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There were a couple of other SMGs that used the Suomi drum. They found out the hard way that military technology had moved on in the decade and a half since they’d first fielded it. Natural enough the M1857 12-pounder “Napoleon” gun-howitzer was based on a French design, as shown by its name. The French went to war in 1870 with the same sort of artillery the Union and Confederacy had used on each other. But it was also the last war fought with muzzle-loading rifles and smoothbore muskets, and the next-to-last fought with smoothbore muzzle-loading artillery on either side. The American Civil War may have been the first war fought with breechloading rifles, at least in part. Yet by 1870, everything they had was obsolete. Army’s artillery was declared the best and most destructive force on any battlefield on Earth. It’s also rather ironic that in 1865, the U.S. The breechblock was essentially an enlarged version of that on the Austrian Werndl-Holub single-shot rifle of 1867 Īnd the recoil system was substantially based on braking systems for locomotives, and balancing systems for cranes, developed by the German Siemens company. Ironically, the “secrets” of the “French 75”, its rapid-acting Nordenfelt rotating breechblock for metallic cartridge and its hydraulic recoil system, were both largely Germanic in origin. It was the drubbing the French Army, especially the artillery branch, took in that one that resulted in the French Model 1897 75mm field gun the French were determined not to come out on the short end of a paradigm shift in artillery technology a second time.
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The Prussians sort of surprised everybody in 1870-71 when their metallic cartridge breechloading field guns, even without actual recoil-absorption systems, proved superior to anything the French had in the Franco-Prussian War. Krupp (and later Rheinmetall) opted for the block breech and metallic cartridge because it gave just as good or better a breech seal than the de Bange type, but had the additional attraction of allowing a higher rate of fire when using fixed or semi-fixed ammunition. Although the perfected version relies on ductile metals rather than the material de Bange started with suet. The main French contribution was de Bange’s “elastic” breech seal, the one we’re familiar with on things like 16″/50 naval guns using bagged charges from WW2. The rotating breechblock/bagged charge breech was largely a French invention, although the original “pipe cap” style rotating breech block was the work of Joseph Whitworth in Britain, used with a metallic cartridge.
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Going back to the late 1860s, with the advent of the metallic cartridge, Krupp opted for the sliding block breech/rimmed metallic cartridge combination on grounds of simplicity of manufacture, plus durability and reliability in service.
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