Alistair asks...
>Some questions on firearms...
>- -------------------------------
> .. At what tech level can you build guns out of non metallic
>materials?
> .. What sort of non metallic materials are possible - plastics,
>carbon fibre, or what?
> .. At what tech level can you build caseless ammo and weapons to
>use it? And when does the result become as practical as weapons
>using cased ammo?
There has been some debate over alternate materials over in
Rec.guns, particularly about stuff like the 'plastic' gun depicted in the
movie "In the Line of Fire'. For those who haven't seen it (and don't
mind a spoiler;-) the bad guy, an expert in making plastic and
composite materials (among other things) makes a simple two shot
pistol that would pass through a metal detector. Opinions varied, but
given current tech levels on Earth (8-10 or whatever) such a gun is
quite possible. Also, remember the infamous Glock 'plastic' pistol of
several years back. It was mostly made from non-metallic
components. The company has since increased the percentage of
ferrous metal components, but at the time it was quite revolutionary in
design. Similarly, ceramic materials of sufficient toughness and
durability exist to make the hard part of firearms today; what lacks is
the economic incentive to make them. Steel is cheap, and will
probably continue to be cheap for some time to come. There are
other considerations to making guns lighter, too. As long as we're
using guns that recoil, a lighter gun is not neccessarily better. Since
perceived recoil is very dependent on the mass of the gun, a light gun
has more perceived recoil, and a much greater effect on the accuracy
of that second shot. A Marlin .44 mag carbine has much less
perceived recoil than a .44 mag snub revolver, and is much more
accurate. Weight also affects the first shot accuracy as well. A
heavier gun requires more effort to move it, so small motions are
less likely to upset the aim once it's established..
Therefore the only time that non-metallic components will be
used, in firearms, or anything else, for that matter, is when they
impart a greater advantage over more conventional materials. This is
pretty much a standard dictum of manufacturing design. Carbon fiber
composite materials are pretty much state of the art stuff, as
materials go, but they're commonly used in fishing rods, because
they're so much better that other alternatives (performance-wise) that
they make economic sense, oce you're tooled up to make them in
quantity. OTOH, the same carbon fiber technology is usable to make
bicycle frames, but since the margin of performance gain is so much
smaller over the best of more common materials, they're only used in
very high performance (read ungodly expensive) applications.
The same applies to caseless ammunition. Caseless
ammunition is in common use today...it's used for the 20 and 30 mm
cannons used in fighter aircraft like the US F-16, and others (I don't
know any others off hand) These give a huge advantage over
conventional cased ammo. You lose the weight of the shells, and so
can carry more ammo, and you don't have to store the shells after
firing them. (a great problem with cased is that when ejected from a
highspeed aircraft during dogfight maneuvers, they can easily cause
great damage to the aircraft firing them) So, in one sense, we're (at
tech 8 or 10, whatever we are) already capable of caseless ammo.
Similarly, there have been experimental hand weapons made that
use caseless ammunition for a few years now. This has other
problems, namely durability, and safety. Coventional cased
ammunition can be dropped, ground into the dirt, carried through mud,
dunked in streams, rattle around in a pocket for years, and still work.
Such durability hasn't been verified for the caseless ammunition
avaliable today. It will become practical, when A) it does prove as
durable and useful as conventional ammunition, and B) it is
sufficiently cheap that is is cost effective to switch, which involves a
weapon redesign. The latter probably won't happen until a
government or two, large ones, decide that this is the new standard,
and order it for their armies. Then, thanks to the economies of scale,
caseless becomes cheaper and more avaliable than cased, and will
probably start to supplant it.
This long winded explanation of something tha would be easily
answered by going to my books (or my campaign, where to simplify
things, all commonly avaliable guns are caseless, and come in two
calibers) is to point out what I percieve as a great problem of the
'granularity' of the Tech level scale. As someone has pointed out,
Earth today is a low tech level, but only because we don't have
interstellar flight. Since the tech level is based on broad classes of
technology, I don't think it's applicable to very minute detail, so the
question of 'when is caseless ammunition avaliable' is really moot.
It's avaliable when it's needed and economically viable. We had
'caseless' ammunition over a hundred and fifty years ago, when
paper cased cartriges for muzzleloading rifles were in common use;
what tech level were we in 1800?
Bruce Johnson
The University of Arizona
[email removed] (work :-(
[email removed] (play :-)
My opinions, All Mine!