In the following year it made its first appearance on the battlefield at Mentana on 3 November 1867, where it inflicted severe losses upon Giuseppe Garibaldi's troops.
Gatling gun | Top Gun | Lewis gun | Thompson submachine gun | Have Gun - Will Travel | gun control | Vickers machine gun | The Man with the Golden Gun (film) | submachine gun | gun | The Man with the Golden Gun | Maxim gun | Darne machine gun | MG 17 machine gun | Have Gun – Will Travel | Gun turret | Gun politics in the United States | The Naked Gun | KPV heavy machine gun | Gun | Crestone Needle | needle | Gun Crazy | Gun Control Act of 1968 | BB gun | The Smoking Gun | ShKAS machine gun | PK machine gun | Gun (band) | 12-pounder gun |
The battle at first appeared to favor the French, for they had better rifles, the Chassepot, an early bolt-action rifle replacing the musket with a range of over 1,500 yards, far superior to the Prussian Dreyse bolt-action rifle, also called the needle gun, which had a range of only 600 yards.
The Waffenfabrik von Dreyse was founded around 1841 to manufacture the famous Dreyse Needle gun for the Prussian Army, and they also made needle-pistols and caplock revolvers.
The success of the Dreyse needle gun spurred subsequent developments in firearms technology and, before the start of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the French introduced the Chassepot rifle.
Prominent Austrians frequently betray a subtle and often humorous obsession with the Prussian Needle gun in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.
The Prussian Needle gun appears in Ensemble Studio's Age of Empires III in the hands of "Needle Gunners", who act as German skirmisher units.
Though the album is based around Elric, "Needle Gun" is a reference to Jerry Cornelius, another of Moorcock's fictional characters.