Precursors An early precursor was the
Puckle gun of 1718, a large
flintlock revolver gun, manually operated. The design idea was impractical, far ahead of what 18th century technology could achieve. During the 19th century,
Elisha Collier and later
Samuel Colt used the revolver action to revolutionize
handguns. William A. Alexander of
Mobile, Alabama, invented a Rapid Firing Cannon Gun made from a design by Captain Weingard, both of whom also helped build the submarine . The gun was the prototype for the
Gatling gun. It was made in Mobile and was first used in the defense of the city. When the
Confederate States of America had to evacuate Mobile, the weapon was placed on the ship
Magnolia to be transported for use upriver.
Union forces were closing in on the ship so to prevent its capture, it was pushed overboard into the river. Union forces discovered the gun underwater and recovered it. In 1864 Alexander was called back to Mobile from
Charleston, South Carolina, to build one of his Rapid Firing Guns. The Confederate States used a single
2-inch, 5-shot revolver cannon with manually rotated chambers during the
Siege of Petersburg. The gun was captured in
Danville, Virginia by Union forces on April 27, 1865. The
Hotchkiss revolving cannon of the late 19th century was not a revolver cannon in the modern sense but was rather a
rotary cannon, with multiple barrels allowing for feeding and extraction operations in parallel in different barrels. In 1905, C. M. Clarke patented the first fully automatic, gas-operated rotary chamber gun, but his design was ignored at the time. Clarke's patent came as
reciprocating-action automatic weapons like the
Maxim gun and the
Browning gun were peaking in popularity. In 1932, the Soviet
ShKAS machine gun, 7.62 mm caliber aircraft ordnance used a twelve-round capacity, revolver-style feed mechanism with a single barrel and single chamber, to achieve firing rates of well over 1,800 rounds per minute, and as high as 3,000 rounds per minute in special test versions in 1939, all operating from internal
gas-operated reloading. Some 150,000 ShKAS weapons were produced for arming Soviet military aircraft through 1945. Around 1935,
Silin,
Berezin and Morozenko worked on a 6,000 rpm 7.62 mm aircraft machine gun using revolver design, called SIBEMAS (СИБЕМАС), but this was abandoned.
Modern It was not until the mid-1940s that the first practical revolver cannon emerged. The archetypal revolver cannon is the
Mauser MK 213 from World War II, from which almost all current weapons are derived. However, various problems, such as only moderate improvements in rate of fire and muzzle velocity, coupled with excessive barrel wear, and the effects of the
Allied bombing campaign against German industry, meant that at the end of the war only five prototypes (V1 to V5) of either 20 mm MG 213 or 30 mm MK 213 were finished. Around that time, a new generation of weapons developed, based on the proposed
NATO 25 mm caliber standard and the Mauser 27 mm round. A leading example is the
Mauser BK-27. In the 1980s, the French developed the
GIAT 30, a newer generation power-driven revolver cannon. The
Rheinmetall RMK30 modifies the GIAT system further, by venting the gas to the rear to eliminate recoil. Larger experimental weapons have also been developed for anti-aircraft use, like the Anglo-Swiss twin barrel but single chamber 42 mm
Oerlikon RK 421 given the code name "Red King" and the related single-barrel "Red Queen" - all of which were cancelled during development. The largest to see service is the
Rheinmetall Millennium 35 mm Naval Gun System. Soviet revolver cannon are less common than Western ones, especially on aircraft. A mechanism for a Soviet revolver-based machine gun was patented in 1944. The virtually unknown
Rikhter R-23 was fitted only to some
Tu-22 models, but later abandoned in favor of the two-barrel,
Gast gun Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-23 in the
Tu-22M. The Rikhter R-23 does have the distinction of being fired from the space station
Salyut 3. The Soviet navy has also adopted a revolver design, the NN-30, typically in a dual mount in the
AK-230 turret. == Characteristics ==