After reading the discussion about how many people feel that revolvers are at least slightly more accurate than autoloaders due to various reasons, I was curious about how effective a "revolver-style" rifle would be.

I know that there were such rifles in the past, and a quick google suggested that they weren't very popular due to gas discharge close to the face of the operator. Were there any other flaws in their design?

Having said that, would there be reasonable ways to correct those flaws? Moreover, would such a design bring any appreciable benefits to a long range rifle, such as accuracy? (the obvious benefit of a built-in brass collector is fairly small). I've heard that bolt-action rifles tend to be at least slightly more accurate than semi-auto rifles, so I wondered if maybe this would fit somewhere in between?

But mostly, I'm just curious..

My other question comes from reading the rules and wondering about recoil and laser sights. Specifically, would a laser sight be at all useful on a fully automatic weapon? It would seem to me that once you're on full auto recoil would make the laser jump around so much that it would be pointless.

Besides, anymore isn't full automatic fire more intended for suppression than actual wounding? Isn't this why they took full auto fire off the M16 as an option (since soldiers would just waste clips rather than aim)?

Thanks a lot...

The Other DSE

A revolver is not inherently more accurate than all other mechanisms.

A revolver has one big flaw: namely that the chamber is not integral with the barrel.

This provides better inherent accuracy than most automatic handguns, which don't have a rigid connection between the frame, slide, and barrel.

But this does not provide better inherent accuracy than a bolt-action rifle. Slapping a cylinder onto a rifle will result in worse accuracy than a bolt, but maybe better than an automatic mechanism.

So you'd be sacrificing accuracy for a marginally better rate of fire than a bolt action, but a revolver mechanism would still be much slower than an automatic mechanism.

As soon as lever action rifles became common, the revolver style rifles went away, because they were vastly inferior.

->Cray74
Actually, I think that a bolt action rifle would in fact be superior in terms of accuracy to a "revolver" rifle (god I feel silly just writing that).

->Sheffield
Yeah, that would be my point. You have an increased magazine capacity over a bolt-action, but you may have more accuracy than a semi-automatic rifle. I certainly didn't think that it would be better than a semi-auto in terms of fire rate...

So, it seems the consensus (so far) is that it would be a compromise between semi-auto and bolt-action (more accurate than semi-auto but with a better RoF than bolt-action). Now the question is whether or not the drawbacks could be worked around...

The primary drawback that I've heard is the venting system. How do modern-day revolvers deal with this issue? Admittedly the chamber's not right in your face which undoubtedly helps, but I wasn't aware of modern-day revolvers cooking off their entire magazine, so the point that Cray brings up must have been resolved, no?

The Other DSE (who really needs to stop obsessively checking the board )