Asked by Charles on Patreon:
“I’d love to hear you do a deep dive on the commissioning and procurement process of the Chauchat compared to the FAMAS or the HK416F (or the STEN and the L85, PPSh41 and the AK-12 etc). The specific question to answer would be: ‘why does defense procurement take so much longer and cost so much more today than it did in the first half of the C20th when national defense was a far more pressing concern?'”
I think there is a misunderstanding in the core question, because small arms procurement a century ago was every bit as complex and costly as procurement today. In fact, trial a hundred years ago often involved many more type of guns, because submissions were taken from individual inventors with the expectation that a winning design would be produced by a national armory. As such, submissions did not have to be limited to companies capable of mass production.
What does make a big difference in procurement is the different attitudes between wartime and peacetime. Both he Chauchat and Sten were adopted during wars, as types of arms that were deemed immediately essential. As such, the standards for adoption were relaxed from “what is the best thing we can develop for out military” to a much more short-term “what will fulfill this specific need as quickly as possible”. In both cases, the resulting guns did the job that was needed, but the abbreviated development process resulted in significant flaws that led the guns to be quickly replaced after the war was over (the Chauchat by the Chatellerault 24/29 and the Sten by the Sterling).
You nailed the main issue about 1:30: they were much better at managing and synthesizing IP before going to the all-or-nothing, cradle-to-grave package system that we have today.
Looking out from the belly of the beast, there’s a very simple answer to this – job justification.
Procurement is always going to reflect the culture of the people doing the procuring, and the times they’re doing it in. You look at how it was done outside of the existing milieu of a specific procurement, and things are going to start looking awfully strange, awfully quick.
The powers of self-delusion within procurement and the internal politics also can’t be discounted, either. Rational choice would have said “Yeah, we’ve got a game-changer here, in smokeless powder. Let’s take the time to get the rifle and the cartridge right, before we commit ourselves…” The French didn’t do that, and thus saddled themselves with the 8mm Lebel which colored their small arms situation for decades to come. Same-same with the British adoption of the .303.
Similarly, the US thought that they had the whole thing worked out, how modern combat worked. They went for the 7.62mm NATO and the M14, which managed to achieve about the shortest period as type-standardized individual weapon in American military history. The M16, adopted in a haze of fantasy and “it’s-only-an-interim-until-we-get-SPIW-working”, turned out to be one of the longest-lived weapons, and has arguably become the late 20th Century’s Remington Rolling Block equivalent.
What’s the line? “Man proposes; God disposes…”? Procurement types all do their thing, and then reality gets to cast its vote. The “desire path” of small arms use in combat has shown that a dual-caliber solution seems to work the best, but we’re still chasing that twinkling light of “one caliber to do it all” that leads us out into the swamps of failure.
You can have some fairly forthright choices made, and do well at procurement of weapons. This requires a clear view of the realities of how you’re fighting, and an ability to cut through the bullshit like our American worship of the individual rifleman (Which is not to say that individual marksmanship isn’t important, but to emphasize that it’s a rather ineffective part of the modern battlefield). I think we’re going to be looking back at the whole of the NGSW program as another classic American procurement fiasco here in a few years, and there’s not much we at our level can do to avoid it. There’s something in the water where these people spend their days, and it seems to block out any semblance of contact with reality. The problems with NGSW stem from the inability to recognize reality and then deal with it at all effectively.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.
I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, but I think you’re unfairly deploying hindsight against Lebel procurement.
Not only was warfare across the Rhine a recurring routine in general, but the long-dominant French had just been stunned by the upstart Prussians (who then consolidated their power, going from a kingdom of a few million in Napoleon’s day to an Empire larger than their own). A sequel was not an “if” but a “when”; if it had happened sooner rather than later the Lebel would have been lauded as a stroke of strategic brilliance.
Their error consisted not in procuring or even rushing it, but in refusing to replace (or at least iterate) it for the next 30 years.
The mistake was “procure in haste, repent at leisure…”
The French did not have the resources to simply replace the Lebel; early and ill-considered procurement locked them in. “Refusing to replace” the Lebel wasn’t so much a choice, but a feature of the fact that they’d expended nearly all their small arms resources on it already. There was only so much resource base available, and once they locked in the Lebel and its 8mm cartridge, sunk costs and the “installed base” problem screwed them.
Resources aren’t infinite. Americans tend to forget that, being as we’re the closest any human culture has ever managed to get to a post-scarcity condition, but the raw fact was, the French only had so much they could expend on small arms. The Lebel was a lousy choice to have made–It would have been one thing to say “Hey, this is a transitional and experimental model we’re handing out to a couple of elite units…” but that’s not what they did. They bet the farm, and they were deep into the 1930s before they could really overcome that. In a vacuum, where they didn’t have to worry about anything besides the installed base of cartridge and rifles they’d already procured? Sure, they could have replaced it. But, having built enough to arm their entire army? They effectively could not.
That may be true in a very limited context. One could make a case that – having equipped its modest peacetime army with Lebels in the 80s – France would be hard pressed to immediately implement rifle advances which mostly arose in the 90s. Even that is fairly weak given how quickly they’d gone from muzzleloaders to tabatieres to Chassepots to Gras to Kropatscheks and Lebels.
Now consider the fact that WW1 did not happen in the 90s; the French had 30 years, during which they replaced pre-dreadnought battleships, procured several generations of far more expensive MGs, tanks, and fighters (that didn’t even exist when the Lebel was developed), etc. Consider as well the size of the forces involved. In this instance hindsight works the other way, just like modern criticism of MacArthur’s .276 Pedersen decision: ammo on hand seemed like it would last an eternity for the army of the day, but it was a drop in the bucket of everything manufactured for the World War that followed.
Modest? The French built close to three and a half million of the Lebel, filling their arsenals to the top. And, then they were stuck with 8mm Lebel for the Berthier series of rifles, and the Chauchat.
Had they waited just a bit longer, they’d have likely gone with something like the Swiss did, and created a cartridge that would still serve on a century later, not to mention drastically simplifying design and everything else that followed.
Opportunity cost is a thing, and when thrown up against all the other things that the French had to do…? The Lebel was the first in a compound series of interlocking issues that cost the French dearly well into the 20th Century.
Resources are not infinite; nor was the technology base. Had the French actually tried replacing the ill-conceived Lebel and its cartridge in the quantities necessary for the war, they’d have had to cut back in something else, like aircraft engines or artillery.
As it was, the Lebel represents a case where the people behind it all were mistaken about the nature of what would have to be done in combat. Their opponents weren’t much better, thinking that the over-long variant of the 1898 Mauser was the way to go. What was apparent, by 1940, however, was that the French weren’t too good at identifying and fixing the issues they had in terms of small arms. The Germans plumped down for the MG34/42 series specifically because they recognized that the firepower the machinegun delivered could easily obviate the fact that they were issuing a bolt-action rifle, while the French were going for a blue-sky idealized mass-issue semi-auto that they couldn’t get into production soon enough to take part in the war. And, to be quite honest, I don’t know that a French infantry platoon armed with a MAS-40 and the FM-24/29 would have done much better than the one armed with a MAS-39, Lebel, or Berthier and the FM-24/29. I suspect that volume of fire and the German tactics built around the MG34/42 would have ruled the day under those conditions just as much as it did in our actual history.
Once you’ve got an arsenal full of three and a half-million odd Lebels, it’s pretty damn hard to overcome that initial miscalculation. The politicians are going to be sitting there going “But, you just bought these, and now you say they’re obsolete already…?” and the civilians are going to be raising hell over their taxes going up to fund this boondoggle. The facts on the ground, in the form of all those rifles, ammunition, and the logistics backing them? Good luck shifting off that base; it’s like the QWERTY keyboard, but in firearms.
Yes, the peacetime French Army of the 1880s was/i>< modest. It appears 3.5M was the final total (encompassing 30+ years and a World War), practically guaranteeing numbers weren't very high by the mid-90s when bolt actions matured. "Had the French actually tried replacing the ill-conceived Lebel and its cartridge in the quantities necessary for the war" wasn't the only option. It was certainly plausible to replace or upgrade before it got that far; retool the Lebel for box mags and stripper clips; use 8mm Mauser for certain MGs only (as the Brits did in WW2, hardly incurring the ruin of their economy), etc.
"Had they waited just a bit longer" is, again, predicated on hindsight completely unforeseeable to a nation that saw the Lebel as a revolutionary marvel and Franco-Prussia Part Deux as a looming menace.
Judging historical decisions through the lens of what we know they could have done with their tech is almost as pointless as expecting them to have ours. Just as one example, it would have been feasible, cheaper and easier to issue STENs to everyone but machinegunners and DMs as early as 1896. For that matter, we could have built the P365 in 1980 instead of waiting until 2018 – but we didn’t.
“(…)They bet the farm, and they were deep into the 1930s before they could really overcome that.(…)”
Armée de Terre was on way of replacing Lebel and its’ cartridge already in 1910s, but outbreak of war prevented finishing such switch, see https://modernfirearms.net/en/military-rifles/self-loading-rifles/france-self-loading-rifles/meunier-m1916-eng/ which lead to question when such switch would be complete if not growing threat of a coming war put it to an abrupt end
Which changes nothing about the fact that if they’d bothered to take the time to get it as right as they could, like… Oh, say… The Swiss? Remember that the cartridge which became the 7.5 GP11 started out in 1888, and while modified and modernized over the years, that sucker is still in service to this day in Swiss machineguns.
The process by which the French arrived at and wound up type-standardizing the Lebel was delusionally bad, with rather more primacy placed on politics, one-upsmanship, and gaining fame than actually determining the future of French small arms. I don’t think the men involved really realized what they were doing, TBH–They probably figured that there’d be something else come along like smokeless powder that would enable another major paradigm shift in the state-of-the-art, but it wasn’t so.
The Lebel was a mistake. Fact was (because the fact was known at the time, there’s no hindsight) that the smokeless powder was a breakthrough, but wouldn’t have given to the French Army any long term advantage. There were dozens ways to obtain the same thing. At best they could think to have a 4 years headstart.
At this point they could:
1) take their time to design a good cartridge in every respect, wasting a little of that time.
2) hastly modifying a black powder cartridge, making it even less ergonomic that the original was, to have something immediately usable.
The second choice made sense only if they were almost sure they would have had a full-scale war with Germany in the subsequent four years. Because otherwise, the advantage would have been of the one that designed the second smokeless rifle service ammo. Since it would have been surely better than the first one.
They thought like they were already in war, and so needed something usable immediately. But, in reality, they hadn’t even been that quick. It took two years from patenting the Poudre B to adopting the 8mm Lebel cartridge. Another year to adopt the rifle. In the same year, 1887, Nobel patented the Balistite and, at that point, everyone really interested (like every European government) could obtain a better cartridge in how much? six months?
The rest is history.
Case in point the Gewehr 88 commission rifle came in 18889 into service, which with all its own mistakes in the design is still a much better rifle than the Lebel. The French really decided with a wartime mindset expecting another war with Germany like tomorrow morning and the General really wanted NOW the new wonder-nitro-cartridge and rifle in service for his ego and career. When in reality until 1914 there was peacetime and Bismarck actually had held word, when he declared Germany satiated and not going to expand more. In the 1900s French procurement realized that there was peace and they needed a new rifle and cartridge for the next war, but that was a bit too late to be put into service and combined with a too far ahead self-loading rifle to one-up the Germans, that ws not really manufacturable in mass at the time. A bit too progressive there. A boring bolt-action repeater and a rimless cartridge as was adopted in the 1930ies certainly would have been the way to go. And imho doable during the 1910s if they had been a bit more pragmatic.
Dogwalker,
I’m struck by the irony of having to ask (because the Lebel embodies so many features I dislike as a modern shooter / designer), but how was it “a mistake” at the time?
-It’s too tapered to stack and feed in automatic weapons (which hadn’t been invented yet).
-It didn’t use a spitzer bullet (which hadn’t been invented yet).
-Its high-capacity tube mag wasn’t conducive to spitzers (which hadn’t been invented yet) and couldn’t be reloaded with stripper clips (which hadn’t been invented yet).
-It would have been longer-ranged, kicked less, and used fewer strategic metals in 7mm or 6mm (which no one had tried yet).
Sincere, non-sarcastic question: What mistakes am I missing (that would have been apparent / correctable in 1886, not 2022 or 1914)?
The question is: why the others didn’t make those mistakes? What happened between 1886 and 1890, that made so that several cartridges adopted right after the 8mm Lebel avoided all those traps? Only by chance?
No, it was that the direction was already pretty clear.
The 8mm Lebel not only was too tapered (tapering a cartridge that much is wasting space. You can have the same lenght and the same internal volume in a smaller diameter cartridge), but the cartridge was not simply tapered, the taper was domed. Not by chance the other cartridges designed at the time were “straight” walled (a truncated cone from the extraction grove to the shoulder). To have a domed cartridge makes more complicate to machine the chamber, in exchange of nothing.
The tubular magazine was known to be problematic even with round nose bullets. It takes the same time to load a round in the magazine than to fire it. It also makes the rifle muzzle-heavy and changes the balance as it fires. The vertical magazine had already been patented in 1879. Austria-Hungary adopted a vertical magazine clip-fed rifle in 1886 and Italy adopted the verical magazine, clip-fed conversion for the Vetterli in 1887. The three shots Bertier demonstrated how well the 8mm Lebel coped with vertical magazines. Fact is that (by chance?) practically all the cartridges adopted after the 8mm lebel (and several adopted before) were more apt to be used in vertical magazines.
The Maxim had already been invented when the Lebel had been adopted, so yes, they could have tought about it. Fact is that (by chance?) practically all the cartridges adopted after the 8mm lebel were more apt to auto fire (and it’s not like the Maxim had been so much used in those three-four years to make it more obvious to think about it).
Dogwalker,
Thank you for your thorough and courteous response. A few counterpoints:
Box Magazines: We know detachable box magazines are better than tube magazines, and so are box magazines that can be reloaded with stripper or enbloc clips. Box magazines may have been invented before the Lebel, but (absent the aforementioned, not yet invented technologies) why would a Frenchman perceive any disadvantage for his tube mag that had to be thumb-loaded a round at a time vs. a (smaller) box mag that had to be thumb-loaded a round at a time?
Maxims: Tapered cartridges are disadvantaged in high-cap box magazines, but not at all in pull-out belts. In fact, it seems to me that the advantage many claim for 7.62×39 in extraction (from a chamber) also applies to tapered cartridges extracted from a belt: the moment it moves rearward, it releases completely (as opposed to more parallel sides that continue to drag on the belt link or pocket).
The 1886-1890 comparison is just more hindsightism. By the same metric, even the most brilliant prop-fighters of WW2 were “mistakes” because a couple years later there were jets.
Mike
Detachable box magazines had been already used to load hand-crank MGs, and stripper clips too. That’s why the application of the same technology to rifles was foreseeable (the Mannlicher 1886 and the Vetterli Vitali 1887 had not been breakthroughs, they were pretty much expected) Not only. By adopting an infantry cartride, you adopt not only the cartridge for a given rifle. You’ll want to use it for the most weapons that’s possible. If you adopt a cartridge that prevents the use of a certain technology, you are preventing the use, by your army, of all the weapons, existing or future, that use that technology. That’s why all the others avoided that trap.
As already said, a so tapered cartridge is, at least, a waste of space. more cartriges less tapered would fit in the same lenght of belt. And the Lebel isn’t a good cartridge for canvas belts also. A so tapered cartridge is more difficult to make sit still in them. Fact is that the French didn’t use them.
During WWII there was a war. That justified the rapid development of WWII prop-fighters. During a war, the wartime mindset is justified.
Without a war, to change the main production prop-fighter every year, in the five years before the introduction of jet fighters, would have been pure madness.
Single-stack, gravity types were used successfully with rimmed and tapered cartridges, so hardly a red flag the French should have perceived.
But not to reload fixed box magazines.
Although the French primarily used the Hotchkiss in WW1, they certainly bought and used Maxims. Were they not in 8mm Lebel?
Spitfires, Zeroes, and FW190s were elegant, brilliant masterpieces of the art developed before the war. Neither they nor wartime P51s even remotely resemble hasty, STEN-like wartime desperation. It would be absurd to say “They were mistakes. Why didn’t they incorporate this great invention from only a few years later?”
None of them tapered like the Lebel, infact all of them avoided that trap.
It doesn’t need to have a perfectly compliant STANAG magazine on the desk to grasp that a vertical dispenser of laterally stacked items, independently if it’s actuated by gravity,spring tension, pneumatic pressure or godwill, and being the items ammos, pens, cigarettes or crayons, stacks and dispenses better cylinders than cones, and it works the worse, the more tapered are the cones.
It was pratically impossible to not realise that.
It’s like saying that Benz couldn’t know he had to use wheels, because they had never been used on a car.
Being them beautiful or not has nothing to do whit what I’m sayin, and NONE is talking of incorporating “inventions of few years later”.
During WWII there was a war. That justified the rapid development of WWII prop-fighters. IMMENSE resources had been spent in enhancing the performances of WWII aircraft engines (in some case, just to make them work). Thus knowing that those performances would have been laughable only few years later. Those performances were needed in that moment. During a war, the wartime mindset is justified.
Without a war, to change the main production prop-fighter every year, in the five years before the introduction of jet fighters, would have been pure madness.
BTW, WE consider those aircrafts works of art. At that time, and for several decades after, they were industrial products (the more cheaply made that was possible and cutting the more corners that was possible). That’s why there’s not a single surviving sample of many WWII aircraft models, despite many of them survived the war.
Because nothing before the first smallbore smokeless cartridge was a smallbore smokeless cartridge.
Being “beautiful” has nothing to do with what I’m saying either (I used elegance in the engineering sense). I also don’t know why you’re stuck on wartime expediency regarding the fighters I mentioned, when most (update: actually all) were first developed before the war.
-All were regarded as brilliant achievements at the time, and still are.
-It would be fair to criticize a designer or engineer for not incorporating or accommodating a feature designed and known years prior.
-Conversely, it is always absurd and irrational to criticize a designer or engineer for failing to anticipate a feature because it was designed “only” a few years after his invention.
It is human nature, in debates, to start countering opposing arguments to the extent that one begins to appear a fierce partisan of the other side. Lest I appear to be a diehard Lebel guy, let me reiterate that I believe the opposite. I think it’s important, though, for people studying the history of technology to approach a “first” fairly: Practically every “first” sucks (e.g. the Wright Flyer is an objectively terrible airplane), by any subsequent standards of that field. One can acknowledge that fact, while also acknowledging the debt that subsequent products (and even the standards themselves) owe to the pioneers who may have stumbled through their first janky inventions.
As a matter of fact, none else that designed a smollbore smokeless service rifle cartridge, made it tapered like that. The reasons had been amply explained.
Sorry, but are you that resorted to “wartime expediency”, bringing an example of something that happened DURING A WAR when the criticism to the adoption of the 8mm Lebel is EXACTLY that it had been adopted with a wartime mindset.
The tremendous enhancement in performances those aircrafts experienced had been justified by war needs. They would have NEVER achieved something like that without the war. IMMENSE resources had been spent during the war in enhancing the performances of WWII aircraft engines (in some case, just to make them work). Thus knowing that those performances would have been laughable only few years later. It had been done because there was a war in that moment, not few years later. During a war, the wartime mindset is justified. Without a war, to change the main production prop-fighter every year, in the five years before the introduction of jet fighters, would have been pure madness, and it would have been remembered as pure madness.
If you have not-wartime examples, you are welcome.
NONE is criticizing “a designer or engineer for failing to anticipate a feature because it was designed “only” a few years after his invention”. The shape of the Lebel cartridge was defective according to the knowledge of its time (and we are talking even about pre-school level knowledge) to be used in devices of its time, infact NONE else fell in the same traps.
–None of the fighters I listed were designed “DURING A WAR”. They were designed during the optimum period for weapons development – an armed peace where the prospect of war is close enough to dispel any notion of a “peace dividend”, yet no enemy is in a position to force anyone to rush for “good enough”.
–All were designed closer in time to the invention of jets than the Lebel was to the development of the Mauser features it lacks.
And yet they did, in anticipation of war, and continued to do that with new jets (which were not only costly, but killed hundreds of pilots a year because they were ongoing science projects) after the war.
-All subsequent smokeless cartridges, again, had the benefit of learning from the Lebel’s example, just like all WW1 aircraft are better than the Wright Flyer.
And what does it counts when they had been “designed”?
Designing something is not adopting it, it’s not manufacturing it, it’s not refining it. It’s not introducing yearly versions that made obsolete the previous one.
The tremendous enhancement in performances those aircrafts experienced had been justified by war needs. They would have NEVER achieved something like that without the war. IMMENSE resources had been spent during the war in enhancing the performances of WWII aircraft engines (in some case, just to make them work). Thus knowing that those performances would have been laughable only few years later. It had been done because there was a war in that moment, not few years later. During a war, the wartime mindset is justified. Without a war, to change the main production prop-fighter every year, in the five years before the introduction of jet fighters, would have been pure madness, and it would have been remembered as pure madness.
If you have not-wartime examples, you are welcome.
It seems that even cartridges adopted before the 8mm Lebel benefited of learning from the Lebel’s example, infact they avoided the same traps.
Again, despite your narrative, NONE is criticizing “a designer or engineer for failing to anticipate a feature because it was designed “only” a few years after his invention”. The shape of the Lebel cartridge was defective according to the knowledge of its time (and we are talking even about pre-school level knowledge) to be used in devices of its time, infact NONE else fell in the same traps.
The planes I noted were built before their builders entered WW2. Were they further improved during the war? Of course. Feel free to scroll up to where I stated that France’s mistake consisted not in developing the Lebel, but in failing to improve or upgrade it thereafter.
What smallbore smokeless cartridges were adopted before the Lebel?
You stated: “Spitfires, Zeroes, and FW190s were elegant, brilliant masterpieces of the art developed before the war. Neither they nor wartime P51s even remotely resemble hasty, STEN-like wartime desperation. It would be absurd to say “They were mistakes. Why didn’t they incorporate this great invention from only a few years later?””
Fact is that you remember those fighters because they had been used during WWII. For what they have become during the war. Not because, as the FW190, a prototype that resembled the production aircraft flew for the first time three months before the start of it. “During WWII there was a war. That justified the rapid development of WWII prop-fighters. During a war, the wartime mindset is justified.
Without a war, to change the main production prop-fighter every year, in the five years before the introduction of jet fighters, would have been pure madness.”
And, again, NONE is criticizing “a designer or engineer for failing to anticipate a feature because it was designed “only” a few years after his invention”. The shape of the Lebel cartridge was defective according to the knowledge of its time (and we are talking even about pre-school level knowledge) to be used in devices of its time, infact NONE else fell in the same traps.
But yes. Those aircraft had the possibility to be developed during the war because they were basically good. State of the art aircrafts according to the engineering knowledge of their time.
Fact is that, contrary to the Spitfires, Zeroes, and FW190, the 8mm Lebel was not a “brilliant masterpieces of the art developed before the war”. It was a basically defective project. Worse in some respect (in any respect that didn’t concern the fact it was filled with poudre B) than ammos that preceded it. And there were reasons it was defective.
Sorry but the question “What smallbore smokeless cartridges were adopted before the Lebel?” doesn’t make any sense. The 8mm Lebel had been the first smallbore smokeless cartridge to be adopded, and it was badly made. teh reason it was badly made, had nothing to do with it being filled with smokeless powder. There was nothing inherent to the smokeless powder that forced the designers of the Lebel to develop a shape that was defective according to the knowledge of its time (and we are talking even about pre-school level knowledge) to be used in devices of its time, infact NONE else fell in the same traps.
What service rifle cartridge was unapt to be used in vertical magazines when vertical magazines had already been invented and adopted, unapt to be used in belts when belts had already been invented and adopted, not that good for machining chambers, and not that good for tubular magazines also?
The 8mm Lebel.
Why the 8mm Lebel was unapt to be used in vertical magazines when vertical magazines had already been invented and adopted, unapt to be used in belts whan belts had already been invented and adopted, not that good for machining chambers, and not that good for tubular magazines also?
Because it’s an hastly converted black powder cartridge instead of a cartridge designed for smokeless powder. The extreme taper required by this operation resulted in a cartridge that was unapt to be used in vertical magazines when vertical magazines had already been invented and adopted, unapt to be used in belts whan belts had already been invented and adopted, not that good for machining chambers, and not that good for tubular magazines also.
Why the French hastly converted a black powder cartridge, obtaining a cartridge whose extreme taper made it unapt to be used in vertical magazines when vertical magazines had already been invented and adopted, unapt to be used in belts whan belts had already been invented and adopted, not that good for machining chambers, and not that good for tubular magazines also, instead of designing a cartridge for smokeless powder apt to be used in vertical magazines when vertical magazines had already been invented and adopted, apt to be used in belts whan belts had already been invented and adopted, good for machining chambers, and good for tubular magazines also? since it would have required only a less tapered cartridge, and to manufacture a less tapered cartridge was clearly possible, and preferable, with the knowledge of the time? Because, once they had the Poudre B, and realised its advantages, they fell, wrongly in a war mindset, thinking they needed a smokeless powder cartridge the sooner they can, as if they absolutely had to exploit that temporary advantage. Regardless the fact that they had no intention to start a war, that would have been the only way to esploit that advantage (like if the service rifle could win a war). so “it’s superior to what whe already have and we can have it now, so it’s good enough”.
BTW, that’s not the way the Spitfire had been designed. They didn’t fit a Merlin engine in a Gladiator, put a ballast in the tail to compensate the weight, and called it a day.
Of course usign smokeless powder effectively required a different shape.
If you’re finally acknowledging/abandoning the absurdity of claiming Lebel should have discovered the optimum (i.e. Mauserish) shape for a smokeless cartridge before Mauser did, and claiming he could have done a better job using the knowledge already available in his time (“[blackpowder] ammos, pens, cigarettes or crayons” – i.e. a gently-tapering near-cylinder), what were his options?
-Use smokeless in a lead-wasting, shoulder-breaking bigbore cartridge – i.e. “Screw the ‘revolutionary’ part of the smokeless revolution; let’s continue to deliver Brown Bess rainbow ballistics, but with less smoke.”
-Use a smallbore bullet, but with a gradually tapering (and therefore very small, low-capacity) case – i.e. a .32 Hornet.
Absent Mauser’s innovation, using only the knowledge available at the time, those are the only two remaining options. Despite its quirks, the Lebel as designed – in the same ballistic ballpark as the 8×57 and .30-06 – is far superior to either of those other possibilities, which would have disadvantaged France vs. its neighbors.
You also have to keep in mind that there was/is a tremendous difference in pressure with smokeless powder and the very earliest testing of the smokeless iterations was to see at what level the test firearm started showing serious problems and the back off the powder charge until out of the danger zone. Many early test rifles failed due to pressure and metallurgy issues. The British discovered that with cordite very large cases with moderate charges kept pressures down, and allowed acceptable, not maximum performance in the widely varied climate conditions of the Empire. Lebel designed his cartridge off a black powder case necked to a smallbore bullet to find out how smokeless powder would perform. This was unknown territory and pressure testing equipment was not very widely available.
DAVID,
All excellent points, along the lines of what I wrote earlier: for a “first” product, being unprecedented brings recognition but also, paradoxically, being unprecedented also generally brings mediocrity by any subsequent standard.
“(…)32 Hornet(…)”
What is this?
Daweo,
“.32 Hornet” is a hypothetical cartridge I postulated – an 8mm rifle cartridge with the external contours (and therefore mediocre ballistics) – of .22 Hornet, to demonstrate that “solving” 8mm Lebel’s quirks with the technology available at the time would produce inferior performance in the ways that matter.
“(…)a cartridge whose extreme taper made it unapt to be used in vertical magazines when vertical magazines had already been invented and adopted, unapt to be used in belts whan belts had already been invented and adopted(…)”
In that time France used Reffye Mitrailleuse
http://www.victorianshipmodels.com/antitorpedoboatguns/Mitrailleuse/
which could be probably adopted to any-shaped cartridge and did used own 13 mm cartridge https://municion.org/producto/13-x-85-r-de-reffye/
not one used in then-current service rifles, thus it might conjured that they were considering having special (another) cartridge for machine gun acceptable.
“Of course usign smokeless powder effectively required a different shape.”
It required a different dimension. It didn’t require a so tapered shape. A so tapered shape was a mistake according to the knowledge of the time, infact none else adopted it before or later. It was a mistake because it was unapt to be used in vertical magazines when vertical magazines had already been invented and adopted, unapt to be used in belts when belts had already been invented and adopted, not that good for machining chambers, and not that good for tubular magazines also.
“If you’re finally acknowledging/abandoning the absurdity of claiming Lebel should have discovered the optimum (i.e. Mauserish) shape for a smokeless cartridge before Mauser did…”
You should really quit listening to the voices in your head and start reading what other people write. I never claimed Lebel should have designed a Mauser cartridge, I stated the Lebel cartridge was a mistake ACCORDING TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF ITS TIME, and I clearly explained you why since the start of this discussion (when you ask something, you really should read the answer). The 8mm Lebel was a mistake because it was unapt to be used in vertical magazines when vertical magazines had already been invented and adopted, unapt to be used in belts when belts had already been invented and adopted, not that good for machining chambers, and not that good for tubular magazines also.
After I clearly explained why the 8mm Lebel was a mistake, you started blabbering about the absurdity of it being a mistake “because it didn’t incorporate inventions of years later”. You should really abandon this absurdity and aknowledging that the 8mm Lebel was a mistake because it was unapt to be used in vertical magazines when vertical magazines had already been invented and adopted, unapt to be used in belts when belts had already been invented and adopted, not that good for machining chambers, and not that good for tubular magazines also.
“what were his options?”
His options were to design a less tapered cartridge, like anyole else did before and after. That was the knowledge of his time. Using common knowledge of his time he would have obtained a cartridge apt to be used in vertical magazines when vertical magazines had already been invented and adopted, apt to be used in belts whan belts had already been invented and adopted, good for machining chambers, and good for tubular magazines also. He didn’t use common knowledge of his time, and instead hastly converted a black powder cartridge, because, once the French had the Poudre B, and realised its advantages, they fell, wrongly in a war mindset, thinking they needed a smokeless powder cartridge the sooner they can, as if they absolutely had to exploit that temporary advantage. Regardless the fact that they had no intention to start a war, that would have been the only way to esploit that advantage (like if the service rifle could win a war). so “it’s superior to what whe already have and we can have it now, so it’s good enough”.
“Absent Mauser’s innovation, using only the knowledge available at the time, those are the only two remaining options.”
Anyone with a working brain can figure out a less tapered cartridge with the same internal volume of a more tapered one. Infact anyone else did before and after the 8mm Lebel.
That’s an awful lot of verbiage without answering any of my questions. The realities of geometry are inescapable, leaving (again) only three possibilities for a “less tapered cartridge [body]”:
1. Less tapered body and more tapered shoulder (Mauser), which I had hoped we’d agreed was an unreasonable expectation because it hadn’t been invented yet.
Thus, we’re back to the only two possibilities under “the knowledge / technology of the time”:
2. Less tapered body because it’s fat at both ends (big, blunt, heavy bullet; just a blackpowder cartridge with less smoke).
3. Less tapered body because it’s skinny at both ends – with either terrible capacity and ballistics, or “the same internal volume” (maybe if it was 4+” long!) and probably still terrible ballistics trying to combust that pencilly powder column.
“thus it might conjured that they were considering having special (another) cartridge for machine gun acceptable.”
There’s no doubt that they considered the 8mm Lebel “acceptable”, otherwise they would not have adopted it. Had you read my posts, you should have read they considered it even “good enough”.
But “acceptable” is no “good” (without “enough”). The fact that the French army was not using a MG loaded by a vertical magazine, or a belt, at the moment didn’t mean that those things had not been invented, and the 8mm Lebel prevented to use them. “If you adopt a cartridge that prevents the use of a certain technology, you are preventing the use, by your army, of all the weapons, existing or future, that use that technology. That’s why all the others avoided that trap.”
Why the French hastly converted a black powder cartridge, obtaining a cartridge whose extreme taper made it unapt to be used in vertical magazines when vertical magazines had already been invented and adopted, unapt to be used in belts whan belts had already been invented and adopted, not that good for machining chambers, and not that good for tubular magazines also, instead of designing a cartridge for smokeless powder apt to be used in vertical magazines when vertical magazines had already been invented and adopted, apt to be used in belts whan belts had already been invented and adopted, good for machining chambers, and good for tubular magazines also, since it would have required only a less tapered cartridge, and to manufacture a less tapered cartridge was clearly possible, and preferable, with the knowledge of the time? Because, once they had the Poudre B, and realised its advantages, they fell, wrongly in a war mindset, thinking they needed a smokeless powder cartridge the sooner they can, as if they absolutely had to exploit that temporary advantage. Regardless the fact that they had no intention to start a war, that would have been the only way to esploit that advantage (like if the service rifle could win a war). so “it’s superior to what whe already have and we can have it now, so it’s good enough”.
Mike.
Shoulders had already been invented. Mauser didn’t have any role in inventing shoulders. The impossibility you stated is a pretended one. The shoulders of the 8mm lebel are no really less tapered than those of other first generation smokeless cartridges. The Patrone 88 shoulders are a bit more tapered, but that didn’t require any imput form Mauser or other geniuses. It had been designed by a commitee using techniques of the time.
Thank you for your highly informative clarification that shoulders existed when the 8mm Lebel (which has shoulders!) was invented.
The minimally tapered case with more tapered shoulders – the only shape that could have mitigated the Lebel’s quirks while maintaining similar ballistics – was, of course, a later invention.
“Less tapered body because it’s skinny at both ends – with either terrible capacity and ballistics, or “the same internal volume” (maybe if it was 4+” long!) and probably still terrible ballistics trying to combust that pencilly powder column.”
Wow! The Brits designed a so terrible cartridge!
It’s interesting to note however how the .303 British managed to obtain performances perfectly comparable to that of the 8mm Lebel, thus having this terrible “skinny body”, shoulders whose taper was comparable with that of the 8mm Lebel, but skinnier, a grand total of 3mm more OAL, and lower operating pressure.
Maybe the 8mm Lebel tapered shape was a turd performance-wise too after all.
Another LATER and therefore improved / more Mauser-like cartridge? How could Lebel have not copied that? Ya got me!
“The minimally tapered case with more tapered shoulders – the only shape that could have mitigated the Lebel’s quirks while maintaining similar ballistics – was, of course, a later invention.”
Again, no. The shoulders of the 8mm lebel are no really less tapered than those of other first generation smokeless cartridges, and cartriges with shoulders with the same taper and even skinnier than that of the Lebel obtained comparable and even better performances.
MIKE
“Another LATER and therefore improved / more Mauser-like cartridge? How could Lebel have not copied that? Ya got me!”
No, A cartride with exactly the charateristic YOU stated the Lebel cartridge could have had instead of being tapered (so no, now pretended, “Mauser improvement”. But what have you with Mauser anyway?) BUT that, in your own words, would have led to terrible ballistic performances.
“Less tapered body because it’s skinny at both ends – with either terrible capacity and ballistics, or “the same internal volume” (maybe if it was 4+” long!) and probably still terrible ballistics trying to combust that pencilly powder column.”
The .303 British has shoulders with about the same taper of the 8mm lebel, BUT SKINNIER (10.18mm instead of 11.42mm). A SKINNIER BASE so SKINNIER AT BOTH ENDS. There are no “Mauser improvements”, here sorry. There are no “later inventions”.THE OPERATING PRESSURE IS EVEN LOWER THAN THAT OF THE 8MM LEBEL.
Yet there’s no “terrible ballistics trying to combust that pencilly powder column”. The performances are perfectly comparable with that of the 8mm Lebel.
Sorry, you got yourself.
.303 ballistics appear only slightly behind 8mm Lebel’s; however, .303 was the subject of constant development (amid great advances in powder chemistry, metallurgy, etc.) through WW2 – making it clear (if it wasn’t already abundantly clear based on case capacity!) that it was well behind in performance at the time of its introduction – the only time that matters, given yet again that I have freely conceded all along that the French erred in not updating or replacing the cartridge in response to later developments.
And how those “improvements” changed case geometry?
“Less tapered body because it’s skinny at both ends – with either terrible capacity and ballistics, or “the same internal volume” (maybe if it was 4+” long!) and probably still terrible ballistics trying to combust that pencilly powder column.”
.303 British has “Less tapered body because it’s skinny at both ends”, so no “later Mauser improvements” it’s shoulders have about the same taper angle than the 8mm Lebel, so no “later Mauser improvements”, but are skinnier, so no “later Mauser improvements”. Has 3mm OAL. So is exactly the cartridge you were talking of.
Yet it hasn’t “terrible ballistics trying to combust that pencilly powder column”. It never had “terrible ballistics trying to combust that pencilly powder column”. Not even at the first iteration it had “terrible ballistics trying to combust that pencilly powder column”. It had been adopted exactly because it hadn’t “terrible ballistics trying to combust that pencilly powder column”.
It’s performances are comparable with that of the 8mm Lebel WITH A LOWER OPERATING PRESSURE, so it hasn’t “terrible ballistics trying to combust that pencilly powder column”. Sorry.
The .303 British later improvements concerned mainly the bullet, not the propellant, exactly like the 8mm Lebel improvements. The original .303 British launched a 215 grain bullet at 2050ft/s from a 767mm barrel, the 8mm Lebelle Balle-M. a 235 grain bullet at 2060ft/s from a 800mm barrel.
So the question is:
“Even considering them (and only them, because NONE ELSE shown this incapability) incapable of even the slightest ability to divert from known cartridge shapes, wuould have been the French better served by a cartridge that’s even more similar than the 8mm Lebel to a black powder cartridge (and infact it was at first), only not made by hastly converting a previous 11mm black powder cartridge?
And the answer is yes.
Because the 8mm Lebel had been a mistake.
And, just to be clear, to taper more the shoulders didn’t require any “later invention”. it had been done when it had been considered convenient, without anyone inventing anything new.
“(…)Same-same with the British adoption of the .303.(…)”
No, ·303 British was originally black-powder cartridge, it become cordite at Mark II. Therefore in this smokeless cartridge was developed which used unaltered case of already used black-powder cartridge and machinery pertaining to its’ production.
In that case the mistake was in adopting a black-powder, rimmed, cartridge the same year the Germans adopted the Patrone-88.
“luckily”, for being a black-powder cartridge, the .303 British was a pretty modern one, at least dimensionally.
Actually the Mark I was a stop-gap with compressed blackpowder, because the mass manufacture of cordite was not ready yet. The .303 cartridge was intended to be a nitro cartridge from the start. Rimmed or rimless was not really decided yet, what would be the way to go at that point in time. For tha Maxim and Vickers machien guns it did not matter, because they pull out from the belt the cartridge to the rear and the slight gain of space in the box magazine of a bolt-action rifle was probabaly not seen as worth it compared to the easier extraction and headspacing a rimmed cartridge offers. Also all other cartridges in service were rimmed, so why change from the tried and true and well-known rim? So the design was not that bad at the time it was made. Before WW1 like the French the British looked into a new rifle and rimless cartridge, but the war started too early for them as well. C’est la vie.
“(…)M14, which managed to achieve about the shortest period as type-standardized individual weapon in American military history.(…)”
No. U.S. Submachine gun, M2, .45 ACP has shorter service span, it was standard from April 1942 to June 1943.
“(…)In fact, trial a hundred years ago often involved many more type of guns, because submissions were taken from individual inventors with the expectation that a winning design would be produced by a national armory.(…)”
Peacetime 3ème République seems to have inclination must be state-entity designed (other abilities optional). Most glaring example probably being Puteaux M1905
https://modernfirearms.net/en/machineguns/france-machineguns/puteaux-m1905-eng/
Actual combat experience in 1914 make them to quickly revise such mindset and order Hotchkiss machine guns.
According to W.H.B. Smith, the only notable difference between the Puteaux and the Hotchkiss was that instead of the gas piston moving backward to actuate the bolt, the Puteaux was designed with it moving forward and operating a rack-and-pinion to cycle the bolt. This was done solely to evade the Hotchkiss patent.
This was far from the only example of an “in-house” design being created to avoid paying patent royalties. The British Enfield MK I/II revolver of 1878 was created, based on the American Owen Jones patent, to avoid buying the Webley top-break.
Ironically, the Jones system was itself a patent evasion, the patents being dodged being the Merwin-Hulbert and King (S&W) patents on simultaneous-extraction systems for revolvers. The Jones patent was in fact an odd mixture of both.
cheers
eon
“(…)why does defense procurement take so much longer and cost so much more today than it did in the first half of the C20th when national defense was a far more pressing concern?(…)”
Important thing: you must not compare directly prices in capitalistic economy against planned economy, like 1940s Soviet Union. Latter allowed bureaucracy to declared product X price is now Y rubles, without any justification.
The amount of political background in procurement led to incidents like the U.S. getting sued by Mauser for patent infringement since the 1903 Springfield was very much a variation on the 1898 Mauser, and someone in the U.S. did not do their homework to appropriately say to Mauser “We like the design of the 98 rifles, can we put together a I’ll scratch your back if you will scratch mine” concerning us modifying you design to meet our projected needs” which probably would have made the 03 type rifles even better than they were. Political considerations were not well thought through before trials and acceptance of the Springfield rifles in 1903/04 for field trials with active troops.
It got worse when the sharp-nosed .30-06 was adopted. Mauser sued Springfield Armory over the M1903 and its ammunition, as it appeared that the US Army did not want to admit to “borrowing someone else’s ideas.” I suppose some idiot general claimed that the M1903 was “100% original American in design and material!”
I agree with you on the whole issue. If I recall, Mauser won the lawsuit and the U.S. had to pay a substantial fee to keep the 03 and 30-03/3006 cartridge in service.
Was that DWM rather than Mauser? The suit would be hard, as the French Balle D preceeded Germany’s spitzgeschoss round. I’m sure Ian made a video on this topic, not that I can find it;from memory later payments were made due to wartime payment seizures.
We’re talking about stuff patented IN AMERICA, not in France. I highly doubt the French army would apply for an American patent on a “military secret.” If DWM or Mauser found that .30-06 resembled a sharp-nosed commercial cartridge Mauser had already patented IN AMERICA, and yet discovered that the US Army claimed that .30-06 was “100% NOT INFLUENCED BY OUTSIDE PRODUCTS”, wouldn’t that trigger the lawsuit? And yes, I know I could be wrong.