Looks like a gatling, works like a gatling but not a gatling gun. This is what we call the start of the idea for a gatling gun. Puckle comes from the name of the inventor, James Puckle. This is what they use in the 18th century as a machine gun. It has the capability to fire seven rounds per minute. May sound like a small number but during the 18th century, it was certainly something an army should be avoiding. Though it sounds like a very crucial weapon to be used in open combat, the puckle gun was never used by the British army. Said that it uses too much cylinders. The uniqueness of this machine is mostly because of its cylinder.The gun has the concept of interchangable cylinders. Cylinders that holds normal bullets, and also square bullets. Square bullets were claimed to be used to shoot muslim Turks. Square bullets was believed to cause more pain than normal bullets. It was used to give out the message about "the benefits of christian civilization"
The whole square bullet business was likely simply marketing spin aimed at selling the weapon to Eastern Europeans who just then ( in hindsight) had turned the tide centuries of massive invasions from the Ottoman Empire. They had almost taken Vienna just a couple of decades before. It was war to the knife so anyone marketing weapons in the area played up its crueler aspects, while in Western Europe, were war was more ritualized and law governed, they spun the weapon the other way, as being so effective it deterred violence.
ReplyDelete"Square bullets" really didn't exist. No molds for such bullets exist for the Pucket gun. Instead, soldiers were commonly issued rectangular lengths of lead which they would cut up, melt and poor into round molds. But, if they ran out of round balls in a hot battles, they would just cut off a squarish chunk of lead and use that for a bullet. It only had an effective range of 20-30 yrds/meters but because it tumbled, it had devestating effect on tissue with the tradeoff of backfires, barrel wear and even bursting.
The basic idea of the weapon dates back to the Renaissance or early. Like those designs. the Pucket gun failed because of the inability to seal the loaded but inactive cylinders from being ignited by the flash of the cylinder being fired.
The gun provided few benefits for its trade offs for its weight, high cost, high maintainence, and general unreliability. The royal navy experimented with it but found that lighter and smaller muzzle loading cannons loaded with grapeshot to be more reliable and effective over all.
Just because an old weapon superficially resembles a successful modern weapon doesn't mean it was functional or practical in its own time.