I once asked a Jesuit priest what was the best short prayer he knew. He said ‘Fuck it.’ as in ‘Fuck it, it’s in Gods hands.’
My knowledge of British weapons of the 19th century is very one-sided. If I did venture into firearms, I think a Lancaster Pistol would be at the top of my list. Here is a nice collection of images and some discussion of this very cool pistol:
http://britishmilitariaforums.yuku.com/topic/9652#.VQyOa1VVhBc
It looks like a steampunk fantasy come to life.
Like a howdah pistol with a bit of serious thought behind it, for the sort of tiger that shot back.
This one’s got a folding Tranter-style secondary trigger for cocking the action.
The writers of “Pollard’s History of Firearms” say that using this device reduced the actual trigger pull by about 10lbs, enabling “near target-pistol accuracy”. They don’t mention that like trigger-guard spurs on, e.g. the Smith & Wesson No.3 Russian…
…it also adds visual interest (in other words, looks cool). The ring on this one serves the same purpose…
Definitely an interesting steampunk weapon. It worked by a “rotating striker” - firing one barrel at a time with successive pulls of the trigger, so showing all four going off at once is wrong.
In theory (and in fiction) it could be loaded so as fire something different each time, escalating
from Mostly Harmless to Megakill, though (realism bites) good luck remembering the proper order of the loads when
your armoured train
is being overhauled by evil Baron von Schtrumpff’s electric Zeppelin…
Major F. Myatt M.C. writes in ”19th Century Firearms,” that it “shot harder” than Army revolvers of the
same calibre because there was no loss of pressure through a cylinder gap. The impressive whoompf here is leaking propellant gas that’s not helping shove the bullet down the barrel…
It also had odd rifling: not spiral grooves (think of the classic Bond movie opening) but an oval twist along an otherwise smooth bore. Unless they knew about that oddity, spent rounds from this weapon would have fictional Ballistics people scratching their heads.
The smoothbore look (the oval and twist are too small to see naked-eye) is probably what caused this Art Collection to incorrectly label their Lancaster as a “repeating shotgun pistol”.
Repeater yes, pistol yes, shotgun no - a correctly-sized shotgun cartridge could probably be used in one of these but AFAIK that was never Mr Lancaster’s intention.
It would probably be effective against the smaller theropods and raptors, but don’t try it on a Tyrannosaur. Here’s why…
me, fishing around in a hat: okay uhhhhhh let’s see, au where odo is…… made of bowtie noodles?
someone else: mmkay here’s how i’m gonna make that sound really sad
If you’re interested in gaming history, sign up for the mailing list for ROMchip, a new online scholarly journal. ROMchip is spearheaded by three historians who absolutely know their stuff, including Raiford Guins, author of Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife; and Laine Nooney, who is currently writing the business history of Sierra On-Line.
It’s exciting to see focused, scholarly, researched attention in this area, especially given how unorganized and flawed popular gaming history often is.
I hope that the journal will focus not just on the big marquee names but
the stories and experiences often left out of informal gaming canons –
the garage developers, the companies that didn’t make it past one or two
games, and the unexamined bulk of games that provide the mortar for gaming history.
So if you want to read up when the journal launches next year, sign up!
A. Aubrey Bodine :: (American, 1906 - 1970) A sailor looking at a clipper ship, 1940′s
That’ll be a windjammer, not a clipper.
Interesting: I thought “windjammer” was just a vague name for “big multi-mast sailing ship” and that a ship type was “sloop”, “schooner”, “barque”,”clipper” etc.
I have Learned A New Thing.
It turns out, according to Wikipedia but also “A History of Ships and Seafaring” (C. Canby, 1963) and “The Lore of Ships” (Svensson, Strand & Leuven, 1997) that clippers had 3 masts and were built for speed, while windjammers (more than three masts) were built for capacity.
But of course it’s never that simple, because a windjammer could also be a schooner (”Thomas W. Lawson”)…
…or a barque (”France II”)…
…or even a full-rigged ship (”Preussen”)…
All of this is (a) not my division and (b) excessively complicated, so I’m going to go do something simple like a novel rewrite, or cataloguing polearms, or herding cats at a crossroads.
But complicated or not, sailing ships are really…
…very pretty.
t00thpasteface
