Tell me about firearm functions

Full automatic pistols:

Beretta 93R

Glock 18

Oh, and on the topic of getting a list of firearms for dual pistol I'd pick up a copy of Jane's Guide. It will have everything and pictures of all of it.

I've actually heard of double shaped charges, myself. There was a programme on Discovery about the history of tanks which mentioned this, but it didn't leave me with the impression that those were practical or accepted. Then again, it was rather very old (maybe 10 years old now) and it didn't leave me with the impression that reactive armour itself was a feasible concept.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The thing about these sorts of rounds is that they need to be a certain size before it is plausible to carry a payload. .50 is the smallest round you can get where adding a payload will not be strictly worse, and even then the round not particularly more effective. The largest round of any practical use to a human firer isn't capable of proper payloads.

The solutions are simple. Either mount it on a platform, or deal with the recoil.

Grenade launchers follow the latter path in part. They greatly increase the size of the round to 40mm, big enough for a really nice payload, and then reduce the proportion of propellant to mass. They don't follow the same ballistic flightpath as bullets, which in this case is advantageous because you can arc the rounds to shoot over cover. They're still size-restricted because past 40mm the absolute minimum force to project the round needs more propellant than the recoil can take.

Also, interesting note; grenade launcher are actually really quiet. The Thumper, the one used in Vietnam, is so quiet the only noise you hear is the mechanisms operating. Why? I have no idea.

Recoilless rifles are where the big fun stuff happens. With no recoil you can have rounds as big as you like. The problem is recoil is what pushes the round forward. If instead of a rifle it pushes back against air it has to push back a whole lot harder and a whole lot longer. This is why these weapons have to be self-propelled instead of cartridge-propelled. The Karl Gustav, my arch-nemesis, fires an 86mm projectile. Shooting a wad of boom that big require a whole hell of a lot of boom at the other end. So much boom, in fact, that the backblast is a thing of terrifying power. Forget the pretty lines of movies. If you fire this in a room you will kill everyone in the room. If you fire this with your back to a wall you will splatter yourself and anybody immediately nearby. The firing range for these is a one hundred metre cleared zone behind the shooter's mound, and that's just the will-probably-die zone. It's not a nice neat line either, or a tight cone. The backblast from these bastards is one hundred and eighty degrees of pain. The firer feels nothing, no recoil, and they're in the calm zone of the backblast. The loader, though, might not be. If you don't get as much of your body into the firer's dead zone as you can, you will hurt. I've seen guys fall over screaming because they were a step away from the firer sideways. Like my instructor said, firing a Karl Gustav is the only time it's okay to hug another man.

I don't think there is a pistol that does what you asked about, that being, can spit out massive amounts of rounds rapidly. But there is an awesome looking pistol that actually CARRIES a massive amount of rounds in a unique way. It has a 50 or a 100 round helical magazine. If you could make sure this pistol is one of the various pistol skins we can select for the new Pistol set, that would be awesome.

http://www.kitsune.addr.com/Firearms...lico_M-950.htm

and

http://207.234.249.73/gunfax/calico/m-950.htm

Quick aside about the sound of grenade launchers. They don't use a conventional type of propellant arrangement. Rather than use a single powder charge in a single case, they use a low-high pressure system where the initial charge is a low pressure charge of propellant to get it moving, then a second stage of higher pressure propellant takes over and finished the job. This makes for more of a push than a kick.

Glad that diagram helped. It was actually in GIMP (open source photoshop).

On the subject of recoil, take a look at some of the late 19th century rifles being sent to Africa. This is long.

Firearms come in either caliber (.45, 9mm, .22, etc) or gauge (12 ga., 20 ga., and so on.)
Caliber is the diameter of the hole, so a bigger value means a bigger hole.
Guage is the opposite. Gauge is the number of lead balls that diameter that make a pound. A 20 gauge means that each ball that just fits the hole is equal to 1/20th of a pound. A 16 gauge will fire a 1/16 pound ball. A 10 Gauge is considered very large and unpleasant to shoot.
Some of the early elephant guns were 4 gauge and still shoulder fired. These could actually be lethal on the firing end. For that matter, so can many modern guns. Of course, the velocity was very low compared to modern guns. It's just that once that mass gets moving, it likes it.

Here are a couple of frame by frame descriptions of recoil; one from a hand gun and one from a very large rifle. But first a bit of background.

I'm about 6 feet tall, and around (at the time) 200 pounds. I've been shooting since I was five, and had fired several SMG's (a MAC-11 in a competition once) by age 13. My father saw to it that I was no stranger to recoil management and muzzle control.

At the range he used to run, we had a guy that was a load developer. He would come in and use the chronograph to see what his current load was actually doing, and to show it off a little. He had somehow managed to make a significant increase in velocity without a significant increase in pressure in handgun rounds. The one we fired this night was a 454 Casull firing a 270 grain bullet. Most people only fired it once. When it was my turn, I stepped up with my feet outside shoulder width apart, a line from my heel of the rear foot passing through the ball of my lead foot and on to the target. This is a basic Neutral Bow stance from Kenpo karate and not much different than other martial arts forms. I leaned forward slightly and relaxed my waist and hips as much as possible. I held the gun in my right hand (rear) and kept my elbow bent slightly (NEVER LOCK YOUR ELBOW). The left hand held the right, with the left elbow bent at a 90 and pointing down to the left at about a 45 degree angle.

When I fired, the gun rotated in my hands, tipping the sights towards me. it rotated over at about a 60 degree angle and pushed straight back. My wrists stayed fixed, more or less, but my torso rotated to my right until I was almost facing the other direction. The top of the gun ended up resting on my chest, tipped over on one side and still pointed downrange. My left arm had folded up tightly against my left side, and my right arm was now bent at a 90 and more or less horizontal, and both hands resting in front of my sternum.

My right wrist hurt just a bit, but not enough to make me not shoot it again. The next guy in line was much bigger (the motorcycle trailer guy from before) than me, and he left.

That was the first time I ever felt the rotational component, and that is another reason that .90 caliber would suck to shoot.

Rifling is the name for the grooves and lands that line the barrels and give the bullets the spin they need to be stable in flight. When a large bullet hits the rifling, the gun will try to spin in the opposite direction in an attempt to conserve momentum. Normally, the energy involved goes unnoticed due to the leverage of the handle and the weight of the gun being more than enough to offset what the bullet is trying to do. That .90 cal would have a nasty spin to it, and you would need a right one and a left. If the rotation forces the top of the gun to the outside of the body, the wrists probably won't have the travel to deal with it.

I should also note that I have fired two handguns guns that were both far worse than that 454, and the 500 S&W wasn't even close. Beware of the .357 Airweight Smiths. Five rounds will double the weight of the empty gun and the trigger guard will rotate over and slice your trigger finger with every shot. Also, the .357 derringer was jsut a bad idea. I lost the use of my right thumb for three days.

Now, for the rifle. My dad went through a phase about a decade ago where he started collecting English Double Rifles. These look like a side by side shotgun, but fire rifle ammunition. The "small" ones were .450 cal.

The rifle that blew Val Kilmer out of the tree stand when he fired it in The Ghost and the Darkness was one of these, possibly a 500.

The biggest one my dad ended up with was a 577 Nitro Express made by Hollis and Hollis. These were developed in the late 1800's and were intended to make a charging elephant just plain stop. My dad had the "light" version, which fired a 650 grain bullet at 1850 feet per second. It weighed 11.5 pounds. The "heavy" used a 750 grain bullet at 2100 and weighed 14 ponds. There are 7000 grains to a pound, so these bullets are about 1/10 pound.

Another fun feature of these rifles is that you can't wrap your thumb over the top of the stock with the firing hand. Well, you can, but your thumb will stop just under your right cheek, having collected your nose along the way. This basically means you can't hold onto them as you fire. Fun stuff.

The first day up, we had a box of 10 rounds to fire form. This is basically just making them go off to force them to the shape of the chamber they will be using later in life. My first shot I had close to 70% of my weight on my lead foot. Maybe 80. It stood me up completely vertical, then pushed me back two full steps. Five shots each was plenty. I was wearing a t-shirt and I could see the pattern of the cloth and stitching in the bruise after the first one.

The big game hunter in Jurassic Park 2 had a 600 Nitro. They make a 700.

The record for hardest kicking rifle (meant for hunting or similar) is probably the .585 Nyati. Felt recoil is around 195 foot pounds. Getting hit with a 105 mph hour fastball is around 100.