How comes it took until the mid 1800s for repeating firearms to become standard?

How comes it took until the mid 1800s for repeating firearms to become standard?
Were they really that hard to make? I've seen designs of really old repeating rifles and revolvers like pic related that I cannot possibly imagine would add significantly to the complexity and cost of each gun. Was it a case of nobody seeing them as a significant advantage? Maybe they weren't as powerful per shot? I'd like to hear some opinions about this.

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standardized and interchangeable parts are the problem here, and those only became available with the industrial revolution.

The ability to manufacture cartridges did not develop until the mid 19th century. If someone wanted to fire a repeating weapon they had to load gunpower seperately for each round.

I didn't think of that, it would make sense, traditional rifles from before that have almost no moving parts, which are the easiest to break. Right?

I've seen some designs that give you space for powder, tho I'd imagine they are a bit of a safety nightmare.

I was also remembering how high rate of fire and accuracy weren't that prioritized in guns during these times because of all the smoke guns would create, which might have played a part.

Repeat fire rounds using gunpowder projectile ammunitions could only be attained once rifling and bullet cased shell munition was invented.

However there were but very limited innovations where precontained rounds were loaded into a chamber and shot either all at once or consecutively.

>there were but very limited innovations where precontained rounds were loaded into a chamber and shot either all at once or consecutively.

I've seen some of those, mainly from the 1700s, hear they were incredibly heavy. Which sounds like a plausable reason not to use them.

>standardized and interchangeable parts are the problem here, and those only became available with the industrial revolution

All of this is correct, but I'm going add on the fact that smokeless powder didn't become standard until around 1900. Even during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, black powder was still the norm for both sides of the conflict. Black powder doesn't work well in repeating firearms because the smoke obscures your view after the first shot. Smokeless powder made repeating rifles much more practical, and more desirable.

Your average /k/ old school firearms general thread will give you the general idea.

There was a time when firearms were much like a sword and that only the very rich or powerful had those kinds of random or innovative contraptions that fire multiple round or of those sorts.

OP pic related is very much what would be probably a Lord's personal show case firearm, most likely never used or used once.

Of course once firearms became the means of warfare and were mass produced we see the lost of that bit if aesthetic style.

repeating firearms where well used way before the invention of smokeless powder. Also, smoke is a problem but not the main problem, but black powder is really dirty, up to 30% of the powder end up as residue, clogging your gun up and there is only so many shots a gun can fire before you need to clean it.

For the repeating arms, they existed since at least the 17th century, were often heavy, unreliable, ultra expensive and one of a kind pieces. Perfect for rich nobles hunting, but not recommended for warfare.

The one in the OP was used in Warfare like once, it was an officer's gun. The design is so simple that it got me wondering how more weapons such as it were not produced earlier, even if only as self-defense weapons for lords and merchants.

>The design is so simple
By modern standards.

But in a time without machine tools, the degree of fine-detail metalwork necessary to make a revolver with tight enough seals to prevent a chain-fire of all the cylinders was almost impossible.

The expense was enormous. It would literally be cheaper to carry six one-shot pistols than one six-shot pistol.

Didn't we figure out the modern bullet back in like the 1500s but it was too expensive to mass-produce so we stuck with metal balls?

That thing probably took a long time to make, and it was made by a craftsman who spent a long time learning how to make all the individual parts. Imagine if that thing broke while on campaign. How would you fix it? You have no way to buy replacement parts and you probably don't have the time, tools, or expertise to fix it yourself.

I find it more interesting that Steel-Cartridge/reusable-steel-chambers weren't more common.

or at the very least "monkey tail"-styled paper-breachloaders (with separate percussion-cap).

though the arguments that I've heard for their not-being-adopted have mostly to do with both their relative expense, and the expense of ammunition.

I gotta admit I know nothing of how production was in the renaissance, I just see that they had a lot of metal instruments and I automatically assume that making something like a barrel wouldn't have been that hard.

True, but that would be an issue today too if the craftsman in question didn't teach some other people how to make it.

No, it wouldn't be an issue today because firearms are mass produced with interchangeable parts and every soldier in the unit would be taught how to fix common malfunctions.

They even invented breechloading guns with cartridges in that moment

>that making something like a barrel wouldn't have been that hard.
making a barrel wasn't that hard, making rotating chambers that all had a perfect gas seal was the tricky bit.

Do you mean the bullet shape or the self contained cartridge?

shit is hard, expensive, inconsistent, and really doesn't offer that much of an advantage. For every one person with a repeating firearm, you could probably have like 3 other people with single shot firearms and even then, cannons win battles far more decisively than individual weaponry
youtube.com/watch?v=bAzJOULyx5c

>traditional rifles from before that have almost no moving parts
wheel locks actually had a rather complex mechanism for igniting the powder
youtube.com/watch?v=wEoecTbp2XM

however this made them expensive and fragile, which was why match locks were more popular despite the disadvantage those had of the match possibly going out and failing to ignite the powder

early revolvers had serious reliability problems because of the lack of cartridges. They had a tendency for all of the powder in every chamber to be ignited at the same time.

> I gotta admit I know nothing of how production was in the renaissance

While complicated devices like the revolver pictured in this thread could obviously be made and were reasonably effective and reliable, they were one-off hand-made objects, the entire thing essentially a unique work of art, made by a single highly trained and experienced artisan and that was expensive and time consuming.

What the Industrial Revolution introduced was standardization, which allowed multiple low skilled workers (not artists) to separately make each individual component all to the same standards and that is a lot cheeper and quicker.

The main problem wasn't the gun, or was the ammo. The concept of repeating firearms is one that's been around for a while. The problem is getting the right ammo. Powder loads can be extremely dangerous for a repeating action. You really do need brass cased ammo for it to work.

After it got invented designs like lever-action rifles and self-loading handguns became practical.

But there was mass production before the industrial revolution, was it a case of a "factory" being a whole bunch of artisans making an entire piece by themselves? Or is the problem that even if each one of them is dedicated to a single piece, they have to make it by hand and can't just operate a simple machine to do it?

They were more like “studios”, where most of the work was done by one guy working on one object from start to finish, doing whatever he felt worked the best. Sure, there were apprentices and such but it was still a case of making one object at a time.

So in order to outfit an army of 100.000 men (and disregarding the fact that at the time a lot of soldiers outfitted themselves) a kingdom would of had to employ thousandths of independent artisans?

This is why most kings tended to gravitate towards single-shot, muzzle-loaded firearms until the Industrial Revolution. The time and expense required to outfit an army with repeaters simply wasn't worth it until smokeless powder was formulated.

With simpler firearms, an artisan would be able to pump them out. He could outsource the stock and possibly the barrel to apprentices while working on the firing mechanisms. The problems comes when you need highly complex designs that take weeks to make a single one

cartridges... full metal cartridges were invented later than the first gatling gun

Is that the one that ian reviewed that used actual cartirdges?

>the founding fathers never could have imagined a repeating firearm dot jaypeg.jpg

no, it's a wheellock intended for hunting. They use an ignition system a lot like zippos

thats definitely the one ian reviewed
I could almost swear that it used metal cartridges to load the gun

youtu.be/beOgmCxeh7A?t=301

that's obviously not the wheellock in The inlay is different and it has gold at the firing mechanism

It's actually amazing to think that we created so many amazing technologies, and yet the most important of them all, was the simple idea of dividing work among many people.

That stopped being the case in the 16th century or so.

Milanese armories had adopted a system of specialized craftsmen who worked as contractors for the big armory families. Each craftsman would only produce 1-2 pieces of armor, and and these small pieces of armor would then be fitted together to make a full set of armor. For example, someone would only make faults, or only make breastplates, or only make armguards. It's from this process that affordable munitions armor was created, and over the course of the 16th century, the price of armor collapsed as other countrie adopted this more specialized model. For example, during the English Civil War, just a month's worth of savings from an ordinary soldier could buy him a basic set of armor.

Only the best quality, customized armor would be overseen from start to finish by expert craftsmen.

The problem with guns is that the tolerances involved are much smaller than the tolerances involved in making armor. A 3 mm tolerance in fitting between two pieces of armor is perfectly fine, and is easily achievable by a decent craftsmen with specialized tooling. A 3mm tolerance in fittings for a firearm makes the whole thing unuseable. It would take the Industrial Revolution to reduce tolerances such that parts from two different sets of tooling can be used in the same gun without catastrophic failure.

Good barrels are surprisingly difficult to make, because the barrel has to withstand very high pressure and you need very low tolerances.

Modern barrels are drilled into a forged steel rod, because that gives you the greatest strength. Barrels back in the day were made by rolling sheets into tubes, and welding multiple tubes together to create a long barrel. The welds were a points of weakness, and barrels often failed upon discharge.

>mid 1800s
>standard
Do you even history faggot, maybe around the turn of the century you'd be right but they sure as fuck weren't the standard

Levergats were used in the US civil war if I recall, but in extremely minor numbers. Brits were still using a damned breach loading rifle in '79
>fuck I want a .303 martini

>we

Cost.

How come it took 3 million years to invent writing?