This one was made in Nuremberg by Hans Stopler, so I suppose raise a stein to German engineering. Once again it never fails to impress. Revolvers wouldn’t become commercially successful & produced in mass quantities until the 1800s.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2016/11/15/worlds-oldest-known-revolver/
One would not be wise to enter into a duel at the time with the one person that owned this.
So in my DND campaign setting, I had planned on black powder being a pretty recent discovery, called flashsand by the country who discovered it. One of my players wanted to be a gunslinger, so we worked out that he would have the first gun, built by his father who had to hide from the military to keep it out of the wrong hands. He wanted a revolver and to be a proto-desperado type, and I frankly didn’t want to litigate logistics with a first-time player. I had been having a tough time squaring the circle between “first gun” and “revolver” but this is a perfect middleground!
Glad to help! Technological adoption is never instant.
Today we’ve had jet packs, flying cars, and rocket pistols for years. In the case of the latter over a century even. But that doesn’t mean every Tom, Dick, and Harry flys to work.
But if you’ve got the cash or know how maybe you can.
As a guy who dabbles a lot in black powder guns… My guess is that it was very rare to make it through a full cylinder without a malfunction
Yeah it makes me think of a gatling gun. Something that had a good idea of where things could go, but the execution wasn’t quite yet there and if you fired it for too long the barrels would melt, so it didn’t have a large impact on warfare.
But it’s interesting seeing the early ways people tried to improve the fire rate of guns.
Then Browning came along and made the gatling gun obsolete and improved on the revolver’s semi-auto fire, too.
We take it for granted now but the idea of using the recoil or gas pressure from a cartridge to cycle a gun is genius.
Horribly brilliant.
Though to be fair, it wasn’t Browning’s fault military commanders didn’t realize they needed an entire new set of tactics and strategies to do war while machine guns exist. Though WWII wasn’t much better than WWI for total deaths since machine guns are always meat grinders, even if your officers aren’t trying to feed them with calvary charges. They’d been using machine guns in Africa for a while yet still thought that horses would play an important role on the battlefield rather than moving them all to logistics, and millions paid with their lives for it.
There are a bunch of modern weapons that are pure genius that humanity has suffered because of. Artillery, bomber planes, and nukes are other examples. It’s actually kinda ironic: nukes are the only weapon that increased offensive capabilities drastically while actually accomplishing the goal of reducing deaths from people willing to go to war. At least so far; it would only take one bad day to change that entirely.
In a dark irony a couple times that people have invented faster shooting guns they’ve imagined that we’d field less soldiers in war. Leading to less deaths.
On your nuke comparison I see an interesting parallel to the Giradoni posted today. It enabled Lewis and Clark to cross America without major bloodshed. But an inequality in capacity to destroy isn’t all ways something harnessed with virtue.
Forgive my ignorance, but where would the original owner have bought bullets for this?
The bullets would have been round lead balls. You could cast them yourself fairly easily. I would imagine the person who owned this would have been rich enough to have their own personal armorer to cast bullets for them.
Here’s a mold:
Then to load it you would follow the same procedures you would follow to load a normal flintlock pistol.
