Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
 

Yes. It's not a feature of "watches" it's a feature of "clockwork" and clockwork covers other things, like wheellocks.

I have never attempted to, and need not do so.

It's not meaningless at all. They are derived from clockwork technology, also require skilled workers to produce and allow more room for the crafter to showcase his technical skill than a flintlock does.

Uh, no. No one has come up with something that fits within the granularity of the game. Despite not needing any technical advantages at all faster ignition is totally the sort of thing people will point to as making a technology the correct choice for discerning users who are willing to spare the expense if there aren't other things that make it unsuitable.

If wheellocks don't have a significant downside for the wealthy all that is necessary for their continued presence is for it to be plausible for them to have grown attached to them given the right circumstances.

No it doesn't. It just needs to allow people to distinguish between items with varying reputation for quality.

There never was a point to begin with. The status of exterior decorations is completely irrelevant because it doesn't interact with the mechanism, nor would being paramount mean that gaucheness isn't a thing if people haven't yet started replacing random things with solid gold.

Reasons have been produced. You apparently have problems with them and I'm responding to your comments regarding them. Please don't take that to mean that the subject of the thread is "can wheellocks coexist with flintlocks and if so, how". The subject at the start was finding small details to differentiate more the various weapons in the wheellocks and flintlocks category and I remain interested in hearing different perspectives on that. I'm also interested in the ideas being generated regarding other alternate lock technologies.

I'm not envisioning a society with a particular obsession for clockwork. It's just a more difficult mechanism to make.

Your post was talking about proportionality. However proportionality doesn't matter in this context. It isn't how people make decisions in terms of status items.

Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
 

But clockwork is broad enough category that different things within it are assessed by different metrics.

And bringing in digital watches is very much relevant to watches and not to guns.



So again where the "more" that you implied existed?


So again as above show where that extra craft actually manifests in increased functionality. Otherwise you just have a complex difficult thing that adds no benefit compared to the simpler thing. to go back to my original point, complexity of design is not a inherent good thing if it doesn't come with anything in return.

So again where is the increased functionality given by the clockwork wheel lock?


So same point again, it's matter of functionality, so where is the improved functionality of wheellocks.

Remember clockwork got easier to make, the skills became more widespread as time went on, so the barriers to wheellocks lowered, so if they also came with a increase in functionality why did we not see their continued use?

Flintlocks came in after wheellocks and during the period when wheellocks would have been getting easier to produce.



I agree, but since that didn't happen we can either assume that there was either some downside, or those circumstances didn't occur



yes but the reputation has to be established and maintained by being their. Remember we're talking about a very small market here. And ultimately we get back to the same point, reliability is aspect fo functionality, again where is the advantage that wheel locks enjoy over flint locks.



That only true if we accept you inherent point that status was irrevocably linked to the internal mechanisms, and you have not demonstrated that is the case. We know decoration was however a key component of an objects status. Even if we did accept you assertion that still wouldn't make it either or, but decoration and mechanism

hate to break it to you but when ever and where ever they could they did



Sorry so far you reason seem to be limited to "because clockwork" and vague allusions to things below GURPS level granularity without actually going into much detail.

We've discussed clockwork but you seem unwilling to address the point about clock work in the different contexts it was used in (watches vs guns)



OK, it's just that by itself is not reason for increased status (I mean it can be part of it, but it normally comes with other factors, and is context specific)

No teh point you were making was: "wheel locks were more expensive than flint locks (being clock work), more expensive things are higher status, ergo wheel locks were higher status than flint locks."

My point was: "but given the all the extra costs of the decoration on top of each, the actually difference in price due to the mechanism is minuscule in comparison to the actual overall cost of the gun. So ergo any increases in status directly derived from different costs of the underlying mechanism in equally minuscule."

So inherent cost not relevant, so we come back to functionality

Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
 

Where did faster ignition come in? There's no increase in ignition speed until you get to percussion caps.

I do think wheel-locks have significant disadvantages and it is not at all plausible that they would remain in production for long after flintlocks became available,

Note that if I was a player in this game I might not argue with you more than once about it not making sense but I'd never believe it was true.

Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
 

Reality. All firearms actions have a delay between pulling the trigger and igniting the propellant, and since the invention of ultra-highspeed photography (and more recently microsecond electronic timers) there have gun enthusiasts who measure it. Except maybe for some kinds of cannon fuses it's never more than a few hundredths of a second, i.e. too short for humans to detect the differences, but that doesn't stop some of those enthusiasts from claiming one or the other action is better because its shorter, or more uniform, or more dependent on how you pull the trigger, or whatever.

Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
 

I'd have called that "human belief" instead if reality.

There's actually an almost perceptible delay between the flash in the pan and the smoke coming out of the barrel. It's quite obvious on high speed film. It also goes away when percussion caps come in. It also gets you another 50 feet per second without making any other changes.

However, since all of the early lock types are identical from the pan to the barrel there's no speed difference between them.

Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
 

Sure there is. Time for a hammer to fall certainly can differ from time until the wheel is fast enough to throw sparks.

Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
 

I misspoke (err, miswrote) when I wrote "ratchet." You wouldn't need anything nearly so advanced - a simple catch as is used to hold a crossbow string or similar should be sufficient. The trick would be to have it in the correct location (note that the piston coming back out isn't in and of itself a serious concern - rather, there's the risk of it coming back out with sufficient force that it breaks free, which will cause you to vent pressure rather than propelling your bullet).

I've been doing a bit of research on fire pistons. First off, you can determine what temperature (in Celsius, assuming the ambient temperature is around 27 degrees - note it doesn't change too much for lower starting temperatures) the tender inside will reach based on the equation T=300*(Li/Lf)^(2/5)-273, where T is the temperature, Li is the initial length of the cylinder of air in the piston and Lf is the final length of the cylinder of air in the piston. I can't find the blasted "Semenov equation"/relationship that nearly every paper references, but apparently autoignition temperature (that is, the temperature at which an object ignites without the presence of an open flame/spark) actually decreases as pressure increases.

Black powder has an autoignition temperature between 200C and 464C. Nitrocellulose apparently has an autoignition temperature around 220C, as does paper (putting a scrap of paper in with your black powder shouldn't be too difficult, so we'll assume 220C is the autoignition temperature of both propellants). So, 220=300*(Li/Lf)^(2/5)-273, or Li/Lf=3.5 (so we need around 70% compression). That's at 27C (80F) - 0C (32F) is going to be Li/Lf=4.4 (~78% compression). This ignores (because, as noted, I couldn't find the blasted equation) the effect of pressure on autoignition - you could probably get away with much less compression.

Regardless, you apparently only need compression of around 80% (5:1), while traditional fire pistons apparently tend to have a compression of around 96% (25:1), yet can be started with a simple slap. It seems that getting a spark out of flint and steel requires comparable force, and detonating mercury fulminate probably isn't far off, so I'd imagine the same springs that store enough force for flintlocks to work would suffice in detonating a fire piston powered firearm.

Indeed. Probably the biggest thing that prevented this in our history was that there was only about a 40 year window between the wheellock and the snaplock being produced. That's really not enough time for wheellocks to become ingrained as a "noble's weapon." If there were 100 or more years between the two, you might have ended up with wheellocks gaining such status.

There's also the fact that apparently the wheel produced sparks in much closer proximity to the pan than the hammer did - no need to wait for them to fall before the powder gets ignited. It's not really enough to be tactically significant, however.

Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
 

The "wheel" on a wheel-lock only "turns" 90 degrees. It's basically the same distance as a flintlock's arm.

Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
 

I disagree. I believe the metrics are the same.

I should hope so! I mentioned them in context to watches.

I have done no such thing.

All it needs to do is give aesthetic pleasure. Any actual practical gains would be very small but also fundamentally irrelevant.

Nor is it necessary for wheellocks to have technical advantages to persist. They must merely have social advantages and not have technical disadvantages their users care about.

The circumstances didn't occur! Obviously, if I wanted wheellocks to persist I would be doing things like tweaking relative dates of introduction and other factors. It's simply bizarre that you'd read "the right circumstances" as our circumstances.

It's trivial to postulate that at least one company can manage to maintain quality standards enough for people to be able to signal their mechanisms quality externally.

Good thing I haven't attempted to do so, because trying that would be stupid. All that is necessary is for it to be plausible that the status of an item is associated with it's internal mechanism's quality, materials and difficulty to manufacture.

It seems my comment regarding slapping gold on things was appropriate then, because I would characterize what they did as decorating with gold not "yeah that thing? it's gold now".

Then I encourage you to reread the thread, because you've clearly missed things.

All it needs to be is another factor.

More proportionality.

At the beginning.

Which I have agreed with. High Malf makes a weapon unsuitable, Lower HT could work but makes things very difficult. Thus "if". What's being objected to here is that there are any pressures that could push wheellocks to persist, not that the net pressure is for them to stop being produced.

Is this

http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/TheSemenovModel/

Helpful?