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
>Since they don’t use electricity I feel like they’re made with materials and technology that was already available in the 1750s
You need at least a steam engine to power the necessary mills and lathes.
It’s only when those machines were developed that mass production of precision parts became possible.
You need a pretty versatile industrial complex to be able to produce automatic firearms.
the first automatic weapon known as the “puckle gun” was patented in 1718. However as stated by others the gun making process during that time was more manual and time consuming. Thus the process of making all the parts to make a successful automatic rifle would make the weapon to costly to REALLY make on a scale to make them effective.
Now that we have the ability to machine these parts it makes these guns far more available.
Machine guns were made possible by a whole series of inventions, and weren’t really possible before that.
One of the most essential inventions was the cartridge. Propellant, a primer, a projectile, all the components contained in a single case. This was a key to having any sort of repeating fire, but wasn’t patented until 1847 and wasn’t widely available for years after that.
While gunmakers quickly figured out how to manually feed cartridges with a bolt/pump/lever, using the power from a round was tricky, because the black powder in use at the time was very dirty. It left behind thick and hard fouling in the gun, enough to gunk up the works after a few rounds and stop them from working.
This is the point machine guns became possible and were invented, but, they weren’t really reliable. The only real way around the fouling issue was to overcome it with sheer force, leading to weapons that were large and heavy like the 1884 Maxim gun.
Smokeless powder was invented in 1884, wasn’t really commercially available until about 1897, but basically solved the fouling issue. This made machine guns viable, and it’s why tons started being invented in the early 20th century.
A key feature of machine guns is they use energy from the previous round to chamber the next one and ready the weapon for firing. This requires both high quality materials and precision machining to work reliably, as well as highly consistent ammunition. The first machine gun was the maxim machine gun which iirc was invented in the 1880s, which basically was as soon as possible once the prerequisites technologies were in wide use.
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
You need the ability to mass produce fixed cartridge ammunition to feed a machine gun- that technology wasn’t invented until the late 19th century. Machine guns are a natural byproduct of fixed cartridges.
It may seems weird but it was hard to manufacture precision parts within a certain tolerance.
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.
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…
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