Editing Firearm (section)

==A Brief History of Firearms==
'''800's:''' Taoist monks attempting to find an elixir of immortality stumbled on the next best thing: a substance that would suddenly and violently make things very dead. They'd discovered potassium nitrate (alternatively called saltpeter), a white crystalline powder that burned with a purple flame. When mixed with powders of charcoal and sulfur the resulting substance would burn instantly and aggressively on exposure to flame. It didn't take long for the Chinese to start inventing ways to use it.

[[image:Firelance.jpg‎|thumb|150px|left|The Firelance, the Chinese invention that started this all]]
'''1000s to 1200s:''' The Chinese realize they can make barbarians shit their pants by shooting hollowed arrows packed with powder and bamboo tubes filled with powder and pebbles at them. Bamboo gradually gives way to cast iron and bronze. The Mongol Invasion accelerated the development as the Song Government tried everything to fight them off, which the Mongols often stole and used themselves.

'''1300s:''' Various gunpowder weapons begin to proliferate westward along the Silk Road, aided by the [[Mongols]]. Crude versions of hand cannons, grenades, rockets, and flamethrowers all see use. Despite considerable psychological effect and good armor penetration, most of these weapons are only marginally more likely to kill the target than the user and had a range of only twenty or so meters. As such, their use is not widespread. For the most part, these weapons were used by skirmishers and guards. The fact that they were so dangerous meant they were mostly used by low class soldiers, and in turn this meant that the smiths making them were generally not the most skilled artisans; which did little to improve quality even given the limitations of the day. Even so, the designs and methods of manufacture were gradually refined and improved by various early gunsmiths through trial and error if nothing else.

'''1400s''': Hand cannons see continued and expanded use. Bit by bit from the crude handgonnes of previous centuries, the first "true" firearms evolve with the gradual development of the matchlock, taking on the basic shape of lock, stock, trigger, and barrel (which is where we get the saying from). By clamping a lighted wick into a flashpan via a trigger, the shooter is able to aim ''and'' fire at the same time, making him markedly less likely to blow his own jimmies off. Despite advances, the matchlock was unwieldy, unreliable, and generally inferior to a good bowman. The issue of course is that only England (in Europe) HAD good bowmen; bowmen were the scum of the army everywhere else. This didn't stop some inventive commanders from seeing their potential, particularly with poorly trained conscript soldiers. [[Weeaboo|Some forces]] made a go of it by carrying two or three guns at a time and just throwing the spent ones away like a really shitty Matrix movie. Note: while we use a "weeaboo" hyperlink up there, it's worth remembering that troops like cuirassiers and even pirates would do the same thing with pistols, carrying a whole brace of them, but they just did not exist yet. By the 1400's having more then one gun was the only way to have any real rate of fire before breechloaders existed.

'''1500s:''' Guns continue to evolve with the invention of spring-loaded firing mechanisms. The wheel-lock spins a steel plate against sulfide rocks to produce sparks (think cigarette lighters), which ignites powder a flash pan. This was revolutionary, allowing soldiers to prime their weapon in a matter of seconds instead of fucking around with a lit wick, and allowed calvary to use guns for the first time while on horseback, giving rise to the cuirassiers. It also means that for the first time, guns weren't completely fucked in the rain, just mostly fucked. They also cost a lot to make and were still not completely reliable, so most people stuck with matchlocks. Powder formulas had improved considerably, including the development of the more powerful, stable, and moisture-resistant corned powder made by wetting raw gunpowder, forming it into corn kernel-sized cakes, crushing them, and sieving them for size. Japan's Oda Nobunaga was particularly notable in the history of firearms for his heavy transition from blades to guns after discovering the novelty of matchlock guns. In fact, by the end of the 1500s, they had more trained arquebusiers in their armies and produced more matchlocks than any other country to date during that period and had the most guns per capita in the world. They still relied on yari equipped pikemen to keep cavalry away but by this time, mounted archery and swordsmen had taken a backseat as supporting units like the knights and winged hussars in Europe. Meanwhile, virtually every army figured out how to use a combination of volley fire in dense square formations surrounded by pikemen (called Pike and Shot) or roughly equivalent units of gunmen protected by spearmen (such as the Chinese Mandarin Duck platoon formations); making armored cavalry, crossbows, & longbows outdated. Accuracy still sucked but that was what the massed shooting was meant to compensate for and soldiers were trained to just point their matchlock in the vague direction of the enemy en masse and fire.

[[image:FlintlockMechanism.jpg‎|thumb|200px|right|The flintlock mechanism. Now you did not need to light some string and put it into a serpentine before firing]]
'''1600s''' The wheellock is refined into the simpler and more reliable flintlock, though it would take some time to supersede the matchlock. Muzzle loading is simplified with the creation of paper cartridges, essentially the pre-measured cake mix of murder. Some German dudes came up with the idea of cutting spirals into the barrel, which they called "rifling," to spin-stabilize the bullet so that they wouldn't have to walk up right next to their targets to hit them, but this required a barrel tighter than a nun's cunt, a hammer to ram the ball in, and grooved bullets made for the gun so it could fit the rifling of the gun like the cap to a soda bottle. To put all that into perspective: well-trained musketeers could fire three to four shots a minute, while a rifleman could only manage one shot every minute. Not great, however the idea of spin-stabilisation hung around and payed off in later times. Breechloaders are invented alongside the flintlock in both Europe and China but the problem of hot gas leaking and burning shooters' hands made them limited in use and in number. Hence, while nobles such as King Henry could own a breech loading rifle for hunting ducks, said breech loaders were either expensive to make in good quality, leaked hot gas every time you shot a less finely crafted piece, or was of inferior performance to the basic muzzleloader.

'''1700s''': The French invent the bayonet, allowing their troops to be [[choppa|choppy]] while they were [[dakka|shooty]]. Thus, the Pike and Shot formation became the Bayonet and Shot formation. That and refinement of tactics led to the dense but slow and cumbersome square formations being reformed into thinner but more responsive rectangle formations. This is the point where gun infantry tactics become the dominant (though still not only) form of fighting when guns go from one of a few common infantry weapons to the primary weapon used by most infantry. Formations of musketeers go from big square blocks to lines two or three ranks thick to put enough bullets in the enemy's ranks as quickly as possible. In the 1600's armies had started to realize that dividing up your people into groups and firing in turn would allow you to maintain fire while reloading (particularly the English with the New Model Army), but it was in the 1700's that everyone really got good at drilling it into soldiers how to fight in lines. Another interesting development at this time was the creation of the air gun. As seen with the Italian Girardoni air rifle, it was issued to specialized sharpshooters who valued it's silence, long range, and rapid-firing capabilities. Their apparent effectiveness in the Austrian Army's Windbüchse Jägers during the Napoleonic Wars was such that according to legend (which is disputed by historians), Bonaparte himself was so angry that he desired for any soldier captured from those units to be hanged as assassins or spies instead of treated as a regular POW. However, the difficulties of making and maintaining reliable pressure tanks and air pumps meant it couldn't compete or become mainstream once conventional rifles and breechloaders were improved upon.
[[image:Chassepot.jpg‎|thumb|200px|left|The mechanism of a French Chassepot needle rifle, an early bolt action rifle, as well as its paper cartridge]]

'''1800s''': Pretty much everything that makes up a modern firearm is invented here. Some English fools discovered fulminates (with the first formula of mercury fulminate made from mercury, nitric acid, and ethanol), an unstable explosive compound that could be put in a metal cap that would instantly ignite if you slam it with a hammer; which led to the first explosive primers. So flintlocks transitioned to percussion caps. This basically involves putting explosives in your explosives to explode your explosives. Eventually, standardized methods of making copper & later brass casings by the French and English replaced paper cartridges; making gas leakage in breech loading mechanisms a thing of the past. Cartridges that contain a primer, propellant, and slug, similar to modern-day bullets, are developed. With this, not only was loading ammunition simplified with a package that contained everything needed for a gun to fire, it also made it waterproof & easier for conscripts to load. Furthermore, the brass casings' small expansion when firing served to seal the firing chamber to prevent hot gases from leaking and burning users’ hands. Extracting the flush but stuck cartridge in the chamber was simply a matter of adding extraction pins that were manually pressed to kick them out by the rims on the bottom base. By this time, wars were largely fought using firearms rather than melee weapons, though also by this time firearms were also melee weapons as in the early 1800s the bayonet charge was still both an accepted and useful tactic.

By the late 1800 inventors had finally gotten the technology to contain the force of the gunpowder explosion with a tight seal and do so cheaply. Experiments that had been done earlier like the Puckle gun (1718), Ferguson rifle (1776), and even the bizarre 1780 Girandoni Air Rifle, [http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Steampunk which was an air gun with a 20 round magazine], all failed to create breech loading rifles cheaply. See, despite that it was well known that that slotting in bullets from the rear and using a mechanism to load it into the chamber is much simpler than spending about half a minute to ram it down a long barrel, the technology was just not there as without cheap steel with good quality control (cheap is important for hand guns you are going to mass-produce). In the meantime, getting regular iron to contain the explosion without deforming, cracking, and leaking gas - thus weakening the shot - was a nightmare. The Industrial Revolution, among other things, gave birth to the ability to mass produce novelty features such as "breech-loading" and later "magazines" and simpler mechanised feeding systems like tubes, slides, cylinders, and bolt-actions. The likes of pump-action shotguns, bolt-action rifles, and lever-action rifles, and revolver and semi-automatic pistols, are developed and/or developed upon, giving a glimpse on how weapons in the future would function. Near the end of the decade, some French guys worked out that they could both improve firepower and keep their guns considerably cleaner by replacing black powder with nitrocellulose, the base component of most "smokeless powders." Also known as “guncotton/flash-paper,” it was first discovered by some German chemist who accidentally soaked a cotton apron in a nitric/sulfuric acid mix before trying to dry it by the fire; culminating with explosive results. After various explosive bouts of trial and error, the French managed to alter its formula to make it stable enough to use without blowing up its creators. They stabilized it by soaking and drying it a second time in alcohol. Next, they added stabilizer compounds that made the concoction safe to make without blowing factories sky high from static electricity. This alongside partly dissolving it in ether/alcohol to form collodion before adding extra explosive compounds such as nitroglycerin served to make it more malleable and explosive for shells and artillery. Shaping it was simply a matter of spinning/rolling it into stiff thread/yarn or sheets to be cut down to desired pellet/flake sizes. Not only is there a massive increase in power, its also a clean burn compared to the highly corrosive nature of black power and the horrible maintenance pain that comes with that. This won't matter ''as'' much for another century, since the primers are still corrosive.

Just as important as the new designs that came about during this period were the new methods of production. People like Eli Whitney worked out devices such as milling machines, which allowed for the quick production of finely tuned parts which were so close in size that you could take one bit off one gun, stick it on another from the same line, and it would work just as fine. Breech loading and repeating firearms had existed for centuries beforehand, but were not cost effective to mass-produce until the Industrial Revolution.
[[image:Lee-Enfield Rifle.jpg|thumb|200px|right|A British Lee-Enfield Bolt Action Repeating rifle]]
This is also the time where the first "automatic" guns were invented and put into production. The word "automatic" is in quotes because these early machine guns were not self-reciprocating; they did not load and fire themselves and were instead manually powered. The most famous (and successful) of these weapons is the Gatling gun, which saw limited action in the American Civil War, but became much more widely used the world over in subsequent wars. But while it was the most famous, the Gatling was not the only manual machine gun developed; dozens of different types were produced during the US Civil War alone on both sides, but because these guns tended to be mounted on cannon carriages they were treated like cannons instead of the close support weapon machines guns are, so it took some time for them to hit their stride. Some were hooked up to a motor and became true machine guns, giving them a rate of fire that's high even by today's standards, but the requirement of having a power source meant it only saw limited use on ships.

The first works of the great John Moses Browning start showing up. While his 20th century inventions are more famous, his perfection of the lever action, and invention of the pump action shotgun were major advances. Browning would even patent a semi-automatic shotgun by the end of the 19th century, though it would not be produced till the 20th.

'''1900-early 1930s''': The heyday of guns because of the advent of WW1. The idea of bolt-action rifles are popularized, along with semi-automatic and fully-automatic weapons. Bolt-action rifles meant that riflemen no longer had to be confined to shooting one round at a time before needing to reload as they could now load individual clips that contained 5-10 rounds a piece. Machine guns are now becoming more and more popular in the battlefields, drastically changing the way infantry would maneuver the battlefield as a single MG emplacement can effectively cripple platoons with the right positioning. Submachine guns are developed by the Italians through total accident, as it turned out their pistol caliber machine gun designed for air-to-air fighting (remember planes of this era were very fragile) was effective as an infantry weapon. The German Empire would be the first to make a purpose built infantry sub-machine gun, giving the rest of the world an idea of the wonders of a lightweight fully-automatic weapon that could easily be used by infantrymen, which was previously restricted to crew-served heavy machine guns and the still heavy BAR. They were so impressive, the various post-war regulations prohibited the Germans from having a military armed with them ([[Derp|completely missing the loophole that the Germans could just arm civilians like police and railway guards with them and have a German owned company in Switzerland build them]]).

On the subject of the machine guns, if there was ever a weapon that represented this part of history it would be the heavy machine gun. We talked about the hand powered machine guns above, and while good when used correctly, these weapons have their issues. In order to use most of them, you had to be standing up to turn the crank and sustained fire was tiring, but the hand cranked guns had one major advantage: the most successful of the hand-cranked guns, like the Gatling or Gardner, had multiple barrels meaning you can fire them with little or no need to stop to let the barrels cool down. At the dawn of the 20th century, this is what the early machine guns had to be compared to when European generals went window shopping. The solution was water-cooling, which allowed machine guns to fire for countless hours with little or no failures, but at the cost of weight rendering them truly static, though highly effective, weapons. If you could point to two developments that caused the First World War's trench warfare, you can point to water-cooled machine guns and barbed wire.

The semi-automatic pistol had some developments in the last decade of the 19th century, but only the bulky C96 Mauser would see any real popularity, with next most notable, the Borchardt C-93, only having a few thousand made. The Borchardt’s refinement by Georg Luger would be one of the big game changers, as it saw adoption by the Swiss in 1900 and Germany in 1904. John Moses Browning would be the real pioneer, creating a series of pocket pistols that saw widespread success in civilian sales. He would cap this off with the 1911 in the same year, his first military pistol that was then adopted by the US military. He designed the 1935 Browning Hi-Power, but didn’t live to see it completed by his apprentice Dieudonné Saive and his son Val Browning. The pistol was produced by both sides of World War II (its factory was captured when Belgium was invaded, but Saive would flee with the plans and produce them in Canada), and all future developments amounted to more plastic, and a few improvements to safeties. All the mainstream self-loading pistol cartridges that remain in use are from this era except for 9x18 Makarov (unique more to deny captured pistols ammo than effectiveness), .40 S&W (never adopted by a military and rapidly falling out of favor after its main user decided to go back to 9mm), and some rounds intended to defeat body armor that aren’t primarily for pistols anyways.

'''late 1930s-1940s''': At the start of World War II, all of the powers involved, France, England, Germany, and Russia, were armed with bolt action weapons. Over the course of the war, automatic and semi-automatic rifles started to become more common; however, only the Americans completely phased out bolt-action rifles for standard infantry by the time of the war (Marines and Army units in the Pacific Front were stuck with the old stuff for a few months due to the Germany First policy). Submachine guns are now becoming more popular with various armies around the world, making it the staple lightweight automatic weapon for infantry troops, totally redefining urban combat due to the weapon's great effectiveness in close combat. Nazi Germany invents the ''Sturmgewehr 44'', the first widely produced assault rifle (the Fedorov Avtomat was the first to be put into service, introduced in 1915, but production was limited due to costs [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution and uh, well...]). This weapon would later become the template for modern assault rifles used by the world over.

[[image:QBZ-95.jpg|thumb|200px|left|A QBZ-95 Assault Rifle, the current service rifle of the People's Republic of China, note bullpup configuration (the magazine feeds behind the trigger), thus saving space]]

One unsung advance is the production side. Advances in manufacturing phase out final hand-fitting (that the 1911 and M1 Garand predate this is why current production still varies and costs so much). The M1 Carbine, due to extensive efforts by the US military, it was the first firearm to have all parts be completely interchangeable, no matter which factory it was made in.

'''1950s-1990s''': With World War II over, the armies of the world had a chance to study Germany's assault rifle and built their own. The key invention was selective fire, which allowed a single weapon to serve as a traditional rifle or a somewhat long and unwieldy submachine gun. Burst fire was also developed, intended to fire a grouping of rounds to defeat personal body armor but automatically stop before the recoil of fully automatic fire would have a significant impact on aim. The USSR's entry was the AK-47, which was powerful, easy to mass produce, and legendarily tolerant of mistreatment after briefly flirting with the SKS (a semiautomatic carbine fed by stripper clips). On the other side of the world, the US briefly experimented with an automatic version of the M1 known as the M14, before (mostly) getting their shit together and developing the M16, which was expensive, complicated, and notoriously finicky. One thing not to be underestimated is the standardization introduced by NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Gone were incompatible calibers unique to each nation, and in their place were a single pistol caliber (9x19 for NATO, unless you were an American snowflake, and 9x18 for Pact.), a single intermediate caliber (5.56x45 for NATO, 7.62x39 for Pact, later 5.45x39 in certain Pact countries), a single full power rifle cartridge (7.62x51 for NATO, unless you were a French snowflake, and the venerable 7.62x54 for Pact), and heavy machine gun cartridge (.50 BMG for NATO and 12.7×108mm for Pact) for small arms. Even before NATO standardization was officially a thing, many western countries eagerly armed themselves with American surplus M1 Garands and M1 Carbines, which greatly simplified things.

'''2000s''': With the invention of more advanced materials such as plastics and carbon fiber, along with numerous technological advancements of the modern world, firearms are... basically the same they've been for the last fifty years, just usually lighter and with more options. Serious efforts were made to look at new designs like caseless ammo and fused smart grenade bullets, but most went nowhere. The most significant development in firearm technology was the advent of practical ranged tasers; essentially wired dart launchers with high voltage capacitors, they're the first handguns ostensibly intended for less lethal force (occasional heart attacks not withstanding) that weren't a total joke (like pistol caliber tear gas rounds).

'''2010s''': Relatively speaking, guns have changed a lot and a little in the following years. Primarily, there had been emphasis placed on modularity, mobility, and ruggedness as can be seen with Western nations adoption firearms such as HK416 variants or overall improving the current M4 system. Development of practical telescopic and caseless ammo (LSAT program), and ship cannon sized railguns (The Naval Research Laboratory) have been placed, with the former showing fruition into the NGSW program (see 2020s). The main innovation at this time comes from the improvement of optics, machining techniques (such as CNC machining), materials (stronger and lighter polymers as well as overall better metal alloys), and further optimized design. New designer rounds have been developed to compete with conventional military ammunition, however by late 2019 most have fallen into either becoming niche or have lost traction/attention for wider spread use. Thus in 2010s the firearm technology focus was improving and fine tuning current technologies with some developments into more experimental areas.

[[File:LSAT telescopic ammo.png|200px|thumb|right| Further development of practical telescopic ammo. Designed to be provide reduce weight not not compromising muzzle energy. Culminated into the NGSW program]]

On the more individual front, CNC and 3D printing development has improved significantly enough that either personally designed or online sourced designs can be used to produce firearms parts and associated equipment that can be used to quintessentially make home made firearms. Although several nations have tried to curb this onset of what have come to be called ghost guns, this phenomenon is here to stay. On a larger scale production front, CNC firearms manufacturing allows for more precise machining thus superior fit and finish and improved tolerances. 

[[File:Textron Systems, General Dynamics, and SIG Sauer NGSW-R respectively.png|300px|thumb|left| NGSW system prototypes by different companies competing for the potential to become America's new service rifle. The last one is the winner.]]

'''2020s''': With the rising commonality of rifle resistant gear (i.e. body armor and helmets, eg not unheard of for soldiers to survive otherwise direct fatal blows thanks to modern helmets), need for reduction of weight and increased mobility, ability to react to both close and extended range threats (eg M4A1/M27 accurately pushes to 500/600 meters where engagement ranges can exceed 800 meters), and desire to [[Powergamer|overmatch competing militaries]], Western firearms development has begun to focus on new munitions. Namely looking to full power and reduced weight ammunition (be it polymer or reinforced) that can reach out lengthy distance without being excessively heavy or cumbersome. In that regards, the US Army is looking into the NGSW system program, with several contractors competing for the program. Thus far the competition as of 2020 consists of AAI Textron Systems (backed H&K & Winchester), General Dynamics, and SIG Sauer competing for the bid.

Currently the US Military and its branches are looking at 6.8mm NGSW (no XM designation yet), 6.5mm Creedmoor, and .338 Lapua/Norma Magnum to either replace or supplement current ammunition such as 5.56 and 7.62 NATO. The latter most more so because American snipers found themselves outmatched by their European counterparts. Come April 2022 and the Sig Sauer candidate has been declared the winner. While sporting a conventional layout and using standard brass ammunition (with a stainless steel tail to contain the pressure), it’ll likely get the job done and will be issued to infantry, scout, and combat engineer units in the Army while everyone else will keep the M4 until further notice. Or they'll just do another competition to get an actual caseless round to replace everything and have XM7’s be used by line units until then.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAHKS0nVlL4 As of 2022 if you have 3,500 dollars you, yes YOU can buy a working Gauss rifle]. While definitely out of the reach of most armed forces for mass deployment, it took less then 1 human life time to go from the Wright Brothers to the heavy multi-engine bombers of WWII so the technology is coming.