Making more ammo stuck on a low tech world.

[Kfireblade]

How hard would it be, realistically, for a high TL character thrown into a low TL world with the proper engineering and chemistry skills to make additional ammo? As I understand it primers are the hardest part of manufacturing new ammo. Assuming the character had access to a large vehicle (SM+7) with the TL 8 Mining and Factory systems from spaceships what would they need to find, and how hard would it be?

[Ulzgoroth]

Primers might be easier than smokeless powder - you need more of it and making it takes lots of good-purity strong acid.

A TL8 factory system is a machine shop - it won't do the chemistry, though you could use it to make lab apparatus.

A mining system, regardless of TL, produces unrefined raw materials - a TL8 fabricator can't use raw minerals, it needs manufactured components. You'd need refinery systems - probably more than one to encompass metal-smelting, chemical preparation, and anything else. You could probably argue that the fabricator can convert refined materials into the components you need, in this context.

EDIT: If you can build out enough infrastructure, you don't need any especially exotic raw materials. You'll want glass and lead for working with the acid, sulfur to make sulfuric acid and nitrates to make nitric acid. Cotton might be the ideal cellulose base source. I think you might need acetone, not sure what you make that from. You may need mercury and/or some other components for the primers - I know three are a few candidates, but I don't know any of them particularly well.

[Celjabba]

It also depend on the weapon . shotgun/revolver ammo will be easier . And if you can afford to clean your weapon every few shots, you can use dirty propeller. But ammo for high rate of fire and automatic weapons will require more precise machining and smokeless powder.

[mlangsdorf]

What kind of weapon do they want to reload? A Spencer rifle firing black powder cartridges is a different problem than a G11 firing caseless than a UT ETK gun.

Assuming you want metallic cartridges, you're going to want:
* Lead or iron or copper, for the bullet
* Brass, iron, or bronze (copper and tin), for the cartridge itself
* Mercury, nitric acid, and ethanol, for the primer
** nitric acid can be made in various ways, but the modern industrial process uses ammonia as a feed stock and requires platinum for a catalyst; you can also use saltpeter, alum, and copper sulfate
** You can use potassium chlorate or potassium perchlorate instead, which require various potassium and sodium chemicals and are more difficult to make

Black powder is made from sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter. You extract it from bat guano, mine it from fairly rare natural deposits, or synthesize it from nitric acid.

Smokeless powder can be made lots of different ways, but guncotton can be made from fine fabric threads, nitric acid, and sulfuric acid.

Caseless and ETC rounds are a lot more complicated, but it's basically the same stuff with some more exotic variants.

None of the chemistry involved is crazy hard or exotic: all the components were made by the 1860s historically. A lot of them are fairly dangerous to handle (mercury, chlorine gas, mercury fulminates) but normal lab safety procedures should be enough to avoid serious mishap. You've got access to TL8 manufacturing, so you can recast bullets and cartridges to the necessary tolerances.

As for finding the components:
* lead, iron, and copper are fairly common on Earth and have been mined since antiquity.
* mercury, sulfur, alum, and tin are rarer but are not terribly hard to find
* ethanol can be distilled from just about any sugar source
* saltpeter can be extracted from animal waste, so as long as there are bat caves or domesticated animals, you should be okay. Alternately, you can synthesize it from nitrogen in the air IF you can find platinum for the catalysts.
* cotton or equivalent threads come from certain plants or animal hair

A lone man would be hard pressed to find, mine, refine, and combine all those components into a single bullet. A lone man with access to an early trading system, like the early Roman Republic or early Chinese empires, could get everything he needed and then would just need to refine and put the pieces together.

There's also a separate question of scale: hand crafting out 100 blackpowder shotgun shells for your personal use is a lot easier than manufacturing 1 milliion .30-06 rifle rounds to equip the Roman Praetorian guard.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

acetone, not sure what you make that from.

During WWI, it was produced via a fermentation process from starch or sugars (molasses). Apparently with the right bacteria, you get a lot of acetone and butanol with only around 10% ethanol, sort of exactly what you don't want from your usual moonshine still.

If your tech base is even lower, medieval alchemists used to make their "spirit of Saturn" from a metal acetate (say, heating lead + vinegar (acetic acid), or dissolving limestone (calcium) in vinegar).

Modern commercial processes usually start with propylene (C3H6), which is a product of oil refining.

The last time I remember the topic coming around, some posters mentioned that the metallurgy for the brass cartridges was particular, and you'd get a lot more jamming or misfires with different brass (never mind different metals entirely, or lower-precision manufacturing methods versus the tolerance expectations of a modern mechanism).

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Kfireblade

How hard would it be, realistically, for a high TL character thrown into a low TL world with the proper engineering and chemistry skills to make additional ammo? As I understand it primers are the hardest part of manufacturing new ammo. Assuming the character had access to a large vehicle (SM+7) with the TL 8 Mining and Factory systems from spaceships what would they need to find, and how hard would it be?

Depends a lot on what the low TL world can supply him with as starting material. And what kind and how much ammunition he wants.

By himself on a completely uninhabited world, it's probably doable if he can devote several years to it - none of the processes are particularly difficult, there are just a lot of steps, and some of the materials, while not exactly exotic, are not so common you can expect to trip over them. And of course prospecting for them will take something other than engineering or chemistry skills.

On a world where he can just go buy already refined classical metals and kind of pure inorganic salts, it becomes easier, though you are still probably looking at a couple weeks of set up time to build specialized equipment, and production rates in the few handfuls of rounds per day range.

If he's got year or two and a village full of people he can talk to who are willing to help out, they can probably build a small factory and easily start turning out enough ammunition to support an 18th or 19th century regiment, or even a small national army.

[fula farbrorn]

you need platinum or rhodium gauze catalysts to make commercial grade nitric acid, and you need a way to make aluminum vats/containers, you also need Mercury fulminate which is also hard to make with early technology ... in the end you need many iterative steps to make the things you need to make any ammo

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by fula farbrorn

you need platinum or rhodium gauze catalysts to make commercial grade nitric acid

No you don't - the classical preparation from saltpeter, sulfuric acid and distillation dates from at least the 16th century, and produces essentially the same product (the distillation azeotrope hasn't changed after all).

This is one of the issues with these sorts of discussions - they mostly hinge on *scale*. There is nothing magical about modern production processes - there is very little if anything made in modern factories that absolutely cannot be made by a craftsman with hand tools. What the factory provides is "fast" and "lots".

They grad student who first made any particular wonder chemical probably did it with equipment at least marginally within the reach of a Renaissance alchemist. But it may have taken him a significant fraction of his 4 year PhD program to make a few grams of it.

Similarly the first copy or two of a modern gun was probably built in a machine shop with no better than modest power tools. Chances are the final version of it is as good (maybe better) than the factory model, but it probably took the inventor/machinist days (or months!) to finish it.

I went to college with a guy whose hobby was hand building an *airplane* - he would do stuff like build a boring machine to cut engine cylinders or try out various formulations of fiberglass goop to stiffen cloth for parts of the skin. It took him something over 20 years, but I hear he did finally get it to fly. What with his equipment already assembled I bet he could turn out another one in less than a decade if he wanted. But he must have put something over half a million dollars worth of tools and skilled labor into building something you could have for a tenth of that by buying a used Piper Cub.

A skilled guy with a TL8 machine shop and chemistry lab certainly *can* make ammunition if that's something he wants to do for fun. But given that he could afford to get here in the first place, it is certainly going to be cheaper to have it shipped in from the TL8 place he came from in the first place.

[AlexanderHowl]

Modern firearms do not use black powder and the rifling would probably erode quite quickly due to the acidic nature of the remnant propellant (shotguns are probably the only exception). Current propellants of nitrocellulose (single-base) or nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose (double base) and neither of them are going to be produced outside of a late-TL5 industrial base. Nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin are also quite dangerous to make, which is why you need trained chemists supervising the process.

A random adventurer is not going to be able to create TL8 ammunition under most circumstances, even with a spaceship. The components required as materials are just too sophisticated to be made by hand. I might allow it if there was a Mining component, a Refinery component, and four Factory components in series making the components for the next Factory in series, but that is a lot of work for ammo.

The materials required are nitrous acid (easily created in the Refinery), cellulose (any woody plant will do), antimony, copper, and tin for the brass for the casing, and lead or steel for the bullet, and mercury for the primer. If you lack detailed knowledge, start with small amounts of propellant to avoid bursting the firearm.

[Fred Brackin]

[QUOTE=Anaraxes;2133999The last time I remember the topic coming around, some posters mentioned that the metallurgy for the brass cartridges was particular, and you'd get a lot more jamming or misfires with different brass (never mind different metals entirely, or lower-precision manufacturing methods versus the tolerance expectations of a modern mechanism).[/QUOTE]

Making brass from scratch would indeed be difficult. One page I googled a few years ago had it be a 17 step process with multiple forming dies and 3 trips through an "annealing oven" which I'm not quite sure what is. Some sort of heat treatment.

If you've saved all your empty cartridges the next hard part is indeed the primers. The unmentioned/non-chemical issue is precision handling of very small quantities of the fulminate compound. I'd say that the only practical way to handle it is to build a primer-making machine. Good thing there's a deluxe machine shop in the plans.

It's going to be an enormous amount of work for just one man's ammo and if he's on an _alien_ world he might be needing to spend his chem lab time on finding/synthesizing vitamins and trace minerals.