Prince Ailtor Revolving Rifle By Imperator-Zor Watch

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House Lavransicos, the ruling house of the Kingdom of Torion was founded by Farennio the Fierce some eight hundred years before the Infrastructural era. Farennio was a son of Herdsman who was levied to serve as a scout, earned a knighthood for a pulling off a dangerous but remarkably successful lightning raid, then a keep and eventually managed to gain the title of Prince of his own domain after the previous Prince threw his life away in a foolhearty attack in a foolhearty war, having married the eldest sister of the aforesaid Prince. Thanks to this tale and the accomplishments of several of his descendants, House Lavransicos has achieved a reputation for ambitions and it's willingness to take risks. This has become something of a tradition, though truth be told the house has yielded it's share of cautious and conservative monarchs as well. Under their rule, their principality grew into a kingdom, uniting the lands of Torion under their banner while establishing themselves as not only royalty, but as autocrats and hold ambitions of Empire. Even so, despite their successes, not every scheme of theirs worked out so well. Among the more recent examples of this was the Prince Ailtor Revolving Rifle.



Ailtor, the crown prince of Torion had, in the 20s (Infrastructural Calender) had taken an interest in modernizing the Torionese army using Infrastructural technology. Torion had adopted flintlock rifles during the Rifle Wars, but he was further interested still. He managed to acquire a number of revolvers in 25 to 26 (including a Pattern-1402 given as a gift by the Emperor of Allergon during a state visit) and came to the conclusion that the future of warfare lay in revolving firearms. As such, he started and was heavily involved in a project to develop a revolving rifle for the army. In 28, Prince Ailtor managed to get a model which he felt confident about and, with his father's consent, had some 30,000 units ordered, mainly for cavalry use. Due to it's royal petigree, others were ordered by nobles using cash from their own purses for them and their body guards. Many merchant captains did the same thing.



The weapon itself was a Cap and Ball system with six chambers and a caliber of 6 Linea (11.61mm). It's chambers were longer than a typical pistols to hold a larger charge. It had an effective range of about 800 meters. A trained soldier could fire off six shots in less than twenty seconds. Simple paper cartridges were used to speed reloading. The weapon was fairly complex, but could still be mass produced. The Royal Arsenals were soon turning out these weapons full tilt, as were local gunsmiths. This was used along with a number of muzzle loading and breechloading rifles, both of foreign (mostly Venoan) and local manufacture.



However, the weapon was soon put to the test and was found lacking. The first concern which cropped up was cost, costing two to four times as much to make as a Breech loading rifle like the Type-2R or the Pattern-1405. In 32 IA, war broke out between Torion and the Principality of Osetia and the Protectorate of Nycon, both of which had improved their arsenals as well. In battle, despite the weapon's high rate of fire when fully loaded, after six shots, it needed to be reloaded manually and became effectively a breech loading rifle. They also had a poor safety record. When handling the weapon, the operator needed to keep their hands clear of the gap between the cylinder and the barrel. Several people who fired this weapon were maimed because of it. But worse still was the matter of Chain Fire. In battlefield coditions stay bits of powder would leak out and get into nooks and crannies, this could result in the hammer setting off multiple chambers at once, devastating the weapon and user alike. These problems were more pronounced in weapons made by local gunsmiths. This eventually earned the weapons the nickname of "The Prince's Peril". Even so the weapon remains in service in the Torion Army due to the simple number of them around and it's high initial rate of fire. In spite of its numerous shortcomings, Prince Ailtor still believes in the potential of revolving rifles and plans on working out the bugs that were present in his first work.

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