Military Technology: Machine guns and the early naval technology

Jan 16

08:42

2013

Johnny Diaz

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On the battlefield, the newly invented machine gun, a fully automatic mounted or portable firearm, usually designed to fire bullets in quick succession from an ammunition belt or magazine, typically at a rate of several hundred rounds per minute, and repeating rifle, a single barreled rifle containing multiple rounds of ammunition, redefined firepower, the military capability to direct force at an enemy.

It also, in part, explains the high casualty of the American Civil War, also known as the “War between the States, or simply the “Civil War,” a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 between the United States (the “Union” or the “North”) and several Southern slave states that had declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the “Confederacy” of the “South”). The next breakthrough was the conversion of artillery parks from the muzzle loading guns (muzzleloader), or any firearm into which the projectile and usually the propellant charge is loaded from the muzzle of the gun (i.e. from the forward, open end of the gun’s barrel),  to the breech loading guns/weapons, or firearms in which the cartridge or shell is inserted or loaded into a chamber integral to the rear portion of a barrel; in particular, the highly mobile, reconciles, field-gun, the French “Soixante-Quinze,” (“French 75mm field gun”), a quick-firing field artillery piece adopted in March 1898, in the late 19th century.
The development of breech loading had the greatest effect in naval warfare, or the combat in and on seas, oceans, or any other major bodies of water such as large lakes and wide rivers, for the first time since the Middle Ages altering the way weapons are mounted in warships, or ships that are built and primarily intended for combat. Therefore, naval tactics, the collective name for methods of engaging and defeating an enemy ship or fleet in battle at sea during naval warfare, the naval equivalent of military tactics in land, are now divorced from the reliance on sails--the “Age of Sail” refers to the era when sailing ships were an important means of transport--with the invention of the internal combustion engine, or an engine in which the combustion of a fuel (normally a fossil fuel;) occurs with an oxidizer (usually air) in a combustion chamber that is an integral part of the working fluid flow circuit. A further advance in military naval technologies the design of the submarine, a watercraft capable of independent operation underwater, and its weapon, the torpedo, a self-propelled weapon with an explosive warhead, launched above or below the water surface, propelled underwater towards a target, and designed to detonate either on contact with its target or in proximity to it.

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breech loading

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