[2020] Long Ammo

Uppercut is actually supposed to fire .45-70 as well! It's not that strong of a round compared to other rifle cartridges in the game, so we thought of using that as the model reference for the Uppercut as it still qualifies as long ammo. Sparks in-game is chambered for a much more powerful .50-90 or .50-100 buffalo hunting cartridge. And yes, the Springfield '66 is using a much weaker "medium-sized" bullet with the .50-70. It's successor, the Springfield '73 would be using what the Uppercut uses: .45-70 government. Pax is in .45 Long Colt, which is still pretty comparable in power to today's .45 ACP. The Nitro is chambered in .500 Nitro Express.

The thing is, the Uppercut is not even based on the Colt Walker. It's based on the Colt Open Top, like the Caldwell Conversion is, just reinforced and modified to fire the larger caliber. The idea is that the Hunters took a stock weapon and made it use rifle ammunition instead. Of course there is artistic liberty with this, just as you say the Avtomat being based on a modified Mosin Nagant, while other weapons mound blades and attachments that no real sane shooter would ever consider getting close to their weapon. But that's the beauty of working on a game in a fictional scenario - even if parts of the rules, gear, etc. of course is very closely leaned on their real-world counterparts. And of course the Hunters might get their hand on early prototypes and military-grade gear with their apparent connections to some powerful institutions like sources in the Russian Empire, etc. :)

There is a fine line I suppose. We definitely took some liberty since it's a game not a documentary about the biggest cover-up in history (or is it?), but we still try to be truthful to the era for the most part. Don't expect WW1 weapons, unless there is a way we can explain them in the universe, like how the Avtomat is scratch-built from the Mosin Nagant, similar to how the Huot was modified from the Canadian bolt-action rifle out of necessity to have more machineguns for the war 20 years after the events in Hunt. :)

Hunt has a very interesting setting in that we have one foot in the Wild West era and one foot in the modern age leading up to WW1. This gives us a lot of different areas to explore, but even in 1895, machineguns were already a thing and appeared in all major armies in one way or another. Be that the classic maxim water-cooled model or the colt-browning model 1895 and others. If we feel a machinegun would be needed, the era would have plenty of oportunities for that - not just the archetypical Civil War era gatling. :)

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Still soooo much to explore in 1895! :)