>>93940Looking at the design Henry came up with, there's some dramatic improvements; first is the ammunition, .41 Rocketball is just a shit cartridge, the .44 Henry is a self-contained metallic cartridge with rimfire ignition, meaning the rim of the cartridge is hollow and filled with priming ignition, the firing-pin crushes the rim and sets off the blackpowder. This isn't as reliable as centerfire ammunition, and there's a practical upper limit to how powerful this style of cartridge can be (as it has to be strong enough to contain enough pressure, yet also be able to be reliably crushed by a hammer spring, which the user and action has to compress), it is however much cheaper to make.
Compared to the Volcanic, the opening stroke of the action always clears the chamber, if there's a live cartridge in there, it'll extract and eject it, if there's a spent cartridge case, it'll extract and eject it, if there's a dud cartridge in there, it's extracted and ejected. The Volcanic does no such thing, if the Rocketball cartridge is chambered, it better fire and be out of there, if it's not, you're not getting it out of there soon.
Henry's design offered far better ballistics; the 1860 Henry is somewhat comparable in ballistics to a modern pistol in .45ACP, so it's no cannon, but it's leagues ahead of the Volcanic, while being far more mechanically reliable. The speed and power of this rifle was at the time practically unparalleled.
