The fastest fixed guns on a seventeenth- (or eighteenth-)century warship were the swivel guns. There were breechloaders with removable chambers, and by having several prepped chambers handy, one could get off several shots quickly-perhaps one a minute, at least until the preps were used up. (Konstam 40). They were short range weapons, intended for anti-personnel use, and I imagine that sustained rapid fire wasn't necessary; either the enemy boarding action was fended off, or it wasn't.
Shells cannot be fired as fast as shot because the fuses have to be prepared and adjusted; percussion fuses are less trouble than time fuses. (Owen 338).
For eighteenth-century field artillery (3 -12 pounders), a good rate of fire for an eight-man crew was considered to be two aimed shots per minute (Peterson 119), and this could be doubled by eliminating steps (such as sponging the bore). dangerous, but not as much getting overrun by the enemy. Speed was affected by the weight of the piece; a 12-pounder might only get off one round a minute. (Wise 31).
The rate of fire at sea was lower. (Smaller gun crews? Ship movement?) In 1738, the 70-gun Hampton Court "fire 400 rounds in twenty-five minutes which suggests that each gun fired about one round every two minutes." (Rodger 540). The USS Constitution could fire its 24-pounders, which had a twelve-man crew, one round every three minutes. (Mehl 33).
Other published estimates include one round every 3–5 minutes for the early modern era (Volo 256); three broadsides in five minutes (Hill 55); at best one round a minute for the Napoleonic British navy (Miller 58); for best crews under perfect conditions, one round every four or five minutes in 1660 and one a minute in 1756 (Ireland 48).
Gunlocks improved rate of fire; Collingwood's flagship Dreadnought "could fire her first three broadsides in three and a half minutes." (Rodger 540). Such a firing rate could not be sustained; the gunners would tire; there would be casualties; smoke would slow down the aiming process.
Note that the British and American crews of the Napoleonic period typically got off 1.5–3 times as many shots as a French or Spanish opponent. (Toll 7). The 74-gun Guerriere at Minorca (1756) fired 659 rounds in 3.5 hours (5.5 rounds/hour), and another French ship averaged 6 rounds/hour at the Saintes; either the crews were less handy or the French were deliberately taking their time. (Rodger 540).
The heavy rifled breechloaders of HMS Warrior (1861) were a bit faster than the old smoothbore carriage guns, firing perhaps once a minute. On the other hand, the rifled muzzle loaders were very slow. To reload, the barrels had to be fully depressed and sometimes they had to be traversed to the fore or aft position, too. That gave them a rate of fire of just one shot every three minutes. When breechloaders were reintroduced, those with the full screw closure only improved the situation a little, to once every two minutes. (Hill 55).
The elevating screw increases accuracy but not necessarily speed. In tests at Shoeburyness, a 40-pdr rifled breechloader fired 10 rounds in 7.5 minutes using the screw, and in just 6 minutes with the wedge. (Owen 337).
In the ACW, the big guns were slow. With the 15-inch Dahlgren, the average time between shots was 6 minutes; depending on conditions, it might take 3 -10 minutes to fire again. On the other hand, a long 32-pdr or 9-inch shell gun might be fired once every forty seconds. (Canfield).
Late-nineteenth-century breechloading deck guns, with pivot mounts, appeared to have firing rates of 10 rounds/minute. (Mehl 81, 85).
Even with the same model of gun, rates of fire will differ from ship to ship. In 1902, with the Mark VII 6-inch quick-fire, nine British warships exhibited prize firing rates that ranged from 4.17-7.38 rounds/minute. With heavier guns the range was 0.62 -1.25. (Brassey 38).
Rate of fire can be limited by barrel overheating. If the barrel becomes too hot, there are variety of potential problems, including increased erosion (thus loss of accuracy over the long term) and self-ignition of propellant. Barrel liquid-cooling systems have been used with some rapid-fire twentieth-century naval guns. (Wu).
In 1820s and 1830s the French experimented with canon foudre (drum cannon), "equipped with a carousel of multiple powder chambers that could be pre-loaded." It was not a success; the seal between the chamber and the barrel was inadequate. (Mehl 36).
The logical solution was to use multiple barrels (i.e., a volley gun), rather than multiple chambers, as on the Swedish Nordenfelt 25 mm machine cannon (1877). It had a rate of fire of 120 rounds/minute, and an effective range of 1500 meters. This was a semi-automatic, gravity-fed weapon. (62).
On the Nordenfelt, the four barrels were fixed, horizontally parallel. Another approach was the Hotchkiss system revolving cannon; an 1896 Russian model fired 80 rounds/minute to 2700 meters. (63). Another source claimed that 12 aimed shots/minute at 4000 yards was possible. (Ireland1997, 42).
In the canonical Baltic War, the USE army had Requa-style volley guns. The USE navy wanted them for its timberclads, for suppressing cavalry raids on river shipping, but the army was given priority. (And fortunately, the air force conceded that it was "at least two generation of aircraft away from mounting machine guns.) (1634: TBW, Chap. 5). Ultimately, the USE navy went with a pivot-mounted Reffye-style mitrailleuse, having twenty.50 caliber barrels. Unlike the volley guns, these were fired in succession; maximum rate of fire was 60 aimed or 100 unaimed shots per minute. It had removable breechblocks and was loaded twenty rounds at a time. (1634: TBW, Chap. 41).
Grantville Firearms Roundtable, "How to build a Machine gun in 1634 with available technology: Two alternate views" (Grantville Gazette 4) may be of interest.
Whether at the breech or the muzzle, manual loading was the norm for big guns until the nineteenth century. When turrets were equipped with steam power for traversing the gun, thought was given to whether this same power could expedite the loading process. On Eads' USS Winnebago, steam power was used to lower the gun platform to a (safe) loading position (cityofart.net), but it didn't actually load the projectiles.
On the USS Indiana (BB1, 1895), the 13-inch gun turrets were semi-automatically loaded. They were equipped with hydraulically-powered ammunition hoists, the hoisted car having separate compartments for the powder and the projectile. However, in the magazine, these compartments were loaded by hand. A hydraulic rammer pushed the projectile into the gun breech. It's not clear to me how the projectile got from the hoist car to the rammer. (Fullam 187). A somewhat similar hatch loading system was used on the 16-inch rifled muzzle loaders of the HMS Inflexible (1895), but of course it communicated with the muzzle. (Ellacott 58).
In canon, Simpson's ironclads use salvaged mine hydraulics to open and close the gunports and perhaps operate the blowers that suck out the smoke, but it appears that the shell and powder hoists are operated manually. (1634: TBW Chap. 38).
This article continues in Part 2, "Ready, Aim, Fire!"
Notes From The Buffer Zone: Standing On The Shoulders of Giants
Written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
I’m not sure what caused it: Maybe watching the news coming out of NASA about the Mars Rover. Maybe downloading too many Star Trek alert tones for my phone. Maybe the deep and somewhat excessive excitement I felt when I discovered some Stargate episodes that I missed.
I know something triggered it in combination with some historical fiction I’m planning. The key to historical fiction is to always make certain that your character is of her time. Maybe she doesn’t speak Chaucerian English, even though she lived in Chaucer’s time, but she has the right attitudes-attitudes she wouldn’t hold at any other time.
I know I am a child of my time. I tell my husband almost weekly that I was born into the 20th century for a reason. and that reason is really a handful of reasons, all intertwined-penicillin, indoor plumbing, and electricity. All those time travel romances in which the heroine happily decides to remain in 17th century Scotland? Well, either those heroines are crazy, the authors don’t know history, or (most likely) the books don’t speak to me.
What speaks to me-what has always spoken to me-is science fiction.
And the realization I had this past fall is that the reason I’m a science fiction writer is because I was born in the latter half of the 20th century.
I love mystery. I love romance. I love fantasy. Heck, I love good old complex family dramas without an ounce of adventure in them. I love great writing, great characters, great settings.
But I get truly passionate about science fiction, and that’s almost all science fiction.
Before I was old enough to separate reality from fiction (and yes, there is a difference, even to fiction writers), I saw science mixed with science fiction. My parents’ black-and-white television set brought me The Jetsons, Lost in Space, and good old Walter Cronkite interrupting this broadcast to let me know that mankind had orbited the Earth, had left Earth’s orbit, had died on the launch pad, had orbited the Moon.
Every kid in my school wanted to be an astronaut-at least until we heard about the amount of exercise those poor people went through-and all the girls had crushes on either Kirk or Spock. We almost came to blows at times, trying to decide which one we wanted to spend the rest of our lives with: the brainy one or the brawny one. Me, I rather prefer brains and passion to brains and bloodless, so I’ve always preferred Kirk.
Or maybe I just imprinted on all of those astronauts. It takes one supersized pair to climb into an Apollo capsule on top of a gigantic Roman candle, and let an explosion propel you out of Earth’s orbit.
How, after that, could anything I imagine even compare?
The first “book” I ever wrote was a typical girl-girl thing, featuring a pony. The second one had a car, I think, and the third-well, in the third, Captain Kirk goes back in time, lands in Superior, Wisconsin, and saves me from the drudgery that was my life. Romance novel meet Star Trek novel, twelve-year-old girl style. (We won’t discuss the Partridge Family gothic novel that followed.)
My friend Toni Rich and I spent most of our English class in our eighth grade year writing one of those back-and-forth novels-she’d write two pages, then I’d write two pages-and from what I remember about it (which isn’t much besides the colored paper), it was some space adventure thing with lots of hunky astronauts and big hairy monsters Threatening The Entire Universe! Yes, there were lots of exclamation points as well, and cliffhangers meant to stump the co-writer, not added for any logical reasons of their own.
But what if I had been born fifty years earlier? Would I have written so much science fiction? Or would I have written cozy mysteries after losing myself in the work of Agatha Christie? Would I write Gold Rush adventures because I loved Jack London? (I still do, by the way.) Would everything have snow and that horrible quest to build a fire?
Or would I have imprinted on the works of Herbert George Wells? Would I look to Mars and see possible invaders? Or would I rip off Jules Verne and writing diving stories set in the deep blue sea?
H.G. Wells makes me wonder if science fiction was just in the air. After all, he was born roughly 100 years before I was, and he became the prototypical science fiction writer. If a modern sf writer wants to do anything, she’ll have to climb on the shoulders of Wells to do it. His work examines both the possibilities of science and the failures of it, the politicization of science and how deeply personal it can be.
But he wasn’t the first with those ideas either. One of the firsts was a woman, Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein is a tale of science gone horribly, horribly wrong. (Metaphorically, it’s a fear-of-childbirth story, or maybe (more accurately) a fear-of-your-own-child story, but we’ll ignore that for the moment.) She influenced entire generations as well, but in a different way. Perhaps her influence was more on the horror side of the equation because her monster is so memorable or perhaps because science wasn’t in the air in the decades after her novel like it was in the late 19th century and all of the 20th.
Everything was about science when I grew up. Everything. From scientifically designed food (the astronauts drink Tang! You should too!) to scientifically enhanced clothing, we couldn’t escape science if we tried.
And, since I’m dyslexic and absolutely unable to write down the correct answer to any equation (even if I know it), I am not very good at practicing science. I would have been a dismal failure as an astronaut. I couldn’t have even started the training, let alone get to that scary exercise program.
But I’m fantastic at making things up. I can imagine strange new worlds and new lives and new civilizations. My imagination can boldly go where Kris herself has never gone before-and will not go ever.
Sometimes I think it a small consolation that I can write science fiction instead of live an adventurous lifestyle. Then I watch documentaries on what the astronauts went through or even watch someone else’s imagined journey (Howard’s trip to the space station on The Big Bang Theory comes to mind), and I realize that I am hopelessly bookish, not all that adventurous outside of my office, and scared to death of Roman candles.
So would I have written science fiction if I’d been born in a different century? Who knows? If I’d been born much earlier, I’d have spent a lot of energy just trying to convince someone I was a person, not the property of the men in my life, that I had a brain and a purpose other than child-bearing. So I’ve had that luxury as well.
The luxury of respect, of education, of science, and of damn good entertainment.
Yes, I stand on the shoulders of giants. And those giants are living breathing people, with real lives and real fears. Sometimes those living breathing people wrote science fiction.
But many of them lived it-and shared the adventure with the rest of us.
And for that, I’m profoundly grateful.
Guardian
Rebecca Birch
Jin hugged the wall on the edge of an alleyway. Loud music and conversation filtered down from the OldTown night market two blocks away, but nothing moved nearby.
The ancient coin Auntie Bai Wei had given her hung on a thin leather cord around Jin's neck. It pulsed with a steady throb that felt as if it should be audible, but she knew from experience that she alone could sense it.
Jin walked this path every day on her way to the cannery where she worked, when it was a bustle of activity. But by night, the darkness pressed heavily on her. Though not a soul broke the stillness, it felt like someone was watching. A tingling sensation spread between Jin's shoulder blades. Yao had told her that when the bullies chased him that morning, a strange man in a dark suit-unheard of on this side of the river-had watched it all with predatory eyes. It had upset him even more than being thrown in the refuse bin, again.
Knowing her deceased mother's spirit wouldn't approve of her illicit ventures into thievery, Jin had ignored the coin's pull for three days but Yao's fear and the fact that she couldn't protect him during working hours had driven her out into the night. She needed the yuan that Auntie would pay for the trinket the coin had chosen, and she needed it now, before registration for the tech school on the other side of the river closed.
She inched forward, crouched low. A solitary electric light burned inside the jeweler's shop, back beyond the showroom. Its soft glow caught on the figurine that drew the coin's attention. A white jade lion, shot through with deep, blood-touched red inclusions in its mane and paws. One paw stretched forward, its claws bared, and its jaw gaped wide in a roar. It was a rare piece of stone and a rare craftsman who pulled the beast from its depths. Jin would be sorry to sell it. Undoubtedly, its owner would be sorry when he found it missing.
Don't think about it. She drove away the image of the jeweler, and his smiling eyes behind their wire-rimmed spectacles, when he waved to her every day. Would he smile tomorrow? Would she smile back, as if nothing had happened?
Metal grates guarded the door and windows. She turned the corner and spied a window high on the wall, just within her reach if she jumped, open a crack. It had been unseasonably warm. Had the jeweler opened it for some ventilation and forgotten to shut it again, since it was so far into October that open windows should be a thing of
the past?
No matter. It made her work easier. No need to pull out her makeshift lock pick, carved out of an old knife, secreted in a breast pocket.
She backed across the space between that building and the next, then sprinted forward and launched herself up, her fingers catching on the bricks at the window's base. With a tug, she pulled the window open wide, then walked her feet up the wall and slithered through head-first. The floor was a long way down, but she kept one hand on the window-ledge and twisted her body until she hung down the wall, then dropped. Her knees bent, absorbing the impact, and minimizing any sound.
Jin froze for a moment, listening. The jeweler lived above his shop. She couldn't risk being caught. Yao would be sent straight back into the Orphan Care Authority dormitories and the predations of his peers. At twelve years old, he was four years her junior, and she'd only recently earned enough to take him under her guardianship in a ramshackle apartment where they subsisted on O. C. A. nutrition bars. It wasn't much, but at least she could begin fulfilling her promise to her mother to watch over him and give him his best chance to make something of his life.
After a silent count to a hundred, Jin decided it was safe to move on. She had dropped into the jeweler's workshop. The worktable sat in the center of the room, littered with tools and coils of silver and gold wire. Jin padded past, guided by the light in the hallway, then slipped into the showroom.
A spirit-bell hung over the entryway, but Jin resisted the urge to ring it, despite the intensifying feeling that she was being watched. Spirits weren't going to turn her over to the police. People would. Besides, it was probably nothing more than her own guilty conscience. Even now she could hear her mother's ghostly admonishment. Find another way. I'm ashamed to see my daughter is a thief.
"I'm sorry, Mother," she whispered, hardly more than an exhale. "There isn't another way."
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