February 21, 2016
Art by Yuuichi Terada
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
02:46 PM
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Post contains 165 words, total size 2 kb.
This plan may require some revision and rethought. 3&4 in particular want for specificity.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Feb 21 14:54:48 2016 (AaBUm)
Posted by: Ben at Sun Feb 21 18:11:28 2016 (BdQxf)
A water purification still....I have made those. I just need to figure out how to make pipe.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Feb 21 19:10:35 2016 (AaBUm)
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Feb 21 19:15:56 2016 (AaBUm)
Musketeers don't become pikemen after one shot.
The way that shot sleeves operate is to be in multiple ranks. On each call by the officer, each rank performs a step in reloading their weapon, and then they move forward one rank. The front rank fires, then retires to the very rear. So at any instant, the front rank either is ready to fire or has fired; the rank behind that has one step remaining before firing, the one behind that has two steps remaining, and so on.
They practiced this, and as a result they could maintain continuous low-levels of fire as long as they weren't attacked by enemy cavalry.
A regiment consisted of a main body of pikemen, and two shot sleeves (one on each side) of musketeers. When enemy cavalry or enemy pikemen got close and threatened, the sleeves would retire behind the the pike main body and let them do the melee. Once the nasties are chased away, the shot sleeves return to their positions and once again started to fire at a low level.
That's 30-years-war technology, and it worked very well.
As the reloading process got progressively more streamlined it required fewer and fewer ranks of musketeers to do this. By the Napoleonic war it was 2 ranks typically. (Some infantry was organized in three ranks but the third rank didn't participate in volley fire.)
Rifle armed troops in the Napoleonic war couldn't maintain the same fire rate as muskets because loading a rifle took longer. The invention of the Minie ball eliminated that difference, and by the American civil war everyone was using muzzle-loaded rifled muskets, if they weren't using anything more modern.
By the Zulu war, state of the art was brass rifle cartridges (the legendary Martini-Henry rifle) and reloading only took seconds, so it was no longer necessary to do this kind of thing.
Anyway, back in the 30 Years War, if shot sleeves did have to fight, they still weren't piles. They'd simply swing their muskets like clubs. The bayonet hadn't been invented yet.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Mon Feb 22 01:30:41 2016 (+rSRq)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Mon Feb 22 01:32:39 2016 (+rSRq)
OMG we're in the weeds. THE WEEDS!
Ahem.
I was speculating on what sort of firearm one person could make. Firearms beyond a matchlock begin to get into the issues involved in Friedman's Parable of the Pencil. The trigger mechanism requires springs and gears beyond the ability of most blacksmiths. The flint has to be mined. If one wants to upgrade to cap and ball then the percussion cap requires some interesting chemistry. Even the chemically simpler tape cap requires...paper, which most of us here can make...but not to the quality required. Obviously, paper cartridges require paper of consistent quality as well.Metal cartridges require good quality control and work best with brass, which is a fairly sophisticated alloy of course you have to make the powder and mine, or otherwise acquire the lead. None of this is beyond the ability of a small settlement with even a modest steam age machine shop, this has the advantage of being easily replicatable and understandable with some training...but if the equipment requires any circuit boards it is not replicatable and is a one point failure waiting to happen.
Wait...where were we going with this? I cant see for all the weeds.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Feb 22 06:34:18 2016 (AaBUm)
Posted by: Jccarlton at Tue Feb 23 22:19:17 2016 (jqaLb)
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Feb 23 22:35:47 2016 (AaBUm)
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