07-03-2015, 02:47 AM | #41 | |||||||||
Join Date: Nov 2011
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Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
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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. Last edited by Sindri; 07-03-2015 at 02:52 AM. |
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07-03-2015, 05:03 AM | #42 | ||||||||||
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
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Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
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And bringing in digital watches is very much relevant to watches and not to guns. So again where the "more" that you implied existed? Quote:
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? Quote:
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. Quote:
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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) Quote:
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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 |
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07-03-2015, 07:56 AM | #43 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
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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.
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Fred Brackin |
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07-03-2015, 08:30 AM | #44 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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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.
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-- MA Lloyd |
07-03-2015, 09:19 AM | #45 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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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.
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Fred Brackin |
07-03-2015, 09:26 AM | #46 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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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.
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-- MA Lloyd |
07-03-2015, 09:44 AM | #47 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
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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. Quote:
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. |
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07-03-2015, 09:55 AM | #48 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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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.
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Fred Brackin |
07-03-2015, 01:13 PM | #49 | |||||||||||||
Join Date: Nov 2011
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Re: Wheellocks and Flintlocks
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I have done no such thing. Quote:
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. Quote:
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http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/TheSemenovModel/ Helpful? |
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