Via Chuck Petras @Chuck_Petras and FN @FN_America:
My first STI 2011 seemed kind of wild. It was based on a 1911. It also used a lot of the same parts as an “ancient” 1911. That was in about 1996. Now that design is 114 years old.
100-Year-Old Guns
The View From North Central Idaho
Ramblings on explosives, guns, politics, and sex by a redneck Idaho farm boy who became a software engineer living near Seattle.
And that’s how St. Moses Browning will lead us to the promised land. (And make sure we keep it.)
1911’s to M2’s.
Imagine what him and Stoner are cooking up in heaven right now?
Epic.
Not to mention what was done to the Gatling gun.
actually, the 1911 was a working prototype in 1905, or thereabouts. just before the dawn of time. maybe someday some will invent a better one, but, I doubt it.
IIRC, the last development by Dr Gatling was to add a motor drive to the hand cranked multi-barreled system. Just think, we could have had that for WW1, but it wasn’t until the 50’s that it was actually built. Basically, GE(?) added a motor to an actual vintage Gatling Gun, and it worked just fine.
Those modern gatlings are either mounted in aircraft with only a few seconds worth of ammo or in a ship with tons of ammo below decks. Keeping a regular single-chamber, single-barrel machine gun supplied with ammunition was difficult enough – and even worse in WWI when most of the ground transportation was horse-drawn wagons, up to the point where men had to unload the wagon and tote the load through the trenches.