[Editor's note: The Grantville Firearms Roundtable is a group of experts on firearms whom I asked to develop a series of articles for the Grantville Gazette on the issue of firearms as it bears on the series. The members are Leonard Hollar, Bob Hollingsworth, John Rigby, Tom Van Natta, and John Zeek. Rick Boatright edited the article.]
In 1633 Eric Flint and David Weber give us our first glimpse at the type of firearm Grantville introduced to arm its allies. Many fans of the series were surprised that more advanced weaponry was not produced. To better understand why a muzzle loading flintlock rifle was chosen, rather than the pet design of every fan, requires a look at many problems faced by the Grantvillers and their understanding of those problems. What weapons would they face on a 1633 battlefield? What materials were available? What thought might have gone into developing the features that are to be found on the weapon now called the SRG?
To understand the reasoning behind the adoption of a flintlock rifle when other designs are available, requires starting with a brief discussion of the weaponry arrayed against Grantville when the town was dropped into the middle of the Thirty Years' War.
Most of the European army units had more men armed with pikes, long wooden poles with metal blades on the end, than men armed with firearms. These units were pike heavy. The ratio of pikes to muskets was in flux and some units might have had as few as one pike per musket, but others might have had as many as four pikes to one musket.
The range of the pikes was the length of the pikes. The pikes served to keep mounted troops from riding down troops armed with muskets and to keep skirmishers armed with blades out of the musket ranks. The pikes tended to be organized into large square or rectangular formations and smaller squares of musket-armed men formed to either side. When threatened by a cavalry or dismounted charge, the musketeers retreated within the pike squares.
This is necessary because the musket of this time has a very low rate of fire and a very short effective range.
The matchlock musket is the most common firearm on the battlefield facing the Americans in 1632. A "lock" in firearms terminology was the system that ignited the gunpowder. Locks may actually have been associated with locksmiths. A gun lock had as a major component a flat metal plate with holes bored in it for the passage of small metal parts and bore some vague resemblance to door locks of the time. Locks might be described as the trigger mechanism in modern terms. Other types of ignition systems existed, but the matchlock is far and away the most common. A matchlock system used a piece of smoldering cloth cord to ignite the priming charge of a musket. The cord was soaked in a solution of saltpeter and allowed to dry. This cord then burned when lit, with little danger of going out. In small arms, this burning cord was called "slow match." A matchlock musket without slow match or some other source of flame was merely a clumsy club.
The matchlock action held the burning cord on an arm that was lowered into a small cup on the side of the barrel near the closed end called the priming pan of the musket. A hole from the priming pan led inside the barrel to the main propelling charge. This priming pan was filled partially with a fine grain of gunpowder and when the match was applied, a small explosion occurred. Some of the hot gases from the explosion of the "primer" flashed through the hole in the barrel and set off the main charge, which then launched the bullet on its way.
The bullet was usually a round lead ball. In 1632, muskets in the hands of infantry could range from .52 caliber (.52 inches) to over .80 caliber or 13 to 22mm in diameter. The muskets were smooth-bore and the balls were undersize so as to drop easily down the barrel. The diameter of the barrel or size of the round lead ball were often expressed as bore in the 1600s. This was the number of round lead balls that fit the gun that are necessary to make one pound. Roughly speaking a 28-bore was .58 caliber, a 20-bore was a .62 caliber, a 16-bore was a .68 caliber, and a 12-bore was about .72 caliber. Those measurements tended not to be exact.
Most of the military muskets of 1632 weighed between twelve and sixteen pounds. There was some move to standardization, but guns of different lock type, length, weight, and caliber could be found in the same formation of most armies.
The musketeer wore premeasured charges of gunpowder in twelve or thirteen wooden bottles, often called cartouches, on a bandoleer worn over one shoulder and across to the other hip. The cartouches hung on cords and swung about as he moved, reportedly clacking together and making a racket. He also carried a powder horn to prime his musket with, and a powder measure he could make more loads of powder with or reload his cartouche with, in the unlikely event that the battle progressed beyond thirteen shots. Although muskets were lighter in 1632 than they were only a few decades earlier, he might very well have carried a stick with something like an oar lock on the end to steady his weapon while he pointed it. This steady was often metal-clad near the ends and might feature a stub blade on the end resting on the ground to act as a short jabbing spear in case the pike men failed at their mission. He might also carry a rapier, or short sword, or large dagger, or some combination of such cutting and stabbing weapons. He also needed a ramrod that was most likely carried on the musket by 1632, but might be carried separately.
To load his musket, he removed the burning match from the holder and placed it someplace handy, like his hatband. Next he placed the butt of the weapon on the ground and held it by its muzzle end in one hand. He then pulled one of the cartouches from his bandoleer and poured this powder down the barrel of his musket. Next he reached into a pouch and pulled out a lead bullet, which he dropped down the barrel on top of the powder. He used a ramrod to force the ball down on the powder to compress the powder and to ensure that there was no air space between the powder and bullet. When in a big hurry, he might have simply dropped the bullet down the barrel and pounded the butt of the musket on the ground and hoped the ball seated itself via inertia. He risked damaging his musket and himself by doing so, for an air space between powder and bullet could be trouble, but it might have seemed less of a threat than the approaching enemy. No patch or wadding was generally used. Now the gun was raised and set upon the steady. The powder horn was used to prime the pan of the musket and a small cover was shut over the pan. The burning slow match was recovered, the ash flicked from the end, the coal blown on to be sure it was good and hot and it was placed back in the jaws of the match holder. When ready to fire, the pan cover was opened and the match lowered into the pan.
Gustavus Adolphus had recently improved this system when Grantville arrived in the seventeenth century. Many of his musketeers on his campaign in Germany had adopted paper-wrapped cartridges. Both the Dutch and the Poles claim to have originated this system, but it was not yet common in other armies. The powder, and in some cases the ball, are wrapped in a sheet of paper rolled into a tube. The soldier could carry twenty or even thirty of those paper cartridges in a pouch rather than the cumbersome and noisy wooden cartouches on a bandoleer. To use the paper cartridges, the end without the bullet was bitten open and the powder poured down the barrel. The bullet was then taken from the pouch or, if it was packaged in the paper cartridge, was squeezed from the cartridge and dropped down the barrel by itself or with the paper, and was then forced down into contact with the powder by the ramrod. Some of Gustavus' men figured out that one could prime the pan by pouring a bit of the powder from the paper cartridge into it and closing the cover before loading the main charge and bullet, slightly increasing their rate of fire.
All those activities involved in loading took a good bit of time. Around one minute between shots would have been considered fast shooting. Each musket produced a huge cloud of smoke when it fired. Musketeers were arrayed in ranks and each rank fired all together on order in a volley. This allowed the entire rank to see what they were shooting at. Most military muskets had only a simple front sight, much like is common on a modern shotgun. The musket was merely pointed at its intended victim rather than carefully aimed.
There are variations in the locks. Many were a simple S-shaped lever that, depending on the design, one either pulled or pushed away to lower that burning cord into the priming pan. Some were spring-loaded with a mechanical release, a trigger, to allow the spring-driven match holder to snap into the priming pan. The triggers might have been designed to be pulled by a finger or pushed by a thumb and could have been on the bottom, side or top of the stock depending on who made it, where it was made and when.
Armies of the day considered any firing of the common musket from beyond seventy-five meters to be pretty much a waste of powder and shot.
Some of the skirmishers to be faced would have had specially selected smoothbore guns of lighter construction that used a greased cloth or leather patch to make the bullets a tighter fit in the barrels. These generally were of relatively small bore, around .50 caliber or 12.6mm. That tight fit generally gave them a higher velocity and greater accuracy than could be had with the common musket. It might well also have had sights and a more advanced form of lock, up to the snaphaunce, an early form of snapping flintlock, or a wheel lock, a system much like the spark wheel on a modern cigarette lighter. The improved locks, sights, and the patched bullets made it possible for the skirmisher so armed to reach out as far as one hundred meters or even occasionally to 150 meters with some expectation of hitting an individual standing man. These weapons were slower to reload when used in that accurate manner, but were faster than a matchlock when a bare ball was dropped down the barrel and musket accuracy and range were expected.
A few people on the battlefield were armed with rifles. A rifle had grooves in its barrel called rifling. The rifling imparts a spin on the bullet when fired and made rifles much more accurate weapons. Rifles of 1632 might have had matchlocks, but were more likely to have a mechanical lock such as the snaphaunce or wheel lock. Some used an oversize ball that was hammered into the barrel and down on top of the powder and might take several minutes to load. Other rifles used a greased patch of cloth or leather and were not as slow to reload, but were still far slower than smoothbore muskets. Even those often required a mallet or an iron ramrod to seat the bullet after a few shots because of the fouling left by black powder when a shot is fired. Reload times on 1632 rifles were frequently three minutes or more. The rifles were also more expensive than a matchlock musket. There were rifles and riflemen capable of reliably hitting a man standing at three hundred meters, though they were rare on the ground.
Cavalry in 1632 was armed mostly with handguns or light carbines of smaller caliber in addition to a sword. Some were still using matchlocks, but mechanical locks like the wheel lock and snapping locks like the snaphaunce were becoming common. There were even attempts at making multishot guns, such as double (or more) barreled pistols and even primitive revolvers, though neither was common at this point.
For Grantville, the threatening infantry look like two kinds of soldiers that work together, one with basically medieval blades and a long pike and the other with a sixteen-pound matchlock musket. Besides his main weapon, the musketeer carried a bandoleer of thirteen loads of powder, a bag of lead balls, a powder horn and powder measure, a sword and dagger, a steady and a ramrod, plus his personal gear. They had to get within seventy-five meters to be a real threat.
The opposing infantry had some support. There was cavalry with advanced for the time handguns and horses. On the 1632 battlefield before Grantville's arrival, cavalry could close with an enemy over open ground in less time than a musket could be reloaded. There were also some little cannon, called battalion or regimental guns as a class, which fired either a solid ball or a multiple projectile load like buckshot with effective accuracy to two hundred meters. Those were typically set up before a battle in front of a formation to harass and reduce the enemy before the advance of the infantry. The guns were small and light enough that their two- to four-man crews could move them ahead of the advancing infantry until just out of range of an enemy's musket fire.
Given these factors, what Grantville needed in 1633 was a basic weapon that could be made with existing resources, cheaply enough to field in numbers, that could outrange the little cannon, reload fast enough to get multiple shots at the calvary and both outrange and have a higher rate of fire than musket armed infantry.
When Grantville made its appearance, there were many examples of late twentieth-century firearms available. Even a belt-fed machine gun was put in use by the Grantvillers early on. In a small, rural, fairly poor American town like Grantville, it would have been likely in 2000 to find representative pieces of nearly every type of firearm action available to civilians without special licensing that had been in large-scale production in the past hundred years. There would be scores of books available that show drawings of the internal parts of those and other gun designs, even machine guns and artillery. Unfortunately, there was no source of all the modern materials needed to manufacture and operate such advanced designs. There was a limit on what projects could be undertaken by the machine shops of Grantville.
In 1633, no one in Grantville could have known whether sufficient zinc necessary for combining with copper to make large numbers of cartridge cases would be available even for decades. No one knew when the chemical industry might produce reliable and safe percussion primers for firearms. No one knew how soon they would be able to make improved steels for reliable coil springs. No one knew when they would ever develop smokeless powder. No one knew how long it would take to increase the abilities of Grantville's machine shops and how they would replace worn out tools. What the leaders of Grantville knew with a certainty was that they needed small arms that would be better than an enemy's on the 1633 battlefield and that they were needed immediately and in considerable numbers.
What was needed was a weapon that would give the Allied soldier the advantages sought on the battlefield and that could be manufactured mainly by existing 1633 gun manufacturers from existing supplies and materials.
Enter the SRG . . .
In 1632, the French were secretly producing small numbers of a new and better gun lock. By the end of the century it would be the most common lock in use by infantry. It was a vast improvement over any lock then in service in terms of reliability of spark, being weatherproof, and cost per unit all taken together. It was the modern flintlock or French flintlock still in general use up until just before the American Civil War. When Grantville relocated to the seventeenth century, the modern flintlock was still in use for sporting black-powder firearms and Grantvillers had several as models on hunting rifles, reenactors' guns, or wall decorations. The flintlock required no advance in chemistry over what was already available. It did require quality flints, which were already being cut for fire-starting and for two other more primitive types of striking lock, the Dutch snaphaunce locks and the Spanish miquelet locks.
Rather than a burning cord, the modern flintlock depended upon spring power from a flat leaf spring to drive a piece of sharpened flint at a piece of hardened steel. This produced a shower of sparks that fell into the priming pan of a firearm. The piece of hardened steel was shaped so that its lower edge covered the priming pan full of powder until the steel was struck to produce sparks. This system freed the shooter of the burning match, gave him a much more weatherproof system and greatly reduced the amount of time between the decision to shoot and the bullet leaving the barrel. This latter meant that switching to flintlocks from matchlocks alone would make a more accurate musket.
Both for reasons of rapid loading and for their ease of use, a breech-loading gun was desired. The two systems that would work with a flintlock that were best known to the Grantvillers were the Fergusson and the Hall rifles.
The Fergusson was a rare gun used by a small unit of Germans in the British Army during the American Revolution. There was very little chance that one existed in Grantville to act as a model for new production. It used a screw that was perpendicular to the line of the barrel to act as a breech. A half turn of the trigger guard exposed the chamber for loading. Despite wonderful things written about it by some, it was a failure as a design as no other nation produced it and the few hundred that were produced were withdrawn from service. Even the private manufacturer soon dropped the design and adopted a tipping breech much like the later Hall rifle.
The Hall rifle served the U.S. Army for a few decades before the American Civil War. The Hall started life as a flintlock and was easily converted to a chemical percussion primer when they became available. They allowed a soldier to load his weapon while lying down behind cover or more easily while on horseback. They had problems such as shooting loose and then spitting hot gases out around the breech. They looked very attractive as a potential rifle for Grantville. They also took far more machine time to make than a muzzle-loading rifle. It appeared that for the machine time, two or more muzzle-loading rifles could be produced for every breechloader. Was the Hall rifle worth giving up two muzzle-loading rifles for? Further, it began to look like a muzzle-loading rifle could be produced with minor tweaking of 1633 technology. The weapons makers of Suhl were already making thousands of muzzle-loading muskets annually. They would be able to make a muzzle-loading design to Grantville specifications, but for the immediate future lacked the machine tools and gauges to make something like the Hall rifle.
It was decided, then, that a muzzle-loading flintlock would be the basic design and a rifled barrel would be desirable. Many reams have been written about the American long rifle. That rifle grew from the very rifles the Grantvillers would face in 1633. The American versions were longer and lighter and usually of smaller caliber, but still depended on a patched lead ball for accuracy. They were as slow as the muskets of 1633 as well. What was needed was a type of bullet that could be loaded fast and that still gave the needed accuracy.
Such a bullet and rifles for it were common during the American Civil War. Again, Grantville had examples of both bullets and rifles of this type. Minié bullets have conical-shaped noses and a conical-shaped hollow in the base. (NB: Minié bullets are named after their inventor; they are not, as many assume, based on the name, small.)
Rifles give the bullet a ballistic spin, much like a well-thrown American football, resulting in bullets that tend to go straight and in a predictable trajectory. The 1633 rifle was accurate, but slow to reload. What the minié bullet does is make a rifle as fast to reload as a musket, or in the case of matchlocks loaded from wooden cartouche, much faster. The minié bullet was smaller in diameter than the size of the gun barrel's bore, just like the musket ball. It is loaded bare or with part of a paper cartridge, just like Gustavus' men are already using, into the bore of the rifle and rammed home. Firing the rifle expands the base of the bullet, thanks to the hollow, and drives the back half of the bullet into the rifling, which spins the bullet. When loaded as part of a paper cartridge, and when part of the powder of that cartridge is used to prime the pan, the minié ball can be loaded and fired for several minutes at a rate of three rounds per minute by trained soldiers standing in formation. Before the American Civil War, it was found that a .58 caliber minié ball weighing about one and one quarter ounce could be fired from a rifle by a kneeling man at the belt of a standing man and the bullet would strike him if he was anywhere between the muzzle and almost 250 meters. This would give any Grantville ally a rifle with three times the range of a 1633 musketeer and 25 percent greater range than enemy battalion guns (the little cannon), with only one sight setting.
The Enfield Pattern 1853 three-band "musket" was the second most common rifle of the American Civil War and most common with Southern forces. Reproductions of that rifle were available from Grantville's small group of reenactors as guides for the production of a minié rifle. The Enfield P53 was also among the longest of rifles of its type and can mount a long socket, or ring, bayonet, giving it some reach as a sort of pike if need be. The rifle could be loaded and fired with the bayonet in place. While the Pattern 53 used a percussion lock dependent on chemical production, it was easily adapted to flintlock action by Grantville's Ollie Reardon and initially produced by the Struve gun works of Suhl where it was called the Struve-Reardon Gewehr, or SRG in common use. (Gewehr is the German term for "rifle.")
Thus the SRG was basically a flintlock equipped Enfield Model of 1853. Like the P53, there are shortened models available for use by cavalry and support troops or marines. These are the basic rifle with shortened barrels, stocks, and ramrods.
Some basic characteristics of the SRG are as follows:
Overall length 55.25 inches
Weight 10.5 pounds
Ignition system Flintlock in 1633
Rifling twist One turn in 72 inches
Sights Front: fixed post on bayonet lug
Rear: stepped tangent and ladder to 800 yards
Ammunition Paper cartridge with lubricated .577 caliber 510 grain minié bullet and 60 grains of black powder
Overall length 40.25 inches
Weight 7.25 pounds
Ignition system Flintlock in 1633
Rifling twist One turn in 48 inches
Sights Front: fixed post
Rear: stepped tangent and ladder to 600 yards
(Note, some models were made with simple fixed rear sight for 200 yards and flip-up sight for 400 yards as an economy move)
Ammunition Paper cartridge with lubricated .577 caliber 510 grain minié bullet and 60 grains of black powder.
Special notes Some models featured a carbine ring and bar on the left side for use with the carbine strap and snap while mounted.
Another consideration for adopting the SRG was that as percussion caps become available, the SRG could be easily converted to use the new caps. The production lines might be altered easily to produce new percussion lock guns and existing guns could be returned to depot to be converted. At a later date, as fixed and self-primed cartridges are produced, the SRG, both flintlock and percussion models, could be converted to a single shot breechloader such as the British Snyder or American Trapdoor series rifles, either as a frontline rifle or as an economy to provide more modern rifles to reserves such as militia.
The design for the SRG was chosen because it was the best that could be produced in large number within the first couple of years that also provided some hope of updating at small expense in the future.
Could a more advanced design have been adopted? Absolutely. But at what cost and at what levels of production?
The SRG was a rifle that was doable, could outrange the known potential enemy small arms, as well as the small battalion guns used in the open field, and load fast enough to get repeat volleys at advancing cavalry. It takes a long ring bayonet, a weapon not seen until the SRG's introduction, to allow SRG-armed soldiers to operate without supporting pike men. The SRG's efficiency as an arm allowed Grantville's allies to field smaller, easier to supply, more mobile and yet harder hitting armies than its potential enemies.
The SRG was not a modern assault rifle or machine gun or even a World War I–era bolt action, but it would serve well until better could be built.