Just for the record I don't know a lot about guns or hunting. This is just a thought experiment based on my experience with a hunting video game but now I'm curious if the concept could maybe be actually good.
So in "theHunter: Call of the Wild" there's a revolver modeled after the Taurus Judge that's chambered for .45 Colt as well as .410. It's pretty interesting but not all that useful in practice since it lacks range and power. To my knowledge the actual Judge isn't marketed as a hunting sidearm but rather as a self defense weapon.
So I got thinking how it could be improved upon and came up with what you see in the sketch. Kind of a bullpup design to give you more barrel length while retaining pocketability, weaver rail for sights, and a grip for better accuracy.
Would this just break and burn your hands or is there a way this could work? And would it even be an improvement? One drawback I'm seeing is that you couldn't fire multiple shots in single action unless you fan it cowboy-style but I'm not sure how relevant that is for irl hunting. I feel like as long as the trigger isn't impossibly hard to pull double action with birdshot could be viable for duck hunting and in most other scenarios you'd probably take one shot at a time anyway.
So yeah, thoughts?
Great breakdowns in the comments already.
One thing I'm not hearing as a problem from others: ergonomics. From your design, that hammer looks all but impossible to cock one handed. Someone mentioned it could be double action, but its been my experience that firing single action (even with double action revolvers) is just better for accuracy and recoil handling.
That said, I don't do a lot of revolvers, so I may be misjudging how viable this is on that single point.
Still, it kinda looks cool in a retro-steampunk kinda way. I doubt it'd have the utility for real world use, but I'm sure someone would buy it for "cool gun" reasons (read as the worst reason I expect we've all suffered from).