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Post by Horsie on Mar 3, 2019 17:51:24 GMT
I guess it's something I'm just really used to, seeing as we have a lot of Chinese rifles, pistols, and shotguns up here, and they're shameless copies of other guns.
Personally I find most sporting rifles today pretty boring, I may be wrong, but it feels like a lot of the really interesting and creative stuff going on right now is with pistols.
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Post by wordweaver3 on Mar 3, 2019 21:53:07 GMT
Of course Canada would be part of the problem.
Psh!
Pistols do seem to be where the all the imagination is these days. That and in airguns. With rifles you just seem to get some new long range cartridge every once in a while.
Though it's hard to see how much further we can go with firearms without coming up with an entirely new concept that fundamentally changes how weapons are made. Like blasters or something.
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Post by Horsie on Mar 3, 2019 23:34:00 GMT
Yeah, I can't tell most commercial bolt-action sporting rifles apart, if you handed me one without markings I wouldn't have a clue.
But if they made a laser gun, would you really want one? Even if they made a practical laser gun and put it up for sale on the commercial market at an affordable price, I don't think it'd really do much for me.
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Post by wordweaver3 on Mar 3, 2019 23:55:17 GMT
Would I want a laser gun?
Hmmm...
YES!
That's like asking if I'd want a lightsaber.
Providing it doesn't have some type of horrible side effect like a radioactive power core or a tendency to explode.
Though I think more practical innovations will surface before that. Maybe a cartridge with multiple projectiles in them that it can fire individually or all at once. Like the Metal Storm concept, only scaled down. Or a propellant with incredibly high yield that will allow for more compact high power cartridges. Maybe in a liquid or gel form. Another possibility would be cartridges that could be adjusted in power level on the fly to instantly go from low power for suppressed use to high power for sniping or increased penetration.
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Post by Horsie on Mar 4, 2019 0:01:02 GMT
I don't know, I like my explosive propellants, metal bullets, and recoil, and knowing that since my gun is all mechanical I can troubleshoot malfunctions, there's be far too much electronics in a laser gun for me to dare try fixing anything.
Of those I think the one we're most likely to see is a better propellant. They developed something more efficient after WW2 and were able to scale the 30-06 down a bit into the .308 Winchester while maintaining similar ballistics, I'm sure it's possible to develop something more efficient than the powders used today.
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Post by wordweaver3 on Mar 4, 2019 0:24:20 GMT
I think the limiting factor for propellant is that once you exceed a certain power level it's no longer a propellant and becomes an explosive. Explosives are more difficult to contain and are less reliable in terms of velocity. Black powder is much more volatile than any modern propellant but is only capable of producing maximum velocities in the 1300 fps range since that's the rate it explodes at. There's also the need for X amount of oxygen to burn X amount of propellant and yield Y amount of pressure. Since the case is enclosed the oxygen has to all be in there already. Even if you make the propellant very powerful you'll still need a larger cartridge to fit the required amount of oxygen to get the same pressure yield. Of course, compacting oxygen is a fairly simple task, but pressurizing cartridges has a lot of issues, most notably it would be prone to leak.
Though it might be possible to create a system that introduces oxygen at the time of ignition, giving you the ability to compact the propellant as much as you want.
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Post by Horsie on Mar 4, 2019 1:35:13 GMT
Could add a chemical oxidizer?
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Post by wordweaver3 on Mar 4, 2019 7:00:43 GMT
Yeah, something that produces oxygen when it's burned would work.
There's also a possibility of a propellant that isn't necessarily a reaction by fire, such as two chemicals that react violently when put together. They would be separated from each other inside the case and when the "primer" is struck what it does is break the seal between them. Though I'm not aware of many chemicals that react that way with enough force to propel a bullet that aren't also a gas.
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Post by Horsie on Mar 4, 2019 7:42:21 GMT
That'd be way too dangerous, it'd have to be a liquid, which would be problematic since there'd always be a risk that the fuel and oxidizer could mix in storage due to corrosion, poorly made cartridges, or leaks because of changes in temperature. Plus, anything that's hypergolic is going to be really volatile by nature, potentially ignited by shit you wouldn't expect; the Soviets had at least 2 different rockets explode during fuelling when the propellant reacted violently with lead solder.
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Post by wordweaver3 on Mar 4, 2019 17:08:18 GMT
Well, that's the Soviets. Everything they did was liable to explode. "President Gorbachev, we have just developed new potato." (Kaboom) "Was it supposed to do that?"
"Uh... yes! It is new self-mashing potato."
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Post by Horsie on Mar 4, 2019 17:39:48 GMT
Oh yeah, there wasn't a single thing they couldn't fuck up catastrophically, these are the same people who managed to lose the head of their strategic missile forces, many of their ICBM designers, and the guys who ran their top test range when they were setting up to launch a prototype missile and the second stage rockets suddenly fired, straight into the first stage fuel tanks.
Still, that's a good example of just how volatile hypergolic propellants are, if they're going to be sensitive enough to react explosively with a second component then they're going to be sensitive enough to react violently with a lot of things, even corrosion or exposure to certain metals can cause some stuff to ignite.
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Post by wordweaver3 on Mar 4, 2019 18:14:48 GMT
Yeah, they're definitely dangerous, I was just spitballing concepts. Someone might be able to develop some that are safer, but I don't know much about rocket surgery.
Hmmm... multi stage bullets?
Nah.
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Post by Horsie on Mar 4, 2019 20:40:26 GMT
You mean something like a Javelin, that gets fired out of the gun and has a rocket engage?
Yeah, probably a little too complicated and bulky.
Maybe stuff that penetrates armour better? I know the Swedes developed one for an SMG/PDW that fired a tungsten penetrator using a sabot, the penetrator itself was only about 4.5mm.
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Post by Canuovea on Mar 4, 2019 22:21:06 GMT
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Post by wordweaver3 on Mar 5, 2019 20:40:33 GMT
I never played Warhammer.
Though the concept of weaponizing balloons should be explored.
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