A Patreon reward for Spypone, and continues the series of drawings of a Steampunk Equestria moving away from black powder to smokeless powder. Link.

With the new chemistry and new technologies new challenges arose for the various nations of the late 19th and early 20th century. One of those was growth of observation balloons, non-rigid airships, and dirigibles. In our world during the period of WWI and the interwar period most of these vehicle, outside of the United States, used flammable hydrogen as their lifting gas.

Now gas envelopes are rather fragile things, and hydrogen is flammable, but little bullet holes don't let that much gas out, and hydrogen needs some oxygen as an ignition source for it to go all Hindenburg on you.

As a result you could put hundreds of 7.62mm holes in a gas envelope and it would take awhile for the craft to fall out of the sky. So during the WWI the Allies came up with several weapons systems to not just fill a gas envelope with holes, but to also fire incendiary projectiles into them.

The weapon that Spypone's OC Antebellum is holding a M1917 Winchester-Burton Light Machine Rifle. Our good friend Ian at Forgotten Weapons has done a video of it. Link

FYI. I deliberately drew the rifle with both magazines not fully seated so folks wouldn't bug me about draw one magazine too short because they didn't watch the video.