Well . . . it was the first one that really caught on, and the first I'm aware of that took the entire magazine in the buttstock.

But highcap pistols did exist commercially before the P-35. Various versions of the Mauser Broomhandle with detachable 20 rd magazines were made by Spanish companies in the 1920s, and Mauser's own Schnellfeuer came along around 1932. Mag was not concealed within the buttstock, but hung down in front of the trigger guard.

But of course, having full-auto capability, these little gems are now NFA items . . .

****************

In terms of ammo and bullet design, for rifles the last BIG advance was Nosler's introduction of the Partition around 1948. Some of today's super-premium bullets may outperform the original NP, but they won't do it by a huge margin . . . and they may have problems of their own. (Don't ask me about X-Bullets!)

After many decades of stagnation, I'd say pistol bullets really began improving when Lee Jurras and Super-Vel came on the scene . . . (though his contribution was probably more to pistol ammo rather than pistol bullets) but I've no doubt that today's bullets outperform the original Super-Vels in just about every particular.

Was he the guy who came up with the original "Skorpion" .38 Special load, that looked like an inverted HBWC with a post in the middle? Didn't Federal buy him out or something?

Very good. Somewhere I've got a box of those, but Tom was paid a royalty on each one of the Hydra-shoks for some period of time.

The context of my original question was from 1980 on. If we wanted to be nitpicking we should also mention the 20-30 round 1911 magazines used by WWI aviators.

I agree that the Mauser 1930 and Spanish Royal predate the P-35 and maybe I should have said "wondernine" instead of high capacity when I mentioned the Glock and now I'm not sure if the CZ might even have been earlier and actually the S&W 59 predates the Glock by a bunch but I still think the Glock is what started the powerwhine about "firepower".

I am keeping an eye on the particle projection cannon and rail gun invention. A deep mineshaft might be accomadating a system platform.

Imagine launching landbased 40 megaton MERV's without the need of rocket engines. Enviromentalists everywhere would appreciate a machine like that.

Only the Shadow knows for sure.

I wonder why we don't have liquid-or gas-fueled firearms. A firearm is just an internal combustion engine, after all. Why not fuel-inject a liquid or gaseous propellant into the chamber when the trigger is pulled and set it off with an electronic spark? No brass, no primers, just projectile.

Two problems are immediately apparent:

1. At least the first ones would almost certainly have to be of crew-served size.

2. How do you get just a bullet loaded up into the "throat" of the chamber; and if you decide not to shoot, how do you get it back out?

But, like most problems, these should eventually be solvable.

I remember looking at a cased Gyro-Jet. I could have bought one at an extremely good price, since they weren't selling. However, the commercial logic of a device that used ammo that sold for over a buck a round (?) in the days when GI surplus .45 ball ran $3 for 50 was decidedly lacking. IIRC, the projectiles were 13mm or so, as a result GCA '68 ended whatever faint commercial promise may have existed.

Snake, your issue #2 was what killed the caseless round. Or at least the least technically complex issue.

I confess I'm not sure what the proposed loading mechanism is for the rail guns. I can recall fondling one of the projectiles once upon a time. It was plastic with a flash coating of something conductive (copper ?) and very light weight. The muzzle velocity had many zeros in it. If terminal velocity was anything like initial, you wouldn't need MERV, it'd be like an asteroid strike.

Last I heard, the US Army and Navy had given up on liquid propellants for the 5" and 155mm that they were working on for years. They couldn't find a propellant which was safe to handle and had the burning characteristics for artillery.

Geoff
Who notes there are some ongoing experiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion_light_gas_gun

The USAF tested the Gyro Jet and my understanding is that they were woefully inaccurate. There were six or eight holes in the base of the projectile drilled at angles to provide spin stabilization. I was not involved in the test, but one of the guys said that it took awhile to get any velocity and he thought you could probably put something in front of the muzzle and stop the bullet.

I got to study and shoot a couple of rounds of caseless ammo in the Voere rifle. It was very cool but basically delivered the same weight bullet at the same velocity as common- cheap- ammo. So while the technology was neat it really didn't have an advantage.

Liquids have been tried but stuff that is volatile enough to do the job is hard to handle- think about carrying a jug of liquid oxygen around- and during WWII the Germans blew themselves up fairly regularly trying to fuel the little rocket airplane. Wasn't it "t-stoff" and "d-stoff" but I never knew what the chemistry was.

I don't know enough about gasses, but we have successful rifles and pistols powered by carbon dioxide so there must be some limiting factor that prevents scaling that type up.

I think phasers are the way to go.

You're close. T-stoff and C-stoff. One of them was hydrogen peroxide, or some variant thereof. I remember reading that they required two completely different types of container (one couldn't touch metal, the other couldn't touch anything organic), and inadvertant combination of even trace amounts of the two would result in horrendous explosions. What a mess!

The aircraft was the Me 163, if anyone is interested enough to Wiki or otherwise research it.

Some where in my reading about the ME 163 they told of a pilot that crash landed one and got doused with the fuel which pretty much melted him.

concentrated hydrogen peroxide will ignite organic material. Seems to me it was 50% but am not sure.

Yeah, I've got the book that tells that story.

As far as Semi-Auto pistols are concerned, the purist in me keeps rising to the top. I see no improvements on the 1911 design, just different ways to do it. None are really better, all variations on the same theme.Some I consider backward moves, Striker-fired guns are a case in point. Blocky, terrible triggers, not the best accuracy-level on the whole. Function seems to have overtaken grace and guns have become butt-ugly.

Ammo- Now there have been great strides here. I can remember my Dad and I getting excited when the Speer 'Flying-Ashcans' came out. Then, the frustration trying to get them to feed. Now, there are so many great designs that they're all about the same, great performance and easy feeding. There're a dizzying array of rifle-bullets out there now, too many I think. But, no real improvements over Nosler's Partition in the controlled-expansion category, just different ways.

Rifles- Just like the F86D and the MIG15, they should have stopped with the M98 and the Springfield 03 in Boltguns. No real improvements over the two designs(Which are almost identical), just different ways to do it.

Semi-Auto- Don't get me started on those POS toys they issue troops nowdays. The last true improvement in military rifles was the 'Product-Improved M1 Garand( The M14)'. With all the junk hanging off them I'm surprised you don't have to yell,"Go,go Mr.Gadget!" before firing an M4.


Artillery, since it been seen fit to mention it, I think the last two improvements in this field were the American Shelailleigh-round and the South-African M15 piece. They should have worked more on the Recoilless-Rifle concept, they almost had it right. It put a light crew-served piece of heavy ordnance in the hands of common troops, where it was needed most.

It could well have been the Glock, but I recall people worried about the Beretta before that, around the time the first Lethal Weapon movie came out with Mel Gibson shooting the smiley face into a target with one. (As a kid I couldn't tell why some people were upset, since I could tell Gibson was the good guy, so why worry?)

Another WW1 high-capacity piece was the Luger with the snail drum. Including the artillery models issued to Zeppelin crews. Given the Luger variants, including artillery and carbine models, and the snail drums, they were getting close to the sub gun level.

I agree with your part about putting it all in the grip, with the P-35. Much like the Luger and the 1911, it was the pistol that took a lot of ideas, made it practical and "right" for a user, and put it all together in a package that could be produced well and work reliably.

Well, the territory has been covered really well by previous posts, but let me throw in a couple other considerations:

1. Holster "technology". I think the "security level" concept (Level I, II, III) ushered in by Safariland really changed the way we look at holsters and what we expect from them. No longer are they merely simple pouches to hold the gun--now they are very sophisticated rigs with (sometimes) multiple locking systems.

2. Equipment rails on guns. Lasers were mentioned previously, but the addition of practical and powerful white lights to guns has been a major event, I think.

Whaddya think?

V/R
Mike

While today's lights are a distinct improvement over those of a couple of generations ago, people have been putting lights on rifles at least as far back as the invention of the first electric flashlights . . . particularly in Africa, where the addition of a "leopard light" to a rifle was deemed almost a necessity for hunting those pests. (I vaguely recall reading that someone tried putting a carbide lamp on a rifle, with less than satisfactory results.)

Something small and bright enough to be useful on a pistol is what I see as an evolutionary development.