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[somemildmanneredidiot]

I'm trying to imagine what the charger does as you've described it and I'm just blanking. The best I've got is that it allows the lever to interact with the revolving section correctly maybe.

I'm seeing a few things here and there that could use a little touching up in some designs. Depending on how resources interacts with our current set up, we might want to spend a design phase revising and building up infrastructure. I'm just going to add a stream of consciousness about possible revisions under a spoiler.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A more accurate trench gun firing jacketed 12.5mm rounds would be quite something to see. It looks like it was designed to use the 10mm "Special" round in an attempt to make its drum belt firing as simple as possible, which ended up failing a bit. We could look into making the drum magazine work with jacketed rounds. Apparently a double drum magazine is basically a stick magazine that has two drums feeding into it and looks like it would fowl less often than a singular drum design. I feel like this would require a few more engineers than a simple revision would need though.

Specifically mentioning jacketing 12.5mm rounds and making them cheaper to produce as those seem to be the only two issues with the munition.

We might want to make a few ammunition factories and hand them off to the government to make that job for them a bit easier.

I remember someone sharing a link to some sort of rocket round which is basically what our "Special" round is. Can't find it though.

I've been looking at the Light Revolving Cannon and thinking about adding an engine to the crank section, but I'm fairly certain that our HMG effectively obsoletes it for further production purposes as it is both cheaper and not hand cranked.

Torpedoes work for now and I recognize that we have so many other things to work on, but I feel like we can do better with them.

The HMG's action could use a bit of work, whatever that actually means?

I remember that AP HE munitions for the 75mmR shells was a thing that was wanted.

We can make the helmet a bit less "spongy" or add a strap or something.

The turret speed on the Type B. Throwing some of our new engines at it might work. There's also progressing the radio to work on ship ranges as well. We still use the 793 Revolving Cannon for the Swordfish and I suddenly realize that a 20mm or 40mm automatic cannon is something that would replace that quite nicely. Granted, it's a design rather than a refinement, but stream of consciousness.

Depending on how our new optics work, we might be able to use them to improve Ratio accuracy even further than before. Heck, miniaturizing it could help our spies out quite nicely.

Do we have bayonets? We have mountings for bayonets but we haven't explicitly designed them.

[Aseaheru]

 In most ways it works like the Johnson rifle, probably with the lever at some point to allow the cylinder to spin freely as it gets charged.

Spoiler: Johnson rifle (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Comments on comments (click to show/hide)

 Mostly it messed up because A: paperbelts, B: no place to get rid of the excess belt(due to the lack of extraction port and the gun being a open bolt design), and C: jsut plain bad rolls.
 As a note, the mags where all side loading. The sitck mag jsut plugged into where the belt initially went and some of the mechanism was removed.
 Rocket ball, though yours is a fair deal longer, and a but narrower.
 The type A ship had a motorized crank for atleast its main turret, I dont think the secondary turrets had them though.
 The HMG action has a few... quirks to it. Mostly related to fine particulate matter and when it has gotten rather warm.
 Helmet has a strap, still spongey
 Bayonets are a thing, they are un-standardized beyond their mounting. Every unit, and sometimes every squad, has their own type that they use.

On the resources front I was thinking along the lines of Ebbor's weapon design game from atleast three years ago. Slightly more genericized in a few aspects.

[somemildmanneredidiot]

So as I understand it, the Revolving Rifle has more of a very small drum magazine that fits into the rifle (as google images of a rotary magazine, which the Johnson uses, suggest) rather than being basically a large revolver with a stock and a very long barrel as I've been imagining.

Spoiler: Comments^3 (click to show/hide)

The sudden clarity that happened as I read what you wrote. So it looks like the trench gun could use some focused work into it.

Many thanks for the link.

Per the design it is handcranked but I am more than happy for our first 4 ships to have motorized main cannons.

I'm trying not to take that as our HMGs are going to jam if they get too dusty or it rains or something along those lines and that if it gets too hot it will explode, and I'm going to write that off as me needing to sleep and bump revising the HMG up a few levels of priority.

Good to know about the helmet, thank you.

On one hand, standardized bayonets would be useful. On the other hand, would it have a significant impact? On the third hand, we could throw some newbies at it and they have a chance to roll a training upgrade off of it. A low chance but a chance nonetheless.

After 30 pages I have a vague idea of how Ebbor's set up worked. If you could provide specific details on how resources are used when you have the system in place, that would be fantastic.

We might want to consider specifically designing cargo ships to help with imports and exports. Radar, sonar, and airships are going to be quite useful in preventing the Monarchy from getting supplies through.

[Funk]

It's basically just a springy bit of metal that goes around the back of the cases to let them be handled as a unit instead of separately. If the Revolving Rifle is currently set up for the cylinder to swing out for reload, it should be dirt-simple to design some clips and go.

It's not, right now it a gate loading revolver with a leaver to work the action.
Some thing like this North & Skinner Revolving Rifle in action.

Or did Aseaheru just say that we have the techs to make both Short-recoil, and rotating bolt mechanisms?

[somemildmanneredidiot]

The link was not able to describe how it was reloaded to my knowledge. My google fu is weak and I cannot figure out what specifc style of loading gate loading is.

I would like to politely ask how our rifle is loaded, in the simplest terms possible in such a manner as one would explain to a child, because I simply do not understand how it works. Diagrams are appreciated.

[Aseaheru]

 The rifle in that link is loaded like any cap-and-ball design.

 Your things, which are lever action with a revolving magazine(distinct from a cylinder), load via loading gate. You do not have short recoil mechanisms, nor rotating bolts.

[somemildmanneredidiot]

Finally found a thing describing how cap-and-ball is loaded.

So as I understand it, the magazine is not detachable from the rifle in any fashion besides disassembling it, and cartridges are reloaded into the magazine one at a time manually.

Is the above correct?

[Amperzand]

With regard to the whole issue of getting rid of the paper belt, my assumption was that it would be torn off and combusted with each cartridge's firing, that's why I went for paper instead of, say, a generic metal link-belt.

[Aseaheru]

 The magazine can be loaded with five-round stripper clips, similar to both the Johnson rifle and the Japanese Pedersen copy, if only in that respect.

 Ah, probally have been worth mentioning that Amperzand. Though, with the way the rolls where, it probably would have jammed up often anyways. That or require almost solid strips of rounds.

[Amperzand]

Oh, sure. I didn't really expect it to work very well, a properly functional SMG in a world that, at that point, still relied on black powder rifles would be utterly horrifying.

[somemildmanneredidiot]

Okay, that's not as bad as I thought. Not the best, but it's not the worst. Definitely doesn't require an immediate redesign. Though with our specialists, we might want to put the idea of refining the Revolving Rifle or making a new rifle on the table.

[milo christiansen]

If we ever design a new rifle we should make something to stand the test of time, in other words a robust, accurate, semi-automatic with detachable magazines.

It's not a huge priority though, so if we do decide to design one it should be done with minimal engineers over several turns...

[Amperzand]

I agree. I mean, one way to do it is put out a military request for civilian designers to make us versions of something we want, and then test their designs and see what we think. A lot of militaries did that rather than try to run their own development programs.

[Aseaheru]

 Most that did that seemed to do both, for the best of both worlds.

 An example being in the Japenese semi-auto rifle trials, where there was a army-led dev group and something like four civilian firms. And, interestingly, two different forms of the Pedersen, one being a almost direct copy and the other being a gas-operated variant of the design. Due to the fact that the guy running the contest was of a lower rank than the guy running the army-led design team, there was officially no winner, and they canceled the next round of testing due to the war ramping up.

 I may have a fact or five wrong. For instance, I remember that the guy who led the army team was a general, but Im not sure as to the rank of the guy in charge of judging. Captain, I think.

-edit-

Colonel.

[Amperzand]

Basically, yes.