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Dark Skies wrote: ↑Fri Jan 07, 2022 1:11 pm When I was a kid a stall at the annual fair had what looked to be a Lewis gun that shot BBs at an amazing rate of fire. Air was supplied via a compressor tank.
You had to shoot out a red star on a card. You never actually managed it because just as you needed a few more BBs it'd run out. I'd have one of those.

Try it with a .22 semi in 2 minutes.

Dark Skies wrote: ↑Fri Jan 07, 2022 1:11 pm When I was a kid a stall at the annual fair had what looked to be a Lewis gun that shot BBs at an amazing rate of fire. Air was supplied via a compressor tank.
You had to shoot out a red star on a card. You never actually managed it because just as you needed a few more BBs it'd run out. I'd have one of those.

I have one of those - or at least I have bits of one of those..

My brother was an auxiliary fireman in 2003 when Brighton pier burned down and was involved in damping down process. As such he managed to salvage one of the Thompson BB machine guns, although the plastic stock was partially melted he kept it as a curio and I eventually inherited it in 2010. Thinking it was fairly worthless but intrigued by the mechanism, I stripped the guts out of it and dumped the rest. Only later did I discover that they are very collectable and going to around $1,000 each. (Made by Feltman, USA)

So - I still have the mechanism and a bit of the smoothbore barrel.

As a teenager in an airgun club I would have been desperately saving up for the Steyr.

In those days it was before Co2 airguns had been taken off ticket.

The best we could get was an ASI/Gamo. Due to the tube mag and loading gate set up, even with an 'Ox' spring the air rifle chronographed at 4ft/lbs!