I am undecided on which black powder machine gun should I employ on my planes

gatling gun is obviously too heavy, but apparently, there's lot of interesting designs that have some potential

problem is the other ones are really really hard to reload for a gunner in an aircraft

@FailusMaximus ask Hiram Maxim about blackpowder fouling sometime

well, there were multiple interesting designs

thou I now have it down to two

IOW: Gatling-type designs are all you can do, and even then, you are still going to be doing an awful lot of barrel cleaning (like, every sortie)

coffee mill has lower firerate, and its coffee bean storage needs to be closed for ammo to not fly around when pilot does some aerobatics

but I can't imagine anyone sucessfully reloading Gardner while in air

yeah, the other crank-operated designs are going to be as far as you can go

of course I know that

hence I spent last 24 hours studying them

to find me a solution for my novel

your only hope of self-loading with blackpowder is long recoil (there are anecdotes of folks running blackpowder shotshells in Auto-5s) but that's still going to be a mess of cleaning

wasn't first maxim black powder?

I certainly know what infantry will use

infantry will definetly go for Gardner

@FailusMaximus Why don't you ask a question about it?

@FailusMaximus yeah, and Hiram Maxim was bedeviled by black powder fouling as a result...the Maxim gun was only made practical when smokeless propellants became a thing

apparently Gardner somehow managed to make 1 barelled version of his gun weigh only 70 pounds

which makes it usable as semi-mobile heavy machine gun

maybe I should, but honestly question "Gardner or Coffee mill in an airplane" sounds too specific

hmm

maybe I missed some candidate

@FailusMaximus I'd just leave it open to "which early machine gun (set a date it had to be invented by or something) would be best to put in an early biplane?"

mhm, working on it

done

hey there @Green, how're things going?

@Shalvenay Going well!

@Green alright here

well, this question went about as well as I expected... but I guess I at least got idea for checking shotguns out of it

I really can't believe people are asking me why you would want faster plane against drake in the air

reality of my situation is that, indeed, I can provide some AA guns, but only in limited number with limited ammo

but when they decide to retreat, having 10 + planes who can give a chase and snipe them down to massively increase casualties is good

especially if by retreat, they mean "decide to try to bomb another location that doesn't have valid air defence"

now the comment section under the question has changed into chat

why is there no flagging for double posts?

@FailusMaximus I doubt it's a common problem. I flagged it for mod attention, it should be taken care of.

Looking at it I wonder if they tried to edit and messed up.

yes, they did I think

and they fixed it apparently

hey again @Green

@Shalvenay hey!

@Green how're things going?

@Shalvenay Pretty well.

@Green alright here, thought of something interesting btw...how would a humanoid infant (half-dragon) go about breaking free of their egg? would they inherit some special feature for that from their draconic ancestors? what would it look like from the inside?

@Shalvenay I'd guess either some kind of egg breaking claw, or maybe a small 'horn' on their elbow, or alternatively the egg weakens at high internal temperatures and the humanoid breathes fire on the egg. This second method does raise the question of how the infant survives the heat.