Quote:
Aarondhgraham wrote:
There was this old movie,,,
The Crimson Pirate Starring Burt Lancaster.
In it's last battle scene,,,They had affixed a bunch of flintlock rifles onto a rotating wagon wheel thingie. As the wheel was turned each rifle went off when it hit the top. Even as a young kid I remember thinking,,, Could this actually work?
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Hi Aarond, glad to see you here at this thread.
I also liked that movie Aarond. It had some neat inventions shown in it. In addition to the rapid fire rotating flintlock rifles in it, it also had a David Bushnell
type of "turtle" (revolutionary war submarine) in it at the very end of the movie.
I can't remember exactly how they had those flintlock rifles configured on the wagon wheel in the movie and whether they were situated in a circle like a Gatling gun or if they were rotated upwards in banks like in one of Leonardo Da Vinci's designs....but the screenwriters were no doubt inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci's "machine gun" designs of banks of rotating barrels. Or perhaps the screenwriters were inspired by Ezra Ripley's early precusor to the rotating barrels Gatling gun, (The Ripley Gun) only using period to the movie flintlock actions instead of percussion caps. As you also considered, I believe they could have actually worked.
Quote from below pic.....
"Da Vinci designed this machine gun in which there are eleven barrels in each tier. When one tier is fired, another tier is loaded, and a third one cools. This weapon shows Leonardo's attempt to constantly create greater fire power."
More pics of Da Vinci's fan type volley fire guns and rotating banks of barrels "machine guns" here.....
http://www.google.com/search?q=Da+Vi...w=1269&bih=679
And check out this boat mounted rotating cannon turret concept of Da Vinci's conceived centuries before the first successful rotating turret of the civil war Union Monitor.
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