Wheellocks and Flintlocks

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

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

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.