I'll admit I've probably made a few assumptions that are wrong. Which is why I talk about these kinds of things. Science is not a strong point of mine, even as I try and write stories that rely heavily on it at times. *Sheepish Kitsune* Furthermore when I was studying the different types of rifles; break-action bolt-action, etc.; I seem to have taken the popularization of bolt-action and the introduction of smokeless powders are being a cause and effect rather just similar timing. More importantly, I seem to have missed that fact that bolt-actions were developed far soon than I first thought. The details that you miss when you come at a topic from one angle and not another.
No worries on that, a few years ago I wouldn't have known either. Much of my source on current more detailed gun knowledge comes from
C&Arsenal, who decided to a small arms primer series for all small arms used in WW1, a project so large apparently that a few years later they're still going at it.
But they cover a fair bit of history on various weapons, all to often bolt actions, that eventually ended up in WW1. This also included converted bolt actions from the black powder era, thus how I came to know about it.
I can try to summarize some of the things I've noticed on it from its many episodes though. For instance the military tends to like to optimize towards a a few features, namely low cost, reliability and simplicity.
Low cost in this is obvious, if you need to equip hundreds of thousands or even millions of men, it would be nice if your gun isn't to expensive.
Reliability is easy to understand as well, it's nice if your gun doesn't break, either in firing or due to the stresses it might encounter in fighting. Like say ending up in mud, hitting the ground some what hard or you know, still working after having used it as a club.
Simplicity is thus the least obvious these three, but still easy to understand, if the gun does break, it sure would be nice if it's simple to repair. Especially if a field repair center can do it, even better if they can manage it in minutes, or even say an hour.
Due to these pressures interestingly enough early bolt action guns are actually less reliable, more expensive and less simple then the later ones. Which gives the impression as if there isn't even a point then to consider early bolt action designs, as the late era ones are simply the best in near every factor you'd care about normally.
Though there is one potentially snag there, industry was improving over that time. So metal quality over the period probably got better, what you can do with good quality steel you need not get away with poor quality steel. And secondly the ability of machining to handle complex high precision machining improved at same costs or not to much increased, which means potentially some of these later era weapons included some pieces of metal shaped in shapes not so easily machined with more basic systems.
Both of these are obviously resolvable and I suspect improving the lathe to the precision required, considering we already know that path now, is the easier of the two. Good quality large scale metal production requires quite a bit of logistic efforts as well as working through the inevitable* early bugs in a large installation. For instance for good metal production you'd want a handle on the quality of say the coals and ores you are using, so as to control the mixture being smelted, so one can get good end results. Just like you'd probably need to expand resource extraction efforts to match the new higher demand levels. Which just hits you through your entire logistic chain.
If good steel isn't available, then one would be forced to use earlier designs with more allowance for things not all lining up exactly as one wants. Like earlier bolt actions... or if truly bad say revolvers, or breech loading weapons. I've at least not heard of bolts ever being made of really poor steel, so I'm suspecting it might not be safe to do so for them.
Aside of this, there apparently was some change in gunpowder use towards the end as well. For instance some of the last types of ammo used compressed gunpowder rounds. I'm not really sure how that works, as I thought spacing was needed to let it burn properly, but apparently they found a solution to that. But these rounds apparently had substantially improved performance compared to previous rounds, being considered some of the best gunpowder rounds ever made.
Final end conclusion... I wonder if anyone really has all of this knowledge on hand at levels beyond what I'm displaying. Because ultimately you'd need to know how late era bolt-action guns were put together to replicate them, else you'd have to do as the original inventors and work yourself towards it over time. Though I guess if they have snipers, they might have some bolt action guns on them... Probably would still have to be adapted to actual materials available and machining abilities though.
*Unless an exalted can do something about that?
I hope this is of some use for you. And if you have any particular questions in this area, I'm sure I or others will wrack their memories on if they encountered any information on it.
