Editor"s note: The firearms round table that produces these articles on firearms doesn"t always reach agreement on a specific issue. They didn"t on this one, and asked me how to proceed. Since I don"t see any reason the fict.i.tious universe of the 1632 series should be any less contentious than the real one, I told them to produce both views and we"d run them simultaneously in the magazine.
So. The question now raised is: which of these alternatives will be chosen in the series?
And the answer is...
Probably both. Not only is the Europe of the 1632 series full of disputing nations, but none of those nations-certainly not the USE-has a command economy to begin with.
Most likely, someone will produce one variant, and someone else will produce the other.
And then, it wouldn"t surprise me to see someone produce something else entirely.
That"s how it happened in our history, after all. Why should an alternate history be any tidier?
First alternative by Leonard Hollar, Tom Van Natta and John Zeek One question that is always coming up on Baen"s Bar is why are there no new machine guns being built in the 1632 universe. The one M-60 is wearing out and spare parts are three hundred years away. What is going to replace it on the battlefields of 1634? One thing to note is the replacement will not be a home built copy of the M-60 or even a mechanical gun like a Gatling. A real machine gun is beyond the gun makers of the USE for a while, possibly until 1639 or 1640.
A real machine gun would require inside-primed bra.s.s cases and smokeless powder. Both of those are coming to the 1632 universe, eventually, but not right away. The ability to make guncotton (nitrocellulose) and nitroglycerin exists by 1634 with the first advent of nitric acid, but not the ability to completely stabilize it so the acids used to make it do not cause it to deteriorate into an unstable state nothing worse than having a soldier"s cartridge go "boom" when dropped, or go "click" when fired. This took some 20-30 years to figure out in Our Time Line (OTL).
Bra.s.s was made from Roman times on in Europe, though zinc was not known as a separate element. By mixing zinc ore with copper ore and heating it together, bra.s.s was produced; some bra.s.s church plaques made this way were the correct 70% copper, 30% zinc ratio for rifle bra.s.s, but this was a happy accident.
Reliably getting a 70/30 ratio to make good rifle bra.s.s is another problem; delivery of metallic zinc from j.a.pan may help solve this.
So we are not going to have a new machine gun-but as of 1634, the armies of the USE don"t need the best, just something better than any enemy can come up with. And they need it on the battlefield now, not in the design room or even being made in a factory somewhere.
First of all, let us look at what a machine gun is. No, that doesn"t mean a physical description, or a
description of how it works, but more what its presence on the battlefield accomplishes.
First and foremost, a gun like this is a force multiplier. That means that the crew of a machine gun, usually two to four, can take the place of many more riflemen. As an ill.u.s.tration let"s look at two weapons from our world that fire the same caliber round, the M-60 machine gun (as found inside the ROF) and the M-14A1 rifle. Both use the same .308 cartridge, the same round Julie Mackay uses in her sniper rifle.
But first a definition is required from the Combat Leader"s Field Guide, 9th edition (1980): Maximum Effective Rate (MER) of Fire (Rounds per Minute) . . . The rate at which a trained gunner can fire and obtain a reasonable number of hits (50%).
Now, one man firing an M-14 rifle in semi-automatic mode has a MER of 20 to 40 rounds per minute (RPM). Compare this to the 200 RPM of the M-60. Simple math shows that the (normally) two-man crew of the M-60 can produce the rate of fire that it would take as few as five and as many as ten men with M-14"s to produce. If one now compares the rate of fire of the semi-automatic (and the fully automatic mode has been purposely ignored here) M-14 with the muzzle loaders found on the battlefield in the sixteen hundreds it is easy to see why the M-60 has been such a big boost in battle. The "Battle of the c.r.a.pper" scene in 1632 shows this very vividly.
Second, a machine gun is an area denial weapon, meaning it prevents an enemy from using an area. This area may be a bridge, a path or a line of attack. Basically the machine gun crew has the job of making an advance by an enemy force through the covered area too expensive in manpower. To put it in even simpler terms, those Spartans of old could have held that pa.s.s with thirty troops and four machine guns, and the other two hundred seventy could have been watching for that flanking movement.
After much discussion, we have concluded that the best bet to have a weapon that does these two jobs, and to have it quickly, is to construct a ribauldequin, or "organ gun." This is a multibarreled gun in a rifle caliber on a two-wheeled carriage. Search Google for ["ribauldequin"], and you will find a number of pages about these so called "Organ Guns," including this one with an ill.u.s.tration way down towards the bottom ( these guns often have about 6 barrels, each one to two inches in bore diameter. We are proposing a larger number of rifle diameter barrels, in rifle calibers of .50 to .75 calibers (one-half to three-fourths of an inch). For ease of production the .58 caliber of the SRG may be best.
Sometime in 1634, USE Steel will go online and one of their first products will be rifle barrels for the SRG and other uses. These are simply tubes of steel that are then rifled by cutting spiral grooves inside to make the bullet fired from it spin-stabilize. We expect that this will be the easy part of a rifle to ma.s.s- produce and that their ability to make these will exceed the number of skilled craftsmen making the rest of the rifle. Ever heard the expression "lock, stock and barrel"? this refers to the gun maker"s craft.
The lock and the stock take as much or more work than making a barrel by hand-forging it-and we
won"t be hand-forging. Barrels not used in making rifles can be made into organ guns.
So, why didn"t this get used before? Well, it did. By 1632 multibarrel guns, including organ guns that looked like this design, had already been made and used. But, they were still muzzleloaders-loaded from the same end the bullet goes out. Thus loading was such a slow process that once they made their initial shot, they might as well be removed from the field. Organ guns that loaded from the muzzle were probably best relegated to defending a fortress wall against siege, since several could be positioned with
interlocking fire zones for mutual protection during reloading. Such a fixed emplacement weapon is seen here: Both cl.u.s.ter barrel and "duck foot" guns (a pistol with three or more barrels splayed out like a duck"s
foot) already exist and have been used by 1632. Since they are muzzle loaders and very slow to reload, they were not found useful other than as a means for an individual to intimidate a group. The cla.s.sic use for a "duck foot" pistol is for a naval officer trying to suppress a mutiny. There are some excellent images at this site: ~da.cushman/ducksfoot.html
As was pointed out in the SRG report, the SRG as it exists can be modified from flintlock, to percussion, to a Snyder, or some such self-contained cartridge breechloader. But the reality is that as soon as cartridges become available, the USE is likely to have better things to do with them than stick them in Snyder or Springfield trapdoors. To all intents and purposes the SRG is a dead end . . . but it was a weapon that could be done fairly quickly at the time.
The organ gun is the same; it can be done using the technology of the time, with only a little up-time help in the design. The USE armies might be able to wait on a true machine gun if they were the absolute strongest power on the continent, not just militarily, but in all categories. They are not. They need a force multiplier now, not three or four years down the road.
Although all elements for this gun were available in 1632, and the need for such a gun was clear (take a look at Gustav Adolf"s own desperate search for antipersonnel artillery), 200 years would pa.s.s before someone put them all together. Then they were obsolete within 6 years when cartridge-firing Gatlings and other magazine-fed mechanical machine guns were introduced, which were then made obsolete themselves in another dozen years.
In this light, there have been a number of proposals for defeating the problem of loading time. All, of course, involve various schemes for loading from the breech. Whether the resulting weapon will have preloaded blocks that attach to the back of the barrels, or individual breech mechanisms using paper cartridges remains to be seen, but rest a.s.sured, someone is going to introduce multibarreled guns to the battlefield in the near future.
Indeed, someone will develop these guns, and who"s to say it"s our friends in Grantville?
It could go like this . . .
As head of the gun makers" guild in St. Etienne, Andre Gueydan had been called to Paris where he had
been handed a number of pages of information on firearms he had never dreamed of. Today, a Sunday, he had been sitting quietly watching the organist in the cathedral and contemplating the problem of making a device that would produce the same volume of fire as the American"s "machine gun." It was then that the epiphany struck.
Tubes! He could make tubes to preload with powder and shot and then load them into the back end of barrels. Barrels which would be cl.u.s.tered just as were the pipes of the organ. Even the holes in the
bottom of the organ"s pipes were part of the vision he had been presented with; powder could be trailed into those holes and used to fire the "cartridges" sequentially. It must be G.o.d"s will, he thought, why else would I have had such a vision in such a place, at such a time?
"G.o.d"s will," or a good guess on the part of Andre, or someone of whatever nationality, finally figures out how to build an organ gun, or to use the correct term, a volley gun. 1634-era USE organ guns would have the following features: 18 open-ended rifle barrels (or more, or less-depends on weight and width desired) affixed to a wheeled frame, capable of being pulled by a single horse (or perhaps a pair of horses). They would be fastened to the frame near the back end with a bolt that would allow the barrel to pivot in a limited range (without moving the gun carriage), and the front would be adjustable with a lever that directed the barrels into "straight" or "spray" configuration. The organ guns will be able to bring all their barrels to parallel, for longer shots or ma.s.sed targets, or splayed a bit to provide greater area of coverage.
Usually the organ gun cartridge will be the same one used by the infantry (a hollow base minie bullet out front, and a tapered nitrated-paper tube full of powder behind, tied with thread to the bullet). However, a buckshot load (5 or 6 .35 caliber lead b.a.l.l.s) may be useful for organ guns. Rifled barrels will spray multishot loads into a donut-shaped pattern-not very accurate, and a definite hole in the middle of the pattern, but a good spread. Occasionally, a good spread of bullets at short range is exactly what is desired in an organ gun.
The back end of the barrels would have a smoothbore chamber about two inches long, to hold a bullet and powder. Behind the back of the barrels is a hinged plate (breech block) that seals the barrels for firing, and a groove for the priming powder trail.
In the United States (in Our Time Line), volley guns were patented just a bare month before the Gatling gun, which proved to be a superior weapon. Despite this, Billinghurst-Requa volley guns, to use their true name, were used in at least one major Union attack and in defense of Washington City (Now commonly known as Washington, D.C.) A brief history of the weapon, along with digitally enhanced photographs, may be found at this site: Please note in the second from last photo the design of the cartridge used. As you can see, while similar to a standard rifle cartridge, instead of being flat on the end there is a slight dome. In this cartridge there was a hole in the center of the dome which was covered from the inside by a piece of nitrated paper. The powder train lay against this dome and the paper burned through to allow the bullet to be fired.
The powder "tubes" for our organ gun would work in the same manner, except they would use a preloaded paper-wrapped packet containing the bullet and powder, or perhaps an unprimed metallic cartridge. For the paper cartridge, the powder could be preloaded and the back covered with nitrated paper, or the powder could be loaded into the cartridges by a gun crew member just before firing; this method would allow for reloading during combat and eliminate the need for specialized machines to form rimmed cartridges such as the one shown on the Virginia Light Horse site. Probably a mixture of these methods would be used.
Once the cartridge tubes are loaded, they will be laid in grooves at the rear of the barrels. A hefty hinged block (called the breech block), running the width of the weapon, lays open below the barrels. Behind the cartridges, a priming trail of loose powder would be poured into the priming groove in the breech block - better too much than too little, the excess priming powder will be forced into the chamber.
Then the breech block will be closed, which pushes the cartridges into their chambers; the breech block is then put under tension sufficient to withstand the recoil of firing-and locked in place. A flintlock would be snapped (or some sort of fire applied, like a matchlock) and the priming trail would ignite, firing all the barrels in a very rapid sequence.
After firing, the breech would need to be swabbed with a mop (putting out any smoldering powder residue and cleaning up a bit) and dried a little-just so it"s not dripping wet, and the firing process repeated. In wet weather, a simple tarp to keep the rain off the back of the gun and the powder would be all that is needed.
* * * Grantville needs the best gun that can be fielded next spring, not the best gun that can be made in five years or one that has limitations placed on it by someone planning to use parts of it or its production machinery five years (or even next year) down the road. They need to get through the coming year to even worry about what might come. There just isn"t time for "nice to haves." In five years these organ guns will be sc.r.a.p. They are very much a dead end. They are also where we need to be now. (The guns are not useless after they are obsolete on major battlefields. Rest a.s.sured that after the USE develops superior follow-on weapons, these guns will be valuable trade items with everyone from those with "private ventures" in the outer world, to other empires.) Once the volley guns have been developed might we see this scenario? The cha.s.seur"s had worked for nearly ten hours clearing a path to get the three pipe organs into position on the hill, and another two clearing lanes of fire that wouldn"t be obvious from the road below. At last the supply column hove into view and began to bunch on the approaches to the narrow bridge, just as had been expected. The captain raised his sword and with a swift slicing motion gave the signal to fire . . . The ma.s.sed fire was as unexpected as it was devastating. The screams of the horses was as from the blackest of nightmares and was matched by the agonizing cries of the teamsters and their escort. Cries from the enemy officers to rally fell apart when the guns fired a second time, and then a third, all within one minute. The carnage was dreadful, and the screams of the wounded men and horses a.s.sailed their ears.
To a man, the organ gun crew preferred their ears to be a.s.sailed than the enemy to attack after crossing the bridge. Far more than their ears would be hurt if the bridge was crossed. And the new guns could hold here until help arrived.
Now the only question is; who"s going to get this weapon first? Exit right with evil laugh.
PS. Thanks to Rick Boatright for nagg-I mean encouraging us.
Second alternative, by Bob Hollingsworth Grantville and its allies need a machine gun!
Fortunately, there is an excellent example of late-middle twentieth century general purpose machine gun available in the former U.S. Army M-60. Unfortunately there will be no way to truly duplicate that gun
in the near future. Many of the same arguments that applied to the adoption of the SRG flintlock minie rifle apply here.
Grantville has only one M-60 machine gun; they have no others and only a limited amount of
ammunition for it. What is it going to take to keep that gun functioning until it is no longer needed?
Let"s take a look at the M-60 machine gun.
The M-60 machine gun is a 7.62 mm NATO caliber fully automatic, gas operated, air cooled, belt feed
weapon, firing from an open bolt, that uses disintegrating ammunition feed links and may be fired from
the hands, off a bi-pod, or from a tripod or vehicle mount.
It weighs 23.06 pounds when properly lubricated and is 43.75 inches long overall and features a 25.6 inch barrel.
It can fire at a cyclic rate of 600 rounds per minute, though to do so necessitates a barrel change to continue firing at a high rate. It is normally fired in bursts of from 6 to 9 rounds and at a rate of about 200 rounds per minute.
It may be fired against area targets to a range of 900 meters from the bi-pods or 1100 meters from a fixed mount such as the M122 tripod.
(Thank you, Drill Sergeant.) The gun is made mostly of steel, with a few minor aluminum parts, with plastic to be found on the front hand guard, trigger group "pistol grip," and the b.u.t.tstock. To a.s.sist in controlling the weapon when it is fired from the shoulder and bi-pod, there is a small folding rest in the b.u.t.tstock that rests on top of the firer"s shoulder in use.
The most common problems with the gun are user malfunctions. That"s right, operator error.
It is possible to a.s.semble the gun with two important parts backwards. The gas piston can be installed
backwards, making the gun effectively a manually operated repeater. The other and more common error is that the firing pin may be installed backwards and the gun will then not fire at all.
Another common a.s.sembly error is to reverse the flat spring that places tension on the trigger group
retaining pin, which may then become loose and fall from the gun, resulting in the loss of the trigger group, the pin and the spring. The gun may be fired without those parts, but it is more difficult to control and accuracy suffers.
Finally there is the common problem of losing the pin that locks the rear of the bolt and so retains the firing pin spring and its guide in position. This can result in the firing pin, and its a.s.sociated parts, coming out of the bolt while firing and causing a serious stoppage.
The likelihood of all of those problems occurring can be reduced by having a written checklist and