The first important improvement was the McGregor
bullet. Captain Angus McGregor, a North Carolina
loyalist of Scottish background, had been using an
heirloom "stonebow" (crossbow adapted to throw small
stones or lead bullets) to hunt duck on his estate near
Virconium. It occurred to him that the same force threw
a pointed quarrel much further and more accurately
than a round stone; in 1792 he patented a
"cylindroconic-conic" bullet, a short blunt-headed
round with a hollow pointed head. McGregor had
anticipated the effect of reduced air resistance, but not
the even more important reduction of cross-sectional
diameter in relation to total weight.
Range was increased to 500 yards against individual
man-sized targets, and 1000 against massed
formations; as an added bonus the hollowpoint round
had much greater wounding power than the round ball.
The colonial forces were rapidly converted, since the
only modification necessary was a new type of
bullet-mold. Performance was altered as follows:
Ferguson Rifle (with McGregor cylindrical bullet)
Caliber: .45
Weight: 10 lb.
Range: 500-600 yards effective, 1000 maximum
Rate of Fire: 6-8 rounds per minute
This was the rifle that the Drakian expeditionary
force took north to Egypt in early 1800. Egypt, formally
part of the Ottoman Empire, had been occupied by a
French army of approximately 15,000 in 1798; the force
was originally under the command of Napoleon
Bonaparte, but he had returned to France in early 1800.
At the Battle of the Nile Delta in March of 1800, 6,000
Drakians (mostly Janissary slave-soldiers) faced 9,000
French troops under the command of Jacques Menou in
a flat, sandy area immediately east of the irrigated zone.
The Drakian infantry were deployed in a single-line
formation, flanked by mounted rifles, while the French
attacked in company and battalion columns—relying on
shock action, and preceded by skirmishers. The
Drakians opened volley-fire at 400 yards, firing by
tetrarchies [platoons]. None of the French formations
came closer than 150 yards to the Drakian line, and only
a few of the skirmishers were even able to open fire.
The French columns broke and reformed for the charge
several times, eventually suffering casualties of up 75%;
the crews of the French field-artillery were practically
annihilated before they discovered that the Ferguson
rifles outranged their fieldpieces.
The battle had begun around dawn; by 1000 hours,
the French were in full flight, pursued by the Drakian
mounted infantry. Less than 200 of the French
expeditionary force ever returned to Europe. Drakian
casualties numbered less than 150, of whom only 30
were free citizens. Oddly, this shattering
demonstration of the superiority of the breech-loading
rifle over the muzzle-loading smoothbore had little
impact on the course of the war in Europe. The
Egyptian theater was remote, and little attention was
paid to it; the details were simply not known.
Furthermore, the contending powers in the Napoleonic
Wars were stretched to the limits of their
manufacturing and logistical capabilities, supporting
armies larger than any Europe had known before. The
British equipped some of their specialist light infantry
regiments (the Royal Greenjackets, for example) with
Drakian-made Fergusons; the French, towards the end,
issued the superior brass-cartridge Pauly-type rifles to
their equivalents. In the postwar cutbacks, innovation
became even slower.
The final refinement of the Ferguson rifle was the
adoption of percussion ignition in 1804; a copper cap
containing fulminate of mercury was used. The
inventor—a sporting Anglican clergyman by the name of
Forsythe—had been bothered by the delay between
pulling the trigger and ignition in flintlock weapons,
which made wing-shooting birds difficult. Percussion
caps proved useful in military applications because
they were immune to damp (unlike the priming powder
of flintlocks) and because they were much less likely to
misfire—one in several hundred rounds rather than the
one in twenty typical for flintlocks.
The war faction in the Drakian Legislative Assembly
had succeeded in hanging on to Egypt, despite strong
British efforts to return the territory to Turkey; the
result was war between the British and Ottoman
empires in 1807. Since all available British forces were
engaged in Spain, the Drakians had free rein in the
Mediterranean theater, and seized Cyprus, Crete,
Rhodes, the Ionian Isles, and Tunis. The Peace of
Vienna in 1814 confirmed these transfers, and the
Ottoman Empire renounced its territorial claims in
North Africa in favor of Britain, in return for 1,000,000
British pounds in gold (paid by the Drakians) and a
large loan.
The T-1 (Teillard-Pauly) rifle: .
The next step in Draka small arms resulted from the
convergence of two factors: the campaigns in North
Africa, and the immigration of substantial numbers of
French after the fall of Napoleon. The lowlands of
Tunisia had been overrun and occupied without much
difficulty, and by 1820 they had been divided into
plantations and the native inhabitants enserfed.
However, to the west stretched thousands of kilometers
of the Maghreb: plain, mountain, and desert, inhabited
by several million hardy, warlike Arabs and Berbers.
The North Africans were technically backward but not
to the same degree as the sub-Saharan tribes; they had
a literate class, firearms, horses, some cities, and a
tradition of large-scale organization in states and tribal
confederacies. To conquer and pacify this enormous
area required two generations of hard
campaigning—the Berber mountaineers of Kabylia and
the Rif Atlas were not subdued until the 1850s—and the
outnumbered Draka forces needed every advantage
they could get. The Ferguson rifle was vastly superior
to the native weaponry, but something better was
eagerly, sought.
From 1812-1816 a French inventor, Samuel Jean
Pauly, had worked on the problems of breech-loading
rifles. His solution was a cartridge case with a brass
base that would expand to seal the breech, then
contract when the gas pressure in the barrel fell after
the bullet left the muzzle. This was an almost perfect
solution—the one used for virtually every small arm
from the 1850s on—but rather ahead of its time. In
particular, seamless drawn-brass tubing was expensive
and its quality unreliable. Pauly also invented a
centerfire primer, a percussion cap set into the center
of the rear end of his cartridge.
Pauly lived and died in France, apart from a brief
visit to England to register a patent. However, his work
inspired two disciples; Dreyse, who developed the
Prussian "needle gun," the first breech-loader to
achieve general issue by a European power, and
Francois Teillard (born Lyon, 1772, died Bon Esperance
plantation, Nova Cartago province, 1842).
There had been some French immigration to Drakia
in the 1790s; refugees from the slave uprising in Santo
Domingo (many of whom settled on the sugar coast of
Natealia and northwestern Madagascar, then just being
opened to settlement), and aristocrats dispossessed by
the Revolution. Few of these ever returned to France,
but news of how they had prospered in the new land
did. After the restoration of the Bourbons, there was
another wave of French settlers, this time largely to
Egypt and the newly-opened North African territories,
consisting mainly of Napoleonic veterans and their
families, discontented with a drab peacetime existence
or ruined by the fall of Napoleon's Empire. Along with
them came others drawn by the same stream, among
them Teillard.
Teillard first settled in Diskarapur, in 1816; at that
time it was a rapidly-expanding center of iron and steel
production, and also of machinery and armaments.
Employed as an "overlooker" in a factory
manufacturing Ferguson muskets, he took advantage of
the Ferrous Metal Combine's policy of making facilities
available for after-hours experiments by its technical
staff. (Diskarapur's free population at this time was
only 3,000, and matters were more informal than they
later became.)
Judging from his surviving notes and drawings,
Teillard attacked the problem of improving on the
Ferguson rifle from two angles. The first was to
eliminate the separation between primer and charge
(loading the round and placing the cap on the vent), and
the second was to find a method of breech sealing which
was as good or better than Ferguson's screw-plug.
The solution had the simplicity of genius. Teillard
designed a single-piece cartridge, consisting of three
elements. First was a rather long, pointed bullet. This
was set firmly into a tube of stiffened gauze soaked in
nitrate; the tube was then filled with a dough of
moistened gunpowder, and a percussion cap set in a
cardboard disk was placed over the open rear of the
tube. Carefully dried, the round then contained primer,
propellent, and projectile in one piece, was strong
enough to be handled, and was reasonably
water-resistant, due to the shellac then applied to the
exterior.
The loading and sealing mechanism was equally
simple. A turn-bolt system was used, shaped exactly
like a door-bolt. To load, the bolt was turned up
(unseating a locking lug at the head of the
bolt,immediately behind the chamber) and withdrawn;
the same motion compressed the spring within the bolt
and readied the firing pin. A round was thumbed into
the chamber, and the bolt driven forward and turned
down to lock firmly behind the cartridge. When the
trigger was pulled, the firing pin shot forward and
struck the percussion cap.
This left the problem of sealing the breech against
the escape of gas; experiment proved that a
metal-to-metal seal eroded quickly. Teillard then
thought of Pauly's solution. Individual brass cases were
impractical, but Teillard developed an alternative. A
brass tube was made, open at both ends; midway
between them was a metal disk, completely blocking the
tube except for a hole in the center exactly the size of
the head of the firing pin. One end of the tube was
threaded, and screwed onto the head of the rifle's bolt.
The other (very slightly smaller in diameter than the
inner end of the rifle's chamber) was open. When the
bolt was pushed forward, the open end of the tube
cradled the base of the cartridge. Upon firing, the hot
gases pressed against the inside of the tube, expanding
it to firmly grip the walls of the chamber with a gastight
seal. When the bullet left the muzzle and the pressure
dropped, the elastic brass contracted, the bolt was
turned and withdrawn, and the whole cycle began
again.
Together with careful redesign of the bullet, the
results were as follows:
Teillard-Pauly Rifle (T-1):
Caliber: .45
Weight: 9 lb.
Range: 800-1000 yards effective, 1500 maximum
Rate of Fire: 8-10 rounds per minute
Operation: Turn-bolt with obturator ring
Field trials in 1820 produced strong demands from
the commanders in North Africa for more of the new
rifles. The design was not perfect; the cartridges
required moderately careful handling, very rapid fire
could produce "cook-off," and the machining required
for mass production of the weapon stretched the limits
of available technology. After a time the brass cup
became brittle and inelastic; the tube then had to be
unscrewed (with a special wrench kept in a
compartment beneath the buttplate of the rifle) and
replaced. The advantages were so overwhelming,
however, that by the mid-1820s the Draka armed forces
were completely reeqnipped with the new weapon.
Teillard himself was granted a commendation,
50,000 aurics prize-money, and a 4,000-acre plantation
in the Cap Bon area of Tunisia. After a further
productive decade (during which he developed the
world's first practical revolver and was instrumental in
organizing the Diskarapur Technological Institute), he
retired to his estate to breed horses and experiment
with viticulture. (1) After the adoption of the
Teillard-Pauly rifle, only minor improvements were
made for the next thirty years. The next breakthrough
was the development in the 1840s of techniques for
cheap mass-production of seamless brass tubing; this
was the result of improvements in automotive steam
engines, but had a military application. West and
Central Africa were being conquered, and the hot wet
climate was having unfortunate effects