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Ballistics, Time Period and Engineer

DimitriDimitri Somewhere cold
in General Discussion
I have a passing interest in firearms, primarily in just the mechanics (my eyes glaze over when the discussion turns to grains and special loads, I'm not a ballistics/handloading nerd). Imperian's set in the (late) 1700s tech-wise, but Engineer clearly breaks laughs at the time period somewhat. So to me that begs the question:

What can the engineer with metalworking trade skills get away with in terms of design for firearms?

I suppose this is why some of the engineer designs are listed as class items and not under the jurisdiction of the Crafter's Guild.
Flintlocks, as we have them currently, are the same design they've always been and we've seen them under every iteration of any Golden Age of Piracy set movie (Looking at you Pirates of the Carribean). But those were everywhere cause they were easy and cheap to produce, apparently. There were all kinds of guns available at the time, even some guns we didn't perfect until very recently.
One example is this from 1625 (if that is the year stamped onto the gun).




I don't think I'm the only one looking for some sort of explanation as to why engineers can reload flintlocks so fast, other than just for the sake of mechanical viability.


Sorry if this seems all over the place, as I'm currently perusing the channel the above video belongs to and trying to design something at the same time.
How I am with Engineer released finally

Comments

  • OwynOwyn US
    edited January 2018
    @Dimitri I can get much, much more specific if you like... but essentially, the speed of reloading should be the least of your worries; and the time-frame is also irrelevant in this case. Sometimes things are just fantasy. In a real flintlock, the action itself had three distinct phases: 1) the first fall of the cock and creation of sparks, 2) the  ignition of the priming by these generated sparks, 3) the explosion of the paper cartidge and ejection of the ball or round.

    This might sound ok, and similar to the way things even in the 19th century worked, but it is not. There is a noticeable gap between the time of the primer igniting and the firing of the round in a flintlock. So much so that you had to be militarily trained with one just so you wouldn't flinch upon ignition of the primer and throw off the aim of your shot before the explosion of the cartridge.

    These are flintlocks in name only. If they were to be remotely historically accurate, they would need to be from a time period of 1818-1823, which were the years of the separate but individually developed inventions of the percussion cap.
  • MereisMereis
    I've actually always thought that IREs were in fact modern. However, instead of materisl physics and science they had planar physics and magic, so their technological improvements went down a different path to our real world lives.
    currently tentatively active
    (may vanish for periods of time)
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