Revolver vs pistol: advantages and disadvantages

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Visually from Harry Callahan

Westerns have taught us that faceless thugs carry rifles, while the really tough guys carry revolvers. It was the revolver in the hip holster that became the calling card of the gunfighter, sheriff and tough cop. And from Westerns, revolvers moved into other genres, firmly establishing themselves in the role of a “pocket gun.”

The reality turned out to be much more prosaic - with the advent of semi-automatic magazine-fed pistols, the popularity of revolvers in the army quickly disappeared, completely relegating them to the category of civilian, police and hunting weapons.

Brief historical excursion

The first devices for “firearms” were huge, inconvenient, and extremely dangerous to use. The medieval arquebus, for example, weighed more than three kilograms, “bullet” at enemies with miniature lead balls. Not every shooter was able to cope with such a weapon, but tiny shells penetrated the knight’s armor in one go. We can say that thanks to arquebuses, metal armor fell out of use - they simply ceased to guarantee the owners the same protection.

Decades quickly flew by, during which people intensely searched for new ways to destroy their own kind. The time has come for arquebuses, muskets, and then pistols. The exact chronology has not been preserved, but this name began to be widely mentioned from the beginning of the 16th century. In terms of compactness, the new weapon greatly outperformed its “ancestors,” but its rate of fire remained low.

In an attempt to eliminate the annoying shortcoming, the designers developed a double-barreled pistol, which a couple of centuries later was replaced by a weapon with a special rotating drum - an analogue of a modern revolver. So the paths of the two “brothers” finally diverged.

Fundamental differences - one, two, three

The main difference is in the principle of feeding cartridges and the subsequent technique for removing cartridges.

What happens when a gun is fired? When the powder charge burns, the same energy is formed that performs three actions at once: it sends the bullet “in flight,” automatically ejects the spent cartridge case and returns the bolt to its original “ready to fire” position, feeding the next cartridge from the magazine.

The owner of the weapon does not require any additional body movements - just aim correctly and touch the trigger to hit the target again. The shutter is manually reset only once, after installing a new magazine (of course, we are not talking about cases where a misfire occurred).

With a revolver, everything is somewhat different (again, if we are dealing with the classic version and not its automated modification). Once - finger on the trigger, press, shoot. Two – rotation of the drum the next time you manually cock the hammer. And so on until the cartridges run out. In this case, the cartridges remain in their sockets; after firing, they still have to be removed in order to recharge. That's three.

Revolver

Even to a person who does not have much practice, it becomes clear that with prolonged fire contact the owner of the pistol is clearly a winner (naturally, if he has stocked up with additional clips equipped in advance). It takes a couple of seconds to snap out an empty magazine and replace it with a full one; it is quite possible to perform such an action on the run, literally “automatically”.

Gun

A revolver shooter, having used up the initial ammunition, is forced to temporarily turn into a defenseless target - until the drum is filled again. It is possible to do this blindly, but only with special practical skills.

If we evaluate a combat weapon, and not its traumatic version, then we can talk about different degrees of reliability - at least this difference between a pistol and a revolver is often mentioned by professional shooters.

It is interesting that it is in this regard that the second has a clear advantage over the first. We are talking about the possibility of a misfire - it cannot be guaranteed that this fatal accident will never happen. The owner of a revolver in such a situation does not waste a second - he simply presses the trigger again.

The pistol shooter is forced to be distracted in order to jerk the bolt, that is, to manually get rid of the “unfired” cartridge and fire a new one. It is clear that a professional will only need a second, but even such a head start will be a pleasant gift to the enemy. But an inexperienced person will most likely become confused and panic – here the outcome of the fight is completely predetermined.

The effectiveness in close combat of the two “brothers” is approximately the same, but in terms of rate of fire the pistol wins.

In a revolver, this characteristic inevitably suffers due to the need to perform additional manipulations (after firing, cock it again). However, there are also types of these weapons in which two actions are combined into one - when the trigger is pressed, the hammer is simultaneously cocked. But using such a model requires the shooter to have a strong hand and good physical fitness - to fire a shot you will have to put in almost three times as much effort.

Examples[edit]

Literature[edit]

• Mark Twain, “A Yankee in King Arthur's Court”: with two revolvers in his hands, the protagonist is ready to challenge the entire English knighthood to battle at once! True, this was a fair amount of chutzpah, which almost backfired on him: it was lucky that it was on the twelfth dead man that the knights decided to stop.
• Stephen King, "The Dark Tower": revolvers in the hands of shooters are very, very cool! Even against automatic weapons, homing bombs and lasers.
• “The Man with the Golden Gun” - in the original source, Scaramanga is armed not with monstrous garbage, but with an ordinary gold-plated large-caliber revolver. Weighing the odds, Bond decides that his enemy has the advantage in the inevitable skirmish, and even decides to do the inelegant thing: stealing the first cartridge from the drum.
• “Chronicles of a Strange Kingdom”: in the world of Delta there are no pistols at all in our understanding; revolvers are called pistols here. In the hands of a good shooter - for example, the same comrade Kantor - it is very, very cool. I guess after the war with Kappa it’s no longer relevant...

Cinema[edit]

Meta-example: Westerns and Eastern films without revolvers are unthinkable. If in the States the Colt SAA became the most popular “cinematic” revolver, then in the vast expanses of the former USSR this title undoubtedly belongs to the revolver. As well as cartoons that parody and play on Westerns.

• Dirty Harry is complete without his Smith & Wesson. So does Tudor Miklovan.

TV series[edit]

• Firefly - where would we be without it? Jane Cobb especially loves revolvers. One of Wash’s crowning moments, when he, with the Python in his hands, proves that he is cool not only at the helm and did not serve in the army in vain.

Animated series[edit]

• RWBY is General Ironwood's monstrous revolver with an under-barrel grenade launcher. The irony is that this is the most "common" weapon in the series. In the seventh season there are already a couple of them, and the second one he uses to fly using cartridges with gravity dust!
• Arthur Watts went up against Ironwood with an 18-round revolver!

Anime and Manga[edit]

• Black Lagoon - Dutch carries a Smith & Wesson 29-2
• Ghost in the Shell - Togusa uses a Mateba revolver with an unusual lower barrel.
• Gunsmith Cats - In the first arc, a gun-loving hitman buys a custom Ruger Super Redhawk from Rally to kill her target. When Rally found out about this, she was very unhappy that the weapon she created would be used for contract killing.
• Lupine III - Jigen Daisuke with the inseparable Magnum.
• Arifureta Shokugyou de Sekai Saikyou - when trying to make a firearm powered by magic, the main character came up with Donner and Schlag revolvers, the automatic did not work out. For the sake of the rate of fire, a minigun was later made.
  And it’s very cool, and it also does without complex mechanics. Immensely cool: black with red stripes, they accelerate the bullet with electricity like a railgun, they shoot so fast that six shots merge into one, they are loaded by teleporting cartridges almost directly into a rotating drum.
  In the original light novel, only Donner was made at first (he had nothing to hold the second one in any case). The revolver format was chosen because something was needed that was both powerful (the beast in the caves was much superior to the guy in level), multi-shot (some animals walked in small groups, while others were obviously very strong in wounds) and one-handed (again for obvious reasons - only the stump remained from the second hand). Well, plus, something with a fairly simple design was required - the accuracy of transmutation left much to be desired, therefore, before assembling a shooting revolver, the hero wasted a lot of ore on unsuccessful attempts: the parts were not immediately able to fit together, and in terms of strength, it was also not possible on the first try, the frame turned out to be quite durable (if he had immediately swung at something like the M1911, he would have been riveting prototypes until the end of time in that cave). And it was precisely a firearm - purely by chance, a vein with a very special ore was discovered, partly similar to bitumen, but at the same time capable of burning without access to air, and when trying to burn in a small closed volume, it gave an explosion - almost like native black gunpowder (the guy was lucky , that in his class, with levels, the skill of identifying minerals opened, due to which he immediately learned a lot of everything from almost every selected cobblestone). The option of railgun additional acceleration was added later and only because the protagonist himself learned to generate electricity: for him, railguns are something like slingshots for an ordinary person, only not with muscular force, but with electromotive force, but that’s how he has it. And he couldn’t load by teleportation after receiving the storage ring - he could only remove the spent cartridges with the ring, but he still couldn’t get fresh cartridges into the chambers, so he spent a whole month learning how to catch them in front of him with the drum thrown to the side (yes, like Rusyuna from Grenadier, she just carries cartridges in another kind of “magic cache”
  ).

Video games[edit]

• ATOM RPG: a capsule revolver assembled on your knee is just right for shooting low-level enemies like rats and rural gopots. What’s funny is that it surpasses the factory revolver in power and accuracy.
• Borderlands (game series): Most of the really cool short guns are revolvers. Especially from Jacobs. Looks funny with bonuses to magazine capacity.
• Crysis - from the second part, the game features the fierce Majestic revolver, used by CELL fighters. Its hits are comparable to those of the HMG heavy machine gun (it even breaks the exoskeletons of ordinary Ceph soldiers), but you can only shoot accurately from it at close ranges
• Devil May Cry - "Blue Rose" Nero.
• Fallout and, especially, New Vegas, the symbols of which were the ranger with Sequoia and the song “Big Iron”. After all, the location of the action obliges.
• Half-Life is a stunning and accurate revolver that can kill many enemies with one shot. It’s a pity that there are few cartridges (and we can’t carry more than 36 “in our pockets” and 6 in the cylinder of a revolver), and ammunition is rare. Not that it’s very rare, but not on every corner. Some of the guards in Black Mesa are armed with revolvers, but they are not seen alive “on camera” - Freeman finds a revolver on the deceased. But in the spin-offs there are also live security guards with revolvers.
• Mafia: The City os Lost Heaven - Smith & Wesson Model 27.
• Parasite Eve II is a huge Mongoose revolver chambered for a magnum cartridge. Alas, on your first playthrough you can only get it in the finale, and on the way to the bad ending.
• Resident Evil - "Hand Cannon".
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: Zigzag - the weakest gun in the game is the Smith & Wesson compact police revolver, and one of the most powerful is the Colt Anaconda.
• Dungeon orderlies - a line of revolvers "Felix De", "Lavrentiy Be" and "Iosif Es". To be fair, they look more like a show-off than they shoot effectively. In terms of combat effectiveness, even compact SMGs chambered for a puny 6mm cartridge are clearly better.

Real life[edit]

Throughout the history of revolvers, there have been many outstanding examples:

• 18-21 charging double-barrel hairpin revolvers. These monsters were not supposed to be carried in a holster, but to be carried with you in a carriage or stagecoach.
• The revolver, designed by the French doctor Alexandre Le Ma, is a nine-shot revolver with an under-barrel shotgun.
• Revolver of the Nagan brothers. The fiercest high-tech of its time: a double-action trigger, an automatic safety that does not allow a shot to be fired when the trigger is not pressed (when the trigger is hit, for example), rolling of the drum and cartridges of a special design, eliminating the breakthrough of powder gases and the wedge of the drum with a primer, the accuracy of a sports revolver with reliability military
• Colt Walker! The personal Colt of the legendary Texas Ranger named Samuel Walker (he is the one Chuck Norris cosplays), created by his order and which became the weapon of the Texas Rangers.
• Ruger Super Redhawk Alsakan - created as a self-defense weapon against bears (!)
• RSh-12 is a 12.7 mm assault revolver.
• MTs255 - shotgun and shotgun!
• The Manurhin MR-73 is a French sporting revolver of excellent durability and workmanship. With an extended barrel and bipod, it is used by GIGN special forces as a sniper weapon (for short distances, of course). Fully meets the trope, because it was chosen for its seriousness and old-fashioned chic.
• Milkor MGL, RG-6 and several others - grenade launchers-revolvers!
• Revolver guns! They are used in aviation, but their design is similar to Gatling, whose rotating barrels were replaced with a revolving drum, thereby saving weight.
• “Cucciolo” from the Italian company New System Arms chambered for .728 MR (18.5 mm (!) “for our money”) weighing 12.5 kg without compensator and bipod and butt and 22.5 kg with all the bells and whistles. It feels like the steampunk mechs haven’t arrived for him yet...
• A laser revolver project developed in the 80s in the USSR for the defense of astronauts. Then it’s worth mentioning the TOZ-81 “Mars” - also for cosmonauts, it was proposed as part of the NAZ in case of an emergency landing: hunting, alarm, self-defense. It lost the competition to the three-barreled TP-82 pistol, but was a very interesting design in itself.

Don't play Russian roulette with a pistol!

In general, there is no need or reason to “pull” the revolver - the designers simply did not provide for such details, although this stubbornly does not stop graphomaniacs. No less funny are the attempts of some authors to force their heroes to play Russian roulette with a pistol. In reality, when the bolt is jerked after inserting the clip, the cartridge (even if it is the only one in the magazine!) is automatically sent into the chamber. No lottery: the first one to put a weapon to his temple and pull the trigger is a guaranteed dead man.

So, once again briefly about the important

1. The pistol has a magazine with cartridges and the same bolt that can be pulled. The revolver has a drum, which fans of hussar roulette spin picturesquely in the movies.
2. In a pistol, the next cartridge is fed automatically, in a classic revolver - manually, by cocking the hammer (although there are exceptions).
3. When firing a pistol, cartridges fly out at the moment of firing, and they will need to be removed from the revolver cylinder after the shooting is completed.
4. If rate of fire and effectiveness during prolonged fire contact are to be assessed, the pistol wins. In terms of reliability (in case of a misfire), the revolver wins.

Revolvers are produced in three types

Small revolvers - from 15 to 24 cm long, with a barrel length from 5 to 10 cm; medium - approximately 16.5 to 28 cm long, with trunks from 5 to 18 cm; large - from 24 to 35 cm long, with a trunk from 10 to 20 cm. Appeared in the early 1990s. The trend towards creating compact revolvers with a short barrel, but a powerful caliber, continues to persist.

During their development, revolvers and pistols underwent a number of fundamental changes, achieving noticeable perfection. A situation has arisen in which most of the design possibilities have been exhausted. But, as you know, there are no limits to perfection.