[X] "From what you've said, things can get awfully close in the trenches. If I'm going to rely on you, you're going to need to be able to defend yourself," you say.
Lily blinks. "Direct as ever, I see. Very well, what to tell you before Janice gets back. If you're going to be evaluating those rifles, shoot for the black circle, it's about head sized, and don't look at the range numbers for the berms you shoot at. If you know the exact range to the trench a target's in, you owe your surveyor big time."
Your thoughts turn momentarily to the maths. Eight inches circle, unknown range, that's not an easy shot.
She must have seen the blank, pondering expression on your face because she continues, "Heads are what you can see. If anyone is daft enough to show their whole body, riflery will get them anyway and you don't have to waste your time. And at least it's clean. Lights off, no wondering what's going to become of them."
That opens up a pit in your stomach. "What's that like on the downrange side? No chance for goodbyes or anything?"
"It's always in the cards. Maybe a sniper, maybe a shell splinter. So if you've got something to say, say it."
"That makes sense. Shall we?" You gesture to the shooting stall.
The first rifle you grab is a Ritterin. Its ammunition is in the distinctive Ritterin wrap around clips, and it has the distinctive top opening and bottom gap for the clip to drop out of, and an unusual scope mount where the scope is off to the side to make room for the clip. You remember Lily mentioning that that would be a drawback, and you're interested to see how much of an impact that makes.
You choose a target to point at and raise the rifle into firing position. Unfortunately, despite the unpleasantly bulbous cheek pad, the scope isn't in front of your eye. You adjust until the scope is in front of your right eye. The position feels wrong, your cheekbone is only tenuously grasping onto the rail, and you are suddenly made aware of just how reassuring the usual feeling of pinning the butt between your shoulder and cheekbone is. Without that, the position of your eye feels tenuous, and you need to consciously hold your head in the right position lest a black shadow eclipse your view of the target.
You don't like this arrangement, but you resolve yourself to determine whether a moderate amount of familiarity would solve the problems. You lower the rifle to waist level as if you were carrying it, and then shoulder it. The position would be right, were you a cyclops. You try again and fail again. A few more tries and you see a partial picture of the target with a slice blacked out of it like a gibbous moon. Satisfied that you're getting closer, you persist in trying until you can reliably get a good view. Then you shift your aim to another target. Your optimism that you can get used to this position without a lot of effort wanes as you shift your head into the position needed to see clearly through the scope. It could be made to work, but it would never be as stable as if your cheekbone was resting over the stock.
You pull the cord for the 300 yard range, and after a few seconds, the target for your bay rises above the flowers gaily decorating the berm. You raise the gun, pull the bolt handle back, insert a clip, and then push the bolt forward. The action is reasonably smooth, and the handle sits comfortably near the trigger when forward. You take careful aim, making sure to get your head in the right place, and shoot. The rifle tries to slide upwards on your shoulder and the gun rises even though the recoil isn't much more forceful than you're used to. You didn't expect much, and this gun has delivered. The semaphore under the target signals a nine, you missed the inner ring. If that had been the face of an enemy looking through a loophole, you would have missed. You suppress a shudder at the gruesome thought of that, and try again. Nine. Again. Nine. You look at the scope, to the left of the rifle's bore, and you decide to experiment. You aim at the left edge of the target. The semaphore flashes to say your shot was registered, but it reads eight. You think for a second, and then you aim to the right edge of the target. Finally a ten. The clip falls out, and you lay down the rifle. If you need to aim to the right, that would mean the rifle is set to intersect the scope's aim point at some distance less than 300 yards, and at this range the scope's point of aim has crossed over the rifle's aim. If it's a game of inches, you'd have to account for that as well.
Next you grab the rifle with the long, skinny cartridge. In an odd counterpoint to the viscerally sharp bullet, the gun has a cheerful little flower stamped on its barrel. You find a clip of those cartridges and feed them into the magazine. The large gap between the bullets feels strange in your hand, but the cartridges slide smoothly. You look at the iron sights, and note how close the settings are for the first few hundred yards. You idly wonder just how wide a range you could cover with one setting for elevation. A head is a much smaller target than the old belt buckle chestnut was meant for, but if it really drops that little, that might be good enough at the shorter ranges Lily talked about shooting at. You set it to 250, and fire at the 200 yard bull. Your shots are consistently high, if you aim lower you can get bullseyes, but almost all the shots fall inside the 8 inch circle. You try the same at the 300 yard target, and again, the rounds are still in the 8 inch circle you're using to represent a head. Your target.
You feel that that rifle would be good for shooting, and if you could have a scope mounted to it you feel it could be a very capable hunting tool. Next, you pick up a Katzen, with a scope mounted over the bore. It's a very stout rifle, and you see why the action is renowned for ruggedness. The toughness of the rifle is matched in the scope mount, a very solid affair that looks to be latched into the top of the gun in two places by two thick arms. The front arm forms an arch and the rear arm curves in from the left side, making plenty of room for both manipulating the bolt and even using the iron sights if needed. Despite handsome engraving on the lockwork and stock, the checkering of the grip and fore end and raised cheek piece give the gun a purposeful look. The boar on the receiver glares at you, and you feel a sort of kinship. After all, your job is much the same as the boar's, to make the Dyske hunters come back feet first and try to survive the process. You charge and fire the rifle, and you are surprised to find that it does nothing to change your opinion of it. The recoil is stout, like any other rifle's. The action requires a bit of force, but it works well. The scope's reticle is a simple pointed post, and it works for pointing out where to aim at the range you select with the simple top dial. After five shots, you want to load up another clip and keep shooting. You're frustrated for a second that you have to load cartridges individually, but you remind yourself that this is the price you pay for the top mounted scope, and after trying it it is a price worth paying. Every part of this rifle works, and nothing gets in your way even if very little of it excites you. The Dyske have a reputation as a staid, meticulous nation, and this rifle epitomizes this. There is nothing obviously wrong with this rifle, and your mission is to beat the people who made it at their own game, to make them your game.
Next, you decide to see how some other nations did things. You pick a rifle you're pretty sure is an Alleghenian rifle, since it has a lever action. It's a very interesting piece to your eye. The scope is long and thin, with a delicate tapering out at the ends, and fits inside a pair of rings. The front one looks relatively narrow, but the rear ring is wider than the scope body and holds it in between a group of claw mounted plungers. In addition, there is a brass band around the scope body, with a spring between that ring and the front ring, the purpose of which you are not quite sure of. Why would a scope need a spring tensioner to push it forwards when the rings would hold it in place? You tug back on the scope and frown. The rings should hold it in place, and yet it slides backwards in them. The stock is dropped into a convenient grip, and to account for this drop, it has a hefty comb to raise your eyes to the stock. You raise the rifle to your shoulder and look through the scope. The picture through it is small, but the objects in it are very large. You rest the cross on a target 300 yards away, and it appears as large as if it were well inside 100 yards. When you adjust the elevation turret on top to 300 yards, it clicks and you're pretty sure it pushes the scope downwards in the rear ring. The whole arrangement doesn't feel robust. You ring up a target, though, and after you load a few rounds one at a time into the gate on the side, you try a few shots. The experience isn't bad at all, apart from the wallop of the large caliber round into your shoulder. The crosshair is fine, and makes it easy to put on the target, and the knuckle bow fits a comfortable hand position for you to lever forward from and back into position. It shoots relatively well, and the lever action doesn't disturb your position much, with the downward pull being mitigated by a textured butt. You do feel that as you try shooting at longer ranges, the bullet takes a long time to arrive. It's to be expected without the benefit of a spitzer round, but it is a downside nonetheless. You shoot a few more rounds and experimentally top the tube magazine up. It works smoothly and allows you to deliver fire relatively rapidly. Watching the gun's mechanism spill out as you work the action further solidifies your impression that this is probably a very effective hunting implement on the empty plain, but a gun that exposes its entire mechanism like this would undoubtedly have a ravenous hunger for the rich clay muds of Gallia, and its fine mechanisms would inevitably jam up. It fires an interesting round, long for high velocity but still rounded in the manner of older heavy bullets, and while you like the visual detail of the target afforded by the scope's high magnification, this does not seem to match a precision in the rifle. It is an odd rifle to your perspective, sacrificing precision in places for brute force but still remaining an instrument for long range. The side is engraved with a herd of giant, furry beasts, and as best as you can figure this rifle is designed to deliver a good number of bullets into them from range before they can flee. This is a foreign practice to you, the hunting stories you know feature single shots placed with care, while this practice smacks of musketry. Thankfully, you feel that apart from the precision of the scope, the indelicacy of the tool leaves little for you to recommend it for your job over existing tools.
You then take up the other rifle you see that has a novel scope configuration. It is another Alleghenian styled piece, and you wonder whether it deserves the dignity of the term "rifle". The wood is handsome, but the metal is a collection of industrial looking rectangles at an angle to each other, and hanging above and to the left is a bulky box with a collection of brass plaques riveted to it joined by an armature studded with adjustment dials. The combined effect is peculiar. The rifle looks industrial and brutish, but fires a modern spitzer cartridge, and the so-called "Telescopic Musket Sight" is an oddly fine-grained implement. It can be set to any distance, calibrated in yards evenly out to three thousand yards, a distance at which it forms an angle with the firearm like that of a volley sight. The brass tables on this scope show you how much to correct for a one mile per hour left/right wind, how many inches a 10 yard range estimation error would cause you to miss high or low of the target by, and a table of drift values whose purpose you cannot divine. This box makes you reëvaluate you see scopes, because where every other scope you've seen is a tool, with a clear purpose, this is an instrument. It's very curious and you try to figure out what the cause for these differences is. Another look at the large plaque gives you a thought. The figures listed would be of assistance in correcting fire but not the first shot, and that aligns with the thought you had about this being specifically labeled as a musket sight. You think that this scope's original purpose must be to direct the massed fire of a line formation against area targets. If combined with tracer rounds, that could allow a rifle so equipped to be used as a very crass sort of ballistic rangefinder. It is a very strange idea, but you can see it being effective for mass fire. It is fascinating to see in a proper woman's collection. You suspect that it is being used despite, rather than because of, its intended purpose. For a calculating shot, the fine detail of the adjustments might make it a useful implement for sport precision shooting. The drift table you're unclear on the purpose of is likely for adjustments that are built into your service rifle's iron sights. For a markswoman without the benefit of a known and calibrated combination of rifle and ammunition as standardized by a military, this would allow greater precision. You look at the mounting apparatus, and there is the curious addition of brass thumbscrews in a few places on top of what seem to be existing adjustments. It is strange to you that such a precision device seems to have required modification after the fact to mount more securely. You shoot the rifle, and the experience is largely similar to other rifles. The scope offers a very powerful magnification, much like the other Alleghenian scope you used, though the short length and large box mean that the balance of the rifle is relatively far rear, somewhat odd for a rifle meant to be dialed in finely. The stock extends straight back, so the lever is awkwardly flat to the gun, and the action isn't as smooth, but the gun is eminently adequate to the task. The high magnification of the scope does mean that with adequate time to make the proper adjustments you make accurate shots at relatively long range, but for shots against whatever opportunity rears its head, its main recommendation would be its existence rather than any excellence. Their head, you remember. In this new war, anyone who raises their head to witness it has presented a target, and this time the thought makes you feel very vulnerable indeed.
You've seen a lot of the most important guns, and you feel confident that you now have a handle on the practical aspects of what distinguishes optical sights among this peculiar sporting breed. You decide to see how Lily is faring and ask Janice for her input on some of the more esoteric guns she's brought.
You walk to the next bay over, and watch Lily shoot off a string of bullets from a modern-looking pistol you do not recognize. You ask, "how have you done finding your next service weapon, lieutenette?"
She turns to you and responds, "Well, all told. We've been trying to see if any of the modern self-loaders are any easier to load when holstered than the Blanc-Streep, and it looks like Janice's intuition was right. There's this pistol from Akatsukuni that sounded really appealing, load it once and have seventeen rounds available or something incredible, but I absolutely cannot do anything with that kind of gun other than pull the trigger. The slide is streamlined so I can't pull it and hold the frame with one hand. I want a gun I can use, rather than to be forced to try and defend myself with a miniscule crew served weapon. But that gun, I can use on my own. Here, I'll show you."
Janice takes up the pistol you saw earlier, and puts it in a holster. She folds the leather flap all the way back, doubling even the belt loops up against the part that holds the gun, and holds it to Lily's hip. Lily then takes the pistol in her hand, pulls the odd lever on its trigger guard back to charge the gun, and fires off five rounds. "And this," she says, "is why I'm settling on this gun", as she charges the gun with the lever again and fires off four more rounds. The gun locks open, and she gingerly pokes the muzzle into the holster that Janice has held to her hip delicately, so as not to flatten the holster's opening. A gentle pinch of the base of the grip allows her to tug the magazine free, and she replaces it with another, giving the butt a gentle slap to ensure the new magazine is seated, and then she draws, pulls the lever again, and fires off a string of ten bullets. She grins to you, "Wherever you end up going, I'll be ready if you want me."
"I'll get that holster made for you right away, then. Go ahead and keep the gun and magazines if you'd like, the holster pattern is unique but I have a template right here to give to the leatherworker. So! Sylvia, while there's still light in the sky and we don't have to be present for dinner quite yet, do tell me what you think of my collection, and let me show you some of the more interesting elements."
She walks over to the stall you'd previously been in, and rummages through the rifles. She remarks, "Ah, looking at the Alleghenian pieces?" and pulls out the matching gun for that strange cartridge. You watch in bafflement as she shows you the gun, which has a form that is as strange in general as in the peculiarities you already noted. It has a cylinder like that of a revolver, but scalloped even more deeply in between spaces for the cartridges, suggesting that it only has four chambers. The metal of the frame on the left hand side extends farther back behind the chambers than you would expect for something that on most revolvers is just to provide structure and cover the rear of the rounds, but not on the right. More strangely, the stock extends straight backwards from the lower chamber to the shoulder, with a wide flange downwards for a grip and then another large segment behind a thumbhole. She presses an indentation in the stock, and slips a catch so she can pull a tube free. She then feeds eight of those peculiar cylindrical rounds into the space it formerly occupied, and then while pointing it downwards runs the action twice. She then loads two more rounds into the stock, and carefully seats the cylinder over the pile of rounds and latches it back into place. She puts the rifle down for a second, and shows you one of the cartridges. "What we have here is one of the most truly innovative rifles I've seen. These wooden plugs hold a very thin copper casing inside them in a cylindrical shape, and the cylinder presses forward so the bullet itself is pressed into the bore of the rifle. It's a strange idea, but the designer thought that if she could solve the issues and make it self-loading it could have a remarkable rate of fire. I would absolutely love to see someone try the idea again now that we have the benefit of smokeless powder to prevent fouling. She pulls the cord for a target, and fires, with a puff of smoke characteristic of black powder. She works the lever forward and a spent case ejects from the left chamber. She then falls into a rhythm that is only interrupted by two stoppages that force her to dig cases out of that left chamber. You look at the spent cases, and despite the hardwood of their construction, they are visibly compressed. When she has placed the rifle down, she looks at the rounds with a frown. "That is the other weakness of this system. The rounds are notionally inexpensive, because wood is not an expensive material, but the only wood that works right is coppiced and carefully formed to give a single band with no grain. Guns that try this idea would need an entirely new material to work properly. It's just so elegant though, I want it to work so badly. I hope you appreciated seeing something so novel."
You nod, "I certainly never expected to see something like that, any one of those ideas would be peculiar on their own. The other Alleghenian guns I looked at are very interesting devices too, very unusual."
"Aren't they the queerest things? If you mean those two, I actually got them from the same source. A correspondent of mine was interested in how we Albians approach riflery, and sent me two guns that she thought might be different from my usual fare. The one with the long scope is, if I remember right, a hunting gun to take some of their huge plains beasts, some sort of buffalo I think. If what I heard about their herds is right, I'd understand wanting more rounds at hand. The other one is fascinating. She was trying to build something I'd be interested in, and she certainly succeeded, but I don't think I'll tell her that lest I encourage her. I told her I dislike the bad ballistics of the rounded cartridges, and I wanted to see just how far accurate shots could be taken. She came back to me with this peculiar assemblage. The scope is apparently for a military contract, its adjustments feel like those of a surveying tool and I have no idea how they expect men to be able to make use of this precision. It feels like one of those harebrained schemes to replace a woman's touch with a man's strong back and an impractical amount of cartridges. However, for my purposes it is a surprisingly enjoyable gun, since I get all the adjustment I could possibly want and can work out the maths to put a bullet right where those fine crosshairs point. I've had more than a few lovely afternoons whittling away the innermost ring with that gun. It's a shame that very few people will ever get to make the most of that gun, it apparently took her a great deal of work to contrive to make the mounting properly secure, and without that, what is even the point? I hope she appreciated the rifle I sent her in return, it was the first magazine fed rifle I ever ran across to truly equal the refinement of our traditional styles. Oh! Speaking of traditional styles! I saw you tried the Type 37. What did you think?"
"Impressive," you say, "it has a remarkably flat trajectory," before she continues her fascinating soliloquy.
"Isn't it just? People were surprised that the Akitsukuni delivered such a delightful shooting gun as that and just how smooth the action is. It's amazing to think that when I was growing up they were importing everything and now they're making pieces like this." She runs a finger over the engraving of a citrus tree with a prominent fruit in the wood, "I made sure to get one of the ones with a citrus engraved on the stock, that's a sign that the original designer signed off on it personally, and just look at how well made the stock is. I think we have time to look at one more gun before dinnertime. Which other guns did you look at, did any catch your interest? Did you perchance get a chance to look at one of the larger game rifles?"
You respond…
[ ] "I saw a Foss-Nystrøm that looked like an incredibly well crafted competition piece, I'm curious how well the rifle performs"
[ ] "You're right, I hardly looked at the larger rifles. I'd love to see how well the pinnacle of Albian craft works"
[ ] "I noticed a Ritterin with one of the new rotary magazines, do you think it might be possible to fit a scope over the top of that? I tried the one with a side mounted scope and it wasn't to my taste."
[ ] Write in!
