Why weren't revolver rifles mass produced for the civil war or later wars?

Why

Probably the people getting burned.

Why would they care

Its hard enough having to shoot back at people shooting at you without your weapon giving you ouchies everytime you fire it.

(you)

cylinder gaps are a problem, shooting it would damage your wrist or forearm. Creating a gas seal to negate the issue makes the trigger very heavy.

Metallurgy at the time wasn't good enough to make a chamber resilient enough to handle a lot of pressure, capable of operating with a rotating cylinder. You couldn't consistently put a high power round through a revolver, you couldn't manufacture with enough certainty in the steel's strength and properties. hence why the few revolving rifles at the time just used pistol calibers while single shot and lever guns could have sturdier chambers to accommodate higher pressure from stronger rounds.

besides that, reliability isn't an issue if its firing cartridges, and ammo capacity could easily be higher than most bolt actions, and manufacturing would be easier.

Why the fuck is that retard holding his gun like that

>6 shots instead of 1
>But now the reloading process is 6 times longer

Wow, such a huge advantage.

Shooting from a bench rest

Cost and logistics, mostly.

See this gun, OP? It's a breach-loading pisotl firing brass cartridges from the mid 1500s. Mainstream military weapons didn't catch up to this for 300 years, yet this invention had no meaningful impact on warfare at the time because it cost too much to mass produce.

Are you fucking sure

Why didn't they use levers then?

They used breech and muzzle loaders

Lever-actions were expensive to produce and it took a weirdly long time for military planners to accept the idea that the normal infantryman wasn't so stupid that he'd accidentally kill himself if you gave him a repeating rifle.

So basically they were soy boys?

Not only that, but the US Army also had a massive fetish for muh rifle marksmen meme. Generals thought that giving an infantryman the option to use more than one shot at a time would lead to ammunition waste, and marksmanship skills would deteriorate.

A combination of logistics, manufacturing difficulties, and fucky doctrine.

Early revolvers were a pain in the ass to use. Before the advent of cartridges, revolvers had to be loaded much the same way you do a muzzle-loader, meaning loading took significantly longer. The gap between the cylinder and barrel would cause a lot of energy loss as gases escaped, and there was the ever-present threat of multiple chambers firing if hot gases managed to get into the other chambers. Combine that with the (arguably unrealistic) long-range focus of infantry doctrine at the time, and you're left with a complicated and potentially dangerous gun that lacks the range of your standard infantry rifle. Like many breech-loaders and repeaters, they were used among cavalry, but they didn't fit well into infantry doctrine at the time.

Once repeaters and breech-loaders became more common, you still had some odd aspects of doctrine that slowed things down to their logical conclusion. Armies continued to emphasize unrealistically long engagement ranges, and wars of the time seemed to give mixed messages - the Franco-Prussian War seemed to show that engagement ranges beyond several hundred yards weren't as important as fire rate, but the Boer Wars years later showed the opposite - British cavalry were having problems with the poor long-range performance of their carbines. The US had a unique outlook, with a huge emphasis on marksmanship likely thanks in part to the open expanses of the American West. So an emphasis on range generally stuck around, and armies mostly stuck with large-bore single-shot rifles like the Martini-Henry that offered significantly better range than repeaters like the Winchester lever actions.

>cont

wew

So by the late 1800s, you had everyone using black powder cartridges with bore sizes slowly shrinking. However, things remained single-shot for a while, and it wasn't until the French came along in 1886 with the groundbreaking 1886 Lebel.

The Lebel was the first smokeless-powder repeating rifle to be adopted by any major power, and it effectively rendered all other nations' service rifles obsolete. The smaller smokeless round - 8mm Lebel - was smaller and had a flatter trajectory than black powder rounds of the time like .577 Martini Henry, and unlike the rounds used in most lever-actions of the time, retained the same long-range performance everyone wanted. Soon enough, everyone had their answer to the Lebel. Germany adopted the Gewehr 88 in 8mm Mauser, Austria the Mannlicher 1886in 11mm Mannlicher, the US the Krag-Jorgensen in 30-40 Krag, and the Brits the Lee-Metford in .303 British.

But the abrupt jump to repeaters was met with resistance among most militaries, who were afraid of the logistical strain of rapid fire and feared repeaters would cause ammunition to go wasted. So plenty of these first-generation smokeless repeaters had magazine cutoffs - the idea was that a soldier would keep it engaged on command and use the gun as a single-shot, only engaging the magazine for rapid fire when ordered. And as counterintuitive as it seems, this idea stuck around generally until WW1 along with the unrealistically long engagement ranges (500+ meters).

Then there's the question of lever-actions. On paper, they seem perfectly suited for repeaters, but they have their own problems. Early lever actions were exclusively tube magazines, which are poorly suited to the kinds of accurate long-distance shooting militaries wanted in an infantry rifle, and although we did see lever guns like the Winchester 1895 in small numbers in WW1 (particularly in Russia), the system exposed the action to mud and was harder to use prone compared to a bolt action.

Also, if anyone's looking for a hyper-autistic look at the history of firearms development from the late 1800s to WW1, I'd seriously recommend checking out C&Rsenal on youtube. If you can get past the guy's faggoty kermit the Frog voice, it's probably the most autistic thing you'll ever see about firearms development.

>Almost two hours of Krags
>hours upon hours of Man-Lickers

Lever guns didn't offer the range of muzzle loaders or later infantry single-shot breech-loaders.

There was some famous siege though where the Ottoman defenders had both Martini-Henries and Winchesters. They had the Martini Henries engage normally at long distances, while the Winchesters were kept in reserve and used to deliver high rates of fire to any enemy who broke through close enough for them to engage.

It looks okay but I don't see any reason to switch away from Forgotten Weapons.

They're nice supplements. Forgotten Weapons offers breadth and covers lots of prototypes that C&Rsenal will never cover. But C&Rsenal gets into autistic levels of detail and constantly builds on previous episodes, which is really great for understanding firearms development of the period.

This, gun Jesus is based.

Ian gives a general overview of the mechanics of a gun, along with a brief history summary.

C&Rsenal goes balls deep into the history and usage of each weapon they cover, as well as in depth looks into the mechanism of a firearm.
Plus, they have a video series about gunsmithing which is pretty neat.

...

youtube.com/watch?v=BZ6T5FxgIwk
your arm