The Evolution of Firearms

[Minuteman37]

Ok so let's say I have an inventor in an AtE game who goes to build the simplest, most basic firearm possible. After that he wants to start upgrading and improving that weapon till eventally it becomes a piece of cutting edge hardware.

Assuming the starting weapon would be something along the lines of a Gonna from low tech just what kind of roadmap are we looking at to slowly get that weapon from lowly stone thrower to state of the art liquid plasma injected death machine?

[Ulzgoroth]

Uh...that doesn't really make sense. You have to replace basically the entire weapon at many of the steps. The technologies evolve, the actual weapons get replaced and junked or sold off.

[Flyndaran]

I can't even imagine that concept would work that well in video games. Even there you "improve" a specific weapon with features that make sense for its type. You don't turn a bow into a gun into a laser.

I hope we're just not getting exactly what OP means to ask.

[mlangsdorf]

You start with an unrifled, matchlock muzzle loader. This is the most minimal gun I'd bother making: you have a stock, a trigger that applies a bit of burning cord to a touchhole that ignites gunpowder packed beneath a round bullet that you loaded from the front of the gun, and a barrel that is wider than the bullet. You can and should do better.

Your immediate two improvements are going to be to improve the action and the barrel. Flintlocks are complicated but more reliable than matchlocks. Rifling the barrel is difficult but very possible. The projectile changes from a round shot to a pointed cylinder with a hollow base (aka a minie ball): it's still narrower than the inner bore of the barrel but wide enough that the gasses will expand the base to grab the rifling and impart spin and stability. This is start of the art circa 1850 or so.

You have a couple of possible upgrade paths from here. One option is to improve your gunpowder from black powder to modern smokeless powder. You'll need to reinforce the gun if you do this but you get a more accurate and damaging weapon. Another option is to move to a metallic based cartridge with a primer in it - this lets you create a breechloading gun. After you do that, you'll also want to make the gun into a breachloader.

You have two options for breechloading - either a simple break-action (or trapdoor - there are variants) single shot gun, or a more complicated bolt action (or possibly pump or lever action) gun that loads from a magazine, preferably a detachable box magazine.

Either way, you're eventually going to have a multishot, manual action, repeater that loads at the breech from a detachable box magazine and fires metallic cased cartridges loaded with smokeless powder through a rifled barrel. This is start of the art in 1905 or so, and is the same as most military weapons in the first world war.

The next step is to rebuild the action to be auto-loading, so that some of the energy of shooting one bullet can be harnessed to loading the next one. There's a bunch of variations on how to do that but that's not really relevant. There's also the question if you want the autoloading to stop after you've pulled the trigger once or if you want it to continue firing as long as you keep the trigger pulled down. If it only fires once, it's semi-automatic like a 1940s military rifle; if it keeps firing, it's fully automatic like a modern military rifle.

The next steps are to replace wood stock and barrel support with plastic, add accessory rails, and possibly relocate the action to the back of the gun (which shortens the gun overall without shortening the barrel). That's pretty much state of the art for a modern gun. You could also improve the speed of the action, so you can fire multiple bullets before the recoil shifts your point of aim - that's high cyclic burst capacity.

In theory, the next step would be to make an electrothermal-chemical gun, which would involve changing your propellant, adding a battery, and having the trigger cause a power pulse that converts the propellant to plasma. We don't really know how to make ETC tank cannons right now, much less how to scale them down to rifles.

Also, there's really no reason to keep the same gun through all of this. At a lot of steps - moving from gunpowder to smokeless, or moving from single-shot to multiple shot - the gun has to be rebuilt so thoroughly that there's not going to much kept from the previous gun. And there's really no good reason not to start with a rifled gun firing a minie ball if you can manage the rifling in the first place: minie balls historically only existed for a few decades but they could have made by Revolutionary War armories if anyone had come up with the idea earlier.

[Minuteman37]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Uh...that doesn't really make sense. You have to replace basically the entire weapon at many of the steps. The technologies evolve, the actual weapons get replaced and junked or sold off.

I mean a single weapon more in terms of a single design that evolves into new physical weapons as the inventor gains more experience and better materials. Less I have a brown bess and I'm slowly taking parts off and on till it's a G11, and more I have the blueprints for a brown bess and I'm erasing parts and drawing new ones till eventally I have a G11.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I can't even imagine that concept would work that well in video games. Even there you "improve" a specific weapon with features that make sense for its type. You don't turn a bow into a gun into a laser.

I hope we're just not getting exactly what OP means to ask.

I have no idea where you got the bow or the laser from. I strictly talking about the evolution of a man portable chemical slugthrower.

[talonthehand]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

I mean a single weapon more in terms of a single design that evolves into new physical weapons as the inventor gains more experience and better materials. Less I have a brown bess and I'm slowly taking parts off and on till it's a G11, and more I have the blueprints for a brown bess and I'm erasing parts and drawing new ones till eventally I have a G11.


I have no idea where you got the bow or the laser from. I strictly talking about the evolution of a man portable chemical slugthrower.

The term "stone thrower" in your first post made me think of a sling, but it's possible I'm alone there.

[Purple Haze]

Functional "black powder" is actually very difficult. Modern people with scientific training and modern equipment can find it nearly impossible. If he has any chemistry knowledge at all, I would suggest working to produce nitric acid. Once you have that nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose are trivial, a few binders and stabilizers and you have pretty much all the propellants for WWII.

Unless you have a degree in metallurgy and a modern steel mill, bronze is in every way superior to steel at about a 15% weight penalty.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

...After that he wants to start upgrading and improving that weapon till eventally it becomes a piece of cutting edge hardware...

You wrote improving that weapon not moving on to more complex infrastructure required higher tech items.

Also how is a "liquid plasma injected death machine" a slug thrower in any way?

I'm not trying to be argumentative, just trying to reconcile what you wrote with what you want.
(Remember by sig if you're sure you're writing clearly.)

[Minuteman37]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

You wrote improving that weapon not moving on to more complex infrastructure required higher tech items.

Also how is a "liquid plasma injected death machine" a slug thrower in any way?

I'm not trying to be argumentative, just trying to reconcile what you wrote with what you want.
(Remember by sig if you're sure you're writing clearly.)

At some level you would just be improving the same weapon while at others you're obviously going to scrap it for a completely new, shiny and plastic one. I admit that wording doesn't hold true for the entire process I'm trying to communicate sorry.

as for the "liquid plasma injected death machine", that's just me being silly with the ultra-tech weapons options. You can take a caseless slugthrower from ultra-tech and make it Electrothermal-Chemical (ETC) and boost it's damage by having a controlled plasma burn inside the chamber instead of a traditional propellant based explosion.

You can also turn them into Liquid-Propellant Slugthrowers that forgo coupling propellants with projectiles inside cases. Instead these guns feed the slug through a magazine and squirt a liquid explosive into the firing chamber so you can fine tune the power behind a shot for a given situation.

[Varyon]

I'd see it like this, assuming ridiculous levels of cinematic.

The character starts with a basic, short-barreled, stockless hand-cannon type weapon, using serpentine powder and cut stone bullets, with a cannon lock (a touchhole that you stick a burning slowmatch or hot piece of metal into to set off the shot). Holding the weapon in one hand while using the other to light it is annoying, however, so he designs a lever he can move back and forth to lower and raise a piece of slowmatch, inventing a matchlock. Now that he's able to hold it in both hands, he finds it's a lot more predictable if he tucks it into his shoulder, but that's awkward to do during combat, so he designs a stock for it. Assuming he has multiple weapons, he happens to notice that one has become a bit more accurate than the others and investigates - turns out the way he's been cleaning the weapons has caused some primitive rifling in the barrel; he replicates and improves on this, inventing rifled barrels in the process. At some point during all this, he probably realized measuring out his powder beforehand makes reloading a lot faster, and thus has invented paper cartridges. Now that his weapons are rifled, however, he finds it's tough to load in a properly-fitting bullet. He first invents the breechloader, but while functional it's difficult to maintain the seal. Since the lead splats from the force of impact when he hits something hard, and it's getting hit hard to send it flying in the first place (the explosion), he comes up with a way to widen the bullet's base with the explosion so that he can use a sub-caliber bullet yet have it properly engage the rifling, inventing the Minie Ball.

*deep breath*

That burning slowmatch is causing all manner of problems now, however, so he needs to come up with a way to light without it. Since he's been using flint and steel to light fires, and knows a pinch of powder makes that a heck of a lot easier, he devises a way to use those same sparks to ignite the powder, inventing the flintlock. This works well for some time, but the delay between igniting the pan and the weapon firing is tiresome. Fortunately, our omnicompetent inventor* has recently found that fulminated mercury detonates on impact, and leverages that to create percussion caps, inventing the caplock. In his search to find more and better explosives, he also manages to produce nitrocellulose, which he then utilizes for the invention of smokeless powder, allowing him to avoid doing so much cleaning as well as improving the damage of his weapons. Around the same time, he comes up with the bright idea to combine paper cartridges with the percussion caps, loading the result into a breechloader. Early experiments don't go too well, but he eventually realizes that a more robust cartridge - say, one cast from brass - will work rather well, so he opts to go that route. The repeating rifle is, of course, the natural progression of this idea, so it isn't long before he makes one of those. He eventually figures out how to use the recoil of the shot to power a mechanism to reload it automatically; this eventually leads to fully automatic weapons. He's also figured out that jacketing the lead with copper will keep his weapons cleaner and help the bullets get through armor more readily, but reduces after-armor wounding - further research leads to the invention of AP, APHC, HP and eventually even various types of explosive rounds. His seals and mechanisms have improved markedly by now, so he'd like to get rid of the brass - he eventually switches to a plastic explosive for his propellant, allowing him to transition to caseless rounds.

*cough*

At this point, I can't really justify him going any further on his own - the next round of inventions just require too much infrastructure and background knowledge. Anyway, he'll be incorporating computer sights (probably started using sights and lenses on his weapons long ago, but I didn't include that), realize he can skip the hammer and detonate his rounds directly with electricity, have some serendipitous error that shows him he can control the burn of the plasma, allowing him to invent ETC, and eventually steal the designs for an LP weapon. He'll combine ETC with LP, and you'll have your state of the art liquid plasma injected death machine.

*relaxed sigh*


*Note that you could have him getting bits of technology from others, rather than making everything himself - historically the guy who invented percussion caps did it after reading about the work being done with fulminated mercury elsewhere.