AH challenge: more Nock guns manufactured

During the Napoleonic Wars, the RN experimented with the 7-barrelled Nock volley gun as a sharpshooters' weapon to be fired by a seaman from the rigging of a RN ship onto the deck of an enemy vessel below. Unfortunately, the Nock gun never developed into a widely-used weapon, due to the huge amount of recoil from firing so many barrels at once (which would break the shoulder of any man), the lack of suitably large men to wield it, and the cumbersome nature of loading 7 barrels individually.

What sort of POD/s would be required for the Nock gun to have been more widely manufactured during 1798-1815, and to be used both at sea and on land ?
 
I'm no expert in guns, but you describe so many problems with the Nock Gun that you would have to make major changes in human physiology (double size, multiple arms, etc.) which is ASB, or else so many changes in the design that it is not the Nock Gun anymore.
 
Sounds like a pretty stupid weapon to me, really. If you mean to kill lots of people, why not use a swivelgun or three-pounder carronade? If you're looking for accuracy, the reload time for seven shots out of a Baker rifle wouldn't really differ, would it? It's just seven at once, then a long reload, rather than shoot-load-shoot...

Of course, that's never stopped military procurement. The best POD, I'd say, is for the manucfacturer to be the second cousin of a secretary to the First Sea Lord. Or an MP.
 

Dunash

Banned
"What were the advantages of the Nock Gun over existing blunderbusses, wall guns, or light swivel guns all of which achieved volume of fire by loading a single oversized barrel with any projectiles that were handy? The range of a fighting top to an opposing deck does not seem to make a bundle of musket barrels any more superior to the single barrel shot weapons in accuracy. Recoil from the wall gun and swivel were in part taken up by mounting them on pivot pins in the rails of the fighting top so the firing seaman did not have to be a guerrilla to absorb the recoil. Finally these single barreled weapons had the potential to be reloaded in action for more individually aimed shots then the slow loading Nock."
 
Top