Shipbucket

Yeah. Last one definitely looks a little wonky.

_________________
Best regards,

RegiaMarina1939

While I am rethinking the cable layer, (I agree it stinks.), here's a little line doodle on the way (a work in progress.) Criticism (I expect some savage...) is welcome.



You see, I can't help but know that Laurence Vincent Benét took an interesting idea bv Baron Adolf Odkolek von Ujezda and made it work by 1897. Not keen about feeder strips, but it is what it is.

Your MG has a very distinctive Hotchkiss flavor, specially with the discs for cooling the barrel , with that butt it looks similar to the spanish model. Cheers.

About the Hotchkiss machine gun.

The French of course are the source of the Hotchkiss machine gun. (a fine machine for its time, which presages so many features rightly, which many modern machine guns wrongly use [cough, M-60, cough] such as the indexer, the gas piston operated lever pawl and spent case extractor unified in one single cam action, a left side feed ramp and a completely screw-less and pin-less parts assembly that is idiot proof. It cannot be assembled incorrectly. It simply is impossible for Private Fumbles to put it together wrong and have it blow apart or tear his face off. (Like the Ross rifle and the Chauchat did.)

It was a reliable if cranky piece of ordnance in use. The users had to be smarter than it was or it would bite them with cook offs and runaway gun. With its low steady 450 rpm, that seems surprising, but the same Private Fumbles would try to ramp up the rate at the factory presets on the adjustable gas port.

The gun could run at 700+ rpm if you were stupid, and jammed the feeder strips in too fast or ran the articulated belt through it with the port wide open.

A feature often overlooked is that the gun was designed to have a field change out of the barrel, if it warped or got too hot. This required a special wrench and gloves (barrel is HOT when dull red, [about 230 degrees Celsius.). It was not a quick change barrel in the modern sense, but it could be changed out in a minute or so, provided Private Fumbles had not lost the wrench.

In the version, modeled for the AU, Private Fumbles flips a locking lever up [top of gun just ahead of the rear ladder sight], turns the lock cam knob to OUT and pulls out the barrel and gas tube unit as a complete unit. The new barrel and gas tube unit fits into the figure eight shaped receiver and is shoved in until Fumbles hears the click and then he turns the lock cam knob to IN and latches the locking lever down.

Here's the thing, though. Private Fumbles did not get that name by being a genius. RTL example. The US Army was chasing a Mexican bandito [and patriot] named Pancho Villa after he crossed into New Mexico and shot up a border town. Wilson sent Pershing and about two brigades worth of Regulars with orders to wipe Villa out.

The American expedition took along a few new toys, including the aero-plane, touring cars for its cavalry [Patton] and the Brand New Benet Mercie automatic rifle. (the Hotchkiss Portative)

This was Mister Benet's much lighter inverted operated cycle simplification of the Hotchkiss Mlle 1900 and it worked dandy fine for Great Britain, Belgium, Sweden... and Mexico.

But it is the US Army... Fed a diet of left hand feed Colt Potato Diggers, the average infantry private, even though he was taught to feed the Benet Mercie from the right with the strip plate up and cartridge fingers down and to make sure the feeder strip (marked this side up and with an arrow stamped on it to show which way the strip was supposed to run through the gun) was fed correctly, insisted on feeding the Portative from the left side and with the feeder strip upside down, because damnit, that was the way machine guns were supposed to work.

The Portative was withdrawn from service immediately after user complaints about the gun being "defective".

Hence, the US army had no light machine gun (or heavy machine gun) for WW I. They would get a very good recoil operated heavy one from John Browning (the inventor of the Potato Digger) after the war (still in use BTW because it is so good.) and an auto-rifle that would mutate into an excellent light machine gun, once someone French remembered what Benet originally did... turn the BAR's action upside down, borrow Browning's gas operated [Potato Digger] belt feed camming action and market it as a Belgian machine gun, after the Vietnam War. (Refer to the M-60 debacle.)

But what about WW I? What machine gun would the AEF use? The Potato Digger was being modified, but the Marlin would be unsuitable for the trenches as it could not stand the heat,

The Maxim was British. Politics.

That left Mr. Benet and the Hotchkiss Mlle 1914.

In this AU, why march on Moscow by way of the South Pole?

Keep Mr. Hotchkiss to fiddle around as a merchant of death, let him croak here, and his company remains after him in the US, exporting arms in competition with Whitworth, Armstrong, and Schneider, which impels his company agents, after he dies, to hunt down those Austrian patents as they did RTL. Let Benet work on the gun in the US (as he did RTL in France as a US Navy ordnance expert on loan to Hotchkiss et Cie) as a Navy officer at the naval gun factory and perfect it. Give it to the Marines.

See what happens...

====================================

About the submarine cable ship.

Okay the British had a series of them called the CS Monarchs 1, II, and III. Let's just say, that two of them had "unfortunate" run-ins with the US Navy. That is strange history for a later day, but being attacked by US destroyers {USS Plunkett (DD-431)} as one of them was in WW II, came as a shock to me.

Anyway...



Cable splicing and grapple stations included.

After all, Mister McKinley's Navy (RTL) DID dredge up British-laid submarine cables and TAPPED them to read the Admiralty cable traffic.

Definitely looks better. The edges on the hull are still rather displeasing to look at...

_________________
Best regards,

RegiaMarina1939

Some of the American ships of the era were remarkably ugly. That is a historic truth.

Hi Tobius.

I think that with a less racked funnel, the aesthetics of your vessel will gain some extra points . In that guise, you also can have a taller funnel, which will improve the natural draught (and if the heiht gain is substantial, as it was common for several american ships of the late XIX century, there will be a lot more of air for your boilers). I think too, that the rudder and screw placed so far from the stern edge, will give an unwanted extra drag. Cheers.

Raked was the style, I chose. The low silhouette made sense to me since there would be a lot of lines rigged and a tall straight funnel would get in the way.

See here the Faraday?

An experiment:



It's my style mixed with history

Hi Tobius.
Looks better with the taller funnel. Still somewhat odd (only aestetically, and only for me), but definitively better.
One question, what kind of ammo feeding do you plan for your MG, tray as the original Hotchkiss or the more common belt? Cheers.

The French (rather Mr. Benet) knew that one of the chief complaints about the Maxim was that it used a canvas loop belt that stretched after a couple run throughs the gun. This made reuse problematic and if the belt was not properly made, also led to interrupted feed jams that were horrendous to clear until the British figured out how to metal wire fiber stitch and partially solve the problem. It was never really solved until the disintegrating link belt (Germans, 1932?). The Americans, being rich, just adopted a use once and throw it away attitude with the Potato Digger, but even they did not like the canvas belt. They went to metal link around 1928-1932 with the Brownings (aircraft) though their army did not see it until about 1942.

Early indications (Parsons 1900 machine gun trials) show me RTL that the Americans would have preferred the feeder strip, for the same reasons the French did; use a hand crank annelling machine to straighten out the fingers and a hopper fed reloader to insert new cartridges. You could reuse a feeder strip up to fifty or more times. Loose ammunition could be shipped to the "front" in bags a lot more cheaply than boxed belted rounds. And with the peculiar logistics the Americans practiced, that was the most efficient way to go.

One finds that when one looks at the ways "ridiculous" things are done; there actually is a good reason for why those things were tried.

Since it is going to be a US Navy machine gun (see AU history above), I figure Benet's RTL solution will be the one applied. That's why the ramp is the peculiar shape it is. There's a roller just adjacent to the pawl. I changed it in details overall for a barrel change feature (minus wrench) and deleted the oil pan and wick (which as I recall, the French never needed since the gun worked fine without it, as long as the loader kept his wits about him.). The Italians tried to "improve" the Hotchkiss as did the Japanese, and both of them learned a harsh lesson when they bugged up the feed ramp. Keep it simple, and keep it clean. The pan and wick systems, they used, collected dirt and actually caused the feed strips to slip on the pawl or the indexer to miss. Result was a feed jam that meant someone was going to lose fingers (Use a screwdriver, Fumbles!) and or the machine gun would have to be disassembled from the butt stock to the barrel change out.