How much are machine guns

The gunpowder and cannonball sit in the breech , or rear part of the bore , which is the open end of the cannon. To prepare the gun for a shot, you run a fuse a length of flammable material through the hole, so it reaches down to the gunpowder.

To fire the cannon, all you have to do is light the fuse. The flame travels along the fuse and finally reaches the gunpowder. Gunpowder burns rapidly when it ignites, producing a lot of hot gas in the process.

This propels the cannonball out of the gun at high speed. The first handheld guns were essentially miniature cannons; you loaded some gunpowder and a steel ball, then lit a fuse. Eventually, this technology gave way to trigger-activated weapons , such as the flintlock and percussion cap guns. Flintlock guns ignited gunpowder by producing a tiny spark, while percussion caps used mercuric fulminate, an explosive compound you could ignite with a sharp blow.

To load a percussion cap gun, you pour gunpowder into the breech, stuff the projectile in on top of it, and place a mercuric fulminate cap on top of a small nipple. To fire the gun, you cock the hammer all the way back and pull the gun's trigger. The trigger releases the hammer, which swings forward onto the explosive cap. The cap ignites, shooting a small flame down a tube to the gunpowder. The gunpowder then explodes, launching the projectile out of the barrel.

Take a look at How Flintlock Guns Work for more information on these weapons. The next major innovation in the history of firearms was the bullet cartridge. Simply put, cartridges are a combination of a projectile the bullet , a propellant gunpowder, for example and a primer the explosive cap , all contained in one metal package.

Cartridges form the basis for most modern firearms. The backward motion of the gun's bolt also activates its ejection system, which removes the spent shell from the extractor and drives it out of an ejection port. We'll discuss this in more detail later. But first, let's take a look at how all of this works -- in a revolver.

In the last section, we saw that a cartridge consists of a primer, a propellant and a projectile, all in one metal package. This simple device is the foundation of most modern firearms.

To see how this works, let's look at a standard double-action revolver. This gun has a revolving cylinder, with six breeches for six cartridges. When you pull the trigger on a revolver, several things happen:. When the propellant explodes, the cartridge case expands.

The case temporarily seals the breech, so all the expanding gas pushes forward rather than backward. Obviously, this sort of gun is easier to use than a flintlock or a percussion cap weapon. You can load six shots at a time and you only have to pull the trigger to fire. But you're still fairly limited: You have to pull the trigger for every shot, and you need to reload after six shots although some modern revolvers can hold 10 rounds of ammunition.

You also have to eject the empty shells from the cylinders manually. In the s, gun manufacturers designed a number of mechanisms to address the problems associated with limited firing ability. A lot of these early machine guns combined several barrels and firing hammers into a single unit. Among the most popular designs was the Gatling gun , named after its inventor Richard Jordan Gatling. This weapon -- the first machine gun to gain widespread popularity -- consists of six to 10 gun barrels positioned in a cylinder.

Each barrel has its own breech and firing pin system. To operate the gun, you turn a crank, which revolves the barrels inside the cylinder. Each barrel passes under an ammunition hopper , or carousel magazine , as it reaches the top of the cylinder. A new cartridge falls into the breech and the barrel is loaded.

Each firing pin has a small cam head that catches hold of a slanted groove in the gun's body. As each barrel revolves around the cylinder, the groove pulls the pin backward, pushing in on a tight spring. Just after a new cartridge is loaded into the breech, the firing-pin cam slides out of the groove and the spring propels it forward. The pin hits the cartridge, firing the bullet down the barrel. When each barrel revolves around to the bottom of the cylinder, the spent cartridge shell falls out of an ejection port.

The Gatling gun played an important role in several 19th century battles, but it wasn't until the early 20th century that the machine gun really established itself as a weapon to be reckoned with. The Gatling gun is often considered a machine gun because it shoots a large number of bullets in a short amount of time.

But unlike modern machine guns, it isn't fully automatic: You have to keep cranking if you want to keep shooting. The first fully automatic machine gun is actually credited to an American named Hiram Maxim. Maxim's remarkable gun could shoot more than rounds per minute, giving it the firepower of about rifles. The basic idea behind Maxim's gun, as well as the hundreds of machine gun designs that followed, was to use the power of the cartridge explosion to reload and re-cock the gun after each shot.

There are three basic mechanisms for harnessing this power:. Click and hold the trigger to see how a recoil-action gun fires. For simplicity's sake, this animation doesn't show the cartridge loading, extraction and ejection mechanisms. The first automatic machine guns had recoil-based systems. When you propel a bullet down the barrel, the forward force of the bullet has an opposite force that pushes the gun backward. In a gun built like a revolver , this recoil force just pushes the gun back at the shooter.

But in a recoil-based machine gun, moving mechanisms inside the gun absorb some of this recoil force. Here's the process: To prepare this gun to fire, you pull the breech bolt 1 back, so it pushes in the rear spring 2. The trigger sear 3 catches onto the bolt and holds it in place. The feed system runs an ammunition belt through the gun, loading a cartridge into the breech more on this later.

When you pull the trigger, it releases the bolt, and the spring drives the bolt forward. The bolt pushes the cartridge from the breech into the chamber.

The impact of the bolt firing pin on the cartridge ignites the primer, which explodes the propellant, which drives the bullet down the barrel. The barrel and the bolt have a locking mechanism that fastens them together on impact. In this gun, both the bolt and the barrel can move freely in the gun housing. The force of the moving bullet applies an opposite force on the barrel, pushing it and the bolt backward.

A mere two guns were allocated to each infantry battalion in When established in fixed strong-points sited specifically to cover potential enemy attack routes, the machine gun proved a fearsome defensive weapon. Enemy infantry assaults upon such positions invariably proved highly costly. The French in particular found to their cost that the technology of defensive warfare was more advanced than that of offensive warfare.

The French pre-war military blueprint, Plan XVII , was founded upon a fundamental assumption of an 'offensive spirit', one which envisaged a rapid war of movement. Early commanders, such as Charles Lanrezac , were dismissed for apparent failures in their implementation of the offensive spirit. Time was to vindicate Lanrezac's doubts. The British similarly found to their repeated cost the futility of massed infantry attacks against well-entrenched defensive positions protected by machine gun cover.

The first day of the Somme Offensive amply illustrated this, although the lesson appeared to be lost to the British high command. On the opening day of the offensive the British suffered a record number of single day casualties, 60,, the great majority lost under withering machine gun fire. Understandably most historical accounts of the First World War have tended to emphasise the defensive strengths of the machine gun.

Throughout the war efforts were made to produce an infantry assault version, such as the Lewis Light Machine Gun , although these efforts were generally unsatisfactory. Although lighter at around 12kg they were still considered too heavy and bulky for rapidly advancing infantry.

Attempts to transport light machine guns by wheeled carriages or pack animals were ultimately unsuccessful: the infantry invariably outpaced such methods. By however one-man portable machine guns including the formidable Bergmann MP18 submachine gun were put to some use each weighing kg , although maintaining sufficient ammunition supplies remained a difficulty.

Although often not truly portable light machine guns were more readily transported on roads or flat ground by armoured cars. Contact us today to make your reservation for our full auto package. Our lovely Gun Girls are waiting to hear from you! The Full Auto Experience. Pick ANY 6 Guns. M SAW. What's Included?

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