Stick Grenades and Gatling Guns

The sun shone through the glass windows of a large conference room within the Industrial District of the city of Kufstein. They gathered various men dressed in work clothes around the table, stained with the various fluids that an engineer would commonly encounter. At the head of this table was a familiar young man, the eldest son of the legendary engineer Ludwig Schmidt. 

Jakob was designing a new weapon, and the men surrounding him were the Research and development team assigned to the Austrian National Armory. Usually, Ludwig would be at this meeting, but the man was getting on in years and had many other tasks to work on. With this in mind, he placed his eldest son as the head of the Research and development department.

At the moment, Jakob and his engineers were working together to design a replacement for the old cast iron grenades that were essentially nothing more than a hollow iron ball filled with black powder and used a slow-burning match to detonate.