Random Dishonored pistol think piece…
What makes the pistol interesting is that it sits in a weird middle ground between historical firearms and industrial era repeating weapons, pre-18th century visually but late 19th century mechanically. It’s not really a flintlock, not really a wheellock, and not really a revolver.
If you’ve spent time around firearms, especially older military rifles that have been modified to shit, you really appreciate that a good gun is a simple gun. Every spring, lever, gear, and linkage is another thing that can wear out, get dirty, break, or cause problems. A lot of firearms history is really the story of engineers figuring out how to do the same job with fewer parts.
Looking at Corvo’s magazine upgrade…
In our world, once you can manufacture reliable cartridges (self-contained rounds with the bullet, gunpowder and primer in a case), the best course of action is usually to store ammunition inside the gun itself. That might be a box magazine, which is a spring loaded container that stacks cartridges and feeds them upward into the action, or a cylinder, the rotating drum used in a cowboy-looking revolver.
Corvo's pistol goes in a completely different direction though. Instead of keeping ammunition inside the weapon, it feeds rounds from a visible belt running across the top of the gun that just pulls the active round into the chamber before firing. I disagree with whoever wrote in the wiki that this upgrade makes Corvo’s gun like a revolver (as I said, a revolver stores ammunition in a rotating cylinder that doubles as the firing chamber). Really, the game’s pistol is closer to a miniature belt-fed machine gun. What’s really impressive is how shrunk down it is. A belt feed isn't automatically unreliable, but shrinking one down to pistol size means you're taking a mechanism that already exists mainly because machine guns need big ammunition reserves and forcing it into a role where those advantages largely disappear. The firearm industry didn’t just happen to overlook belt fed pistols. It's a shockingly complicated and problem prone solution to giving Corvo more ammo.
As an aside, I’m so curious about other guns in the dishonored universe. Historically, firearms evolved from single shot muzzleloaders to repeaters through several approaches: revolvers, lever actions, bolt actions, tube magazines, box magazines, and then belt-fed systems. Why do we only see one kind of gun in the game?
I understand that by the time of Dishonored 2, there had already been years of technological exchange between Gristol and Serkonos. The pistols used in Karnaca and Dunwall are similar for the same reason a rifle in Canada and a rifle in Germany are broadly recognizable as rifles. Trade, military contracts, and industrial production tend to smooth out differences.
But in 16th century Europe, you had matchlocks, wheellocks, snaphaunces, early flintlocks, and all sorts of local experiments existing at the same time. Nobody knew which evolutionary branch would win yet. Even once gunpowder use became standard, the 19th century was full of bizarre guns that led nowhere: needle guns, chain guns, rocket balls, harmonica guns…
What if the pistols we see in game are just one species in a much larger ecosystem? I look at the game’s model and wonder what the local equivalent of a service revolver looks like in Morley, or what a Tyvian hunting rifle looks like after fifty years of development in subzero weather, or what bizarre thing a Serkonan duelist carries because that’s just what became fashionable there. Were Serkonan guns more like luxury mechanical watches? Beautifully made, highly individualized, full of clever solutions that a Gristolian factory worker would consider superfluous? There are just so many solutions to “how do you launch a piece of metal very very fast?” that I wish the game touched on more.
Wait. Actually... A hot minute later, I’ve found a few hints that other firearms exist. In The Tales From Dunwall, Part 1, soldiers carry rifles, and you can even see the characteristic blue glow in the barrels. Yes *in* the barrels x) The animation is highly stylized, but this does tell us that whale oil powered firearms aren't limited to pistols. The Dishonored RPG also refers to “pistols, rifles, and other guns”... Anyway..... I digress
Corvo’s pistol was clearly inspired by a 1600s wheelock; you can see the big circular mechanism on the side. In a true wheelock, you pour loose powder and a lead ball down the barrel, shove everything down, and a spring loaded steel wheel spins against a piece of pyrite to make sparks which ignite the powder in the pan, and boom. The problem is that wheelocks don’t use cartridges, yet Corvo’s pistol does, so the visual design is borrowing from a technology that predates cartridges by roughly 200-300 years to tell us This Is An Old Timey Gun. It's a bit like discovering your horse drawn carriage has a jet engine hidden under the seat.
What’s funny is that, from a gun design standpoint, whale oil could actually make the pistol simpler. If you suddenly had access to a reliable fuel source that powerful, you wouldn’t need all the complicated mechanisms people historically invented to squeeze more performance out of black powder. E.g. you wouldn't need long barrels or increasingly elaborate locking and repeating mechanisms just to eke out a bit more muzzle velocity. And of course, gameplay aside, the Dishonored universe treats refined whale oil as stable enough to build an entire industrial civilization around. If it's safe enough to metaphorically pipe through the capital, it's probably safe enough that a pistol doesn't need a Rube Goldberg action just to keep it from detonating. Instead, Piero uses this advantage to make the gun even weirder.
In a normal firearm, the cartridge is actually doing several jobs at once. The primer (a small impact-sensitive explosive in the base of the cartridge) is struck by the firing pin and ignites the powder inside. That powder burns super fast, making a huge volume of hot, high pressure gas, and since the bullet is the easiest thing to move, the gas punches it down the inside of the barrel and out of the gun. Also, note that when the powder ignites, the thin cartridge wall swells and presses against the chamber. This creates a seal that prevents most of the gas from escaping backwards. Without that seal, hot gas and burning powder would basically turn the gun inside out.
Importantly, the cartridge case is not strong enough to contain firing pressure on its own. A 9mm case sitting on a table isn’t a gun. If you hit the primer, it’ll pop and split and throw fragments around, but it won’t launch the bullet with much force because there’s no chamber supporting it and directing the pressure.
Also importantly, the primer doesn't provide much energy. Its job is just to start the reaction. A typical primer only has a tiny amount of explosive to ignite the powder charge, but nowhere near enough to launch a bullet at useful velocity by itself.
And looking at the game’s bullets…. there’s a whole lot of blue in there….
(Admittedly Bend Time muddies the waters a lot. What looks like the entire cartridge gets fired rather than just the bullet… while a separate spent case is ejected from the pistol’s side through means unknown…) (some mysteries are better left unexplained)
If you accept that a few drops of refined whale oil can store absurd, predictable amounts of energy, an interesting possibility is that the whale oil acts as a monopropellant. Rather than using separate primer and propellant systems, the fuel itself quickly decomposes when triggered, and then boom.
The obvious question is why anyone would do this. Monopropellants exist, but they're generally associated with complicated things like rockets, where a certain amount of complexity is acceptable because you're launching a whole ass spacecraft. A handgun is expected to survive being dropped in mud and heated and frozen and generally abused. I've seen AKs modified to the point of really taking the whole thing apart, welding and hammering parts into shape in ways that put video games to shame. You want simple, idiot-proof guns in people’s hands, not rocket science. That said ! Dishonored has never been particularly concerned with workplace safety, so maybe the pistols are indeed monopropellants? Just how stable is whale oil canonically...?
I also considered that the oil cartridge could be working like a miniature power source that charges some internal component immediately before firing, like a tiny chemical generator. Most whale oil powered technology in Dishonored behaves like a fuel-burning system coupled to an energy storage device with a recharge period (think of Arc Pylons). I.e. you put whale oil into a machine, the machine charges something, and that stored energy is released in bursts.
The problem is that the pistol obviously acts much more like a firearm than a miniature Arc Pylon. If there is an energy storage component involved, it would have to be hidden somewhere inside the weapon which. why. Even the monopropellant system makes more sense. Still, it's an interesting possibility that’s more consistent with how whale oil gets used in-game.
Tl;dr from a worldbuilding perspective, the pistol is a successful firearm because every strange feature tells you something about the setting. It isn’t trying to be a realistic pistol by any means, but it is trying to be a pistol designed by a civilization that runs on whale oil instead, and in that respect it succeeds very well.
If anyone knows their gun history, please feel free to correct me if I’ve made any mistakes! I was also relying on an online translator dictionary for most terminology so that might've caused issues.
