Designed for shipboard use in repelling boarders, his gun could fire 63 shots in 7 minutes. Remember, the late Queen Anne's newfangled Brown Bess musket could only manage 20 in the same time. And the Brown Bess wasn't 125 caliber (37mm).
All right, it's not a machine gun in the modern sense, as Hiram Maxim would have described. But this was in 1718. The King was King George. The First. You know, the one who didn't speak english much and who was buried in his native Germany.
You just know that Vulcan was smiling down from that great Arms Room in the sky when that patent was granted, even if they only made a couple of prototypes.
Positive: The smoke screen from all the black powder alone would probably provided enough cover for ships to evade boarders- even if the operator didn't manage to hit anything :) If you've ever fired a black powder rifle, you can imagine the result of so many shots from the same gun in so short a span.
ReplyDeleteNegative: That same smoke screen would probably have made actually seeing what you were shooting at impossible after the first couple of rounds.
Still cool, though... I can envision it on the bow of a Steampunk Zeppelin :)
And the anti's would have us believe that people of that era could NEVER have envisioned high capacity, rapid fire weapons.
ReplyDeleteNo way they would have ever written the Second Amendment the way they did had they been able to do so.
Riiiight.
According to American Heritage Magazine the weird thing about this gun was that it was designed so it could shoot round bullets at Christians and square ones at heathens. You can see evidence for that in the drawing.
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