Why do we still use revolvers today if pistols can hold more ammo and shoot faster?
In: Physics
Revolvers can more easily/cheaply/reliably fire higher powered rounds.
Revolvers have basically no moving parts when firing. Like, obviously the hammer falls and the firing pin strikes the primer, and then later the cylinder rotates, but compare that to a semiautomatic, where you have a whole complicated mechanism of cycling the slide, extracting the brass, stripping and feeding a new round, etc. All of this is driven by the back-pressure of the gasses pushing the bullet before it leaves the muzzle. And if any part of it is not quite right, you get malfunctions (falure to feed, failure to extract, etc).
At the moment that a revolver is expelling a bullet from its muzzle, the gun is not “doing” anything. It’s just a big hunk of metal. And all the “doing stuff” involved with preparing the next round to fire happens when the gun is not firing a round.
It’s not that you can’t design a semiautomatic to fire higher-powered rounds, but it gets more complicated to manufacture, more expensive, and reliability may suffer. So for example, high powered pistol hunting rounds are usually fired from a revolver.
EDIT TO ADD: Also, since revolvers never have to strip a round off the top of a magazine and feed it into a chamber via a feed ramp, the shape of revolver bullets can be different. Semiauto bullets are tapered, or in other ways designed to be reliable to feed. Revolver bullets don’t have to be designed this way. There are some revolvers that can fire shotgun shells.
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