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Old 02-02-2013, 08:04 AM   #191
Icelander
 
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Default Monter hunting big guns

One of the best reasons to dress up as a Victorian colonial officer is that you can pretend that you are cosplaying a safari hunt and carry guns that have enough firepower to bring down even the fiercest monster. There's a reason they call them elephant guns.

While it would be important for such weapons to look antique, I don't see any reason to confining the effectiveness to the black powder era. Chambering them for high-pressure brass loads with modern propellant seems like an excellent idea for everyone involved except the monsters.

First of all, gun experts, I wonder about 10G shotshells. Are there any particular reasons to avoid making brass shells that look superficially like Great White Hunter era shotshells, but are loaded to modern 12G Magnum 3.5" pressures, i.e. PSI 14,000?

Could you design guns that look mostly the same as black powder doubles, but could handle those pressures?

Regardless of the answer on the pressure front, would there be any pitfalls involved in designing a reproduction of an old-school exposed hammer English double shotgun in 10G for 3.5" shells? Would it be obvious to any observer that this was not a normal replica?

Are there any brand names that would be better for such a project than others? Worse?

I was thinking London Sporting Park, Greener, W. Richards, F. Williams or Williams and Powell. With these guns, I want to convey the period between 1856-1880 or so, but these guns are supposed to be backup ones for soldier servants or less shooty friends, not the finest double rifles carried by the primary shooter. What would be the best brand to choose to imitate?

What about a hammerless double 10G? Anything change there? Any pitfalls involved in chambering it for a 3.5" shell, high-pressure or not?

The workhorse of the 19th century big game hunter, the 8-bore rifle, is next on my list. These usually had a case length of 3.25", but could range up to 4", apparently. Would these mean different rifles, or could you chamber cartridges of both lengths in the same gun?

And could you design one for higher pressures than black powder allows without changing the external look of the gun? I'm not talking about insane pressures like those of a modern small-caliber centerfire rifle, just something over 15,000 psi, maybe.

What about black-powder Express bullets? Did you need a special gun to chamber such loads or could you use the same 8-bore for spherical ball, light conical Express loads and even the occasional multiple-ball load, provided that you had either shallow or no rifling?*

Moving on to more 'modern' aesthetic, the 1880s onward, the Nitro Express weapons took over. The .450 Nitro Express was the first one invented, but it isn't statted in High-Tech. Obviously, I can use Douglas Cole's spreadsheet, but given that GURPS Range statistics are not based on physics as much as legacy, I'll have to assign an appropriate range that is consistent with previously statted rounds. It looks like it was similar, if slightly weaker, to the .470 NE and .500/450 NE in ballistics, so does Dmg 8d pi+ and Range 600/3,600 sound about right as the official GURPS stats of an unmodified Rigby's Best Double in .450 NE?

How much could one improve on that load in a gun that looked superficially the same? There's plenty of space in the cartridge for modern powder, to say the least, but how much could the gun tolerate?

Finally, as a backup gun for late Victorian era hunting parties, the H&H Paradox Gun existed down to the 10-gauge. Would it be possible to design a reproduction for a 3.5" shell, preferably slightly higher power, as above? Without changing the gun so that it looked wrong to external scrutiny? Granted, you'd always be able to measure the chamber, but a normal glance wouldn't necessarily give a person that much information.

Were there any other backup guns in use between 1880-1900 that would be particularly effective as monster hunting guns in the modern era?

*Not as useless as it sounds, because shots were often at very short ranges. A lot of elephant 'rifles' were smoothbores.
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Last edited by Icelander; 02-02-2013 at 08:08 AM.
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Old 02-03-2013, 08:03 AM   #192
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Default Incendiary rounds, for Killing It With Fire!

Ordinarily, WP or other incendiary merely adds the Inc damage modifier. That's because smallarms can hardly fit all that much incendiary material.

What if one were prepared to put an ounce of white/red phosporous or some other incendiary, such as TPA, inside a specially designed large-bore slug? What kind of damage would that do on contact with someone? For how long would it burn?

What about an ounce of thermate, assuming one could arrange for a decent fuze?

A 40mm grenade would support four to five ounces of either, easily. What could one expect to see with WP (or similar) on one hand and thermate on the other? In both cases, no bursting charge, just a contact burn, designed to damage a target of a direct hit.
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