What stopped 18-19th century armies with guns from being able to create automatic weapons like AK-47s and Uzis?
Since they don’t use electricity I feel like they’re made with materials and technology that was already available in the 1750s, surely they could’ve put their heads together to create a machine gun and just annihilate any ops…
Thanks
In: Engineering
>they’re made with materials and technology that was already available in the 1750s
That’s the thing. The manufacturing technology wasn’t there at the time. The rifle cartridge hadn’t been invented and wasn’t possible at the time, and the capability to make guns with the tolerances, materials, and durability to withstand operating conditions didn’t exist.
Yeah, basically they were all really stupid. If only you had been around to explain to them how stupid they are then we’d all be living on Mars
Three things, mostly:
1. What precision machine tools existed in that time period were very rare and expensive and also just not all that precise.
2. Poor materials science meant that metals were more brittle or just plain weaker and couldn’t handle the high thermal/stress load.
3. It was difficult to mass manufacture parts and especially ammunition – the first cartridge was invented at the turn of the 19th century but even then it was paper and couldn’t be manufactured in bulk like brass cartridges can be.
No automatic gun has been made which did not use parts made on a lathe, and the all metal lathe was literally *just* invented in 1751, and it took many more years before it was a common tool.
There’s steel, and then there’s steel. It has to have the right characteristics. That’s getting each piece right. Then there’s tolerances – how much too big or small the pieces can be, so they fit together but still move where required.
Then there’s the ammunition…
Self contained cartridges were needed to have machine guns that could reliably feed from a magazine or belt. To have self contained cartridges it requires machining hundreds of thousands or millions of cartridges to exacting specifications (off by fraction of millimeter = explosion). Once machining advanced to the point where cartridges and weapons could reliably be manufactured, automatic weapons followed very shortly.
Fullimates had not yet been discovered. These chemicals were required for percussion cap. Percussion cap are required for cartridges. Cartridges are required for fully automatic guns.
Black powder. Its foul. It creates a thin coating of wet grease that hardens as it cools. It can get thick enough in just a few shots that it literally makes the barrel of a smoothbore musket smaller, and it fills the rifling grooves of rifles to an extent that makes the rifling useless until its cleaned.
Now imagine all that shit inside the receiver of an AR15. Just a few shots will gunk it up and foul the moving parts on the inside. It’ll jam the feed from the magazine, interfere with the gas cycling system, and pretty much destroy its ability to function unless its continually cleaned.
It may seems weird but it was hard to manufacture precision parts within a certain tolerance.
Do you realize how hard that is to load up with musket balls that quickly? I mean the fastest of gun loading probably took 25-30 seconds and I mean if you want to be shooting faster than that, imagine having to load a Gatling gun with that many. I mean then you also have to worry that while you’re loading one barrel, the one next to it might shoot your hand off. This alone probably made it the hardest part. /s
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