The Gallagher rifle may prove of interest to you as a design, if you can find anything on the action.
The Gallagher is really strange, as it is a lever-break action. When the lever swings forward, the barrel first slides forward, opening the breach, and then drops downward like a break-action shotgun.
Using an action like that, you could actually design the gun so that the piston and valves are in the rear half, and the barrel and chamber seals are in the forward half. If the barrel end is male, you could easily design it as a breach loader. But it would take some design work to get the linkage right.
(The other weird thing about the Gallagher is that the breach actually open at the middle. The bullet sits half sticking out of the breach, and then slides back into the rear half of the breach when it closes. And the entire round is capsule-shaped. And instead of having a primer built into the bullet casing, it just has a hole in the back, and uses an old cap-lock to set off the round. Truly odd...)