

Actually breech loading weapons are older then most of you think. Breech loading for cannons happened before breech loading for small arms. The earliest breech loaders worked differently then the ones we are familiar with now. The breech was a separate solid piece that was removed and loaded individually and then loaded back into the weapon. The Breech was then held tightly shut by hammering in a wedge of metal or wood against a back stop to keep it closed firmly. It worked for the most part. Note that is for the artillery. For hand guns a part was used to push or hold it shut via some sort of force or tension. It varied from piece to piece.

The earliest breech loading artillery or artillery like piece existed as far back as the 14th century (1300's) and were increasingly common by the 16th century. Please note that is for the larger weapons. The smallest of which are typically considered "swivel guns". Scroll down a ways to the gun diagram to see some examples.

For small arms, notable appearances started around the 1500's. They were likely produced in very small numbers prior to that.

See here. This belonged to Henry the VIII and was believed to have been created as a wheel lock and then converted to match lock. This piece is from around the 1530's.

This is a later example from the 1700's◊

The biggest limiting factor was the cost and skill required to make fire arms let alone with a removable component that such an integral part of the gun. These guns would have been fairly expensive because of the need to fabricate the separate breech unit in such a small scale with sufficient care and accuracy to function without suffering catastrophic failure. This would have required costly skilled labour.

There are even other weapon designs that are older then most think. The first revolver is believed to have been manufactured around 1597. It was made by a one Hans Stopler. It was a functional if crude design that was heavy and required the cylinder to be rotated by hand.

edited 11th Jul '17 10:51:07 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Wait, was Belisaurius' use of 'breach' a typo rather than a specific term for a break action breech?

'Cause I knew about most of the above and I figured most people did and so I just assumed it was just some kind of convenient gun enthusiast jargon portmanteau. (Along the lines of: Break action breech -> Break breech -> Breach.)

(This may be influenced somewhat by the fact that I doing research on linguistic drift in slang for the purpose of including it in one of my own stories at the time.)

I was refering to the break action you find on shotguns or possibly a simple falling block design. A screw on breech would be more secure but getting it in and out is a two step process at minimum.

The biggest limitation was the priming method. Until the discovery of fulminates in 1800, and the invention of the percussion cap around 1820, some type of matchlock or flintlock priming mechanism was all you had.

I keep wondering if a gun could be fired by using piezoelectric crystals, like those used in some modern cigarette lighters, gas grill igniters, etc. I read in an online discussion forum that somebody tried it with a .22 rimfire blank, and it went off. So if some artificer in your setting discovers that a certain type of quartz crystal, cut a certain way, will emit a spark when you strike it with a small hammer, he could invent the "quartzlock."

Thanks for the feedback everyone, the feedback was quite useful.

Got another question. This might seem like a strange question but for a 16"/50 caliber Mark 7 gun (the type on an Iowa Class dreadnought) could you rig a system like a modified and scaled up mechanism from a machine gun to load the ammo? The "belt" of the machine gun would wrap itself around the inside of the turret with rollers along the turret walls to hold the ammo belt in order to reduce the friction. To make space for the mechanism the turret would only contain one gun rather than 3 per turret and the turret structure itself will be larger.

How high could you get the fire rate until the system threatens to either damage the ship either due to kickback or the heat from the weapon firing? Might it just be better to use a mechanism that feeds missiles on a belt into a launcher and uses a plate behind the missiles to catch a small amount of the back blast to load the next missile?

As you may have guessed this setting is roughly at World War 2 but there's quite a bit of schizo tech around.

You're probably thinking of smaller naval guns that take self-contained brass shells. The sixteen-inch guns on an Iowa-class don't fire fixed ammunition, so a belt-fed mechanism is right out.

Watch the Steven Seagal movie Under Siege, where they show the slow and laborious process of loading a Mark 7 16-incher. The projectile (which weighs over a ton by itself) is loaded into the breech with a hydraulic ram, and then powder bags are rammed in behind it. A maximum charge consists of six silk bags of propellant weighing 110 pounds each. They vary the range and trajectory by using fewer powder bags. The primer is then inserted separately into the breechblock. After firing, they clear the gun of gasses and burning scraps of silk by blowing compressed air or nitrogen through the barrel. (Nitrogen is better because it starves any embers of oxygen and snuffs them out.)

Here's a site with pictures: http://www.ussiowa.org/pics/turrets/loading2.htm

edited 12th Jul '17 11:26:49 PM by pwiegle

Would it be practical to use a scaled up version of those self contained brass shells with the same yield that the original Mark 7 gun shells? This would in effect be trading the ability to vary the propellant in each shot for an increased fire rate so aiming would have to be by angling the barrel and rotating the turret only.

I don't think it would be practical. You're talking about a fairly complex mechanism with lots of parts that have to move freely, and remember that the ship is probably being shot at by enemy warships or airplanes. One explosive shell or bomb (or even an APIT^* Armor-Piercing Incendiary Tracer machine-gun bullet) hits the feed-belt, and it's goodbye, Charlie!

That's why they kept the shells and powder bags way down in the ship's magazines, below the water line where they'll be better protected. Sure, you could put armor plating around the belt and feeding mechanism, but then how would you get at it to fix it if something jams? And if when it does jam, you'd need cranes and hoists and other heavy equipment to clear it, since the shells weigh over a ton apiece.

A belt-fed battleship gun may sound cool, but it's not worth the hassle. Besides, the whole process of loading only takes 30 seconds with a well-trained crew.

edited 13th Jul '17 7:38:05 AM by pwiegle

Hmm, now those are good points.

Good point about the jamming problem for shells, that would be extremely difficult to clear. What if the mechanism used rockets in the belt mechanism instead? Instead of a firing mechanism for a shell there would be a firing mechanism for a rocket. A plate behind of barrel could catch just enough of the back blast to pull the next rocket in the belt into position. A motors attached to the belt could pull the belt left or right relative to the launcher to help clear any jams.

What about if our setting used a special type of propellant for the weapon which required an electrical current to fire? Kind of like C4 which is inert until you use a detonator but this propellant would have it's properties tailored to being useful as rocket propellant. Given that humanity was wanted to create such a substance, how far into the future might it be until humans have the capability to create such a substance?

As for the shell setup would it be useful for a smaller cannon such as in a tank? Would the crew members be strong enough to clear jammed shells in that situation?

edited 13th Jul '17 8:24:03 AM by zepv

A motorized loading system for a rocket launcher would be more feasible. I recall a description of the Mark 13 missile launcher where the missiles are fed singly into the launcher by elevator from a spiral magazine below decks. You could do something similar with unguided rockets, if you don't have guided missiles in your setting. It wouldn't fire as fast as, say, a 40mm autocannon, but one shot every eight seconds is a lot faster than a sixteen-inch naval gun.

Smaller naval guns could be magazine-fed, and the gun crew could clear a jam manually, if the shells don't weigh much more than a hundred pounds each. The reason they don't use them in tanks is because the loader often has to switch ammo types in the middle of a firefight (i.e., from armor-piercing to antipersonnel), and a mechanical system simply isn't as fast or as flexible as a well-trained nineteen-year-old crewman. (Until very recently, that is.)

As for your propellant idea, I don't think that's possible unless you alter the rules of chemistry and physics in your world. Anything remotely volatile or explosive will go kaboom if another bomb goes off right next to it. And even if it just burns instead of exploding, a fire aboard a ship is always a Very Bad Thing, so powder and fuel must be kept in a well-protected bunker or magazine below decks.

edited 13th Jul '17 9:51:31 AM by pwiegle

Rob: One of the links shows a break action style weapon that opened to remove the breach block. There are a couple older designs from the late 1600's that I have seen floating around somewhere. The example belonging to King Phillip of Spain the breech block is also a cartridge that you reloaded. As for breach and breech they are sort of interchangeable. When talking about weapons though you should use breech. Spell checkers sometimes fudge that.

One way you could do it is sort of similar to how black powder revolvers worked. You don't load it down the barrel but have a chamber that is loaded instead. The barrel closes over the chamber mouth when the break action is shut. To ensure a snug fit the ball or bullet is slightly larger then the chamber and is pushed in on loading. If you are using flint locks or match locks you still need to prime the pan. Small priming horns were sometimes used with some military weapons so that is an option.

Sorry, what I should have said was that I thought the term (which I now know isn't a separate thing) referred specifically to a break-action meant to be loaded 'from behind', like a stereotypical double-barreled shotgun (or any modern break-action shotgun, really), not, as actual powder-and-ball break-actions, loaded at the breech but still 'from the front' (i.e. not from the muzzle directly, but still from the direction of the muzzle).

Gun tech gets kind of odd with its older parent technology. The Chinese have some wild gunpowder creations pre-date just about everything.

Yeah, there were some wacky inventions such as the Huo Long Chu Shui which was supposed to be a multi stage rocket in the 14th century.

How about using a Binary Explosive to propel the rocket. It wouldn't be as vulnerable to being detonated by a hit to the magazine. Maybe some kind of mechanism that can rapidly combine them prior to launch.

Perhaps we could just put extra armor around the gun turret and accept the extra weight as a trade off for increased fire rate.

edited 14th Jul '17 3:32:34 AM by zepv

Could we have a disc shaped grenade? You can throw a Frisbee much further than you can a cylinder shaped object.

edited 15th Jul '17 9:11:02 PM by Matm

The problem is the shape of a disk does not lend itself well to good fragmentation patterns. The various spheroid and cylinder shapes are much better at creating a more ideal fragmentation pattern.

Have disk grenades and explosives existed? Yes but they were not very popular designs and at least one was demolition and anti-tank charge rather then a thrown munition.

edited 16th Jul '17 1:15:05 AM by TuefelHundenIV

That isn't quite accurate. It is possible to make a disc with decent aerodynamics and a decent fragmentation pattern by creating a 'bulge' on the centre (like an old-timey shield's boss) and the crenelating the surface.

But a disc shaped grenade that's worth using would use far more material than a regular old sphere or cannister grenade and wouldn't actually have a range advantage over a rifle-grenade or one launched from any modern grenade launcher.

And hand grenades don't need massive range. This is also why stick grenades have gone out of fashion: a regular sphere/cannister grenade outperforms them at short range, while a rifle-grenade (and nowadays a launched grenade) is far more efficient when longer ranges are required.

edited 16th Jul '17 5:44:44 AM by Robrecht

There was (once) a discus grenade, although it was shaped more like a canteen, fat in the center and tapering towards the edge, with impact fuses set into the edges. It was one of those early WWI designs that never caught on.