You are François Léon Émile Rimailho. Your close friends call you ‘Émile’. Most people call you ‘Captain’.
The present year, 1898, finds you at the arsenal at Puteaux, just west of Paris, where you have been working on a new artillery piece. In particular, as the junior member of a team of extraordinarily talented engineers, you have been charged with perfecting the mechanism that gives this field gun a formidable rate of fire. (The best weapons of this class currently in service can fire five or six rounds a minute. In the same amount of time, your invention can send thirty shells into the air.)
Two features of the new system, developed in parallel with your ‘on-carriage recoil-absorbing mechanism’, augment the effect of its high rate of fire. One of these is the extraordinarily high velocity imparted to each shell as it leaves the muzzle of the piece. The other is an automatic fuze setter, a little machine that programs a shell to explode at a pre-determined distance from the gun that fired it.
Thanks to this innovation, the shells fired by a battery armed with four of the new guns could, over the course of a minute, deliver 36,000 twelve-gram bullets, each of which flies at more than 300 meters per second to any football field within five thousand five hundred meters. (In the English-speaking world, those figures equate to 715 pounds of lead, 1,000 feet per second, and three point three miles.)
As you contemplate the power of the revolutionary field gun you helped to make, you find yourself thinking of weapons that might complement it. In particular, you wonder about the other sorts of artillery pieces that might benefit from an ‘on-carriage recoil-absorbing mechanism’ of the type that you designed for the new 75mm field gun.
Please use the comments section to propose solutions to the conundrum faced by Captain Rimailho. I will post the historical solution on Tuesday, 18 June 2025.
I would apply on carriage counter recoil systems first to 105mm systems (howitzers and guns) and 155mm systems (again, howitzers and guns) and ensure they worked well before scaling up to other all other artillery systems. Who needs ramps and all that rolling/flying around nonsense?
Maybe the machine guns, mortars and the 37mm?