Volcanic pistol and rocket ball ammunition

Hello again, in this blog I will be talking to you about the volcanic pistol and its rocket ball ammunition.  the volcanic pistol is a lever action pistol. for all you non gun people this means that one bullet is fired with each pull of the trigger and to chamber your next round and cock the gun you pushed forwards a lever.  This design was great for its era having been invented in the 1860's meaning its only competition was revolvers.  Now don't get me wrong revolvers are great but in single action they could not shoot as fast as the volcanic pistol and in double action the trigger was a very long pull making shooting it accurately more of a challenge. 

Let's talk about the efficiency. I did already mention a little about the gun itself but let's get into the details of the rocket ball ammo.  Many people who are not familiar with the volcanic pistol don't know of rocket ball ammo, it is a bullet where the back half is hollowed out and the powder and primer are in the back of the bullet. When it is fired the bullet leaves the barrel and there is no casing to be extracted.  This to me seems like a good idea there are less things that can go wrong due to no casing but the ballistics of the round suffer.  the Bullets are .31 caliber which is not bad but because the powder needs to fit in the back of the bullet you can't fit as much which lowers the velocity of the bullet which makes it as effective as a .24 ACP round.  Compared to its competition and the in .41 colt it is blown out of the water.


That is the reason I think this gun failed.  The design and idea of the gun itself is great but the lack of power is probably what killed it off, if everyone wanted a gun that could do more damage then it was not sold very much and was discontinued.  If a lever action pistol were made today I still do not believe it would catch on. Modern hand guns can hold more bullets and shoot faster due to self loading semi-automatic actions. Thanks for reading and next time we jump on over to the civil war to talk about a steam powered machine gun.