| From: | Marc Renouf renouf@********.com |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Flechette and Silencers |
| Date: | Sat, 13 Mar 1999 16:07:15 -0500 (EST) |
> I concede this may have been a HR that made SO much common sense, I have
> fudged it in mymemory into the realm of the official. <g>
I think you're quoting a house rule, because so far I've been
unable to find any mention that flechette ammunition and
silncers/suppressors are incompatible in the SR2 or SR3 rulebook.
> Still, think for a moment. Those silencers use a tubular brush
> arrangement to contain the gasses and flash of a gunshot, right?
Um, that's only one way to do it, and probably the least
efficient of them. Most silencers work by porting the barrel, which
allows the expanding gas to move into a chamber. Within that chamber is
usually some sort of batting material to "absorb" the shock of the
expanding gas. You can also do it with spring-and-washer arrangements.
This allows the expanding gas somewhere to go while the bullet is still
travelling down the barrel. By the time the bullet leaves the muzzle of
the gun (thus breaking the barrel seal), the pressure behind the bullet
has dropped drastically, meaning that there's less of a "bang." If the
gas expansion rate is slowed below super-sonic speeds, all you hear is a
pop, and the slower the gas becomes, the less sound the weapon makes when
fired. Note also that by bleeding off some of the expansion energy, the
bullet is not being accelerated as quickly as it otherwise would. This is
the cause for the decreased muzzle velocities of rounds fired from weapons
fitted with silencers versus those fired from weapons without.
The reason that silencers have associated lifetimes is because the
batting material tends to become charred, compressed, and generally
destroyed to the point where it no longer absorbs the gas expansion
energy. For instance, those green scrubby pads (which work pretty well as
silencer innards) tend to burn up pretty quickly. Even metal meshes like
steel wool or screen material are flammable. Even if the extreme heat
doesn't destroy the batting material, it can still get "squished" over
time and not absorb as much energy.
Suppressors work differently, usually by allowing the gas to
expand into specially formed chambers that do not have any kind of
compressive material in them, but are designed to use their shape to
induce extreme turbulence within them. This turbulence wastes scads of
expansion energy, and achieves the same general overall effect.
However, any ammunition which does not "seal" in the barrel as it
is fired gains no benefit from a silencer. This is why shotguns firing
shot ammunition cannot be silenced, but shotguns firing slugs can. The
shot ammunition begins dispersing even as it travels down the barrel,
allowing the gas to escape past it and around it.
If flechette ammunition truly is a cluster of sharp needles, then
perhaps it cannot be silenced. If it's a single dart, or a cluster of
darts uncased in a shoe that *does* seal the barrel, then there's no
reason why a silencer wouldn't work with it. You can run it either way,
but the standard SR2/SR3 rules assume that it's compatible.
Marc
