Why didn't the world embrace the Giradoni air rifle?

Murffy · Apr 29, 2025

Mrbsct said:
a musket needs sources from all over the planet.

I'm wondering about this. To make a musket, basically you need iron, wood and some flint (plus, of course, the necessary skills and tools). Black powder requires sulphur (saltpeter), ammonia (urine) and charcoal. All of these are commonly available in most regions. Perhaps I'm missing something.

Mrbsct · Apr 29, 2025

Murffy said:
I'm wondering about this. To make a musket, basically you need iron, wood and some flint (plus, of course, the necessary skills and tools). Black powder requires sulphur (saltpeter), ammonia (urine) and charcoal. All of these are commonly available in most regions. Perhaps I'm missing something.

Sulfur and Saltpeter and not easily found, as I constantly mentioned that Confederate soldiers had to raid bat caves. If you are a small nation and you have no mines you are basically at the mercy of a larger nation with those mines.

Saphroneth · Apr 29, 2025

Mrbsct said:
Sulfur and Saltpeter and not easily found, as I constantly mentioned that Confederate soldiers had to raid bat caves. If you are a small nation and you have no mines you are basically at the mercy of a larger nation with those mines.

Sulfur, maybe (though it's a trade good anyway because it's used for other things, like bleaching cloth), but saltpetre is very easy if you've got more than a few years to do it - the Confederates had massive nitre beds that matured right at the end of the war. You can produce saltpetre on a farm because it just requires human or animal waste.

But you certainly can't make an air rifle in 1800 in the backwoods - they're specialist kit requiring a specialized artisan and a lot of individual care.

RandomRodent · Apr 29, 2025

Mrbsct said:
Everyone talks about range. I for one believe warfare is still a very personal masculine endeavour. Looking the enemy in the eye and killing him and watching blood splatter on your own face or close to you is still instinctively in every modern soldier. Everything else, tanks, planes, artillery is just support. That is the reason I don't really believe this idea that range is the most important thing to factor in. Kills, the ones that are decisive are within 100 meters.

The repeating air rifle likely is more expensive than a musket however, a musket needs sources from all over the planet. The air rifle can likely fire cheaper ammo better since it is less likely to explode or get burnt like wooden bullets for example. A muzzleloader air rifle likely will be cheaper than a firearm. Keep in mind with a musket you can tap load for only a few shots and the weapon fouls. With an muzzleloading air rifle, you can have undersized ball, tap in there and you can probably get a similar rate of fire of a repeating rifle.

The warrior mindset is simple no need for globalized parts when your mind is telling you to bash your enemies brains out.

You are obsessing about range, I am pretty sure the main emphasis in the rest of the thread above was stopping power. There many recorded events from the across several centuries of warfare of men with melee weapons being shot more than once and still closing the range to main their killer before expiring. The musket was often utilised to deliver a single crushing volley before a bayonet charge. The air rifle was considered as a tool for skirmishers who are not useless but are the support to the very main event you so extoll....a main event which is rather different now due to the advance of the 20th century where firepower can destroy men and indeed armies at ranges of kilometres so that blood in your eye comes from the guy who was standing next to you before he was shredded by bomb or shell.

Anyway the thing is launched into the very rant that demonstrates why the military air rifle went the way pneumatic dynamite gun, an interesting oddity without a long term purpose.

Mrbsct · Apr 29, 2025

RandomRodent said:
You are obsessing about range, I am pretty sure the main emphasis in the rest of the thread above was stopping power. There many recorded events from the across several centuries of warfare of men with melee weapons being shot more than once and still closing the range to main their killer before expiring. The musket was often utilised to deliver a single crushing volley before a bayonet charge. The air rifle was considered as a tool for skirmishers who are not useless but are the support to the very main event you so extoll....a main event which is rather different now due to the advance of the 20th century where firepower can destroy men and indeed armies at ranges of kilometres so that blood in your eye comes from the guy who was standing next to you before he was shredded by bomb or shell.

Anyway the thing is launched into the very rant that demonstrates why the military air rifle went the way pneumatic dynamite gun, an interesting oddity without a long term purpose.

Your telling me 200 joules isn't enough stopping power? I bet you would consent to be shot with a .22.

Many recorded events of people getting shot multiple times and closing? Then focus on your bayonet skills then.

UltraPampers · Apr 29, 2025

Mrbsct said:
Sulfur and Saltpeter and not easily found, as I constantly mentioned that Confederate soldiers had to raid bat caves. If you are a small nation and you have no mines you are basically at the mercy of a larger nation with those mines.

Confederates had about 175 000 modern shoulder arms when the U.S. Civil war started. It is estimated that they manufactured a little over 100 000 and imported about 340 000 from Europe. They also used a lot of weapons captured from Union soldiers. E.g. The Arms of the Confederacy - Springfield Armory National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

What this means is that Confederates were at the mercy of larger nations when it came to firearm imports. Powder could be manufactured locally, even if not in sufficient quantities. Based on this I seriously doubt that Confederates would have had the capability to produce almost half a million Girardonis (imports have to be included in this number if criteria is to not to be at mercy of larger nations), which require more sophisticated manufacturing industry than smoothbore muskets (air reservoirs, pumps and all that).

EDIT: It seems that the Confederate problems with gunpowder were due to lack of preparation and industries ready to manufacture it, not due to scarcity of ingredients. It is estimated that by the end of the war they had enough gunpowder to continue the conflict for a year. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2005/jul/30/20050730-102307-1080r/

AlpinLuke · Apr 29, 2025

Probably my brief and quick comment wasn't exceptional, anyway in my questionable opinion that's the core of the matter.
The Gilardoni [Gilardoni, the title of the thread is wrong] rifle was the product of a watchmaker.

Sophisticated, accurate, but in some way fragile.

That's the origin of the mass production problems related with that rifle.

An easy comparison can explain something: AK-47 Kalashnikov.
Very cheap and very effective [and very enduring!].

Mrbsct · Apr 29, 2025

Firearms IMO aren't a very graceful weapon. That is why society still romanticize swords and bows. In fact even when the Brown Bess was the standard issue with the military the British aristocracy and society practiced archery. IMO the more cleaner air rifle is a way for more hierachal control of the military, and that is why I think Emperor Josef wanted them in his service.

Matthew Amt · Apr 29, 2025

Mrbsct said:
Sulfur and Saltpeter and not easily found,

Wrong. The whole world knew where to get sulfur, so it was a common trade item. And the whole world knew that saltpeter could be made from human and animal waste, and *most* inhabited areas of the planet had humans and animals, right? What's hard about this?

Mrbsct said:
as I constantly mentioned that Confederate soldiers had to raid bat caves.

So you're saying they had caves full of saltpeter!! Cool! (And yes, you DO seem to mention it a lot.) (We noticed.) (Repeatedly.) That's a lot easier than making it yourself. Might explain why the Confederates never ran out of powder.

Mrbsct said:
If you are a small nation and you have no mines you are basically at the mercy of a larger nation with those mines.

Small nations are ALWAYS at the mercy of larger ones, for EVERYTHING that they have to import or cannot produce. The ingredients for gunpowder are way down the list, after food, textiles, metals, and any number of manufactured items. And you know what? Not ONE of those little terrified nations struck a blow for independence by cranking out those oh-so-cheap-efficient-deadly-simple-and-easy-to-use air rifles.

Guess they were just stupid.

Firearms IMO aren't a very graceful weapon. That is why society still romanticize swords and bows. In fact even when the Brown Bess was the standard issue with the military the British aristocracy and society practiced archery. IMO the more cleaner air rifle is a way for more hierachal control of the military, and that is why I think Emperor Josef wanted them in his service.

You're just spouting fantasies now. Why?

Matthew

Saphroneth · Apr 29, 2025

Mrbsct said:
Your telling me 200 joules isn't enough stopping power? I bet you would consent to be shot with a .22.

In a military situation it's certainly preferable to ten times that much energy, and being hit by a 2000 joule shot. Remember, thick clothing is a kind of protection (it's irrelevant against 2,000 joules, but perhaps not so much against 200) and in a military situation you prefer a weapon that is as likely as possible to disable the enemy with a single hit - every hit that does not disable the enemy as a combatant is a hit wasted from the point of view of winning the battle. And that's before getting into the difficulty of damaging a one-ton horse - if nobody in your army has weapons that can reliably bring down horses, then you have a problem.

If your enemy is able to score such a disabling hit with their muskets basically anywhere on your body, and you are hoping for a head or torso hit which you think will probably be disabling, then more of your shots (all else being equal) are going to be non-disabling. It's actually quite a large difference because about 2/3 to 3/4 of a person seen from the front isn't their head or central torso.

UltraPampers said:
EDIT: It seems that the Confederate problems with gunpowder were due to lack of preparation and industries ready to manufacture it, not due to scarcity of ingredients. It is estimated that by the end of the war they had enough gunpowder to continue the conflict for a year. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2005/jul/30/20050730-102307-1080r/

Quite, yes - the Union had a fairly sizeable stockpile of nitre before the opening of the war, but the Confederacy was not expecting to be a state more than a few months in advance, if that!

Saphroneth · Apr 29, 2025

So let's look at a particular kind of soldier that the Austrian needle rifle might actually have gone up against - a contemporary. The Napoleonic French...

...cuirassier.

As we can see, this man is wearing a ......-and-backplate, covering the whole torso (which makes him effectively immune to an air rifle round over that part of his body) and also a helmet (which comes down to about the level of the eyebrows) and a gorget (covering the space between the ......plate and the chin).

So to disable this man an air rifle round needs to hit him pretty much in the face. His horse is another matter, but the low energy of the air rifle means that you need to get a lucky hit, again probably in the face, to disable the horse immediately - and you don't care about the long term because in the event of a lost battle you personally are probably dead.

Conversely, a conventional black powder musket like the Charleville or the Brown Bess can defeat the armour at Napoleonic battle ranges, and also do a hell of a lot more damage to the horse (being more likely to disable or kill the horse).

Stopping power isnt everything, but it's certainly not irrelevant.

Saphroneth · Apr 29, 2025

Mrbsct said:
Your telling me 200 joules isn't enough stopping power? I bet you would consent to be shot with a .22.

Something I want to point out here is that a .22 has about four times the energy density (same energy, 25% the area) so its penetration is much greater than an air rifle ball would be. This sort of thing doesn't matter so much when discussing larger amounts of energy, but for something so marginal this matters.

Mrbsct · Apr 29, 2025

I mentioned Cortez. If an Aztec sling could put a hurt on his men, than a air rifle ball can certainly put a good hurt on a person with plates.

Remember a Musket has what 3000J of energy. That is 3000 J of energy into the enemy and 3000 J of energy going into you via the wood stock. Remember Newton's 3rd law. Most of the army are just a bunch of guys on drugs.

Mrbsct · Apr 29, 2025

Were Cuiraseers stopped by guns? No they were stopped by squares.

Saphroneth · Apr 29, 2025

Mrbsct said:
Remember a Musket has what 3000J of energy. That is 3000 J of energy into the enemy and 3000 J of energy going into you via the wood stock. Remember Newton's 3rd law. Most of the army are just a bunch of guys on drugs.

The energy of the ball is rather focused. What are you talking about with the drug thing?

Mrbsct said:
Were Cuiraseers stopped by guns? No they were stopped by squares.

Squares, yes - armed with guns.

A square which threw away its fire could be broken. It was the threat posed by the muskets that meant that the square was able to resist attack.

Of course, the Girardoni was too fragile to take a bayonet, so your air riflemen are proper buggered. They can't shoot the curaissiers effectively and they can't stab them.

Saphroneth · Apr 29, 2025

Mrbsct said:
I mentioned Cortez. If an Aztec sling could put a hurt on his men, than a air rifle ball can certainly put a good hurt on a person with plates.

I think everyone would agree that the Incas had the sling, and yet...

at the Battle of Vilcaconga in 1533, an Inca force of several thousand caught an ambushed a Spanish force of 300, on favorable terrain (a hillside where the Inca had the high ground), with the element of surprise, against an exhausted foe (the Spanish had marched all day)…and still lost (to be clear, it wasn’t guns that won that battle, but swords and pikes). The Inca took some 800 killed-in-action to the Spanish five.

Plate doesn't make you completely impervious to attack, but it makes you far less likely to be hurt because a projectile has to hit just right. It's why people wore armour - at this point to defend the air rifle you're basically arguing that armour was never effective.

Matthew Amt · Apr 29, 2025

Mrbsct said:
...
Remember a Musket has what 3000J of energy. That is 3000 J of energy into the enemy and 3000 J of energy going into you via the wood stock. Remember Newton's 3rd law.

Ah! I'm not a physicist, but that does explain why every soldier with a blackpowder musket was immediately killed when he fired.

Oh, wait...

Mrbsct said:
Most of the army are just a bunch of guys on drugs.

Well, SOMEone might be...

Saphroneth · Apr 29, 2025

Mrbsct said:
Remember a Musket has what 3000J of energy. That is 3000 J of energy into the enemy and 3000 J of energy going into you via the wood stock. Remember Newton's 3rd law.

So this actually really gets into the armour thing.

See, the way all this works is that a weapon is trying to do the target an injury. A blade or spear point involves a certain amount of energy and then that energy is concentrated into a very small point, which means that it can do a major wound to the target. This is also why arrows have cutting heads.

Below a certain level of energy, the weapon cannot do this.

Part of what armour does is that it absorbs and also spreads out energy. It's easier to endure being punched hard than being stabbed with less actual energy involved in the stab, because the stab's energy is focused down to a point and so it can more effectively do damage.

When a musket fires, the energy and impact of the recoil is spread out between (for a right handed shooter) the left hand holding the stock and the right shoulder which is behind the stock, and in addition the stock is a very flat surface that effectively spreads out the force - it may be most of 3,000 joules, but the contact patch is dozens of square centimetres.
The ball, meanwhile, is much smaller. It concentrates a lot of energy into a small impact point - much larger than the super-thin point of a broadhead arrow or a spear, but smaller than a punch and much smaller than the contact point of the stock on the shoulder.

So all that energy is concentrated in a very small space, and it defeats the ability of the skin to locally resist the impact. It breaks through and causes an injury - it delivers energy which causes the flesh damage as it absorbs the energy. It's less effective at doing that damage for a given amount of energy than a bladed weapon, because a blade can cut while a ball is rupturing, but the ball has so much energy that it can actually do significant damage in that way.

This is why I'd rather be punched (very hard) than shot (even with an air rifle) because the punch, while it has more force, is spread out over a greater area.

RandomRodent · Apr 29, 2025

Mrbsct said:
I mentioned Cortez. If an Aztec sling could put a hurt on his men, than a air rifle ball can certainly put a good hurt on a person with plates.

Remember a Musket has what 3000J of energy. That is 3000 J of energy into the enemy and 3000 J of energy going into you via the wood stock. Remember Newton's 3rd law. Most of the army are just a bunch of guys on drugs.

Well for a start no because the musket weighs about 5 kilos and absorbs a lot of energy, the big consideration is the resultant much slower velocity of the musket as damage transfers depends a lot on the speed of the projectile, then consider the surface area of the butt plate at about 66cm² compared to approximately 2.5cm² of a Revolutionary War era British musket ball (other sizes available) . Basically what happens with the musket is the body has time to rock back dissipating a lot of the energy which is already more dispersed. The bullet might actually transfer far less absolute energy to the target but it does so far faster and to a much more concentrated area, the flesh and likely bone is forced to part for the passage of the bullet rather than simply rock back as it does with the butt stock.

Saphroneth · Apr 29, 2025

The point about projectile speed is actually quite relevant - during the US Civil War period an oddity was observed, which was that rifle-muskets seemed to be causing far worse wounds than old style smoothbores.

In fact, what was going on was the opposite of that, in a sense. An M1842 musket fired a .65 ball (.94 of an ounce) at a supersonic muzzle velocity of 1400 feet per second/420 metres per second, for a muzzle energy of (0.5 * 0.0266 kg * 420 * 420 ) = 2,350 J.
An M1855 rifle-musket fired a slightly heavier minie ball (about 33 grams) at a much lower velocity of under 1,000 feet per second, resulting in less energy (about 1/2 to 2/3), and in addition the ball was less efficient at transferring energy to the flesh.

So a minie ball would cause a wound track along the line it passed, while a round ball from a smoothbore would cause damage further from the path of the ball (by cavitation) as the flesh is forced to absorb much more damage - meaning that there were locations where a Minie ball would wound you and a smoothbore ball would kill you. If you were struck in certain locations by a minie ball, you'd have a terrible wound - but the same hit location from a smoothbore at short range would simply kill you and the surgeons would never see you.

An air rifle ball has even less energy, so it has less scope to do damage.

Search

Search

Why didn't the world embrace the Giradoni air rifle?

Murffy

Mrbsct

Saphroneth

RandomRodent

Mrbsct

UltraPampers

AlpinLuke

Mrbsct

Matthew Amt

Saphroneth

Saphroneth

Saphroneth

Mrbsct

Mrbsct

Saphroneth

Saphroneth

Matthew Amt

Saphroneth

RandomRodent

Saphroneth

More History Discussions

Recent History Discussions

Trending History Discussions