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Old 11-13-2017, 08:43 AM   #104
acrosome
 
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Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: The Land of Enchantment
Default Re: Making more ammo stuck on a low tech world.

Quote:
Originally Posted by lwcamp View Post
Is there any reason you can't cast the brass?
Sort of out of my area, but I would suspect that it would be hard to cast something that thin-walled. Though if you were milling you would first cast it as thin as you could.

These straight-walled black powder cartridges are good candidates to just mill the bases and then weld a tube of brass sheet to it, though.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Rupert View Post
Unless you need the rate of fire, there's a lot to be said for the idea of a lever-action in .45-70 (or .444 Marlin). It's a large nearly straight cartridge originally intended for black-powder use, and would be fairly easy to make and reload. Alternatively lever-actions in .44-40 with matching revolvers (also in .44-40) will make logistics simpler as you'll only need one round for all the firearms.
The .44-40 would have issues. It wouldn't perform as well against a cuirass or cover, and a .44-40 gatling would be moderately pointless. I'd stick with .45-70, with the 1886 Winchester, the Remington Rolling Block, or 1874 Sharps rifle, and one of the many Gatlings as the machinegun, possibly the short-barreled 1874 variant.

Handguns are over-rated, anyway. :) Or maybe you could make one of those 1871 Rolling-Block pistols in .45-70, or something like the Greener Double-Grip. :) Modern manufacturers make .45-70 revolvers, after all... Or just make the .45-70 a bit shorter, call it ballistically equivalent to the .45 LC, and make Colt Single-Action Armys, or any other TL5/6 revolver that took the .45 LC cartridge.

Frankly, my mind boggles at why the GURPS supplements list the Sharps and Remington as more expensive than the Winchester, which required more milling/labor. Perhaps those very precise micrometer sights they often had? (The 1871 Remington Rolling Block pistol is damned cheap, after all.) I would propose the Sharps or Remington with more simple sights as the "low-end" rifle for handing out to low-tech allies. Well, either that or an 1863 Springfield rifles with paper cartridges and Minie balls, since that would be easy to train for someone familiar with the TL4/5 manual of arms for a musket. And reserve the Winchester for PCs and other high-techers.

Last edited by acrosome; 11-13-2017 at 09:13 AM.
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