ANSF, Coalition forces recover weapons caches in Nangarhar

Heh. Intent matters. The picture below looks a little bit like what Castle Argghhh! did when the collection was in transit from the Auld Castle to the New Castle.

And, I'm sure, there are those in this country who would see little difference between the two, and would like to see the Castle Armory treated in a similar fashion. Of course, a major difference between the two assemblages are that the ones at the Castle are, 1. Inert, and 2., generally in better shape.

Heh. That RPG-2 and associated B4 rocket look pretty tatty. The Armorer would be reluctant to pull the trigger on that one. The same is true for the RPG-7 rounds - their booster cartridges look... dangerous. And if the mortar rounds have been stored without their fuze well covers... well, it's no wonder that sometimes the bad guy's mortars blow up when they fire them.

Still, much of that stuff can be salvaged for the explosives or fashioned into IED's.

The stuff at the Castle will only hurt you if you drop it on your foot.

080214-A-3325A-001 - Afghan National Security Forces, assisted by Coalition forces, recovered a suspected insurgent weapons cache near Shamakalay Village, Khogyani District, Nangarhar Province. The cache included a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, eight rocket-propelled grenade rounds, five rocket-propelled grenade boosters, two hand grenades, a mortar fuse and a stockpile of 25 mm ammunition. (U.S. Army photo)

BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan – Afghan citizens supplied information leading to the recovery of several weapons caches in Kot and Khogyani Districts, Nangarhar Province, Feb. 8-14.

Afghan National Security Forces, assisted by Coalition forces, recovered a suspected insurgent weapons cache near Laghurji Village, Kot District, Feb. 8, consisting of 10 anti-tank mines, three 60 mm mortar rounds and two 82 mm mortar rounds.

Another weapons cache was found Feb. 12 in Kailoaghu, Khogyani District. This cache consisted of two anti-personnel mines, a hand grenade, and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in good condition.

The final cache, discovered Feb.14 near Shamakalay Village, Khogyani District, was the largest. This weapons cache included a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, eight rocket-propelled grenade rounds, five rocket-propelled grenade boosters, two hand grenades, a mortar fuse and a stockpile of 25 mm ammunition.

According to a Coalition forces servicemember, the weapons were in fair condition when found.
“Recovering these munitions reduces the insurgents’ ability to conduct attacks in Nangarhar Province,” said Army Maj. Chris Belcher, Coalition forces spokesman.

Earlier this month, residents of Fateh Mina Village, in, Lal Por District, Nangarhar Province, discovered a suspected insurgent weapons cache in the area. Afghan National Security Forces were able to secure the area and safely remove the weapons from the cache site. In that cache, 30 rocket-propelled grenade rounds and 32 82 mm mortar rounds were secured.

Insurgents frequently use these weapons to terrorize Afghan citizens or attack Afghan National Security and Coalition forces throughout the Nangarhar, said Belcher.

“The citizens of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan are committed to government objectives to thwart insurgent activity in their neighborhoods,” said Belcher. “Afghan National Security Forces continue to take these weapons out of the hands of insurgents, making Nangarhar safer for residents.”

The Whatziss, revealed!

A Laurel, and Hearty Handshake to Old Fat Sailor and Mongo for getting it right. It is, indeed, a round for the WWI 3" Stokes mortar.

This woulda been your next clue if we'd needed one.

But OFS and Mongo took care of it.

Interesting method of fuzing, eh? Right before you hang and drop the round, you pulled the ring, inserted the round, and let it go - the lever flipped free as it cleared the tube, and off it went.

The Stokes mortar is essentially the first modern mortar. I could write a learned treatise here, but heck, real weapons geek Bruce Canfield has already done so - if you'd like to know more about the Stokes - simply click here.

Ammunition, Part the 4th. Closing out the muzzle-loading ammunition piece.

Closing out the reprise of the ammuntion posts... again - it's an old post, so some links may be broken. I'll fix 'em as I can.

G'day, everybody! While I certainly haven't exhausted the muzzle-loading era and may return to it, I'm going to close it out for now with a post about 'cleaner' bullets and what to do when your weapon misfires. Then I can move on to black powder primer fired cartridges and beyond - at a later date, at a later date, keep your shirt on!

If you need a refresher, here are parts I, II, and III.

As I mentioned in earlier discussions about black powder, a major problem with those guns and that ammunition was the residue, or fouling, from firing. It doesn't take long before it starts to get hard to load your weapon. Instead of the bullet dropping down onto the powder, you have to exert more and more force to ram the bullet down the bore. That takes time, meaning you reduce your rate of fire, and the distortion of the soft lead bullet can significantly reduce accuracy, and even range, if you distort the skirt of a minie' ball sufficiently. Most Civil War engagements were fought at distances where range wasn't a question, but accuracy, and most importantly, rate of fire, were important.

The most common kind of 'cleaner bullet was the Williams. It came as a Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3. In this photo, they are 1, 3, 2, something I didn't notice until after I took the picture last night. You'll have to excuse me, I was in the basement right after the tornado warning sirens had gone off. Have you ever tried to snag 7 cats and get 'em to the basement - quickly? And I expected Beth's new car to be a dimpled wreck from hail, too. In the event, nothing happened.

Shown with an 8mm Mauser round for comparison. Hi-speed (or patient) version here.

These were designed to clean the bore as the bullet traveled down the barrel. When fired, a zinc ring at the bottom of the bullet would expand to clean the debris and grease from the rifle. On the Type 1, the zinc ring is gone from years in the ground, leaving only the post. The Type 2 was only produced briefly, in favor of the Type 3. The differences are the Type 2 has a thicker ring than the Type 1, and in an attempt to contain costs, a smaller bullet. The Type 3 is basically a Type 1 bullet with the improved Type 2 disk. Depending on who you read, they ranged from really effective (Williams himself) to worthless. I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle - and had more to do with training of the soldier and intensity of the combat.

There's more in the extended post.

Ammunition, Part the 3rd

Heh. Things change over time. This is part three of the Ammunition series that I'm reprising. Yesterday I was gently chid on a disagreement of fact - which I concede half of, anyway - and was posed a question that I really am going to have to buy the OED to be able to answer. Given the subject of yesterday's chiding... I may get chid again today!

Change over time - peoples blog-reading habits change, and bloggers posting habits change - I just realized that the JDM Warning in these, well, JDM doesn't read here anymore, I don't think - because, among other things, I quit writing things like that, as life got too cramped for the rather stout effort putting together a post like that takes. Mebbe when I retire, I can write "The Curmudgeon's Guide to the History of Arms" a snarky look at the subject.

Anyway - welcome to part three. If I have the time, I'll check the links - but this piece is over three years old, and so some links may be broken - the Armorer

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Welcome to Ammunition, part the 3rd. Yes, this one comes with another JDM Warning® - excessive words, not enough pictures. Hey, when you guys pay for my bandwidth you can gripe about the lack of pictures.

We left off in Ammunition, Part the 2nd with the shift from flintlock to percussion ignition of the powder charge. I mentioned how governments liked it because it was a cheap and easy replacement to do with flintlocks, so you didn't have to completely rearm, you could retrofit. Cheaper and quicker. Here's an example, with a US M1842 (Springfield) conversion.

Note from a collector's perspective - many of these rifles were back-dated to flintlocks because the original flintlocks were so scarce (having been converted, eh?). They don't hold the same value as a true original configuration, so take a good hard look at one of these offered in a flintlock form. The parts usually don't match in overall age patina, especially ones made with more modern parts made from different steels than the originals. You can see in the picture - where there is brass, that is a filler for the old flintlock pan. Oh, yes, I did say rifle. Many of these were rifled when they were converted to percussion as well. Not a deep rifling, not really a very useful rifling, but they were rifled.

The simple expedient of putting fulminate of mercury in a copper (later brass) cap that fit on a nipple simplified the soldier's drill and the gun-makers workload - meaning more rifles could be made, and effectively more shots fired in a given amount of time by a given body of troops.

Here is an example of modern large rifle caps. Not very dissimilar from the originals. A little more stable/less sensitive (don't want it too stable or it won't work well as an ignition system) and a little less sensitive to environmental conditions. Plus the ignition compounds are safer, both for the producer and the consumer.

When you ally the percussion cap with paper cartridges, rifled barrels and the Minie' ball, you produce a virtual revolution in the armament of the individual soldier. The soldier now has a weapon which has a near equal reach to artillery on flat ground - making the life of the artilleryman suddenly very much more dangerous. The added range and accuracy give a murderous advantage to the defense which can only be overcome with numbers, as the Army of the Potomac found out numerous times to it's lasting regret, and as the Army of Northern Virginia, especially Pickett's Division, found out on the third day at Gettysburg.

So, what's a paper cartridge? Glad you asked. Here is a paper cartridge and a fired Minie' ball.

The paper cartridge is another innovation designed to reduce the number of steps required to load, thereby speeding up the loading process and upping the number of shots the soldier can get off in a given time.

(continued in the extended post)

Flash Traffic (extended entry) Follows �

For example - you are armed with a flintlock. Mean People Who Suck are standing over there, shooting at you. You want to shoot them. Here's what you do, in general terms:

1. Half Cock the gun.
2. Ground the butt of the gun, holding it muzzle up perpendicular to the ground.
3. Grab your powder measure, whether it be a wooden bottle, horn, or other implement. Pour in the powder.
4. Open ball pouch, retrieve ball. (and, in some cases, patch)
5. Drop ball in barrel. If using a patch, put patch over muzzle first.
6. If not using patch, put wad in muzzle. This step can be skipped - but you better keep the weapon pointed up!
7. Get Ramrod.
8. Ram.
9. Remove ramrod.
10. Replace Ramrod.
11. Pick up weapon.
12. Open Frizzen.
13. Get priming powder measure.
14. Prime.
15. Replace (or let go of, if it's on a lanyard) priming powder measure.
16. Close frizzen.
17. Check flint. (This step can also be skipped now and again)
18. On order, go to full cock.
19. On order, fire.

In the age of paper cartridges, minie balls, and priming caps it goes something like this:

1. Half cock the rifle.
2. Ground the butt of the gun, holding the muzzle perpendicular to the ground.
3. Open cartridge pouch, get cartridge.
4. Tear cartridge open with your teeth, pour powder into barrel.
5. Drop bullet (with paper wrapping still on it) down barrel. (There's some disagreement about leaving the paper on it). I've fired both ways, no difference in accuracy, but you do get more burning embers - so have a care if it's dry).
6. Get Ramrod.
7. Ram.
8. Replace Ramrod.
9. Pick up rifle.
10. Open cap pouch, cap the nipple.
11. On order, go to full cock.
12. On order, fire.

In practical aspects, the rates of fire are about the same, 2-3 aimed shots per minute. The big difference is level of training required of the soldier, reliability, and accuracy.

In good weather, flintlocks could have a 20-30% misfire rate. Percussion less than 10%. In bad weather, flintlocks could be useless (except as unwieldy pikes), while percussion weapons, as long as the soldiers handled the cartridges properly between the cartridge box and barrel, would only have a failure rate of about 20%. There is no realistic comparison in accuracy - 100 men firing at 100 men with average smooth-bore muskets would get 3-5 hits at 100 yards. That same group firing rifles could have up to %25 hits in the right conditions at that range. Hence the power of the defense during the Civil War. And since a rifle is easily accurate out to 300 yards in the hands of a trained man, the danger zone is correspondingly large - especially if they defender are up high, firing down, such as at Maryes Heights during the Battle of Fredericksburg.

So, how do you shoot round ball from a rifle? You use a patch, a swatch of cotton cloth. You put the patch over the muzzle, and you put the ball on top of that. The patch material should be thick enough that you now have to exert some real force to get the ball in the barrel. The patch is actually what engages the rifling and imparts spin to the ball. Some care had to be taken however, that you got a good, uniform ram and didn't distort the ball too much or it would be unstable anyway! And, as we later discovered, a round ball is not the most aerodynamic shape. But that's a later post...

Most mass-produced military arms of the smooth-bore era were not conducive to rifling, the manufacturing standards were too loose. Those military rifles produced were produced for specialist soldiers, who, due to the relatively low rate of fire, needed to be protected, either by fortifications or other, more conventionally armed soldiers.

Two things combined to make a sea-change in this arena - mass production of standardized parts with finer tolerances, and the invention of the Minie' ball.

The revolution in mass production was a meld of the work of John Hall and Eli Whitney. John J. Hall, rifle maker, and Eli Whitney, maker of anything, including guns, great contributions to economic progress was not Whitney's cotton gin - that just paid the bills. What made the the big change was the concept, and tools to support it, of mass production - made possible by standardized production methods and tolerances leading to interchangeable parts, first demonstrated at the US Arsenal at Harpers Ferry (worth a visit).

I've mentioned this before, but there is a reason, buried in history, that British mechanics are called fitters. Even up through WWII, Brit industry still didn't produce the same part to the same spec, hence the need to 'fit' the parts. This was true of smalls arms parts or starter motors. It made for highly skilled and talented mechanics and armorers, but is tough to sustain under wartime conditions. That's one reason Brit firearms from WWII and back have so many serial numbered parts, matched to the receiver number - a legacy of when the arms were assembled in what looked like an assembly line but was in fact a fitting line - craftsmen took parts from bins and fitted them together - and the parts were not always interchangeable with the rifle next to them in the rack.

This lead to the relatively cheap production of high-quality rifled arms. Then along comes Claude Minie'. "His "cylindo-conoidal" lead bullet would expand in the barrel to grip the rifling. With a diameter of 0.57", around 25% more could be carried by soldiers than the old 0.75" diameter cartridges. Effective at 600 yards, with the same rate of fire as the old musket, it changed the nature of two centuries of warfare." (The above description comes from here, a cool site about the Woolwich (pronounced Wool-ich) arsenal in England).

Minie' did not invent the concept of the easy-to-use muzzle-loading rifle bullet - he took the original idea and made it cheap and practical. The original designs were called "pillar" bullets that had separate bottoms with a 'pillar' protruding from them which was driven into the bullet by the gases upon firing. This causes the base of the bullet to expand into the rifling, and away we went. Minie' dispensed with that - as this picture shows, the base of the bullet is hollow - lead is soft - the pillar isn't needed, the gases will do all the work for you. He also designed the grooves, or cannelures - which served to hold lubrication for the bullet. The lube both greased the passage of the bullet and served to emulsify the firing residue - making cleaning easier, and with the use of special 'cleaner' bullets, could reduce fouling in the bore during combat, which will eventually lead to slowing reloading time, as you have to exert much more force to seat the bullet.

Let's take a break here and talk about how much of this firearms talk has made it into the culture (Sarah Brady shudders). "Lock, stock, and barrel." The major components of a musket. The lock, containing the mechanism for the hammer, and on flintlocks, matchlocks, etc - the pan. The barrel, which is the whole point of the thing, and the stock, which holds it all together. "Don't go off half-cocked." Referring to the way flintlocks and percussion weapons are loaded - the half-cock position is essentially the safety. Going off half-cocked meant you'd have to stop and cock before you could fire. "Flash in the pan." Refers to the unfortunate habit of flintlocks, especially after several shots, to flash off the powder in the pan, but not fire the charge in the barrel, due to fouling of the touch-hole (a term left over from the very beginning, where fire was brought to the barrel). That's why Sergeants were such 'pricks' - they carried extra pricks (tools to ream the touch-holes). And last, but not least for today's musings - "Bite the Bullet". That comes from at least the Civil War. In a time of still-crude medicine and little to no anaesthesia, troops were given a Minie' ball to bite on as they were hacked operated on. To me, these are some of the more poignant finds on Civil War battlefields. Like this one.

So, let's wrap up percussion weapons, shall we?

Here's are shots of a reproduction Enfield 3-Band Musket in .577 caliber. Enfield - where the rifle was designed. 3-Band meaning 3 bands holding the barrel and stock together - a long rifle. These rifles were used by both sides in the Civil War and highly prized as excellent weapons.

This is the rifle at full-cock. For capping, it would be at half-cock, which as I said is the 'safe' position.

Here it is capped.

And here it is, hammer home at rest, after firing (since I didn't want to clean it - I didn't fire the cap, sorry!)

When next I take up the subject, we'll go from paper cartridge to the black powder metallic cartridge - with a stop for the needle-guns and their linen cartridges.

� Secure this line!

Reporting As Ordered, Sir! �

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Great Post!

by DaveH on April 8, 2004 9:06 AM

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Don't forget about the Springfield and Fergusson breechloaders!

(This is almost as good as watching 'Tales of the Gun' on the history channel.)

by GEBIV on April 8, 2004 7:20 PM

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But Gebiv - that will make me feel bad, because I don't have any! Though I intend to build a Ferguson.

by John of Argghhh! on April 8, 2004 7:28 PM

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Cool, i have one of those "fired rounds" myself, found hiking at Shiloh Tennessee as a boy scout. Same crusty white stuff all over it... what is that anyway?

by Vigilance Matters on April 8, 2004 10:13 PM

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The white stuff is lead oxide. Better known as rust. When iron rusts, you get red iron oxide, when lead 'rusts' you get white lead oxide.

by John of Argghhh! on April 9, 2004 6:12 AM

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� Dismissed, Soldier!

by John on Jun 14, 2007
� Les Jones Blog links with: Thursday Gun Links #13

Ammunition, Part the Second.

[Armorer's note - continuing from yesterday, the Ammunition posts from the Archives of Argghhh! Warning - some links may be broken]

Now for the JDM Warning® - Excessively wordy post ahead!

In the first part, we met D'oh! who discovered and then lost the concept of attacking your enemy with a projectile weapon because Mean People Suck. While I postulated the idea lay dormant for another 10,000 years until rediscovered, once a guy used the trick and survived, the whole concept took off like gangbusters. You go from hand-thrown rocks , darts and spears to applying mechanical advantage to the process, with slings, bows, and atlaltls. From there you move to applying more mechanical advantage and produce catapults, onagers, ballistas and other engines of massy destruction.

Trebuchet

But with the discovery of black powder things changed dramatically. For a long time, the western world held to the myth that black powder was discovered by a monk, Black Berthold. The Chinese have a claim, that they are still working on. This fellow in New Zealand has his own opinions, but offers no definitive answer... In short, it's still up for grabs - except for the adherents of the Chinese, Hindu, Greek, Arab, German, Spanish and English theories - though the english claim is really tied to Roger Bacon, who recorded the recipe, but never claimed to have been the inventor. At least, unlike the machine gun, you can't blame America for this.

What we do know is this - in the early to middle 1200's, gunpowder made it's debut in Europe. And the governing elites haven't been happy since, because, among other things, "God Created Man, but Sam Colt made 'em equal!" And if there is anything a governing elite dislikes, it's people with power to do something about it!

It didn't take people long to figure out that if you took a rocket, plugged it with something moveable, that the resultant activity of the moveable object might have interesting uses in hunting game and Mean People Who Suck.

Flash Traffic (extended entry) Follows �

Just as the first motorcars had the engine in front because that's where the horses had been on carriages (and carriage-makers were making the first bodies) so too the first cannon used a common projectile - the arrow.

Cannon firing an arrow, from "De Nobilitatibus, Sapientii et Prudentiis Regum", manuscript, by Walter de Milemete, 1326

But people quickly learned that round shot was better, whether made of stone or iron. The stone balls, while comparatively cheap, didn't do that well against fortifications. As a projectile, round ball and shot lasted until the end of the blackpowder era in the late 1800's, as this little collection of projectiles in my living room demonstrates.

Just as the first form of mechanical locomotion in the form of steam engines were large, because it was technically hard to make them small, so it went with firearms. As the technology improved, the 'gonne' got both smaller and larger.

Okay. We've got gunpowder. We got barrel making. We've got lead. We've got handier weapons. And there are plenty of Mean People Who Suck. Now we've got to go through the development of ways to get all this to work - i.e., getting the powder to explode. Many methods worked. Some better than others, and for a long time, the better methods were also more expensive to make or didn't stand up well to battlefield conditions. The first, and still simplest, is bring a coal to the hole. After that, well, it gets complicated. If you want a detailed look (and I recommend it if you have the time - this is an excellent site!)

Early "Handgonne"r

The next step was to take a fuse rope and touch it to the hole, and after that came the matchlock, where the fuze was held by an arm on the weapon and a trigger bar used to bring the fuse to the touch hole. I happen to have an arm like that, a North African Jezail that was made in the late 1800's. Unfortunately, the match holder is broken - but here is a representative example of an ignition system that survived very late in the era.

Let's cover the major bits. All blackpowder muzzle loaders had this much in common: a tube, generally closed at one end (there were breechloaders, but that's a different story) with a small hole to allow flame in. The soldier dumped in his powder, with or without a wad to hold it down, tamping it as he did so. He then dropped (or after a few shots and the fouling that resulted) rammed a bullet home. After that, it changes.

The basic components look like this.

A large (in this case, .69 cal) ball, and a quantity of powder.

There were many tools in use over time to make this job easier for the soldier under the stress of combat. If you look at engravings and paintings from the era, you see soldiers festooned with odd-looking bits of paraphernalia. Like this guy, taken from a 16th Century drill manual.

He has all those little bottles all over him so that he can load without having to measure while under a little pressure - ie, Mean People Who Suck inconsiderately trying to kill him before he kills them. One of the purposes of drill was to make the loading process automatic, and correct - learned at the muscle-response level, not just intellectually, so that you can still respond to the commands even though your lizard-brain is telling you to run. The rump of drill we have left today is what's left of a much greater body of drill. Today we use it to move groups of troops around in an efficient, disciplined manner - without the natural straggling that occurs when people move as a mob. This is just a tiny bit of what was a vast body of drill designed to move blocks of muskets around the battlefield quickly (in column) and get the weapons employed in mass quickly (shift from column to line) in order to mass fires on the Mean People Who Suck.

Modern tools that do the same thing as all the little bottles do are illustrated here. Powder measures. They both allow you to fill in bulk and dispense measured amounts, the large one for the main charge, the smaller one for the finer powder used in the pan of a flintlock or similar action.

Speaking of the flintlock, let's go on into that particular weapon, as it became the dominant form of lock until the good Scot Reverend Forsyth invented the percussion cap.

We've covered the basics of the weapon already. With a flintlock you add a pan, to hold fine grained powder that will be set off by the sparks. A frizzen, which serves to both cover the pan retaining the powder and is the striking surface for the flint, and the hammer, which holds the flint.

This is the lock at half-cock, with the frizzen down, and the hammer locked back so that you can open the frizzen to charge the pan, but not inadvertently send the hammer forward.

Next step is to open the frizzen and charge the pan.

I cheated here - I also cocked it. Normally you would still be at half-cock. Starting to get an idea where the phrase "Don't go off half-cocked" came from?

Now you are locked, cocked, and loaded. All you need is a target and permission to fire.

Target? If you look at old military smoothbores, you'll see the sights are rudimentary. Targets were blocks of men. There was much windage in the bore, to make it easier to load when the weapon was fouled from firing and to make manufacturing simpler and cheaper. Since the ball bounces down the bore, final trajectory is defined by the direction of the last bounce, so fancy sights aren't needed. Troops were taught to aim low, maximizing their chances of a hit.

Once you got the command to fire - pull the trigger.

There are sparks there, but in the light it's not easy to see them.

The next major improvement came with the invention of the percussion cap (for a discussion of that, see the Reverend Forsyth link, above). This further simplified the loading and firing drill. Though improperly trained soldiers would still screw it up, witness the rifles picked up in the area of the Pennsylvania militia at Gettysburg some of which were loaded near to the muzzle with multiple charges - the militia drilled without percussion caps to save money and ammunition - and forgot to cap their piece when under fire. There are also several confederate accounts of casualties caused by ramrods. Works once.

The other nice thing from a governmental perspective was that this new technology was adapatable to older arms and didn't require a complete re-arming to take advantage of it.

And that's going to wrap it up for this installment - next up, percussion ammunition in Ammunition, part the third.

� Secure this line!

by John on Jun 13, 2007

Ammunition, part the first.

[Armorer's note - today is just a killer day - since we've got a lot of readers who are new since I published this - I'm going to be lazy and give the newbies a taste of the stuff I used to write when there was *time* to write like this. So, from the Castle Archives...]

Ammunition. What is it? The Webster's defines it thusly:

am�mu�ni�tion ( P ) Pronunciation Key (my-nshn) n.

1. Projectiles, such as bullets and shot, together with their fuses and primers, that can be fired from guns or otherwise propelled.

2. Nuclear, biological, chemical, or explosive material, such as rockets or grenades, that are used as weapons.

3. An object used as a missile in offense or defense: Rocks were my only ammunition against the bear.

4. A means of attacking or defending an argument, thesis, or point of view.

Okay, so I've been promising to discuss ammunition. Teased you with a picture.

Let's get started. At the beginning. JD - the above paragraph was for you, I'll be covering 1-3, and if you keep being grumpy about no gun pictures, 4.

As artillerymen have known forever - the weapon is what hits the target. The rest is a delivery system. Ammunition is consumed by delivery systems.

As the bumper sticker so fatuously notes, "Mean people suck." It's true now, it was true 160,000 years ago, too. Creationists who don't like dating like that - work with me - it's funnier this way. Bullies have been around as long as people have been around. Even before we climbed down out of the trees and tried that walking upright thing.

D'oh! was out doing a little gathering near the present day village of Herto, in what was to be known eventually as Ethiopia. He'd done pretty well, and had a nice little woven-grass baggie of nuts to his credit, that he looked forward to using to entice M'arg's father to let him do a little foolin' around with her tonight.

M'untz is out looking for food, too. But he prefers to harvest the harvester's harvest. Rather than actually bend over and pick all of the goodies himself, he prefers to bend over the prostrate body of his unconscious/dead victim and pick up the bag, once. Lazy b*st*rd.

So, D'oh!, happily anticipating the night's frolicsome promise, comes into a cleared area in the verge of the forest - and sees M'untz. M'untz has been waiting, knowing that D'oh! always comes this way, having slept through the anti-terrorist briefing - the part where they say vary your routes daily. M'untz, a hulking brute of early Homo Sapiens Sapiens, stood there, slapping his yet-to-be-named-thus knobkerry in the palm of his left hand, grinning evilly.

D'oh! realizes this in Not Good. Last time this happened, D'oh! had bruises that lasted weeks, and he still had a knot on his forehead from a previous encounter with M'untz's knobkerry. Running was no good. D'oh! was fat and slow. M'untz was a ponderous runner - but have seen how fast a rhino can go when it gets up to speed? D'oh! also knew that M'untz wouldn't just take the bag and leave. Some weird concept of honor drove M'untz to think of himself as a hunter, and he had to take down his prey, which meant D'oh! was going to get thunked on the head again. D'oh! really wished that M'untz would go hit something eatable, fresh meat was so much better than what was left after the hyenas left a carcass.

Necessity being the mother of invention, and with terror fueling an adrenaline rush, D'oh! had an idea. Since people who beat on you suck, and people who beat on you with a club REALLY suck, the thing to do was to try to get them before they could reach you with the club. Hmmmmm. Space. Distance. Range. Rock. Rock! There was a nice rock nearby. D'oh! reached down and picked it up, hefting it experimentally (though the concept of experimentation not being known yet, D'oh didn't recognize the pattern).

M'untz started across the clearing, again with that evil grin, this time the knobkerry held up and ready for the knock on the head.

D'oh seized the moment and hurled the rock. However, being the first human to ever throw a rock, he threw like a girl. [Hey! Baseball hadn't been invented yet - *everybody* threw like a girl] The rock went sailing harmlessly over M'untz's head, landing with a rattle and crash in the bushes behind him. M'untz wasn't sure what had just happened, but he knew there had been a Perturbation of the Force. And THAT pissed him off. So he knocked D'oh! on the head and killed him. Picking up the bag of nuts, M'untz went off munching happily with visions of a naked M'arg doing really interesting things by the fire tonight dancing in his head.

Since M'untz was a self-absorbed bully, he never thought anymore about the rock. Since D'oh was dead because of no training in the use of rocks - his idea died with him, not to be raised again for another 10,000 years, when a distant descendant of his, B'art, would actually kill a distant descendant of M'untz, and the idea of launching weapons at your enemy/prey would be born, squalling and squealing, into the toolkit of people who wanted fresh meat, or were just mean and wanted other people's fresh meat, or who needed to defend themselves against people who wanted their fresh meat - even back then, the police didn't always get there in time, Constable B'arney being more common than Officer K'ojak.

In our next installment, we'll skip 150,300 years and get to gunpowder, since I currently don't collect any weapons that don't use chemical energy to hurl the rock. Suffice it to say that whole projectile thingy went through a lot of development, to include the application of mechanical advantage (a concept first introduced by B'art's pal M'artin, with the invention of the sling), through spears, atlatls, bows and arrows, catapults, and other such stuff.

So, here it is. The first projectile weapon, found near the village of Herto, in Ethiopia.

The Whatziss from yesterday.

Not too many takers on this one. Which is interesting, given that there is boatloads of data out there on this particular beast.

That said - only two takers, but #2, Pat - got it mostly correct when he identified them as rounds for the M8C Spotting Rifle. His only error (obliquely) was continuing on and tying it to the 106mm recoilless rifle.

These were used for the M8C rifles used on the British Wombat recoilless rifle - a quibble, certainly, except the red paint in the flutes indicates their Brit origin.

This website (the Armorer wants one of these guns) has a nice set of pictures of a before and after restoration of a 106RR.

The spotting rifle is used by the gunner to acquire his target, without wasting main gun ammo, and with a lessened signature to give away his position. The M8C is a gas-operated semi-auto, which means the gunner just pings away with it until he sees a hit on his target at which point he fires his main gun. The use of a special cartridge with the M8C, vice a regular .50 cal round, is because you want the ballistic performance of the round to be roughly equal to the trajectory of the main gun - speed of flight isn't as important as trajectory matching is.

Tanks can use their coaxial machine guns for the same purpose. The Israelis even mounted M2 .50s on their M109A1 155mm howitzers for the same purpose - to make it easier to use the guns in direct fire mode.

Now for the fun part - doing some research for this post, I found this very nice picture of an M50 Ontos - the USMC reckless rifle carrier of the Vietnam era.

And I found this website with a lot of great pictures of the Ontos, certainly one of the odder weapon systems we've developed over the years. A lot of firepower on that little tracked chassis - but all served from outside the vehicle, on a vehicle, by the very nature of the weapon, that is going to attract a *lot* of attention.

Enjoy.

The Sunday Whatzis, revealed.

Confused? Click here.

That's a bullet for the Nordenfeldt 1-inch anti-torpedo boat gun. The Nordenfeldt guns were an early type of machine-gun. Like the Gatling gun, they used multiple barrels and mechanical power to operate. Unlike the Gatling, the didn't last very long in the grand scheme of things, much less enjoy a renaissance when someone realized what electricity might accomplish when applied to the concept.

Here's a group of Brit tars training with one (though no feed hopper has been loaded).

The Nordenfeldt guns were developed between 1873 and 1878 and were very popular in Europe, especially amongst the sailors. They generally had four barrels in line horizontally and were fed by gravity-feed hoppers. You can see them with 5 barrels or as few as two. One advantage the Nordenfeldts had over the Gatling was that the mechanism was much easier to get to for the purpose of clearing jams. Plus, if the jam was too complex and the situation dire, you could simply disconnect the barrel and keep firing with the remaining barrels. Unlike the Gatling, which used a rotating crank to cycle the gun, the Nordenfeldts used a lever that was moved back and forth. I've seen both a lever in the vertical plane, on the left side of the gun, or a handle that moved in the horizontal plane, on the right side of the gun. The sailor on the left right (sigh, I suppose, in the future, I'll just submit all posts to CAPT H for editing before publishing) in the picture has his hand on the lever for this particular gun. The cyclic rate of fire was about 350 rounds per minute.

Here we can see some more sailors getting it on for the camera. This gun has its feed-hopper mounted.

All that flailing about did affect accuracy a bit, but heck, they weren't used as sniper weapons.

The Brit National Maritime Museum has a wonderful copyright protected (way too expensive to buy permission to use) photo of a 1-inch Nordenfeldt anti-torpedo boat gun right here.

The Ordnance Museum at Aberdeen Proving Grounds has a nice little four-barrel Nordenfeldt - which shows the lever nicely, too.

The Whatziss, revealed!

The question is here, if you need to catch up.

Al and MajMike were correct, it's a linker-delinker for disintegrating link machine gun belts. The markings are frankly not conclusive as to origin. They are not Brit nor US.

The three-pronged side links:

The two-pronged side de-links. It really doesn't make linking any faster, but it sure reduces the stress on arthritic hands... Werekitten noted that it was a spreader - it actually does both - part of what I like about the cleverness of the gizmo. It squeezes to link, but flip it over, and it spreads to de-link. I shudder to think where you all might go with this.

Regardless - Bragging rights to Al and MajMike (though MajMike has some scale issues, not unusual with guys who have spent time running about in panzers).

Since only the hardcore show up...

...on Saturdays - here's a Whatzis for Mr. Bullet Encyclopedia, Chris:

Post WWII.

You may begin. Anyone may play - but I'm hoping this one at least makes Chris pull a reference book off the shelf.

Time for a whatzis!

Trias likes those, and I missed his birthday, and we haven't done one in a while...

The first hint - post WWII.

The Answer to the Whatzis.

Eric finally got it. It's the "glasflasche" or glass bottle, that contained the "clark" poison gas in a German WWI 77mm shell.

Like in this picture.

Congrats to working your way through the problem. Of course, it was an *easy* one for this collection of geeks!

And no, I am *not* the John who posted it on Gunboards.

For more information on the subject - read the document that finally pulled it together for Eric.

Okay - enough teasing on the Whatzis from Sunday.

I just left you guys hanging yesterday, in order to give the "I only read Argghhh! from work" guys a chance at the Whatzis.

You really did pretty well. Owen got it quickly, and Captain H went a step further and emailed a link (chicken - won't post openly...) to a write up. They were the first to get it. And, speaking of that, CAPT H - upon further review, I withdraw my statement about this shell being Brit (as I was informed by the guy I bought it from) it *is* the French version of Armstrong's studded projectile.

Oh - and that *was* a shadow guys, not a notch, in the pic. That was just an artifact of taking the picture, not a deliberate attempt to mislead. This time. Owen - your size referent is... 3 inches. That's the nominal caliber. Some sources say 3.3, but that would include the studs, at least in my example.

Zinc, not a lead or copper stud - which strongly argues for it being french and not Brit.

This was an early method of rifling artillery - if you notice, the studs are slightly offset, and the studs themselves actually have a direction - the shell was fitted into deep grooves and rammed home. It worked well enough when the guns were new, and not badly fouled from firing... but it also only worked well with black powder. When more powerful propellants were used, the friction inherent in this process was too great and the studs just sheared off, and the flight of the projectile was unpredictable.

But with the acquisition of this piece, the artillery collection has representative examples of most major varieties of imparting a spin to the projectile. Now if I could only find an affordable shell with an *intact* papier mach� sabot...

Whatziss, answered!

Old Fat Sailor - I name you Brainiac of Argghhh! You got it right.

If our Ozzie OFS hadn't gotten it, I would have offered up this as a clue today, followed quickly with this.

If that was insufficient (I'm thinking it would have been enough) - I'd have offered up this.

But I don't have to do that. Because OFS identified it - it's a stand of quilted grape.

In this case, a replica of Revolutionary War-era stand of quilted grape, in the six-pounder version. An early form of "Improved Conventional Munitions," grape was used against attacking infantry at greater ranges. Comprised of a wooden base, or sabot, with a wood rod protruding from it, they were stacked round with iron balls, held in place by the cloth and twine wrapping, which was then doped. The wrapping and sabot kept it all together for easy loading, and the paint helped waterproof it, prevent rot of the cloth, and provided some more rigidity.

The ones you find in museums have usually been painted black or red. This one is au naturel, to show the basic construction better. Made this way to speed loading (that infantry is looking pretty determined), the twine and cloth gave way upon firing, turning the gun into a giant shotgun. Grape, with it's larger balls, had a greater range at the expense of fewer projectiles. Canister is grape's short-range cousin, being smaller balls, usually lead musket balls, loosely loaded into a container (canister) and fired when the infantry had gotten annoyingly close and looked like they were still interested in killing artillerymen. Of course, once you started shooting this at infantry, the infantry became notoriously uninterested in taking prisoners, either... infantry sucks that way.

Why is is called a Stand of Grape? In fortress use especially, but also in the field, you stood them up on the wooden sabot, so they wouldn't roll around. Larger guns oft times fired grape made of larger iron balls held together by iron plates and rings, like this stand of 12-pounder grapeshot.

Since Owen's running around picking fights in the comments today...

...let's see if we can distract him with bright shiny objects.

Silly blog graphic and refrigerator magnet to the first person who gets this one.

What is it? Whose is it? When was it used? Bonus points for succinct dissertations!

Let's see if we can attract a lurker or two with this one.