French M1777 Charleville Cavalry Pistol
Ahh, the Charleville! Now this project wasn’t aiming for a specific goal, there was a simple sunny morning where my eyes popped open, and the idea took shape:
I want to model a flintlock cavalry pistol!
Why, you might ask. Well, it has this distinct beauty. Those curves, bolts, and metal with wood. It was just screaming for the attention, I had to do it. There were some versions, where I experimented with procedural materials based on noise maps, but in the end I stuck to the original, polished walnut wood stock as image textures.
I really had nothing on my mind, what kind of end product will come out of it, so it has a mixed quality, in terms of vert number and topology. I would say, it became more of an asset for a rendered video than a hyper optimized game asset.
A little history
The French M-1777 Charleville Flintlock Cavalry Pistol.The magnificent pistol was adopted to replace the earlier M-1763 cavalry pistol. It was a smoothbore, muzzle loading, flintlock pistol.
It was equipped with a 7 “ round barrel and was about .673 caliber (17.1mm). The pistols were brass mounted with wooden stocks and a brass frame.
The rounded brass frame had an integral brass flash pan with a rounded profile, with an iron frizzen and pan cover. The pistol has an iron, button head ramrod, which was stored in the brass frame and was threaded at the opposite end for cleaning and ball pulling implements. The guns were initially produced with an iron belt hook, which was retained by a mounting screw under the brass frame, but later production pistols that were intended for mounted use dispensed with the belt hook, and most M-1777 pistols encountered today were manufactured without the belt hook, or had the hook removed during the period of use. The pistols were manufactured at the French national armories of St. Etienne, Charleville, and Maubeuge. During the American Revolution thousands of French M-1777 flintlock cavalry pistols were supplied to the American military by the French.
Even though earlier French designs and the dragoon pistols of British design appear to be the most popular of the handguns in use by the Continentals, the M-1777 became the pattern from which the very first official US military handgun was designed. The US M-1799 as produced by the firm of North & Cheney was the first officially sanctioned and purchased military handgun and was a nearly direct copy of the French M-1777
Source: College Hill Arsenal
