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Old 04-22-2019, 08:03 AM   #41
Anaraxes
 
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Default Re: Blessed Oil

Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
Does anyone happen to know if blessing oil is restricted to olive oil, or if it would be permissable to bless the kind of oil that could be used to store ammunition in?
I'm no theologian, but I'm pretty sure we can't question the theological credentials of the Pope. Pope Paul VI did in fact expand the range of oils permissible in creation of one of the holy oils (there are three kinds) beyond just olive oil, but (my emphasis in bold):

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sacram Unctione Infirmorum, 1972
Further, since olive oil, which hitherto had been prescribed for the valid administration of the sacrament, is unobtainable or difficult to obtain in some parts of the world, we decreed, at the request of numerous bishops, that in the future, according to the circumstances, oil of another sort could also be used, provided it were obtained from plants, inasmuch as this more closely resembles the matter indicated in Holy Scripture.
---
Therefore, since this revision in certain point’s touches upon the sacramental rite itself, by our Apostolic authority we lay down that the following is to be observed for the future in the Latin Rite:

THE SACRAMENT OF THE ANOINTING OF THE SICK IS ADMINISTERED TO THOSE WHO ARE DANGEROUSLY ILL, BY ANOINTING THEM ON THE FOREHEAD AND HANDS WITH OLIVE OIL, OR, IF OPPORTUNE, WITH ANOTHER VEGETABLE OIL, PROPERLY BLESSED, AND SAYING ONCE ONLY THE FOLLOWING WORDS: "PER ISTAM SANCTAM UNCTIONEM ET SUAM PIISSIMAM MISERICORDIAM ADIUVET TE DOMINUS GRATIA SPIRITUS SANCTI, UT A PECCATIS LIBERATUM TE SALVET ATQUE PROPITIUS ALLEVIET.

https://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-v...unctionem.html
(I found this via a question about whether or not you could make do with petroleum-derived paraffin in an emergency, which also has some relevance. The answer there* was "no".)

Of course, this simply highlights the possibility that a later Pope expands the range yet further. If the Vatican is clued in, they might adapt. Since there's more than one kind of holy oil, it also suggests that this Pope might invent a fourth type of holy oil specifically to be used against supernatural threats, and allowing this type of oil to be of non-plant origin, which at least preserves the traditional formulas for the existing three types. At worst, oil #4 would just be non-holy, if creation of a new oil were somehow a mistake, but would still preserve the ammunition. Though my understanding is a Pope can't make that kind of mistake, what with things bound on earth being bound in heaven. If he says there's a new holy oil, so it becomes.

Otherwise, "chrism" seems to be the most general-purpose oil. Incidentally, it has a varying recipe including various sorts of balms and balsams in the olive oil. It's not straight olive oil. The blessings used in the three types are different, and the most significant difference.

Another tidbit that I learned was that the holy oils are created annually by the bishop of a church with the full set of priests (presbyterium) in attendance at a Chrism Mass on Maundy Thursday. Perhaps there's some dramatic or color potential there -- maybe a target for the bad guys who'd like to disrupt the supply of this iron ammunition. It is permissible in an emergency for any priest to bless oil as a part of actually performing a sacrament (as opposed to preparing it for future use, I think), but that seems to be more an exception for a sacrament like extreme unction than for storing ammunition.

--
* by one "Legionary of Christ Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university" in Rome, since we're considering credentials :)

Last edited by Anaraxes; 04-23-2019 at 08:59 AM.
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Old 04-22-2019, 08:20 AM   #42
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Default Re: Blessed Oil

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Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
Another tidbit that I learned was that the holy oils are created annually by the bishop of a church with the full set of priests (presbyterium) in attendance at a Chrism Mass on Maundy Thursday.
This gives me a vision of a group of bishops in all their fancy outfits, chanting and praying around a team of rough-necks up in North Dakota as they set up their drilling rig to frac up some holy shale oil.

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Old 04-22-2019, 09:15 AM   #43
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Default Re: Blessed Oil

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Originally Posted by lwcamp View Post
a team of rough-necks up in North Dakota... frac up some holy shale oil.
And just as Pope Agallo had planned, we traveled far beyond the reach of men on machines. The juice, the precious juice, was hidden in the vehicles.
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Old 04-22-2019, 06:04 PM   #44
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Default Re: Blessed Oil

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
I'm no theologian, but I'm pretty sure we can't question the theological credentials of the Pope. Pope Paul VI did in fact expand the range of oils permissible in creation of one of the holy oils (there are three kinds) beyond just olive oil, but (my emphasis in bold):

(I found this via a question about whether or not you could make do with petroleum-derived paraffin in an emergency, which also has some relevance. The answer there* was "no".)

Of course, this simply highlights the possibility that a later Pope expands the range yet further. If the Vatican is clued in, they might adapt. Since there's more than one kind of holy oil, it also suggests that this Pope might invent a fourth type of holy oil specifically to be used against supernatural threats, and allowing this type of oil to be of non-animal origin, which at least preserves the traditional formulas for the existing three types. At worst, oil #4 would just be non-holy, if creation of a new oil were somehow a mistake, but would still preserve the ammunition. Though my understanding is a Pope can't make that kind of mistake, what with things bound on earth being bound in heaven. If he says there's a new holy oil, so it becomes.

Otherwise, "chrism" seems to be the most general-purpose oil. Incidentally, it has a varying recipe including various sorts of balms and balsams in the olive oil. It's not straight olive oil. The blessings used in the three types are different, and the most significant difference.

Another tidbit that I learned was that the holy oils are created annually by the bishop of a church with the full set of priests (presbyterium) in attendance at a Chrism Mass on Maundy Thursday. Perhaps there's some dramatic or color potential there -- maybe a target for the bad guys who'd like to disrupt the supply of this iron ammunition. It is permissible in an emergency for any priest to bless oil as a part of actually performing a sacrament (as opposed to preparing it for future use, I think), but that seems to be more an exception for a sacrament like extreme unction than for storing ammunition.

--
* by one "Legionary of Christ Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university" in Rome, since we're considering credentials :)
Wonderful. Thanks for a detailed and well thought out answer.

As it happens, Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) both knew about the apparent emergence of the supernatural since the 1980s. They were among the very small group inside the Vatican who took formal steps to establish a capability to investigate it in secret, accumulate enough evidence to convince the world and plan for a future where the Catholic Church would have to defend humanity from evil on a scale never vefore seen.

Pope John Paul II believed that the Church should collect data, evidence and wisdom, but that intelligence, military or security action should be in the hands of secular governments. The Holy See should advise, influence, guide and listen, but act only to safeguard the souls of their flocks, relieve the suffering of those harmed and counsel those seeking guidance. The modern world was not a place where a Church Militant could ever thrive.

Cardinal Ratzinger was more proactive in his views. His influence drove focused intelligence gathering about the worldwide threat, organized occult research in secret archives and even the use of approved ritual magic to defend the faithful, churches and any agents dispatched by the Holy See.

When Ratzinger was elected Pope, his plan, shared with his closest advisors, was to prepare the groundwork for going public in the next few years with the supernatural threat and for the Church to be in the vanguard against the servants of evil walking the Earth. To that end, the new Pope Benedict strengthened the Vatican's occult intelligence gathering capabilities and started creating new covert teams to obtain evidence by force.

Evidence somehow never became incontroversible proof, but all the same, the cumulative weight of eyewitness testimony, statistics, otherwise inexplicable things and various other points of data should still convince many people, certainly most truly religious Catholics. But Pope Benedict XVI somehow never issued the expected Papal bulls.

What he did instead was to announce, in a secret papal brief, that as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, he had clearly heard the guidance of the Lord urging the Catholic Church not to reveal to all and sundry what had been covered by a veil of mystery. While the doctrine is somewhat involved, simplified, it amounts to the fact that Catholic clergy and all others under the authority of the Holy See are allowed to advise those who come to them with problems, even supernatural ones, but are not allowed to reveal the existence of monsters or the supernatural to anyone not already involved in such matters.

From collecting evidence, the focus of the covert activities carried out in the name of the Church shifted to responding to grave threats, often by direct order of one of the inner circle of Vatican insiders aware of these counter-supernatural teams. Targeting information is believed to come from either divine inspiration or magical oracles, depending on the level of devoutness.

All of which is to say that Pope John Paul was aware of the supernatural and took it into account, but probably didn't consider tactical teams working for the Vatican an appropriate response. Pope Benedict XVI, however, was the man who codified much of the church-sanctioned magic used to protect the faithful, including how to maximize the thaumatological effects of traditional prayers and blessings, and also one of the major figures behind the Vatican's anti-paranormal response.

Homeboy definitely would be cool about some sacred gun oil, is what I'm saying.

Quote:
Originally Posted by lwcamp View Post
This gives me a vision of a group of bishops in all their fancy outfits, chanting and praying around a team of rough-necks up in North Dakota as they set up their drilling rig to frac up some holy shale oil.

Luke
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
And just as Pope Agallo had planned, we traveled far beyond the reach of men on machines. The juice, the precious juice, was hidden in the vehicles.
And that is the winner of +1 Internet.
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Old 04-23-2019, 07:17 AM   #45
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Default Former Soviet-bloc Steel-core Ammo Iron Content

As has been noted, the majority of military 5.45x39mm, 7.62x39mm and 7.62x54R ammunition is steel-core, with a layer of lead around it and then a mild steel or other soft metal jacket.

I haven't had any luck finding a source that states how much of the total weight of the projectile in any of these calibers is steel. So, I thought I'd ask the forumites for estimates, as I know that some of you have shot surplus ammo in one or more of these calibers.

How much iron do you estimate to be in the projectile of the following rounds?

5.45x39mm 7N6/7N6M: 53 grains. I was able to discover that the steel penetrator weighs 22.1 grains, but how much steel, if any, there is in the gilding metal clad jacket, I do not know. Still, that's about 35-40% iron, more if the jacket is steel clad in gilded metal (Edit: Which I've discovered is almost universal). In that case, add however much the jacket weighs, which I imagined as something less than 25% of total bullet weight (to avoid being designated as AP by US law). WAG has the 7N6 at about 50% iron, depending on the breaks (specimens with increasingly hardened steel penetrators might knock a grain off the final iron content, but mostly the uncertainty is about the exact composition and weight of the jacket). Edit: US M855 jackets seem to weigh just under 20 grains and the bullets are not lightyears apart in size. With a generous fudge factor, 7N6 rounds might thus be anywhere from 50-60% iron.

7.62x39mm M43/57-N-231: 122-123 grains. The core of the bullet is approximately 50/50 lead and steel, by volume. The jacket is copper-plated steel, but I don't know how much of the bullet weight is jacket. Nor do I know how much there is of copper and steel, respectively, in such bimetallic jackets. As a total guess, the M43 might contain anywhere from 35% to 60% iron, by weight. Edit: Looks like 38-41% is a good guess, depending on the ratio of copper to steel in the jackets. There seems to be noticably more lead in the M43 AK rounds than in other steel-cored former Soviet bloc ammo.

7.62x54mmR LB, 57-N-323S or similar: 147-151 grains. Basically any round in thia caliber with a mild steel core. I was able to find out that Bulgarian silver tip 147 grain bullets contain a 69.4 grain mild steel core, a much smaller lead filler in the front that is .359" in length (out of 1.27" length of the bullet) and narrows to a tip from a diameter of 0.238". The jacket is bimetallic, copper over mild steel, and seems to be just over 0.01" thick. From pictures, the steel core seems like it's most of the bullet, but it still weighs slightly less than half of the projectile weight. Somehow, the thin jacket and tiny lead filler weigh a combined 77 grains or so. So, it's roughly the same 35% to 60% guess, depending on how much steel there is in the jacket. Edit: Assuming a similar jacket thickness to US M80 rounds and about 50/50 copper and steel by volume in the jacket, I get around 55-60% iron.

Can anyone help me narrow down these percentages?
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Last edited by Icelander; 04-23-2019 at 07:19 PM.
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Old 04-23-2019, 11:07 AM   #46
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Default Re: Former Soviet-bloc Steel-core Ammo Iron Content

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Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
Can anyone help me narrow down these percentages?
I know you love to indulge in precision, but why not just call it "50% of bullet weight?" It's not wrong, based on your research, and then if you want more (or less, for some reason) iron, you're into specialty ammo so you just charge more.
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Old 04-23-2019, 11:38 AM   #47
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Default Re: Former Soviet-bloc Steel-core Ammo Iron Content

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Originally Posted by DouglasCole View Post
I know you love to indulge in precision, but why not just call it "50% of bullet weight?" It's not wrong, based on your research, and then if you want more (or less, for some reason) iron, you're into specialty ammo so you just charge more.
If it came up in a game right now (and I hadn't found more precise numbers), I would probably do just that, yes.

But it's a neat detail to be able to specify that a given private military contractor is using 20-30 year old Bulgarian M43 rounds and that Occultism and Intelligence Analysis tell the PCs that this is because the iron content is higher in those rounds than in most other available surplus ammo.

I could make up details like that, but it's both easier to keep straight and more fun for me if I am able to find out this sort of information for real. At the very least, I don't want any details I do make up to contradict reality.

For example, knowing the iron content of one or more real bullets to a reasonable degree of precision would be a great help in making up fictional custom round designs, specifically intended for monster hunting (whatever the official stated purpose).

At the moment, I'm mostly stuck on the fact that I have no idea how much of the total bullet weight in typical FMJ rounds represents the jacket and how much of bimetallic copper/steel jackets is composed of the outer copper coating and how much is the mild steel.

I know that there is US legislation where pistol AP ammunition is defined, in part, as bullets where more than 25% of the weight is the jacket. This suggests, but does not confirm, that 25% or less is a reasonable number for typical rounds. It also confirms that any ammo usable in a handgun sold commercially in the US that is available in US stores will have 25% or less of its weight as jacket.

Supporting this is the fact that if 7.62x51mm M80 ball bullets contain 114.5 grains of lead and weigh 147 grains, if the remaining weight is the copper jacket, that makes the jacket about 22% of the projectile weight.

I've found that 7.62x51mm AP steel cores weigh between 58.6-71 grains, which will allow me to know the iron content of P80 or M61 AP ammo pretty well if I can narrow down the relative values of copper and steel in bimetallic jackets.

That would be nice, as in real life, CBC Defense in Brazil makes a 7.62x51mm AP round which seems to have a fairly long 71 grain steel core and looks promising as the ammo that would have been most easily acquired for Brazilian military hunters. Depending on the weight and steel content of the bimetallic jacket, such a round could be as much as 55-60% iron, even without a custom monster-hunting version.*

I also have to determine how much total iron content is plausible for a round designed from the ground up as a monster hunting round. Granted, pure iron is soft enough to engage rifling, but in my campaign, I'll have the fancy cold-forged pure iron rifle ammo that johndallman and Rupert advised on designed by RUAG in Switzerland and sold only to Vatican-backed monster hunters or those with relationships based on mutual trust with them. Those making monster hunting rifle ammo with more traditional and less expensive methods will need a jacket similar to normal rifle ammo and probably less pure iron and more very mild steel.

So manufacturers like POF in Pakistan, Fiocchi in Italy, CBC Defense in Brazil and others in other places that have some supernaturally-aware contacts will make rounds that are essentially inspired by existing mild steel rounds, but simply use more iron in preference to other materials where possible without major cost or performance effects.

*Which I'll have introduced around 2012-2013, but not necessarily available to all the smaller Brazilian police teams that encounter supernatural threats without necessarily knowing about the larger context or having any contacts with the secret anti-supernatural faction within Brazilian intelligence, military and security establishment.
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Last edited by Icelander; 04-25-2019 at 09:55 AM.
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