I think a lot of people have this idea that the patent system has been distorted by software patent trolls and giant corporations, and that at one point in time it was a reasonable and sensible system. Here's a counterexample.
In the 1830s and 1840s, Samuel Colt had an actual patent on the manufacture of revolvers. The idea of a revolving cylinder that you'd load with powder and ball – these were the days of percussion cap revolvers, so you'd load from the front of the cylinder – was patented and exclusive to Colt's company or someone who licensed from him.
This prompted a lot of people, especially in the US where Colt was most effectively able to enforce his patent, to try and develop some kind of repeating firearm that didn't infringe on the patent and could compete with Colt. Hence, the turret gun. In a normal revolver cylinder, all the bullets point forward and they revolve around that longitudinal line. In a turret revolver, the bullets point in all directions like a pinwheel, and the cylinder revolves around the vertical axis.
Now, this may not seem like such an awful idea until you stop and think about one of the failure modes of percussion-cap revolvers, which is chain fire. You see, a percussion cap revolver is fired by a percussion cap – a little lump of mercury fulminate – that's struck and then ignites the gunpowder inside the cylinder. One of the ways this can go bad is a chainfire. If a percussion cap is a little too eager about exploding, it can ignite its neighbor on the next chamber over, and so on around the whole cylinder.
When this happens with a conventional percussion revolver, the gun fires all six shots all at once; one out the barrel, and the remaining out of the naked cylinder. This will typically damage the gun, and the kick might injure the shooter's arm, but it is a reasonably tolerable failure in this era.
What happens when a turret gun has a chainfire is left as an exercise to the reader.
up until the moment I read this chost it had never occurred to me to be disappointed in the Receiver (2012) dev team, but now I will never forgive them for not including this weapon
