| From: | shadowrn@*********.com (Strago) |
|---|---|
| Subject: | gun questions |
| Date: | Thu Jun 21 15:55:01 2001 |
of a fictional gun that's used by the US military. There's two entire
paragraphs describing it and I have a few questions which the list
might be able to answer, but first I'll type in the paragraphs.
"The M-29 ATAR, or advanced-technology assault rifle, was a
direct-line descendent of the German-made G-11s of the 20th century,
firing a 4.5mm ablative sabot caseless round with a muzzle velocity of
over a kilometer and a half per second. With each bullet embedded in a
solid, rectangular block of propellant, there was no spent brass with
each shot, and no open ejection port to foul with dirt, sand, or mud.
The weapon was loaded by snapping a plastic box containing one hundred
rounds into the loading port in the butt, a "bullpup" design that
resulted in a rifle only seventy centimeters long and weighing just
four kilos. The '29 looked like a blocky, squared-off plastic toy with
a cheap telescope affixed to the top and a pistol grip on the bottom .
. . which was why the men and women who carried them referred to the
weapons as their toys.
The caseless ammo was both the M-29's greatest strength and its
biggest weakness. The lack of shell casings to feed through an
ejection port gave the rifle an incredibly high cyclic rate of
twenty-five hundred rounds per minute, so fast that a three- or
five-round burst could have the bullets on their way and dead
on-target before the recoil had affected the shooter's aim. On the
downside, though, the firing chamber was easily fouled by chemical
residues from the propellant blocks. The weapon used a clean-burning
propellant, but there was always some gunk left over when it burned,
and without an jection port or shell casings, that gunk built up fast
. . . fast enough to degrade the rifle's performance after only a
couple of mags."
So, the questions:
1) What is an ablative sabot, and how is it different from your
generic round?
2) Are caseless rounds normally rectangular, or are they shaped like
cased bullets?
3) I'm assuming there's a coating over the caseless round so the
propellant doesn't get on your hands. Is this correct?
4) About the cyclic rate: is this possible? And if so, do the
super-machine guns in SR fire this fast?
5) What do you think about recoil not affecting the first three- or
five-round burst? Is this feasible or dramatic license? And would
something like this work in SR?
6) Finally, the "gunk" build-up from caseless rounds. Is this true? If
you fire four or five magazines of caseless rounds, will there be
chemical residue? And what would the effect be upon the weapon?
Thanks.
--
--Strago
All Hail Apathy! Or don't. Whatever. -abortion_engine
Down with the Moral Majority
-Green Day
