[AtE] Black Powder vs Smokeless

[copeab]

Originally Posted by Luke Bunyip

Praise be unto Gun Jesus. I've been checking out his channel as I've been reading what everyone has posted upthread, as well as regularly seeing what Beardy and Dino Girl have to say on the topic. They do like themselves a bit of black powder...

Oh yeah, Beardy and Dino Girl have covered a lot of black powder weapons in their series on WWI firearms (most were not actually used in the Great War, but Beardy likes to give a full historical development of what was used, many of which Dino Girl gets to shoot).

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Good barrels will be a problem, though. A lot of those hand-made AK copies (and the Lee-Enfield copies before them) have awful barrels, with poor or absent rifling. Quite a few don't split on first use solely because they have enough windage that the pressure stays low - and accuracy is thus effectively non-existent, and bullet energy well below what you get from a properly made weapon. Some are well-made, most are not.

I'd expect a lot of post-ruin guns would be like this - a smoothbore tight enough to have a decent but not perfect seal, polished enough that the bullets don't stick and make the gun blow up. Accuracy would be low, especially for long arms, but acceptable in pistols and submachine guns (but see my previous post on the cost of making even simple SMGs by hand). Good rifles, either pre-ruin or from reputable post-ruin manufacturers would command serious premiums.

I've said this before and others upthread have touched upon it- it is not very difficult to rifle a barrel to a certain minimum standard, either cut or buttoned. As the first video shows, a dowel and an old hacksaw blade are all you need. Or as the second shows, a home-made button reamer, a hammer, and a good strong arm. Certainly to rifle to TL5 breechloader standards.

Finding good steel would also not be a problem. There will megatons of the stuff laying around AtE. Heck, every truck axle could be cut and lathed into several barrels. Certainly good enough for black powder, and almost so for smokeless too.

For a rifle-musket you don't even need anything approaching good steel. Or, actually, with black powder it needn't be steel at all- iron will do, and worked just fine for centuries. So the heaps of scrap mild steel laying around would work just fine, too. Back before boring holes to make barrels was really practical they were made by wrapping an iron plate around a mandrel and hammer-welding it into a tube. This was then reamed and rifled. Most of the early American long rifle barrels (aka Kentucky or Pennsylvania rifles) were made this way. If you have ever been to the gunsmith's shop at Colonial Williamsburg you have seen the dowel-with-a-few-flakes-of-steel-set-in-one-end rifling device in action.

For a nascent state as it being discussed here (rather than a desperate individual survivor) I think that one can assume that a few competent machinists could be rustled up by the resident warlord. If you want a fascinating read, the Gingery Books are an instruction manual on how to bootstrap a full machine shop starting with scrap aluminum and using clay ti make a crucible.

For most desperate wastelanders though, as I have said before, I agree- shotguns are the way to go. They are very tolerant of all of black powder, poor metallurgy, and sloppy tolerances. And casting a rifled slug isn't exactly rocket surgery. Not the greatest, but it'll beat the pants off a musket. And making shot is even easier- just drip molten lead into water from a height. That's what a shot tower is. As mentioned before, it's the primers that are tricky, at least for a layman. Making good corned black powder (and the brown or cocoa powders) is somewhat technical, too, but word would get around pretty quick on how to make at least functional stuff.

[Luke Bunyip]

Originally Posted by acrosome

For a nascent state as it being discussed here (rather than a desperate individual survivor) I think that one can assume that a few competent machinists could be rustled up by the resident warlord. If you want a fascinating read, the Gingery Books are an instruction manual on how to bootstrap a full machine shop starting with scrap aluminum and using clay ti make a crucible.

Interesting. Ta, I'll check it out.

Originally Posted by acrosome

.. And making shot is even easier- just drip molten lead into water from a height. That's what a shot tower is...

Curiously, during the pregame PC generation session, one of my players mentioned shotties and shot towers...

I'm thinking that abandoned office towers lift wells could work. How cluttered is the internal volume in a wind turbine tower?

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Luke Bunyip

I'm thinking that abandoned office towers lift wells could work. How cluttered is the internal volume in a wind turbine tower?

Lift shafts would be great. There's plenty of height in an office building, though I don't imagine a lot of enthusiasm in the ones selected to take the lead and fuel up the stairs.

And shotguns are indeed a great choice. Note that a muzzle-loading shotgun and a musket are about the same thing. A breechloading shotgun is simply a musket that's breechloading - there's nothing to stop you using rifled slugs in a musket.

[Luke Bunyip]

<Goes off and google-fu's for office building floor plans>

EDIT: How many floors up would they need to go?

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Lift shafts would be great. There's plenty of height in an office building, though I don't imagine a lot of enthusiasm in the ones selected to take the lead and fuel up the stairs.

I'd imagine they'd just have workers at the top of the shaft use pulleys to lift up each load of lead, and workers at the bottom doing the loading and the fetching of shot from the cooling pool.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

I'd imagine they'd just have workers at the top of the shaft use pulleys to lift up each load of lead, and workers at the bottom doing the loading and the fetching of shot from the cooling pool.

The workers still have to get up to the top. The left shafts have been cleared for dropping things and there's probably no power anyway. So they walk up all those many steps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_tower

Note that #6 shot isn't terribly large, and a 40-metre building is roughly 13 floors. #2 shot is getting there for a combat load, and that's ~27 floors.

Making large shot without a tower is possible, but it's slower and more expensive. I like the idea of using old skyscrapers as shot towers.

[Anaraxes]

If you have pulleys to lift the lead, you could lift workers -- just not all the workers.

But more simply, most or all of the workers stay at the bottom. They haul up the lead with those pulleys, then pull the release that drops the lead back down.

This being the post-apoc wasteland and not a modern office building, I imagine you also could simply coerce the unlucky few to head up the tower once or twice each day if you had to have someone physically at the top (because building remote machinery is too much trouble). They don't have to walk down and up with each load, nor cart the lead up to the top on their back, but only themselves (and maybe their bag lunch) once each workday. "Will climb stairs for food."

[Celjabba]

Not to mention that if you have a 30+ floors tower and are planning to stay in the area for a while, keeping a couple of lookout on top at all time is a good idea. Preferably with some kind of scope, binoculars or refractor, and the most accurate guns you can spare.
With pulley and ropes, whenever someone goes down, they can haul a load of supply, mostly lead and fuel for melting it, up as counterweight while rappeling down.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Rupert

The workers still have to get up to the top. The left shafts have been cleared for dropping things and there's probably no power anyway. So they walk up all those many steps.

Well, sure, but that's probably one of the less onerous things that wastelanders have to worry about in their lives. But if it's a sizeable office block, they might have living quarters in the higher levels anyway.

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

But more simply, most or all of the workers stay at the bottom. They haul up the lead with those pulleys, then pull the release that drops the lead back down.

I think you do need workers at the top to boil up the molten lead. It would need to be a fairly complex operation to automate that.