sunhawk wrote:for the Temple breech loader to take a paper cartridge round. They would have to be open on the back side of the breech behind the screw.
given the description of the breech screw. with it only having thread on the top and bottom of the screw. which means the middle of the screw is smooth and smaller in diameter then the threaded portions. This prevents them from getting a breech seal with an open back side of the breech block.
they have a breech loader but they need to use musket ball and pour the powder.
Incorrect.
First, let me point out that I've actually fired a Ferguson replica. There's substantial reason to believe that many of the replicas available don't actually duplicate the pitch and thread number of Ferguson's actual design. (A bit more about that below.) Despite that, after an hour or so of practice, I was able to fire 16 rounds in 3 minutes loading with powder from a self-measuring flask and priming the pan separately. That comes to a bit over 5 rounds per minute, and I'm pretty sure that if I had some time to practice and used the weapon regularly, I could increase that rate further.
Now, as for your comments.
The Ferguson was
designed to load exactly as you are describing, and exactly as I fired it in the example above. Even so, it is entirely possible to insert the tip of one's finger into the breech, exactly as one would have to do to insert and tamp a paper cartridge which, by the way, doesn't need to be enormous. Now, admittedly, the Ferguson's chamber is small enough and I have large enough hands that getting
more than the tip of my finger into the opening would be virtually impossible, and (as I said) the
Ferguson wasn't designed to use a consumable paper cartridge in the first place, but it doesn't have to be that way for the
St. Kylmahn rifle.
By deliberately increasing the width of the breech (which is made separately and threaded onto the barrel) and making the chamber larger and longer, with a taper to meet the rifling of the narrower bore, it would not be difficult to insert a cartridge containing the bullet and the powder charge through the top opening of the dropped screw. The round would be held in the curled fingers on the loading hand (let's assume the right) with the tip of the thumb against the base of its rear end. The bullet-loaded end of the cartridge would be released by straightening the fingers, which would drop its nose into the opened breech in rough alignment with the tapered chamber. The thumb would move down into the opening (deliberately larger than in the original Ferguson specifically to allow the thumb to be inserted), pushing the cartridge slightly forward. The thumb would then thrust towards the muzzle of the rifle, pushing the paper cartridge clear of the breech screw. Then the thumb comes out of the opening, the breech plug is closed upward, the lock is capped, and the rifle fires. This, BTW, is exactly how Lt. Zhwaigair envisioned the weapon working. In this design, a separate, broader breech assembly is produced which houses the breech screw, the lengthened and tapered firing chamber, and the trigger group. The assembly (I'm calling this the "breech assembly" for clarity's sake for the non-shooters among us; technically, it really ought to be called the "receiver") isn’t mounted into the wooden stock at all; instead, it forms a solid metal bridge between a slightly shortened rear stock and the forestock and hand guard surrounding the barrel itself.
The conversions, built on existing rifles,
will be more difficult to load with a cartridge which contains the powder and ball as a unit because they won't have the enlarged breech and chamber. Nonetheless, they will still be capable of around 6 rounds per minute, even loading as you have described (i.e., loading with ball and loose powder) — which, while admittedly lower than the Mahndrayn's rate of fire is a huge advance on the AOG's current muzzleloaders. (My point here is that while it's certainly pertinent to compare the St. Kylmahn's rate of fire to the Mahndrayn or the M95, what the
Church is actually comparing it to is the
muzzle-loading design which it will replace.) Conversion will (effectively) require kits sent out from home rather than being something which can be easily accomplished with an armorer's tools at the front, primarily because the breech screws' threading has to be gotten exactly right.
Muzzle-loading rifles are made to be permanently closed at the breech end of the barrel with a heavy, threaded, in-line plug. (The barrel had to be open at both ends, originally, so that it could be rifled; the breech plug is added and permanently secured in place once the rifling is completed and it’s time to mount the barrel into the rifle stock.) The conversion will require the barrel to be removed from the stock so that the plug can be removed, turning the barrel back into an open-ended tube. The rear end will then be reamed out to slightly more than its previous bore, creating a stepped chamber a tiny bit larger in diameter (say 1/10 of an inch) than the rest of the barrel. The vertical cut for the breech screw is made, a slightly larger breech plug is used to close the rifle behind it, and the barrel is rebedded in the stock, which will have to be slightly strengthened because the breech plug is taking a chunk out of the wood. As I say, all of this will be made much easier if the frontline armorers are provided with kits containing precut breech plugs and breech screws, thread cutters to be cut the threads to match the plugs and screws, and the necessary metal-cutting head to ream out the standard barrels. As I pointed out above, trying to accomplish all of this with any speed
without the aforesaid kits would be . . . difficult.
Now the truth is that Zhwaigair’s design could be (and was) improved still further by Brother Lynkyn at St. Kylmahn’s Foundry, because your description of how the breech-closing screw works is incorrect. You said that "with it only having thread on the top and bottom of the screw. which means the middle of the screw is smooth and smaller in diameter then the threaded portions.” But the screw is threaded for its
entire length, not just at the top or bottom, and what actually seals the breech is the threads on what becomes the front of the screw turning into the threads cut into the rear face of the firing chamber. That is, when the action is closed and the screw is locked up, the rear of the firing chamber is a solid wall of steel and the opening is closed and sealed by the threads engaged around the front and sides of the screw, with no leakage around it. If there
were any leakage around it, the firer would observe flash coming out of the top of the breech.
Lt. Zhwaigair’s original design concerived of the screw as riding in a complete set of threads at both front and back — essentially, like the original Ferguson, a vertical channel perpendicular to the bore which was solid on both sides. The modified
St. Kylmahn design, however, has an open rear face. The bore of the barrel/firing chamber continues past the channel in which the screw rides, with a substantial amount of threaded, solid steel above and below the opening. When the breech screw is turned out of the threads, it drops to the bottom, leaving the axis of the barrel open from the rear end all the way to the muzzle. The cartridge is slid in through the open rear end with the index finger pushing it beyond the screw opening. The screw is then turned back up into the chamber, closing the breech. The lock is capped, the weapon is aimed, and the trigger is squeezed.
As I observed in my second paragraph, one problem with a lot of the reproduction Fergusons is that they use the wrong pitch and number of threads. The “self-starting” (i.e., interrupted thread) screws have to be very carefully designed, but if they are designed correctly (which they are not in a lot of reproductions because there are virtually no originals left and the intial reproducers got their math wrong), they are actually self-cleaning, which (along with the grease applied to the vertical cuts which interrupt the threads to make them self-starting) obviates the biggest complaint of folks firing the aforesaid reproductions: the way in which powder residue begins gumming up the breech screw. W. Keith Neal, one of the best authorities on amtique English firearms, owned and fired a Ferguson and found that it was, indeed, possible to fire it as rapidly as claimed (he calculated a 4 rounds per minute sustained rate of fire and a 6-7 round-per-minute “rapid fire” rate using loose-loaded powder and a flintlock, not a caplock) and that fouling was not a problem even over the course of several hours. It
did become a problem, however, if the weapon was allowed to sit and cool for any extended period with the breech closed. In fact, he found in at least one instance that having fired the rifle in the morning and then paused for lunch, when he returned to the rifle it was so solidly locked up that he had to take it into his workshop and disassemble it before he could get the breech screw out. The
number of screw threads can also be a factor, as well as their pitch, because the more threads there are, the greater the force required to turn the screw once fouling does become a problem. That is, a 10-thread screw has twice the threads of a 5-thread screw, which means that it would have twice the surface for fouling and require twice the force to turn against resistance. The flip side of that is that the greater number of threads provides a stronger lockup and a better seal.
Because the St. Kylmahn
can be loaded with powder-and-ball cartridges from the rear and used percussion caps rather than a flintlock, its rate of fire will actually be
higher than the claimed 7 rounds per minute of the original Ferguson. Troops would obviously have to be trained to clean and grease the screw threads as part of their regular maintenance, and it would probably be wise of them to leave the breech open to cool — and to prevent the gummy black powder fouling from hardening and locking the screws in place — if there was any lengthy pause in an engagement.
As a final note on this entire topic, let me point out that the ability to fire as rapidly as possible may or may not be a huge advantage, whereas the ability to load from a prone position or while kneeling behind cover will almost
always be a significant tactical advantage. Moreover, riflemen who are using aimed fire will normally take more time for each shot than riflemen who are blazing away in suppressive fire mode. Ultimately, any paper-cartridge, caplock rifle's maximum rate of fire is going to be far inferior to that of the M96, but the
effective rate of
aimed fire is likely to be a lot closer.
and, Mangy Fur the Smart Alick Spacecat.
If I’d wanted to go immediately to a better action, or if I’d decided the Temple would be able to mass produce metallic cartridges and I wanted to give them a qualitative edge there, the rolling block would have arrived on the scene, as used in the Remington, because it's a very strong, very simple, and much more easily machined action than the one I actually adopted. For that matter, in my opinion, it's also much better than the Sharps' sliding block. 