Firearms Tech Tree

The development lineage of the world's firearms, from the metallic-cartridge revolution of the 1860s to the modular rifles of the 2020s — who designed what from what, who built it under license, who copied it without one, and what everyone else called it.

What this is

Every firearm links to its Wikipedia and Grokipedia article. Solid arrows are direct development; dashed arrows are influence; dash-dot arrows are license production or copies — including unlicensed ones, of which firearms history has more than any other field: the Springfield that paid Mauser royalties mid-lawsuit, the Chinese Type 56 universe, the M16 clones nobody asked Colt about.

Where a family matters, its variants are their own chain — the AK's 47→AKM→74→12 line, the AR's path from AR-10 to M4 and beyond — and the Variants button collapses those chains back to family heads.

How to read it

Node color is bloc: United States, USSR / Russia, Europe, elsewhere — and each horizontal lane is one designer, factory, or nation, so Mauser, Browning, Kalashnikov, and the houses that copied them each hold their own line. The chart is a timeline: horizontal position is the design's introduction, from the 1860s to the 2020s, with 1886 — the Lebel and smokeless powder — marked as a dotted line where every earlier firearm became obsolete overnight.

Scroll to zoom, drag to pan (on touch screens, pinch to zoom), hover a firearm for a quick look, click it — its summary, designer, operator designations, and article links open in an In Detail tab in this sidebar. Arrows are clickable too: each one explains what changed between the two designs it connects. Press Esc or close the tab to come back here.

Sources & honesty

Max Popenker's Modern Firearms (the encyclopedia long known by its old address, world.guns.ru) is the standard reference for this material and the inspiration for this chart's coverage; its text is its own, so article links go to Wikipedia and Grokipedia, and the write-ups here were written fresh and fact-checked against Wikipedia. We used an LLM (Claude) to write the firearm summaries and the description text on every arrow. Lineage is genuinely contested in places — the StG 44's influence on the AK-47 is the most argued arrow in the field — and disputed or informal links carry a ? and say so. Photographs are loaded from Wikimedia Commons with per-image credit in the detail panel. Corrections welcome via GitHub issues.

Scope

Cartridge firearms from roughly 1860 onward: military pistols, submachine guns, rifles, machine guns, precision rifles, and combat shotguns, plus the landmark civilian designs their lineages run through. Muzzle-loaders, air guns, and grenade launchers are out of scope. This is an identification and history chart — names, dates, lineage, and stories — not a technical manual. Dates are the design's introduction or adoption, which sometimes differ from first prototype by years.

License

Site code is MIT · source on GitHub. Text content draws on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) for facts; photographs remain under their stated licenses with credit per image.