Q for Military Historians

Okay, a few things to bear in mind.

First, a Ferguson flintlock using loose powder and ball is capable of about 10 aimed shots a minute. The maximum effective aimed rate of fire for a bolt-action, magazine-fed rifle is about 15. Note my use of the term "aimed," which has a great deal to do with my third paragraph, below.

Second, a Fereguson with a properly designed breech plug (not one of the duplicates attempted before people figured out how Ferguson's actual screw was made) is good for at least 60 rounds before fouling becomes a significant problem, unless the weapon is allowed to cool without cleaning and with the breech plug in place. If that happens, the varnish will, indeed, glue the plug solid. It's been estimated by at least one late 18th-century/early 19th-century Britsh shooter and gunmaker who personally fired one of the original Fergusons that he could have fired pretty much "indefinitely" if he hadn't taken a break for lunch and allowed the gun through which he'd already put in excess of 60 rounds to cool down with the breech plug closed while he ate.

Third, the greatest advantage of a bolt action rifle is not the maximum rate of fire it will allow you to lay down, although this is obviously a critical factor if the action closes to close quarters and the enemy is coming at you. At more common engagement ranges, however, the primary consequence of having bolt action, magazine-fed rifles is that the troops fire off a lot more ammunition a lot more rapidly without necessarily scoring the same percentage of hits they might have scored if firing more deliberately. I am not putting this forth as a hard and fast rule, since a well-trained rifleman doesn't waste ammunition firing when he doesn't have a target except in circumstances where purely suppressive fire is called upon (and those situations certainly do arise). The primary advantage of a bolt action rifle magazine rifle, however, is that it can be manipulated from a prone position (which a muzzleloader simply can't be, under any imaginable circumstances) better than a single-shot weapon. There's less waste motion and it's possible to stay somewhat closer to the ground, but the bolt action per se has no huge tactical advantage over a single-shot breechloader, many of which actually were bolt actions of one sort or another. A secondary advantage of the magazine-fed bolt action rifle is that it pretty much requires strong, durable, self-contained, and — above all — waterproof metallic cartridges. That means they are much more reliable, especially in wet weather, and that ammunition deteriorates much more slowly in storage.

Fourth, the Church's final version of the Saint Kylmahn rifle is a substantial refinement of Lieutenant Zhwaigair's original design, which is capable of an even higher rate of fire than the original Ferguson.

Fifth, whatever one may think about the secular armies serving the Church and the Group of Four, one should be very, very careful about accusing the Army of God or its leadership of tactical or strategic ossification. They don't have the advantage of Merlin or Owl. The tactical doctrine that they evolved for their initial invasion of Siddarmark went from (effectively) black powder matchlocks and pikes to tactics Lee, Jackson, Grant, or Sherman would have recognized, without the advantage of any advisers from a high-tech society with an institutional memory of what black powder armies did wrong. Do not sell the adaptability of the AOG's senior or junior officers short. Whether they can adapt quickly enough to the lessons they're being taught by the Imperial Charisian Army to match the Charisians' tactical flexibility or rapidly enough to offset the Charisians' technological advantages is one question; whether they can adapt as quickly and as well as any other military force in human history is quite another.

Sixth, don't forget weather conditions in Siddarmark. Safehold has a substantially cooler average temperature than Old Earth, and a substantially greater axial inclination. This means even summers are much cooler on Safehold (latitude-for-latitude) than our own experience and that winters in northern Siddarmark are genuinely arctic. At the same time, that same extreme axial tilt means that summers are considerably warmer relative to their winters than is generally our experience, so despite the lower average planetary temperature, the permafrost line doesn't drive a lot further south than it does here on Old Earth. One of the critical components of Safeholdian military planning is that the summer campaign season once you get out of the equatorial regions is significantly shorter than Old Earth generals had to worry about. That means, among other things, that there is more time between campaigning seasons in which supplies can be built up (although ice and snow may lead to transport problems), troops can be drilled, lessons can be digested, et cetera. Recall that Eastshare moved south to Fort Tairys because it was possible to campaign through the colder months that far south, but also recall the miserable weather conditions which still obtained, and while you're recalling that, don't forget that Fort Tairys is roughly 100 miles closer to Safehold's equator than Miami, Florida, is to our equator. The implications for a planet-wide war are sufficiently pointed, I believe.

Seventh, remember that while Safehold has a far more sophisticated transportation net than Napoleon Bonaparte did when he headed for Russia, it's still far [iinferior [/i]] to the transportation net Ulyses Grant had when he was trying to figure out how to deal with Vicksburg and immeasurably inferior to that of Europe in the second decade of the 20th-century. The Schlieffen Plan failed in 1914, despite the existence of a highly developed and quite dense rail network, because of the limitations of animal traction (admittedly, without dragons). Now that both sides are prepared to destroy canal locks, take out bridges, blow up high roads, and dynamite (or black powder) tunnels, logistic considerations are going to preclude anything remotely like blitzkrieg operations, no matter how great a weapons technology advantage one side has over the other.

Eighth, scale. Even a World War Two mechanized army in good supply would quail at the sheer distances involved in a Safeholdian campaign. The distance from Berlin to Moscpw fpr Adolf Hitler was approximatelym 1,000 miles. From Paris to Moscow was approximately 1,550 miles for Napoleon Bonaparte. The distance from Siddar City to Zion for Cayleb and Greyghor Stohnar is roughly 5,300 miles — 3.4 times the distance Napoleon had to cover to reach Moscow, and 5.3 times the distance Hitler had to cover. Even Gorath is 1,200 miles in a straight line from Thesmar. So the ability to deliver some sort of fatal strategic thrust is hugely mitigated simply by the distances which have to be covered. And, by the way, the fact that Bahrnabai Wyrshym was able to cover over 1,100 miles in his initial advance to the Sylmahn Gap as quickly as he did should tell all of you volumes about the capabilities of the AOG's quartermaster's corps. A comparison to the Army of Shiloh's performance might also be informative.

Ninth, remember that briefcase the Church acquired in Siddar City — you know, the ones with the plans for open hearth furnaces in it? One thing Mother Church is good at is putting together large-scale projects, and one of the large-scale projects to which her loyal servants have been paying a great deal of attention is the improvement of their steel producing capacity. The main reason Charis has been able to systematically outproduce the Church has been the sophistication of its techniques and its labor force. It certainly hasn't been due to Charis' huge advantage in population and resources. Even with the captured plans, documentation, and (yes, I'm afraid) basic notes on steel formulation, the Church isn't going to be able to match those sophisticated techniques of someone like Ehdwyrd Howsmyn. But Ehdwyrd Howsmyn is still unique, even on Charis' side, and any significant disaster at his Delthak Works would have enormous repercussions for Charisian productivity in general. He, Cayleb, and Sharleyan are all aware of how much of their total capacity is invested in a single very large, very productive egg, and that is as great a reason for them to be encouraging the spread of heavy industry to additional areas of the Empire as any concern over inequity of income or the possibility of one lobe of the Empire becoming a debt peon to the other as the American South had become to the North even before the American Civil War, far less after it. In the meantime, the Church now has the knowledge required to rapidly expand the productivity of all of its blast furnaces, steelworks, and foundries, and thanks to Duchairn's comb-out of the great Orders' underemployed (or completely unemployed) workers, it has an even larger labor force than it had before. Worse, in people like Lieutenant Zhwaigair and Brother Lynkyn, it has thinkers and innovators who understand both the need to innovate and the general fashion in which Charis has innovated. They don't know about Merlin, and they don't know about Owl, but they do know about interchangeable parts, the need to produce more (and more sophisticated) waterpowered machine tools, et cetera, and I think you can take it for granted that they will be doing all within their infernally creative power to find ways to mitigate and offset Charis' advantages.

None of this is to suggest that the Church isn't in deep, deep trouble, or that if I were a member of the Group of Four, I wouldn't be getting progressively more and more nervous. I would venture to say, however, that it ought to suggest that Charis is not looking at any sort of cakewalk, nor is the Church about to simply curl up and die.

That being said, the title of the most recent book — Hell's Foundations Quiver — is an allusion to the fact that even the most complacent members of the vicarate are being forced to face the possibility that they might actually lose this thing. Because the truth is that up through the destruction of the Army of Shiloh, it never really occurred to the majority of the vicarate (any more than to Zhaspahr Clyntahn) that Mother Church's reverses in the field could be anything but temporary. Her resources were so vast, the support of the Faithful was so strong, and the favor of God and the Archangels was so firmly on her side, that it was surely only a matter of time until she found the right commander and the right combination of forces to triumph.

Unfortunately, they are somewhat less certain of that after Fort Tairys and the Battle of the Kyplyngyr Forest.

I suppose things could always get worse in HFQ, but, hey — what do I know?

Well if you don't know, nobody knows.

runsforcelery wrote:Okay, a few things to bear in mind.

First, a Ferguson flintlock using loose powder and ball is capable of about 10 aimed shots a minute. The maximum effective aimed rate of fire for a bolt-action, magazine-fed rifle is about 15. Note my use of the term "aimed," which has a great deal to do with my third paragraph, below.

Second, a Fereguson with a properly designed breech plug (not one of the duplicates attempted before people figured out how Ferguson's actual screw was made) is good for at least 60 rounds before fouling becomes a significant problem, unless the weapon is allowed to cool without cleaning and with the breech plug in place. If that happens, the varnish will, indeed, glue the plug solid. It's been estimated by at least one late 18th-century/early 19th-century Britsh shooter and gunmaker who personally fired one of the original Fergusons that he could have fired pretty much "indefinitely" if he hadn't taken a break for lunch and allowed the gun through which he'd already put in excess of 60 rounds to cool down with the breech plug closed while he ate.

Third, the greatest advantage of a bolt action rifle is not the maximum rate of fire it will allow you to lay down, although this is obviously a critical factor if the action closes to close quarters and the enemy is coming at you. At more common engagement ranges, however, the primary consequence of having bolt action, magazine-fed rifles is that the troops fire off a lot more ammunition a lot more rapidly without necessarily scoring the same percentage of hits they might have scored if firing more deliberately. I am not putting this forth as a hard and fast rule, since a well-trained rifleman doesn't waste ammunition firing when he doesn't have a target except in circumstances where purely suppressive fire is called upon (and those situations certainly do arise). The primary advantage of a bolt action rifle magazine rifle, however, is that it can be manipulated from a prone position (which a muzzleloader simply can't be, under any imaginable circumstances) better than a single-shot weapon. There's less waste motion and it's possible to stay somewhat closer to the ground, but the bolt action per se has no huge tactical advantage over a single-shot breechloader, many of which actually were bolt actions of one sort or another. A secondary advantage of the magazine-fed bolt action rifle is that it pretty much requires strong, durable, self-contained, and — above all — waterproof metallic cartridges. That means they are much more reliable, especially in wet weather, and that ammunition deteriorates much more slowly in storage.

Fourth, the Church's final version of the Saint Kylmahn rifle is a substantial refinement of Lieutenant Zhwaigair's original design, which is capable of an even higher rate of fire than the original Ferguson.

Fifth, whatever one may think about the secular armies serving the Church and the Group of Four, one should be very, very careful about accusing the Army of God or its leadership of tactical or strategic ossification. They don't have the advantage of Merlin or Owl. The tactical doctrine that they evolved for their initial invasion of Siddarmark went from (effectively) black powder matchlocks and pikes to tactics Lee, Jackson, Grant, or Sherman would have recognized, without the advantage of any advisers from a high-tech society with an institutional memory of what black powder armies did wrong. Do not sell the adaptability of the AOG's senior or junior officers short. Whether they can adapt quickly enough to the lessons they're being taught by the Imperial Charisian Army to match the Charisians' tactical flexibility or rapidly enough to offset the Charisians' technological advantages is one question; whether they can adapt as quickly and as well as any other military force in human history is quite another.

Sixth, don't forget weather conditions in Siddarmark. Safehold has a substantially cooler average temperature than Old Earth, and a substantially greater axial inclination. This means even summers are much cooler on Safehold (latitude-for-latitude) than our own experience and that winters in northern Siddarmark are genuinely arctic. At the same time, that same extreme axial tilt means that summers are considerably warmer relative to their winters than is generally our experience, so despite the lower average planetary temperature, the permafrost line doesn't drive a lot further south than it does here on Old Earth. One of the critical components of Safeholdian military planning is that the summer campaign season once you get out of the equatorial regions is significantly shorter than Old Earth generals had to worry about. That means, among other things, that there is more time between campaigning seasons in which supplies can be built up (although ice and snow may lead to transport problems), troops can be drilled, lessons can be digested, et cetera. Recall that Eastshare moved south to Fort Tairys because it was possible to campaign through the colder months that far south, but also recall the miserable weather conditions which still obtained, and while you're recalling that, don't forget that Fort Tairys is roughly 100 miles closer to Safehold's equator than Miami, Florida, is to our equator. The implications for a planet-wide war are sufficiently pointed, I believe.

Seventh, remember that while Safehold has a far more sophisticated transportation net than Napoleon Bonaparte did when he headed for Russia, it's still far [iinferior [/i]] to the transportation net Ulyses Grant had when he was trying to figure out how to deal with Vicksburg and immeasurably inferior to that of Europe in the second decade of the 20th-century. The Schlieffen Plan failed in 1914, despite the existence of a highly developed and quite dense rail network, because of the limitations of animal traction (admittedly, without dragons). Now that both sides are prepared to destroy canal locks, take out bridges, blow up high roads, and dynamite (or black powder) tunnels, logistic considerations are going to preclude anything remotely like blitzkrieg operations, no matter how great a weapons technology advantage one side has over the other.

Eighth, scale. Even a World War Two mechanized army in good supply would quail at the sheer distances involved in a Safeholdian campaign. The distance from Berlin to Moscpw fpr Adolf Hitler was approximatelym 1,000 miles. From Paris to Moscow was approximately 1,550 miles for Napoleon Bonaparte. The distance from Siddar City to Zion for Cayleb and Greyghor Stohnar is roughly 5,300 miles — 3.4 times the distance Napoleon had to cover to reach Moscow, and 5.3 times the distance Hitler had to cover. Even Gorath is 1,200 miles in a straight line from Thesmar. So the ability to deliver some sort of fatal strategic thrust is hugely mitigated simply by the distances which have to be covered. And, by the way, the fact that Bahrnabai Wyrshym was able to cover over 1,100 miles in his initial advance to the Sylmahn Gap as quickly as he did should tell all of you volumes about the capabilities of the AOG's quartermaster's corps. A comparison to the Army of Shiloh's performance might also be informative.

Ninth, remember that briefcase the Church acquired in Siddar City — you know, the ones with the plans for open hearth furnaces in it? One thing Mother Church is good at is putting together large-scale projects, and one of the large-scale projects to which her loyal servants have been paying a great deal of attention is the improvement of their steel producing capacity. The main reason Charis has been able to systematically outproduce the Church has been the sophistication of its techniques and its labor force. It certainly hasn't been due to Charis' huge advantage in population and resources. Even with the captured plans, documentation, and (yes, I'm afraid) basic notes on steel formulation, the Church isn't going to be able to match those sophisticated techniques of someone like Ehdwyrd Howsmyn. But Ehdwyrd Howsmyn is still unique, even on Charis' side, and any significant disaster at his Delthak Works would have enormous repercussions for Charisian productivity in general. He, Cayleb, and Sharleyan are all aware of how much of their total capacity is invested in a single very large, very productive egg, and that is as great a reason for them to be encouraging the spread of heavy industry to additional areas of the Empire as any concern over inequity of income or the possibility of one lobe of the Empire becoming a debt peon to the other as the American South had become to the North even before the American Civil War, far less after it. In the meantime, the Church now has the knowledge required to rapidly expand the productivity of all of its blast furnaces, steelworks, and foundries, and thanks to Duchairn's comb-out of the great Orders' underemployed (or completely unemployed) workers, it has an even larger labor force than it had before. Worse, in people like Lieutenant Zhwaigair and Brother Lynkyn, it has thinkers and innovators who understand both the need to innovate and the general fashion in which Charis has innovated. They don't know about Merlin, and they don't know about Owl, but they do know about interchangeable parts, the need to produce more (and more sophisticated) waterpowered machine tools, et cetera, and I think you can take it for granted that they will be doing all within their infernally creative power to find ways to mitigate and offset Charis' advantages.

None of this is to suggest that the Church isn't in deep, deep trouble, or that if I were a member of the Group of Four, I wouldn't be getting progressively more and more nervous. I would venture to say, however, that it ought to suggest that Charis is not looking at any sort of cakewalk, nor is the Church about to simply curl up and die.

That being said, the title of the most recent book — Hell's Foundations Quiver — is an allusion to the fact that even the most complacent members of the vicarate are being forced to face the possibility that they might actually lose this thing. Because the truth is that up through the destruction of the Army of Shiloh, it never really occurred to the majority of the vicarate (any more than to Zhaspahr Clyntahn) that Mother Church's reverses in the field could be anything but temporary. Her resources were so vast, the support of the Faithful was so strong, and the favor of God and the Archangels was so firmly on her side, that it was surely only a matter of time until she found the right commander and the right combination of forces to triumph.

Unfortunately, they are somewhat less certain of that after Fort Tairys and the Battle of the Kyplyngyr Forest.

I suppose things could always get worse in HFQ, but, hey — what do I know?

Hi RFC,
I'm struggling a bit with your comparison between the St. Klymans and the bolt action repeaters, particularly if you have to load the bullet separately from the powder. Then you have to place the percussion cap. Even if you allow for a cartridge where the bullet and the powder can be inserted into the gun in the same action, that is a lot of motion that forces your attention away from the barrel and the target to reload.

Whereas by way of contrast, with a bolt action, you move your hand from the trigger to the bolt perform the needed action in less than a second, put your hand back on the trigger, pull the barrel back on the target without removing the stock from your shoulder or repositioning your head from the shooting position.

Dunno. I don't have any experience with something like the Ferguson, but if my visualization of the needed actions for loading are correct, the difference in firing would have to be more than you seem to be suggesting...

Don

n7axw wrote:Hi RFC,
I'm struggling a bit with your comparison between the St. Klymans and the bolt action repeaters, particularly if you have to load the bullet separately from the powder. Then you have to place the percussion cap. Even if you allow for a cartridge where the bullet and the powder can be inserted into the gun in the same action, that is a lot of motion that forces your attention away from the barrel and the target to reload.

Whereas by way of contrast, with a bolt action, you move your hand from the trigger to the bolt perform the needed action in less than a second, put your hand back on the trigger, pull the barrel back on the target without removing the stock from your shoulder or repositioning your head from the shooting position.

Dunno. I don't have any experience with something like the Ferguson, but if my visualization of the needed actions for loading are correct, the difference in firing would have to be more than you seem to be suggesting...

Don

It's actually not complicated.

The original Ferguson used an oversized chamber and a round ball which was slightly larger than the barrel bore. The trigger guard was given a half-turn, which dropped the breech plug. The ball was inserted into the breech. A small quantity of powder from either a powder horn or a paper cartridge which had contained both ball and powder was poured in behind. The breech was closed; because of the nature of the breech design, there was no need for the wad a conventional muzzleloader required (and when the powder charge fired it forced the ball into the rifling and ensured a very tight fit). The pan was primed, which could be done either by pouring a little powder from the same cartridge into the pan or by enlarging the inner end of the touchhole so that a smack to the side of the rifle shook powder into the pan. It was then cocked, aimed, and fired. All of this could be done very, very quickly by a trained rifleman; certainly, it could be done far more rapidly than a muzzleloader, and particularly a muzzle-loading rifle, of the time could be loaded and fired. The eventual introduction of the Minie ball changed the equation a bit, since it could be dropped easily down the muzzleloader's barrel without the requirement that it be hammered down the bore as the original German rifles required and didn't require the heavily greased patch adopted by the American lung rifle. The design of Ferguson's breech plug was one of the cleverest parts of the entire rifle. He arranged for it to drop out the bottom of the breech, which meant that the rifle could be easily loaded from a prone position, and the pitch of the self-starting/interrupted screw's threads was designed so that closing the breech actually cleaned the threads cut into the face of the breech, with the scraped-off fouling dropping out through the bottom of the breech the next time it was opened for loading.

Zhwaigair's design is very similar to the Ferguson, except that it's designed to use percussion caps which speeds loading, compared to priming the pan with loose powder, and slows loading slightly compared to what is achievable with a funnel-shaped touchhole, but also provides far more reliable ignition and much greater immunity to conditions of damp. (I should point out here, in addition, that one of the huge advantages of more rapid ignition is reduced and reliable "lock time," the interval between the hammer's fall and the instant the weapon actually fires. Reduced lock time, especially if the lock time is the same from round to round, has a huge effect on accuracy.)

Brother Lynkyn's design is a significant refinement on Zhwaigair's, and it most certainly does use cartridges. In fact, it uses a cartridge identical in concept to that of the Charisian Mahndrayn breechloader, but its rate of fire is somewhat higher than that of the original Mahndrayn and it's far easier and less expensive to manufacture.

Now, please do reflect that I am comparing the aimed rate of fire of this weapon and a bolt-action rifle. There is a distinct difference between aimed fire and maximum rate fire.

The motion path of firing a bolt-action rifle is, indeed, simpler than firing even a Saint Kylmahn rifle. Operating the bolt handle ejects the expended round, chambers a fresh round, and cocks the hammer. The hand then drops and the trigger finger finds the trigger. So the hand basically makes 4 motions (some people might break this down differently): from trigger to bolt handle; lift bolt handle and pull rearward; push bolt handle forward and down to lock; return hand to trigger.

The St. Kylmahn requires 8 motions: hand on trigger pushes trigger guard through half-turn and gravity drops plug, opening the breech (there is no spent metallic cartridge to eject; the paper cartridge, like that of the Mahndrayn, has been consumed); firing hand leaves trigger guard and travels to cartridge; cartridge inserted through back of breech; firing hand returns to trigger guard and half-turn locks up breech plug; firing hand finds percussion cap; heel of hand cocks hammer; percussion cap finds nipple; firing hand returns to trigger. If the firer adopts the same trick that was used by US troops firing the Trapdoor Springfield, the rifleman will hold up to three additional cartridges between the fingers of his left hand in order to speed reloading; otherwise, if he is in a prone position, he'll open his cartridge box and lay it out in the most convenient position. And, by the way, after a few five-days of training, all of these motions become basically muscle memory, to the point that they can be carried out without actually looking at your own hand or the rifle while you perform them.

The hand of a rifleman firing the Saint Kylmahn is making twice as many movements as the hand of a rifleman firing an M96 bolt-action rifle from the Delthak Works, but remember what I said about aimed fire. If all you are doing is essentially to close your eyes and blaze away at a another group of massed riflemen or musketeers at relatively short ranges, the net difference can become time-critical. It would not translate into the M96 firing 2 rounds for every one the Saint Kylmahn fired, but it would probably be close. However, finding the target, aiming, and taking the time to be sure your weapon is steady, you've allowed for range (not a minor consideration with black powder and low velocities which produce significant bullet drop) and windage also takes time. It takes the same amount of time for both weapons once they are in firing condition, but they are a large enough component of the total firing cycle that they reduce the M96's theoretical advantage in rate of fire significantly. So instead of firing 2 rounds while the Saint Kylmahn fires 1, it fires 15 rounds while the Saint Kylmahn fires 10 (an advantage of only 1.5-to-1).

In maximum rate fire — as in your backs are to the wall and you are firing everything you have into the charging mass of close packed spearmen who want to get close enough to kill you — picking individual targets is much lower on your priorities than simply cranking off as many rounds as you can. Under those circumstances, the difference between the M96 and the Saint Kylmahn would become very pronounced (as in possibly even better than 2-to-1). . . at least as long as the M96's supply of charged magazines held out. In practical terms of what a rifleman, as opposed to a machine gunner, is supposed to do with his weapon, however, the opportunities to fire usefully at such high rates will be extraordinarily few and far between.

Most early-generation magazine-fed rifles had a magazine cut off slide which could be engaged to prevent rounds in the magazine from being chambered. The logic was that the rifleman would load single cartridges at extended range, while he was supposed to be taking his time and picking his targets (which would be less wasteful of ammunition), and could always disengage the cut off slide to let him fire some or all of the rounds in the magazine much more rapidly in a situation in which the enemy was closing rapidly on his position.

There's been some mention of the "Mad Minute," which was a British Army firing drill in which the marksman fired as many aimed rounds as possible in one minute. I don't have the best record ever put up in that regard in front of me, but I believe someone up thread cited 38 or so rounds, which sounds about right. That was by a highly trained marksman/rifle instructor, and it should be noted that it was on a rifle range, not on a battlefield covered with smoke and with other people shooting at him. That being said, it is certainly true that the professional, long-service regulars of the British Army who made up the original BEF in 1914 were probably the best trained riflemen — as a body — in the history of the world. They probably were capable of firing as many as 20 individually aimed shots in one minute; they were, however, an enormous exception to the rule of what more typical riflemen could achieve, and it is worth noting that the marksmanship standards of the volunteer battalions — the "Pals Battalions" — of Kitchener's Army which replaced those long-term professionals came nowhere near being able to match those standards. Partly that was because the conditions of trench warfare had come to be seen as placing a decisive premium on volume of fire rather than accuracy of fire, so the replacements for the fallen regulars tended to concentrate on acquiring other skills. An even more telling reason, however, was that it took a long time and a lot of rounds put down range on a rifle range to acquire that slick, smoothly polished professionalism and there simply wasn't enough time to instill that skill set into the new recruits before they were rushed off to charming vacation spots like the Somme.

As I say, the biggest advantage of a breechloader — single shot or magazine-fed — is the firer's ability to get low and stay low, or to reload behind the cover of a convenient tree, boulder, or stonewall with minimal exposure to enemy fire. This both Zhwaigair's design and the Saint Kylmahn provide. The practical and useful rate of fire advantage of the bolt-action, however, really is only about 3-to-2. That's still a hefty edge, probably a decisive one as long as there's anything close to the quality of numbers, but it's also a disadvantage which a sufficiently large numerical advantage can overcome.

Does that make the logic any clearer?

Yes!

n7axw wrote:Hi RFC,
I'm struggling a bit with your comparison between the St. Klymans and the bolt action repeaters, particularly if you have to load the bullet separately from the powder. Then you have to place the percussion cap. Even if you allow for a cartridge where the bullet and the powder can be inserted into the gun in the same action, that is a lot of motion that forces your attention away from the barrel and the target to reload.

Whereas by way of contrast, with a bolt action, you move your hand from the trigger to the bolt perform the needed action in less than a second, put your hand back on the trigger, pull the barrel back on the target without removing the stock from your shoulder or repositioning your head from the shooting position.

Dunno. I don't have any experience with something like the Ferguson, but if my visualization of the needed actions for loading are correct, the difference in firing would have to be more than you seem to be suggesting...

Don

Major nit, I have been informed by people with experience that you cannot reload a bolt action rifle without losing the sight picture. If you try to keep your eyes on the sights, you would attempt to put the bolt through your cheekbone. Most users of bolt actions when firing standing will lower the stock to their waist or hip when working the bolt.

Castenea wrote:Major nit, I have been informed by people with experience that you cannot reload a bolt action rifle without losing the sight picture. If you try to keep your eyes on the sights, you would attempt to put the bolt through your cheekbone. Most users of bolt actions when firing standing will lower the stock to their waist or hip when working the bolt.

Depends on position. When Standing, it is easiest to work a bolt by dropping the rifle butt from the shoulder -- not necessarily as low as the waist or hip; mid-chest height works well for me.

In kneeling, seated or prone, it is easiest to keep the rifle on-tartget and tip the head away from the action as needed; usually not far, and no longer than absolutely necessary.

If you're a halfway decent shot, losing the sight picture is no big deal because you'll need to shift your point of aim after each shot.

I spent enough time firing the .303 Lee-Enfield to know that "attempt to put the bolt through your cheekbone" is pure and utter rubbish. I kept my sight picture with no such problems when snap-shooting at momentary targets that just happened to come up in almost the same place every time, and only had to shift my aim by a fraction to hit the targets again and again. That's with 6-inch discs at 200 yards, rapid fire.
Cheers, John

Castenea wrote:

n7axw wrote:Hi RFC,
I'm struggling a bit with your comparison between the St. Klymans and the bolt action repeaters, particularly if you have to load the bullet separately from the powder. Then you have to place the percussion cap. Even if you allow for a cartridge where the bullet and the powder can be inserted into the gun in the same action, that is a lot of motion that forces your attention away from the barrel and the target to reload.

Whereas by way of contrast, with a bolt action, you move your hand from the trigger to the bolt perform the needed action in less than a second, put your hand back on the trigger, pull the barrel back on the target without removing the stock from your shoulder or repositioning your head from the shooting position.

Dunno. I don't have any experience with something like the Ferguson, but if my visualization of the needed actions for loading are correct, the difference in firing would have to be more than you seem to be suggesting...

Don

Major nit, I have been informed by people with experience that you cannot reload a bolt action rifle without losing the sight picture. If you try to keep your eyes on the sights, you would attempt to put the bolt through your cheekbone. Most users of bolt actions when firing standing will lower the stock to their waist or hip when working the bolt.

Hello RunsForCelery!

I'm sorry I forgot that excellent series!

I might try to defend my lapse by pointing out the difference between 10,000 and ~200, but I won't.

I will say it was early in the morning.

L

runsforcelery wrote:

lyonheart wrote:Hi Thucydides,

Brilliant as always.

RFC has yet to echo or praise Xenophon, with the possible exception of EoH, ie escaping Hades etc; which is curious, given how worthy it is.

So I should take it you don't like Prince Roger and the Bronze Barbarians?

runsforcelery wrote:

n7axw wrote:Hi RFC,
I'm struggling a bit with your comparison between the St. Klymans and the bolt action repeaters, particularly if you have to load the bullet separately from the powder. Then you have to place the percussion cap. Even if you allow for a cartridge where the bullet and the powder can be inserted into the gun in the same action, that is a lot of motion that forces your attention away from the barrel and the target to reload.

Whereas by way of contrast, with a bolt action, you move your hand from the trigger to the bolt perform the needed action in less than a second, put your hand back on the trigger, pull the barrel back on the target without removing the stock from your shoulder or repositioning your head from the shooting position.

Dunno. I don't have any experience with something like the Ferguson, but if my visualization of the needed actions for loading are correct, the difference in firing would have to be more than you seem to be suggesting...

Don

It's actually not complicated.

The original Ferguson used an oversized chamber and a round ball which was slightly larger than the barrel bore. The trigger guard was given a half-turn, which dropped the breech plug. The ball was inserted into the breech. A small quantity of powder from either a powder horn or a paper cartridge which had contained both ball and powder was poured in behind. The breech was closed; because of the nature of the breech design, there was no need for the wad a conventional muzzleloader required (and when the powder charge fired it forced the ball into the rifling and ensured a very tight fit). The pan was primed, which could be done either by pouring a little powder from the same cartridge into the pan or by enlarging the inner end of the touchhole so that a smack to the side of the rifle shook powder into the pan. It was then cocked, aimed, and fired. All of this could be done very, very quickly by a trained rifleman; certainly, it could be done far more rapidly than a muzzleloader, and particularly a muzzle-loading rifle, of the time could be loaded and fired. The eventual introduction of the Minie ball changed the equation a bit, since it could be dropped easily down the muzzleloader's barrel without the requirement that it be hammered down the bore as the original German rifles required and didn't require the heavily greased patch adopted by the American lung rifle. The design of Ferguson's breech plug was one of the cleverest parts of the entire rifle. He arranged for it to drop out the bottom of the breech, which meant that the rifle could be easily loaded from a prone position, and the pitch of the self-starting/interrupted screw's threads was designed so that closing the breech actually cleaned the threads cut into the face of the breech, with the scraped-off fouling dropping out through the bottom of the breech the next time it was opened for loading.

Zhwaigair's design is very similar to the Ferguson, except that it's designed to use percussion caps which speeds loading, compared to priming the pan with loose powder, and slows loading slightly compared to what is achievable with a funnel-shaped touchhole, but also provides far more reliable ignition and much greater immunity to conditions of damp. (I should point out here, in addition, that one of the huge advantages of more rapid ignition is reduced and reliable "lock time," the interval between the hammer's fall and the instant the weapon actually fires. Reduced lock time, especially if the lock time is the same from round to round, has a huge effect on accuracy.)

Brother Lynkyn's design is a significant refinement on Zhwaigair's, and it most certainly does use cartridges. In fact, it uses a cartridge identical in concept to that of the Charisian Mahndrayn breechloader, but its rate of fire is somewhat higher than that of the original Mahndrayn and it's far easier and less expensive to manufacture.

Now, please do reflect that I am comparing the aimed rate of fire of this weapon and a bolt-action rifle. There is a distinct difference between aimed fire and maximum rate fire.

The motion path of firing a bolt-action rifle is, indeed, simpler than firing even a Saint Kylmahn rifle. Operating the bolt handle ejects the expended round, chambers a fresh round, and cocks the hammer. The hand then drops and the trigger finger finds the trigger. So the hand basically makes 4 motions (some people might break this down differently): from trigger to bolt handle; lift bolt handle and pull rearward; push bolt handle forward and down to lock; return hand to trigger.

The St. Kylmahn requires 8 motions: hand on trigger pushes trigger guard through half-turn and gravity drops plug, opening the breech (there is no spent metallic cartridge to eject; the paper cartridge, like that of the Mahndrayn, has been consumed); firing hand leaves trigger guard and travels to cartridge; cartridge inserted through back of breech; firing hand returns to trigger guard and half-turn locks up breech plug; firing hand finds percussion cap; heel of hand cocks hammer; percussion cap finds nipple; firing hand returns to trigger. If the firer adopts the same trick that was used by US troops firing the Trapdoor Springfield, the rifleman will hold up to three additional cartridges between the fingers of his left hand in order to speed reloading; otherwise, if he is in a prone position, he'll open his cartridge box and lay it out in the most convenient position. And, by the way, after a few five-days of training, all of these motions become basically muscle memory, to the point that they can be carried out without actually looking at your own hand or the rifle while you perform them.

The hand of a rifleman firing the Saint Kylmahn is making twice as many movements as the hand of a rifleman firing an M96 bolt-action rifle from the Delthak Works, but remember what I said about aimed fire. If all you are doing is essentially to close your eyes and blaze away at a another group of massed riflemen or musketeers at relatively short ranges, the net difference can become time-critical. It would not translate into the M96 firing 2 rounds for every one the Saint Kylmahn fired, but it would probably be close. However, finding the target, aiming, and taking the time to be sure your weapon is steady, you've allowed for range (not a minor consideration with black powder and low velocities which produce significant bullet drop) and windage also takes time. It takes the same amount of time for both weapons once they are in firing condition, but they are a large enough component of the total firing cycle that they reduce the M96's theoretical advantage in rate of fire significantly. So instead of firing 2 rounds while the Saint Kylmahn fires 1, it fires 15 rounds while the Saint Kylmahn fires 10 (an advantage of only 1.5-to-1).

In maximum rate fire — as in your backs are to the wall and you are firing everything you have into the charging mass of close packed spearmen who want to get close enough to kill you — picking individual targets is much lower on your priorities than simply cranking off as many rounds as you can. Under those circumstances, the difference between the M96 and the Saint Kylmahn would become very pronounced (as in possibly even better than 2-to-1). . . at least as long as the M96's supply of charged magazines held out. In practical terms of what a rifleman, as opposed to a machine gunner, is supposed to do with his weapon, however, the opportunities to fire usefully at such high rates will be extraordinarily few and far between.

Most early-generation magazine-fed rifles had a magazine cut off slide which could be engaged to prevent rounds in the magazine from being chambered. The logic was that the rifleman would load single cartridges at extended range, while he was supposed to be taking his time and picking his targets (which would be less wasteful of ammunition), and could always disengage the cut off slide to let him fire some or all of the rounds in the magazine much more rapidly in a situation in which the enemy was closing rapidly on his position.

There's been some mention of the "Mad Minute," which was a British Army firing drill in which the marksman fired as many aimed rounds as possible in one minute. I don't have the best record ever put up in that regard in front of me, but I believe someone up thread cited 38 or so rounds, which sounds about right. That was by a highly trained marksman/rifle instructor, and it should be noted that it was on a rifle range, not on a battlefield covered with smoke and with other people shooting at him. That being said, it is certainly true that the professional, long-service regulars of the British Army who made up the original BEF in 1914 were probably the best trained riflemen — as a body — in the history of the world. They probably were capable of firing as many as 20 individually aimed shots in one minute; they were, however, an enormous exception to the rule of what more typical riflemen could achieve, and it is worth noting that the marksmanship standards of the volunteer battalions — the "Pals Battalions" — of Kitchener's Army which replaced those long-term professionals came nowhere near being able to match those standards. Partly that was because the conditions of trench warfare had come to be seen as placing a decisive premium on volume of fire rather than accuracy of fire, so the replacements for the fallen regulars tended to concentrate on acquiring other skills. An even more telling reason, however, was that it took a long time and a lot of rounds put down range on a rifle range to acquire that slick, smoothly polished professionalism and there simply wasn't enough time to instill that skill set into the new recruits before they were rushed off to charming vacation spots like the Somme.

As I say, the biggest advantage of a breechloader — single shot or magazine-fed — is the firer's ability to get low and stay low, or to reload behind the cover of a convenient tree, boulder, or stonewall with minimal exposure to enemy fire. This both Zhwaigair's design and the Saint Kylmahn provide. The practical and useful rate of fire advantage of the bolt-action, however, really is only about 3-to-2. That's still a hefty edge, probably a decisive one as long as there's anything close to the quality of numbers, but it's also a disadvantage which a sufficiently large numerical advantage can overcome.

Does that make the logic any clearer?

Yes, it does and thanks for the response.

Don