Re: [DL] Law Dogs, Bullards etc. (Steve Long)

["John Goff" <JohnGoff@deadlands.com>]

> In refrence to this someone posted to the gurps:deadlands playtest list
that
> there was never a double action "peacemaker".  Is is a flub for game sake
or
> some kind of strange mix-up or what?

A little of both. "Peacemaker" was a standard name for any six-shot revolver
at the time--kind of like a "Xerox" machine today.

Colt firearms were virtually indistinguishable on sight to anyone but an
expert, and the company continually experimented with variations on existing
designs. Samuel Colt himself tinkered with a DA gun, but gave up and until
his death the Colt company produced no DA pistols. Afterwards, in the early
1870s, they went nuts. The company tried so many different designs it would
be hard to say _anything_ was "never" produced. They even made a model of
the Colt Army with an automatic ejection system (don't ask me how it works
<g>).

The differences between a Frontier, an Army 1872, and a Peacemaker 1873 are
almost entirely internal, leading many older gun books to mislabel them,
which no doubt adds to the confusion. Heck, I can only barely tell a
Lightning and Shopkeeper from a Frontier after years of looking at the
things in books. :-)

Long and short, I wouldn't say there was _no_ DA Peacemaker produced, but I
would allow it wasn't probably mass-produced.

Just my 2 cents,

John