First Paintball tech?

[Drunkscriblerian]

Here we have Gun Jesus looking at a pneumatic rifle design...from the 1780s, natch:

I dunno about the rest of you, but some aspects of that air system look more than a little familiar to me. Same with the feed system if you squint sideways at it. I know DocsMachine references this design in The Whiteboard at one point, maybe he's got some details about it that Ian missed.

[bored383]

a buddy of mine has gotten to mess around with some reproductions, and has handled originals. They are really fascinating

[DocsMachine]

On the contrary, I learned a few things I didn't know.

Although I do know that "air tank" isn't pronounced "magazine".

My biggest takeaway is I'd heard the same thing about Napoleon- and I've even repeated that online a few times. Yeah, assuming Ian's data is right, by the time Napoleon came on the scene, the original guns were mostly worn out, and there weren't enough of them to make any sort of a difference- let alone so much that Napoleon would have accused a soldier using one as an "assassin".

Oh, and I'd posted this on the Guild yesterday, and then tried to find a page I'd seen once years ago. Somebody in the Beemun family- of airgun fame- set out to make a period-correct copy of a Girardoni. It's probably on beemun.net, but I couldn't find it in a quick look- that isn't exactly a user-friendly site.

I did, however, find this excellent page- in Czech, I think- about making a copy from scratch. Even without a translation, the pics are clear, detailed and self-explanatory. Note he rifled his own barrel!

But yeah, note the cutaway drawings towards the bottom. It's a convoluted way of making a rotating hammer work what's clearly a poppet style valve little different from what we know of as a PGP or 'Cocker valve, but it works.

And as I said over on the Guild, if somebody wanted to fire an original, I bet it wouldn't take much to make an adapter to take a modern CO2 or HPA tank.

Doc.

[Drunkscriblerian]

What I think is really cool about the design; despite being an engineer with an idea that was a wildly radical departure from the norm, Girardoni didn't try to completely reinvent the wheel. While the propellant system is a huge departure from what was in use at the time, in therms of functionality the gun itself "works" very similar to competing designs...as in, the manual-of-arms to actually shoot it would have been familiar to an 18th century grunt used to operating a standard flintlock.

If it had been possible to manufacture these "rifles" in greater numbers, I'd imagine training time on the new system would have been negligible. Have someone explain how the air system works, give the grunts a few hours at the range to plink away and they would have been able to transition from standard flintlocks fairly easily.

Another huge potential advantage that wasn't seen at the time; thanks to how the seals work I'd imagine these things would have performed better in wet weather thanks to the need to keep the leather in the seals moist to ensure a proper air seal. Contrast that with standard flintlocks, which thanks to damp powder suffered horribly in wet/rainy weather.

I mean, imagine the chaos that would've happened if a small infantry unit equipped with these pneumatic (repeating) rifles attacked an enemy encampment when it was raining. I'm picturing a horrible rout for the defenders in that situation.

[DocsMachine]

One thing Ian touched on but didn't give the weight I think it deserved, was the fact that all the air tanks in that relatively large batch of guns, were interchangeable.

That doesn't surprise us today (you can screw a brand-new HPA tank into a forty-year-old SMG-60) but in the late 1700s, that was actually a pretty radical concept. Machine tools, as you might imagine, were still really primitive back then, and a proper screwcutting lathe (one able to turn threads) still in it's infancy.

For the most part, by the time these air rifles were developed, most of gunmaking was still a lot of handwork. Hand forging a rough blank, hand-sawing and hand-filing it to shape, stoning individual sear fits, hand-fitting the stock to the barrel, etc.

Girardoni- and his undoubtedly large group of employees, apprentices and assistants- were able to have hundreds of handmade air tanks randomly interchangeable with hundreds of handmade guns. That'd be kind of a trick today, if making them on manual lathes and machines, let alone 250 years ago, when your machines were powered by a waterwheel and lit by an oil lamp.

Doc.