AHC: earlier development of machine guns

as stated. Gatling was developed due to US Civil war, Maxim was used in British colonial wars. what kind of war(i.e. prolonged First Opium war? Crimean war? etc) could have brought forth an earlier development of such machine guns?

bonus points if they are developed without wars.
 
You're not going to get it much earlier.

Firstly, you need percussion caps, which are really only available in the 1830s or so. And early caps were tricky. Mercury fulminate can go up if jostled or dropped, and require really pure chemicals, but the reliability of caps has to be a lot greater if you have a hundred or more jostling in a hopperof a gatling gun than if you have a handful in padded cases, eg for a revolver.
Then you need cartridges. The earliest Gatling guns used paper cartriges, iirc, which were exceedingly unreliable. You really need drawn copper or brass cartridges or a machine gun, and the tech for that was only just arriving - at least for making thousands at once.

Then, you need the precision machining needed for breechloaders - and not just manual breechloaders, but automatic ones.

I doubt you could get a gatling gun equivalent functioning reliably in the field before 1850 or so. I really wanted to push that back to the '40s for my tl, and couldnt convince myself it was possible.
 

Neirdak

Banned
You had the Puckle Gun in 1718. Called Defence Gun, it was a tripod-mounted, single-barreled flintlock weapon fitted with a multishot revolving cylinder, designed for shipboard use to prevent boarding. The cylinder held 11 charges and fired 63 shots in seven minutes. It could fire shots around three times faster than a well-trained fusilier.

It was a conceptual revolution, sadly those guns were never used and only hurted the ones who had shares in the business venture. Now imagine if this gun was actually adopted by the Royal Navy and used effectively to protect their ships or in order to bombard coastal targets. Later, some officers could improvise and decide to use them on land to defend forts or fortifications.

What if another gunsmith decided to modify the Puckle Gun to fire smaller musket balls, diminishing the size of the cylinders and thus multiplying the number of shots per cylinders ...
 
You had the Puckle Gun in 1718. Called Defence Gun, it was a tripod-mounted, single-barreled flintlock weapon fitted with a multishot revolving cylinder, designed for shipboard use to prevent boarding. The cylinder held 11 charges and fired 63 shots in seven minutes. It could fire shots around three times faster than a well-trained fusilier.

It was a conceptual revolution, sadly those guns were never used and only hurted the ones who had shares in the business venture. Now imagine if this gun was actually adopted by the Royal Navy and used effectively to protect their ships or in order to bombard coastal targets. Later, some officers could improvise and decide to use them on land to defend forts or fortifications.

It doesn't sound like it would be very useful against coastal targets, although seeing it as a defense against boarding - assuming it worked reliably - would be interesting.
 

Neirdak

Banned
It doesn't sound like it would be very useful against coastal targets, although seeing it as a defense against boarding - assuming it worked reliably - would be interesting.

Several of them were bought IOTL for the Saint-Vincent and Lucia ill-fated expedition by John Montagu (2nd Duke of Montagu). During this expedition, the British adventurers went to the islands with a group of seven ships, and established settlement at Petit Carenage. Unable to get enough support from British warships, the new colonists were quickly run off by the French.

:) Ok, ITTL, one of the colonist has the idea to bring all the cannons of the blocked ships on land to protect the settlement and to use the Puckle guns against the attacking French.

1. The Fort is able to resist and Puckle guns worked well.
2. The Fort is taken by the French, but those strange guns that fired quick shots (or didn't fire) are deemed interesting enough by the French military commander who sends them to France to be studied.
 

dead_wolf

Banned
Puckle's weapon wasn't really a machine gun though. It was a volley gun, and like all volley guns it simply fired several barrels, either all at once or in quick succession, and then had to be manually reloaded. Things like the Agar's or Gatling's weapons would automatically reload as long as they were being feed ammunition, and that's a central feature in all modern machine guns. That's why they were so revolutionary.

As Dathi THorfinnsson said, you need a certain level of not only skill and technology but also of industrial equipment in order to make these and then make them widespread early on.

I mean, repeating rifles have existed since at the least the 17th century, but they were always very limited in scope and use because they were incredibly expensive due to the difficulty in manufacture, use, maintenance, and repair. They were essentially toys for the nobility. It wasn't until the application of Industrial-era processes that they could be mass produced and used by the common man on a wide scale.
 
You really need smokeless powder also, the fouling from black powder was a big problem for rapid fire weapons. As was heat build up.


Lots of people tried really hard for a long time, and had pretty much the right ideas. The reason that repeating machine gun type weapons didn't come along earlier was because they needed a number of technology breakthroughs, all of which had to be there. PoDing one of them forward won't do it, you'd have to move forward the entire industrial revolution.
 

Neirdak

Banned
Puckle's weapon wasn't really a machine gun though. It was a volley gun, and like all volley guns it simply fired several barrels, either all at once or in quick succession, and then had to be manually reloaded. Things like the Agar's or Gatling's weapons would automatically reload as long as they were being feed ammunition, and that's a central feature in all modern machine guns. That's why they were so revolutionary.

As Dathi THorfinnsson said, you need a certain level of not only skill and technology but also of industrial equipment in order to make these and then make them widespread early on.

I mean, repeating rifles have existed since at the least the 17th century, but they were always very limited in scope and use because they were incredibly expensive due to the difficulty in manufacture, use, maintenance, and repair. They were essentially toys for the nobility. It wasn't until the application of Industrial-era processes that they could be mass produced and used by the common man on a wide scale.

I didn't know it was a volley gun, its firing system doesn't look like one of them at first look.The Agar's and original Gatling's weapons were fired using a hand crank too.

--> Which modifications would be needed to transform the Puckle's gun into a real "machine gun" ?

Puckle's system :
A manually operated crank movement brings the chambers one by one to the breech of the gun’s single barrel. Then a lever is tripped to release the cock of a flintlock mechanism, which ignites the charge in the chamber. After the first shot, the cylinder is unclamped, moved around to line up the next loaded chamber with the barrel, reclamped, and fired. Once the cylinder is empty, the operator can loosen the crank, allowing it to be taken off and a fresh one loaded. The top part of the weapon, turned laterally and freely, provides a large arc of fire. The illustration of Puckle’s gun from the patent indicates that the designer was far ahead of his time. As rudimentary and clumsy as it seemed, Puckle’s gun is a direct ancestor of the modern machine gun.

Quote from : http://weaponsandwarfare.com/?p=5304
 
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The Puckle was not a volley gun like the Nordenfelt : indeed since it used pre-loaded cylinders the single-barrelled Puckle was not different on this account from modern machine guns fed from belts, drums or box magazines. The real difference with 'true' machine guns was that it was not fully automatic but was powered by hand, as were far later the Gatling and the Agar. The key innovation was to use the energy from the previously fired bullet to reload, allowing continuous automatic fire as long as the trigger is held down. Thus the question is: would it require ASB to have someone having Sir Hiram Maxim's idea at an earlier date? Also, the tactics of the major armies and the enemies they face have to provide an incentive to the use of such innovative weapons : while the Gatling 'did marvels' against 'savages' it was, just like the Reffye mitrailleuse, a partial failure against modern opponents because treated in all accounts as an artillery piece, from the mounting on a heavy carriage without transverse capacity to the use in counter-battery fire where it was out-ranged by the 'real' guns.
 
You really need smokeless powder also, the fouling from black powder was a big problem for rapid fire weapons. As was heat build up.

This. I got my BF for brainstorm for Appolinis et Dianae based on whether it was viable to create a practical machinegun analogue using this idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalthoff_repeater

He told me that fouling from black powder was major limiter of why this thing remained unsurpassed in the rate of fire for so long - it was just a practical limitation on fire rate possible with black powder weapon.
 
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