This one was made in Nuremberg by Hans Stopler, so I suppose raise a stein to German engineering. Once again it never fails to impress. Revolvers wouldn't become commercially successful & produced in mass quantities until the 1800s.
So in my DND campaign setting, I had planned on black powder being a pretty recent discovery, called flashsand by the country who discovered it. One of my players wanted to be a gunslinger, so we worked out that he would have the first gun, built by his father who had to hide from the military to keep it out of the wrong hands. He wanted a revolver and to be a proto-desperado type, and I frankly didn't want to litigate logistics with a first-time player. I had been having a tough time squaring the circle between "first gun" and "revolver" but this is a perfect middleground!
Glad to help! Technological adoption is never instant.
Today we've had jet packs, flying cars, and rocket pistols for years. In the case of the latter over a century even. But that doesn't mean every Tom, Dick, and Harry flys to work.
But if you've got the cash or know how maybe you can.
Yeah it makes me think of a gatling gun. Something that had a good idea of where things could go, but the execution wasn't quite yet there and if you fired it for too long the barrels would melt, so it didn't have a large impact on warfare.
But it's interesting seeing the early ways people tried to improve the fire rate of guns.
Then Browning came along and made the gatling gun obsolete and improved on the revolver's semi-auto fire, too.
The bullets would have been round lead balls. You could cast them yourself fairly easily. I would imagine the person who owned this would have been rich enough to have their own personal armorer to cast bullets for them.
Here's a mold:
Then to load it you would follow the same procedures you would follow to load a normal flintlock pistol.