Posted on 09/24/2006 8:15:58 AM PDT by tomzz
When Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark out on their famous journey, he took extraordinary steps to provide for their safety. He provided them with a blank check backed by the United States government to purchase any ship they might figure they needed on the west coast, assuming they felt such a need, and he provided them with the ultimate small arm of the time. It appears as if this ultimate small arm might have been a major factor in the expedition not having been annihilated by Indians. Not that tribes were wiped out with the weapon, nonetheless it was demonstrated to them and they were given to understand that there was no limit to the number of shots the thing could fire and that all of the expedition people had them.
Air rifles are normally thought of as single shot, very small caliber weapons to shoot starlings and rats with; if that's your whole exposure to air rifles, this one might shock you:
The Lewis and Clark air-powered assault rifle.
That thing could have made Austria the terror of the world if Austria had been a warlike country and its soldiers had been a tad brighter. Basically their military and their soldiers couldn't deal with it, too far ahead of its time. Against an Austrian army equipped with that thing, Napolean should have gotten wiped.
bump, need to come back to this later.
That obviously would not have worked with a technological marvel like the Zarandoni rifle. Austria would have had to scrap its entire military as it existed and developed a citizen army.
I usually just email the page to myself. It comes with links and all.
ping for later. I love history, plus my husband sells these things (high powered air guns) I don't pay any attention to them usually, so I don't know most of what you're talking about, but it's interesting to me because of Lewis and Clark.
Now the boys, they'd understand what you all are talking about right away.
:)
The idea of women getting good with weapons isn't unheard of. check out http://www.aftershockarchery.com for a picture of a girl with a 45-lb bow and a 450-lb boar hog she killed with it.
haha, that's ok. I used to be an archery coach and I'm a lot better shot than my husband is. He says I'm a natural. It's just not my interest now.
i am basing it on my old paintball guns that are .62cal but maxout about 400fpsthere is still no supersonic crack at 700+fps... that's around 1000+fps give or take depending on elevation and air density
it prolly sounds more like a 40mm blooper/thump gun than anything. i doubt it's anywhere near 120db
but that's just my SWAG.
Yeah, you're right! When he was born, out on the "trail", he was kicking his little legs, so they said he looked like a "pompous little man", or a little dancing man, or something like that!
I also would like to add that his real name was Jean Batiste Charbonneau, or something like that. His dad was white, and French. Apparently they were very fond of him. And as he got older, and the expedition was long over; Lewis's expedition partner, Clarke(forgot his first name for some reason)took the boy under his wing, and sort of adopted him. He helped pay for his upbringing, and paid for his education.
You had an age in which a battle amounted to lines of men walking up to within fifty yards of eachother and blasting away with muskets; obviously IQ was not something you wanted in a soldier at the time.You had an age in which a battle amounted to lines of men walking up to within fifty yards of eachother and blasting away with muskets; obviously IQ was not something you wanted in a soldier at the time.
You probably could put an eye out with one of those.
It would be this one or, if you could find it, the Luger pistol in .45 ACP which the Army tested prior to WWII.
Apparently 2 were made. The destruction of one is documented by no one knows what happened to the second one.
L
May seem funny to you but that's the way it actually was. Friedrich der Grosse once told Voltaire that if any of his soldiers actually ever thought about what they were doing, they'd all be gone in less than ten seconds. It's not like you had causes to fight for or anything like that in those days; wars were basically fought between royal families to determine pecking order. That's just a really sorry thing to want to die for and the rollcall of German names you find in Pennsylvania attest to the desire people had to avoid such business.
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