Making more ammo stuck on a low tech world.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by lwcamp

Is there any reason you can't cast the brass?

Not that I can think of, aside from it being tricky for anything with a shoulder. However, casting and then forcing a shoulder onto the case should be possible, though it might require several passes to put the shoulder in, and you'd want to heat-treat afterwards (especially if you intended to reuse the case).

[Kfireblade]

Originally Posted by dcarson

I fit is a planned event, pick a weapon that it is easy to replace the ammo in terms of propellent quality, police your brass so you can reuse them several times, bring reloading equipment and lots of primers.

I might go with the AK-47 then.

[Rupert]

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.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by lwcamp

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.

Originally Posted by Rupert

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.

[mlangsdorf]

Instead of a lever action, I'd go with a bolt action, probably based on the Mauser design. People used to convert Gew98s to bolt actions before Mossberg began producing the Model G bolt action shotguns, and I expect there's not a huge deal of difference between a .410 shotgun and a .44-40 in terms of chamber and barrel design. So there's no reason why you couldn't have a .44-40 or similar with a bolt action, and bolt action has some advantages over lever action when firing prone.

I do agree that some kind of manual action, large bore, black powder, removable magazine rifle is the way to go for the majority of the troops. Specialist sharpshooters get something like a Springfield M1903, possibly in a larger caliber if you expect to have to deal with supernatural entities with lots of armor and toughness. There are a couple of big-bore, straight cased rifle rounds like the .375 H&H Magnun of .458 Winchester Magnum that look like they would minimize some of the difficulties in machining the cartridges, and the .375 H&H even has stats in GURPS (Pulp Guns 2 p 10, 14).