This is a community dedicated to discussion around historical arms, mechanically unique arms, and Ian McCollum's Forgotten Weapons content. Posts requesting an identification of a particular gun (or other arm) are welcome.
https://www.youtube.com/@ForgottenWeapons
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/
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This one was made in Nuremberg by Hans Stopler, so I suppose raise a stein to German engineering. Once again it never fails to impress. Revolvers wouldn't become commercially successful & produced in mass quantities until the 1800s.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2016/11/15/worlds-oldest-known-revolver/
Yeah it makes me think of a gatling gun. Something that had a good idea of where things could go, but the execution wasn't quite yet there and if you fired it for too long the barrels would melt, so it didn't have a large impact on warfare.
But it's interesting seeing the early ways people tried to improve the fire rate of guns.
Then Browning came along and made the gatling gun obsolete and improved on the revolver's semi-auto fire, too.
We take it for granted now but the idea of using the recoil or gas pressure from a cartridge to cycle a gun is genius.
Horribly brilliant.
Though to be fair, it wasn't Browning's fault military commanders didn't realize they needed an entire new set of tactics and strategies to do war while machine guns exist. Though WWII wasn't much better than WWI for total deaths since machine guns are always meat grinders, even if your officers aren't trying to feed them with calvary charges. They'd been using machine guns in Africa for a while yet still thought that horses would play an important role on the battlefield rather than moving them all to logistics, and millions paid with their lives for it.
There are a bunch of modern weapons that are pure genius that humanity has suffered because of. Artillery, bomber planes, and nukes are other examples. It's actually kinda ironic: nukes are the only weapon that increased offensive capabilities drastically while actually accomplishing the goal of reducing deaths from people willing to go to war. At least so far; it would only take one bad day to change that entirely.
In a dark irony a couple times that people have invented faster shooting guns they've imagined that we'd field less soldiers in war. Leading to less deaths.
On your nuke comparison I see an interesting parallel to the Giradoni posted today. It enabled Lewis and Clark to cross America without major bloodshed. But an inequality in capacity to destroy isn't all ways something harnessed with virtue.