Gear Rifles - design assistance requested

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Anthony

What TL are you thinking about? I was assuming this was for a clockpunk TL 5-6. The essence of 'clockwork' is that you have a primary energy source (for something portable, probably a mainspring, though non-portable clocks often used a suspended weight) that gets converted to something else through a set of gears, and if you can build a mainspring you've got pretty good elastic materials. Still, your basic problem is that most methods of converting rotary motion to linear motion involve long arms (the prototypical simple example is a torsion catapult).

For Oubliette, the world at large is mostly TL 3-ish, with some TL 4 technology - that is, your stereotypical DF setting. The dungeons are otherworldly in origin (and are their own pocket dimensions, after a fashion), and contain some technology from other worlds. Some of this technology, such as the gear rifles, is technically TL 3^ and TL 4^ clockwork, which performs roughly comparably to TL 5 and TL 6 clockwork. The inhabitants of Oubliette can duplicate this technology (in large part because one flavor of magic in the setting allows one to unmake an item, and in the process gain the knowledge to make it again, given appropriate time and materials... and skills), but as it is TL 3-4^, it is unreliant on the sorts of materials and technology available at TL 5-6, being able to use what they already have access to (iron, steel, etc).

What sort of material/technology did you have in mind? It may be something they could get access to via the dungeons, and potentially have other uses (for example, I'm considering the advanced knowledge of clockwork and gears allowing for decently-accurate timepieces and low-tech velocipedes, despite such not showing up as loot in the dungeon). I'll note I'm not aiming for scientific rigor, rather more "that makes sense, and would be pretty neat."