Breechloader

A breechloader is a firearm or artillery piece in which the user loads the ammunition from the breech (rear) end of the barrel. The vast majority of modern firearms are breech-loaders.

Before the mid-19th century, most guns were muzzleloaders, guns loaded from the muzzle (front) end of the barrel.

Only a few muzzleloading weapons, such as mortars, rifle grenades, some rocket launchers, such as the Panzerfaust 3 and RPG-7, and the GP series grenade launchers, have remained in common usage in modern military conflicts. However, referring to a weapon explicitly as breech-loading is mostly limited to weapons in which the operator loads ammunition by hand (and not by operating a mechanism such as a bolt-action), such as artillery pieces or break-action small arms.

Breech-loading provides the advantage of reduced reloading time because it is far quicker to load the projectile and propellant into the chamber of a gun or cannon than to reach all the way over to the front end to load ammunition and then push them back down a long tube – especially when the projectile fits tightly and the tube has spiral ridges from rifling. In field artillery, the advantages were similar – crews no longer had to get in front of the gun and pack ammunition in the barrel with a ramrod, and the shot could now tightly fit the bore, which greatly increased its power, range, and accuracy. It also became easier to load a previously fired weapon with a fouled barrel. Gun turrets and emplacements for breechloaders can be made smaller since their crews do not need to retract the gun for loading into the muzzle end. Unloading a breechloader is much easier as well, as the ammunition can be unloaded from the breech end, which can often be done by hand. Unloading muzzle loaders requires drilling into the projectile to drag it out through the whole length of the barrel, and in some cases, the guns are simply fired to facilitate the unloading process.

The advent of breech-loading gave a significant increase to effective firepower by its own right, and it also enabled further revolutions in firearm designs such as repeating and self-loading firearms.