GIRARDONI

Why didn't air rifles like the Girardoni become more commonplace? They sound op as frick.

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    very complicated and expensive

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Gunpowder stores much more energy per gram and per cubic inch than compressed air does.

      Also

      Too expensive and clumsy, also armies were cheaper, steel ram rods and proper uniforms were considered extravagant at the time

      They were expensive and it required something like 1000 pumps of air to refill so you couldn't do shit once the 20 rounds you had were out

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Depends, if you compress air to 500 psi it's going to have more kick than gunpowder.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Absolute nonsense.
          Modern high end airguns operate at about 3000 psi, roughly.
          Meanwhile modern cartridges generate chamber pressures of 30-50,000 psi.

          According to https://cair.fandom.com/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage#Technical_boundaries
          the highest energy density people can get from compressed air tank storage is 300 kJ/kg. For comparison, old-school black powder is 3 MJ/kg, and modern smokeless goes up to 11 MJ/kg. Compressed air has shit energy density compared to gunpowder.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            What about flywheels?
            Could a flywheel powered weapon work?

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Yeah, you can store a ton of energy in a flywheel, but that's better suited to electromagnetic guns because of the process of turning the flywheel's energy into a moving bullet. Spin a giant magnetic wheel to store energy, dump it into a railgun, coilgun, etc.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >Could a flywheel powered weapon work?
              flywheel is a weapon

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Even if that was true, pneumatics are pretty delicate

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Too expensive and clumsy, also armies were cheaper, steel ram rods and proper uniforms were considered extravagant at the time

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They were expensive and it required something like 1000 pumps of air to refill so you couldn't do shit once the 20 rounds you had were out

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They're not as powerful as you probably think.
    Also, that kind of airgun--PCP aka "pre charged pneumatic" are a big deal these days. Airforce Texan, FX Impact, Edgun Leshiy2, etc, etc.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Also, that kind of airgun--PCP aka "pre charged pneumatic" are a big deal these days. Airforce Texan, FX Impact, Edgun Leshiy2, etc, etc.
      Can you elaborate? Why if all the other posters dismiss the design?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        You can get a modern airgun that's almost as good as a 22lr at full charge, in most places they're sold in walmarts and normal sporting goods stores. People use them for hunting.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Because it is still inferior to a firearm. Big bore airguns are used in places where firearms are restricted or by people who want a quiet shooting experience without shelling out money for a supressor

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Can you elaborate?
        I gave you the names of the guns, you can look up their specifications. Basically:
        Texan is as powerful as a 9mm pistol, but uses a frickload of air. Single Shot.
        FX Impact, depending on settings, can duplicate .22LR, or do slightly better in larger calibers, but is still weaker than most pistol rounds. It is a bolt-action repeater.
        The Leshiy2 is an 8-shot semiautomatic but it is weaker than the Impact.
        There are tons of videos of all of these up on YT if you want to see what they are capable of.

        >Why if all the other posters dismiss the design?
        Most of /k/ assumes that the only purpose of a gun is fighting a wa or looking cool in a video game. PCP airguns are indeed terrible for that. But they are commonly used for target shooting, pest control, hunting, and so on.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Can you elaborate? Why if all the other posters dismiss the design?

        Read Lewis and Clark's diaries. The guns were a constant, massive pain in the ass they used mostly for small game and impressing random local Poo-bahs. The one wartime use of them went poorly because of maintenance and endurance issues.
        Regular old reservoir, pre-charged airguns are still used, but for anything besides fricking around they're completely obsoleted by cartridge guns.

        here
        I didn't dismiss PCPs, I said they were completely obsolete, all other things being equal. The only real reasons they see use is
        A) People like pushing engineering envelopes for shits and giggles
        B) they're unregulated in the US and can still get performance equivalent to an actual firearm (for a few shots, anyway)
        C) They're already quiet, and suppressible out of the box without having to jump through the ATF's hoops
        D) Per-shot they're a lot cheaper than dealing with ammo, and storage is much, much less of an issue. Overall price is a bit of a wash -- you can get a .22-equivalent rifle and a compressor for around 2-3 times the price of a "real" .22 because the latter are so cheap to make, while the bigger and more effective stuff is priced more like a decent hunting rifle.

        So if all you need is a very quiet gun that you put a few rounds through at a time, and you already have a compressor, a PCP is fine. They're great for urban varmint control and plinking in a backyard shooting gallery. If you want to do stuff like multi-day hunting trips or spend an hour or two on the range, they're not nearly as much fun. Likewise, in countries where suppressors are unregulated (and airguns are regulated nearly as harshly as smokeless guns) a huge chunk of their US niche disappears.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          You fricking nailed it. I love my airguns for backyard plinking and target practice which it would never be safe to do with a firearm in a suburban area, and they're so quiet I can do it without bothering the neighbours.

          Plus they're good for pest control (birds, rats etc) out to 50m, but I don't do that as there are so many cats there's no wildlife in my area besides crows.

          For any other purpose? A real rifle is better.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >D) Per-shot they're a lot cheaper than dealing with ammo, and storage is much, much less of an issue.
          I love airguns, but this one isn't always true. .177 pellets absolutely are cheap. But once you get to .22's they aren't so cheap anymore. Most .22 cal pellets are around 5 or 6 cents each. .30 cal pellets are about 15 cents each. So are the "slug" style pellets in .22 cal. The big ones used by the Texan in .45 or .50 cal are $1-2 each.
          For comparison. .22LR starts at 4.7 cents per round on Ammoseek. A premium brand like CCI starts at 6 cents each. Brass case 9mm is 16 cents a pop.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >But once you get to .22's they aren't so cheap anymore. Most .22 cal pellets are around 5 or 6 cents each.
            There are plenty of options for .22 pellets that cost about what .177 pellets do. Do you also think that gun owners only use premium hunting ammunition at all times even when they're just shooting targets at the range? Big bore PCP guns do lack in cheap ammo for practice though unless you're casting it yourself.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >There are plenty of options for .22 pellets that cost about what .177 pellets do.
              Like what?

              >Do you also think that
              Nope. I picked the average shit from Pyramid Air. I specifically ignored the handful of low outliers (i.e Crosman at about .025 each) as well as many premium brands like Polymags, Hornets, slugs, the extra-extra heavy ones, etc.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >I specifically ignored the more cost effective options that people concerned with cost would reach for
                Frick off moron.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Read Lewis and Clark's diaries. The guns were a constant, massive pain in the ass they used mostly for small game and impressing random local Poo-bahs. The one wartime use of them went poorly because of maintenance and endurance issues.
    Regular old reservoir, pre-charged airguns are still used, but for anything besides fricking around they're completely obsoleted by cartridge guns.

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Because it's much easier to frick up than a flintlock musket and the maintenance is greater. The seals are leather and very easy to ruin. When your soldiers are illiterate morons with hookworm, you need to keep the gun as simple as possible. Also, your soldiers might have familiarity with muskets from home use, whereas nobody would be familiar with an air rifle.
    Also it was more costly than a musket.
    Later the same wide improvements in technology that would have made air rifles cheaper, better, and easier to maintain also made firearms better.

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Too costly to manufacture and maintain.

    Also you're just better off going longbow

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    IIRC you needed to bring a giant wagon with a bunch of shit on it for maintenance and filling it with air if you didn't want to just manually pump it a gorillion times

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >They sound op as frick.
    They aren't. They managed to construct a katana like mythos around them that isn't even achievable with modern PCP guns unless you're using an air tank too large to be mounted on the gun. In reality, only the first 10 shots are as powerful as .22lr with the next 20 quickly dropping off. Muzzle loaders at the time were cheaper and could easily top them for effective range.

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It seems like the entire period from 1800 to 1950 was full of superior guns that nobody had the imagination or ambition to actually issue until they had been around for decades. Probably something to do with generals being old men etc.

    The fricking Garand being mass produced seemed to make people go "WHAT IS THIS SPACE GUN FROM THE FUTURE"

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Hindsight is 20/20. It's easy to look back and chart out the perfect course of adoption when you already know how things turn out. When you're actually living in an era of rapid innovation betting on the wrong horse can have massive long-term effects so caution and conservative thinking is warranted. It's easy to bring up the Garand as an example while overlooking the twenty years of development it went through, or that the USA had deficiencies in development, procurement, and doctrine for light machine guns, tanks, and torpedoes during the same time period.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >It seems like the entire period from 1800 to 1950 was full of superior guns that nobody had the imagination or ambition to actually issue until they had been around for decades.
      Not quite to the extent that most people feel. All those faster firing guns that are more inline with what people want today had massive disadvantages when it comes to effective range, during a time when volley fire by massed infantry kept the enemy from just rolling up real close with artillery or cavalry. Even after magazine fed bolt action rifles and smokeless powder cartridges had been adopted, there were wars like the Boer War and the Spanish American War that had battles where the maximum effective range of the average infantryman's rifle came into play, which caused the US to drop the Krag for the 1903 Springfield and the British to try dropping the Lee Enfield for the P13 Enfield in .276 Enfield (although the start of WWI stopped them from going through with that).

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >why aren't they common?
    It's taken almost 250 years since the Girardoni but they're becoming common. PCP air rifles are getting stupid cheap and manufactured in larger numbers, not to mention being massively improved, they just have to become more common, which is happening rapidly.

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Shit like the Seneca dragon claw exists

  13. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    [...]

    >Austria was fabulously wealth and splashed out on its military

    Wat? Mein neger, Habsburgs were notoriously broke and even in periods when their treasury was balanced they cut corners in military spending wherever they could. For example Franz Josef for autistic reasons ordered that miitary budget had to be allocated the same fixed amount of money for decades, despite inflation and improvements in artillery and small arms that made weapons and equipment significantly more expensive. Shit like junior officers ubnable to get married befor 40 due to poverty or soldiers getting leaves from garrisons to earn their living in civilian jobs. Or cannon barrels made locally of hevay and substandard cast iron, because KuK army didnt have the money to purchase quality shit from Krupp company.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Franz Josef
      1780s, not 1840s

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The Austrian army used them during the Napoleonic wars. Here is was Rudolf Otto von Ottenfeld writes about them in "Allgemeine Uebersicht über die Bewaffnung der
    kaiserlichen Armee 1700—1867" from 1895.

    >was used by one corps of 1300 men from 1790 to 1815
    >each company was equipped with two air pumps
    >the amount of air in each rifle was enough for 40 shots, although the power and accuracy started to heavily decrease after 20 shots
    >after the death of Girardoni there weren't enough skilled workers to maintain the large amount of rifles, the valve-part of the rifle was very delicate
    >as a result the number of operational rifles was steadily decreasing
    >very few remainders of the original stock are said to be handed out to one Austrian unit during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848

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