Over the centuries that guns have loomed large over society, hunting and competition, there have been all sorts of unusual guns that have ended up in storage, many of which have unique characteristics that were never widely adopted.
One of the most unusual examples of this in the 20th century is the time when a company produced a revolver that was magazine-fed and used triangular bullets, based on a hodgepodge of mid-20th-century technologies that ultimately went nowhere.
The Dardick Tround was intended to combine the capacity of a semi-automatic pistol with the firing operation of a revolver, using triangular bullet rounds to square the circle and provide the best of both worlds.
Invented by David Dardick and patented in 1958, the Dardick handgun was an open-chamber gun that used non-removable magazines to allow a revolver with only three firing chambers to carry up to 20 trounds at a time.
Unlike a standard revolver, which required the chamber to be open in whole or in part to load ammunition, the Dardick allowed rounds to be inserted from the side as well as be magazine fed.
The revolver was inherently double-action, as the long pull rotated the cylinder, cocked and released the hammer in one motion, loading another bullet from the mag in the process.
By default, the trounds were .38 calibre (equivalent to 9mm), and the initial Dardick Model 1100 could only be chambered with .38 Dardick Trounds.
Later models allowed for multiple calibre options, including .38, .30 (7.62mm) and .22 (5.56mm), as well as a kit that allowed the Dardick to be converted into a somewhat cumbersome carbine,
There were even kits that converted conventional rounds such as the .38 Special into trounds to be loaded.
Whilst the Dardick did not have removable magazines, it could be speed-loaded using stripper clips.
The concept for triangular bullets came from a 1950s US Army experiment. As triangles could fit into less space than round bullets, there were experiments to see if belt-fed triangular clips could work as a more efficient solution.
However, whilst the bullets were half the size of a conventional round cartridge, triangular bullets were much harder to feed from a magazine into a chamber, leading to a lot of guns jamming in the testing process.
The tround did seem, to its credit, to have gotten around this issue, and found a lot of novel ways to fix issues with potential jamming.
Despite this, however, it never gained any popularity with gun owners, and after selling less than 100 revolvers in four years, Dardick was wrapped up.
Part of the problem was a reliance on plastic cartridges, which warped over time and ultimately jammed the chamber, leading to awkward repairs and maintenance.
Beyond this, it was simply awkward, cumbersome and ugly. Part of the appeal of revolvers is their aesthetics and simplicity, and the Dardick revolver range looked awkward and struggled to appeal to people looking to add either a pistol of any kind to their collection.
Unusual revolvers still exist but the tround experiment has never been repeated, to the point that it is expensive just to fire a single shot.