4 weapons cataloged
Rifling changed everything. Cut spiral grooves into a barrel and the bullet spins, flies straighter, and hits harder at range. The problem was always loading: a tight-fitting ball is accurate but slow to ram home. The Minié ball solved this in the 1840s with a hollow-base bullet that expanded on firing, and suddenly infantry could kill at 500 meters. The tactical implications took a generation to absorb, and the cost was measured in the mass graves of the American Civil War. Every rifle since has been an extension of that same idea: spin the projectile, extend the range, increase the lethality.
The Minié rifle is a muzzle-loading rifled musket that fires the revolutionary Minié ball — a conical bullet with a hollow base that expands upon firing to grip the barrel’s rifling grooves. This solved the centuries-old problem of making rifled weap...
The semi-automatic rifle fires one round per trigger pull and automatically cycles the action to chamber the next round. The M1 Garand, adopted by the US Army in 1936, was the first standard-issue semi-automatic military rifle. General George S. Patt...
The assault rifle is a selective-fire weapon chambered in an intermediate cartridge, capable of both semi-automatic and fully automatic fire. The German StG 44 (Sturmgewehr 44) of 1944 established the concept. The Soviet AK-47 (1947), designed by Mik...
The anti-materiel rifle is a large-caliber, long-range precision rifle designed to destroy equipment, vehicles, and fortifications rather than personnel (though it is devastatingly effective against both). The Mauser 1918 T-Gewehr, firing a 13.2mm ro...