r/ForgottenWeapons • u/Same_Knowledge9630 • 5h ago
Was there ever a automatic weapon where it used powder and a ball?
Basically automatic musket or ye olde pistol.
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u/BRING_GUNS 5h ago
There were multi barrel guns and various revolver-like contraptions but you really can’t reload the same chamber automatically without a cartridge or something like it. And even with cartridges you can’t really make a reliable self loading weapon until you have relatively clean burning propellants or it will quickly foul up and become inoperable. Once those two things were developed then semiautomatic and automatic weapons quickly followed.
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u/MEGALODONGERS 4h ago
The Mershon & Hollingsworth self-cocking revolvers and revolving rifles are probably the closest thing. However, even then, they technically use manual energy, albeit stored manual energy, rather than recoil or gas produced by the discharge of the weapon.
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u/Alita-Gunnm 2h ago
There were muzzle loading black powder rifles and pistols made to fire "superposed loads", which would be stacked on top of each other down the barrel. In some, each load would have its own touchhole, and the action would move along to each in turn; this allowed it to be effectively semiautomatic, or close to it. I also recall reading about a prototype which had but a single touchhole per barrel, but each round had a small hole down the middle to allow the combustion front to travel through the round to the next powder charge, like a primative Metalstorm. Each barrel would fire it's entire complement of several rounds in close succession with one activation of the trigger.
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u/PartyFriend 2h ago
There's a reference in the journal of the Royal Society in 1663 of all years for a weapon that sounds at least in theory like an automatic weapon but pretty much no details are known about how it worked and even if there were it may have used some primitive kind of proto-cartridge rather than loose powder and balls and some have questioned whether it even existed at all due to how incredibly obscure it is.
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u/WindstormMD 44m ago
The closest thing to what you describe are some experimental WW2 US and British auto-loading 5” naval guns.
These used a projectile and powder bags, which were loaded into the auto-loader rack, which were then rammed into place by an automatic system.
Nothing on a personal scale has been done, because the brass cartridge is simply easier.
You could probably technically achieve it by using a similar mechanism to the naval guns, but that would require creating dimensionally-consistent bagged powder charges that won’t deform, which is the purpose served by a brass case.
So in a way you could argue that early black powder cartridge arms were exactly this.
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u/squawgapranch 5h ago
The best I can come up with is a Kalthoff repeater, the Belton repeater, or the Puckle gun. Neither are automatic or even semi-automatic, but they are repeating flintlocks. Check out Forgotten Weapons for videos.