Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
I envision ontogenically engineered pseudo-plants that produce a papery PET capsule with a base, with pseudo food bodies in the base producing strands or thin rods of propellant inside the capsule. When it is ripe it can be harvested for processing, but you can divert the ripe capsules for use as charges. Just put the thing into a muzzle-loader with the capsule end towards the breech, the base acting as a wad, and ram down a Minié bullet in front of it. Half-cock, attach primer to lock, Robert is your mother's brother.
It would only look like loading a musket with a bird's-eye chilli.
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Unless I'm mistaken, the bullet would need paper (or similar) wrapped around it as well in this case; one purpose of the wad was to hold the bullet in, and this is doubly important for a sub-caliber (prior to the expansion of the base from firing) bullet like the Minié.
The visual image of shoving (what looks like) a chili down a muzzleloader and blasting someone
is pretty awesome, though. And here I thought ghost peppers packed a punch!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
Yeah. One way to do it would be to drill a flash tube somewhat wider than you need, tap it, and then screw in a tubular fitting with a nipple on the outside for the cap to go on and a sharpish spur on the inside to tear open the charge-wrapper as it is forced past.
Or, as you say, you could stick a bodkin or spine through the touchhole before fitting the cap, as a routine part of loading.
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I wonder it it would be an option to design the percussion "caps" so that they have a sharp point that extends into the barrel, penetrating the cartridge-chili. I've envisioning a percussion cap that looks somewhat like a push pin, but probably with a longer needle. I'm concerned the needle would be blasted off when the cap detonates (or when the smokeless powder ignites, although perhaps if this happens it's likely to be flung out of the barrel along with the bullet? If not, shooters might regularly tilt their weapon down and give it a quick rap to knock the loose pin out between reloads.
If this is doable, I suspect it would speed up reloading a good deal. Indeed, you may be able to get away with attaching the wrapped bullet to the top of the cartridge-chili, letting you ram the whole thing in at once. Normally, a caplock muzzleloading rifle using a paper cartridge and Minié bullet would take 20 seconds to load, 16 with Fast-Draw (Ammo), while a caplock muzzleloading rifled pistol in the same situation would take 10 seconds to load, 8 with Fast-Draw (Ammo). Not needing to tear open the cartridge is going to save some time; perhaps these times become something like 15/12 and 7/5?