#BigGuns

Yes, you don’t own a flying car, but at least some of the promises of the future are coming true: The United States Navy has successfully tested its railgun prototype in multi-shot (autoloading) mode, earlier this summer. Although the US Navy has been testing railguns since 2006, this latest test was the first time such a weapon had fired multiple shots in quick succession, thanks to an autoloading mechanism fitted to the rear. You can see the railgun in action in the video below, released by the Office of Naval Research:

It’s a rifle for when you had something very, very big that you needed very, very dead right now. Although the British exploration and colonization of Africa is most closely associated with the tail end of the 19th Century, there were hunters and explorers venturing into the Dark Continent as early as the late 18th Century. One relic of this era was a 10-bore flintlock hunting rifle from the 1790s, a .775″ caliber weapon designed to hunt the very large game native to Africa. Ian McCollum met with Mike Carrick, Q&A Editor for Arms Heritage Magazine and owner of the Ferguson rifle replica that Forgotten Weapons did an article on back in May, and one of the other weapons Mike brought along was replica of that very 10-bore gun. So, naturally, they did a little shooting:

The Simonov PTRS 14.5mm anti-tank rifle was a very innovative rifle, that seemingly offered the Soviet AT gunner of the early part of World War II a frightening amount of firepower. Its semiautomatic action, and en-bloc clip loading gave the infantry five rounds of high velocity heavy AT rifle ammunition on tap, that could be fired as fast as the trigger could be pulled and the target reacquired. By comparison, the contemporary single-shot Degtyarev PTRD seems downright crude. However, as this evaluation translated by EnsignExpendable of the Soviet Gun Archives blog shows, things are not always how they seem:

The second Forgotten Weapons video to feature really big guns, the embedded flick below shows a T124E2 AT (anti-tank) gun firing. These weapons were the last of the towed American AT guns, with less than a hundred made, although the Soviet Union – and its successor the Russian Federation – continues to use towed AT guns to the present day.

Propper’s Blog posted up an excellent link on the early development of camouflage. As it turns out, the first impetus of camouflage in the modern era was from the development of optics… but not to target infantry.