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Breech-loading firearm that belonged to Philip V of Spain, made by A. Tienza, Madrid circa 1715. It came with a ready-to-load reusable cartridge. This is a miquelet system. Mechanism of Philip V's breech-loading firearm (detail) The breech mechanism of the Ferguson rifle. Breech-loading firearms are known from the 16th century.
A break action is a type of firearm where the barrel(s) are hinged and can be "broken open" to expose the breech. Multi-barrel break action firearms are usually subdivided into over-and-under or side-by-side configurations for two barrel configurations or "combination gun" when mixed rifle and shotgun barrels are used.
A muzzleloader is any firearm in which the user loads the projectile and the propellant charge into the muzzle end of the gun (i.e., from the forward, open end of the gun's barrel). This is distinct from the modern designs of breech-loading firearms, in which user loads the ammunition into the breech end of the barrel. The term "muzzleloader ...
Advances in metallurgy in the industrial era allowed for the construction of rifled breech-loading guns that could fire at a much greater muzzle velocity. After the British artillery was shown up in the Crimean War as having barely changed since the Napoleonic Wars the industrialist William Armstrong was awarded a contract by the government to ...
Rotating the crank opens the breech of the weapon, allowing for loading. The use of paper cartridges — a pre-measured amount of gunpowder and a lead bullet wrapped in paper — also sped up the rate of fire. While not as fast as more modern rifles, which use fixed cartridges, the kammerlader was much faster than contemporary muzzle-loading ...
This is most commonly found in bolt-action firearms but is also found in some automatic firearms. The most common locking mechanism on rifles is a rotating bolt, which can be classified as a rigid type of bolt lock. Semi-rigid bolt locks have their locking elements movably mounted on either the bolt, barrel or breech housing and using a bolt ...
E.g. if the preponderance was quoted as 4 tons 2 + 1 ⁄ 2 cwt (4.2 t) as for the RML 17.72-inch "100-ton" gun, the breech end sat with that weight on its mounting, enough to ensure stability but not enough to hinder changes in elevation. The preponderance of British muzzle-loading guns was typically stamped on the end of one of the trunnions.
A muzzle-loading rifle is a muzzle-loaded small arm that has a rifled barrel rather than a smoothbore, and is loaded from the muzzle of the barrel rather than the breech. Historically they were developed when rifled barrels were introduced by the 1740ies, which offered higher accuracy than the earlier smoothbores.