Nikov Posted August 15, 2016 Posted August 15, 2016 The new improvised firearms use ammunition clearly too powerful for the pipes, as evidenced by their failure rate. I think this is fine given the lack of heat treating, questionable material quality and human error when cobbling together a boomstick with sweaty hands and blaring alarms. It balances the high damage output of shotgun shells and slugs from the improvised shotgun and keeps it from being a go-to weapon when shit goes down. However, a full powered shotgun shell isn't strictly needed, nor are full powered shells attainable without a hacked autolathe. Some alternative should exist that requires more effort to produce, yields less damage, but offsets this with more reliability. Improvised shells should stem from existing elements, expanding logically from them. Looking at the improvised shotgun we see two elements. First, the barrel is atmospheric pipe, which is enough to contain very hot high-pressure gas or a deflagration but not necessarily a detonation ( http://www.interfire.org/res_file/def_det.asp ). Second, there is no clearly defined firing mechanism beyond a somewhat generic "receiver". So lets start with that firing mechanism. May I suggest attaching a welder to the receiver? Heating a shotgun shell with a 2000 Celsius torch will almost certainly ignite the primer, which otherwise is being fired by a complicated pin/sear/bolt/spring assembly that is a bit beyond hand tools. It also provides us with an existing element that we can expand upon, namely, what deflagrates in-game when you put a welder to it. Why, welding fuel in a closed container. What's a good shotgun-shell-sized container for welding fuel, preferably open on one end for loading the projectile? Why, a pipe cap. Which exists in a few places around the station, but largely comes from the two pipe dispensers in Engineering, which engineers drag around sometimes, and one of which is out-of-sight on the mining outpost. Easier to steal than an autolathe. A good solid metal-to-metal contact with the pipe cap should hold a lower chamber pressure in place, much as the early breechloading smoothbores or revolvers did. Remember, a revolver cylinder just slides into alignment behind the barrel. There's no gas seal to speak of beyond a good metal contact, and the Take a pipe cap and use it on a welding fuel tank or welding backpack, and you fill the cap with fuel. Now what to load into it? Small, easily acquired bits of sharp stuff, say from smashing windows. Like glass shards or metal rods. Or uranium, silver, gold or solid phoron bits. Or fun stuff, like chili peppers full of capsaicin as a stun round, or a syringe or pill full of God-knows what chemical, but those are just spitballing. So now we have an improvised shotgun shell with the ammo of your choosing; a bit of glass, a bit of steel, a bit of phoron glass, or maybe some specialized and creative ammunition. The materials glass, steel, and phoron (and other exotic materials) should go flying as shrapnel of whatever material was loaded. That shrapnel is your projectile, embedding into your target . Uranium shrapnel? Glass shrapnel? Probably some interesting after effects. An embedded chloral hydrate pill? Poly acid? Sounds nasty. Wooden bullets as a blunt-force less-than-completely-letha round? Maybe so. Possibilities expand to the horizon, but for starters, we can stick with glass shards and steel rods creating glass and steel shrapnel. Branch out from there. Certain examples of rare or hard-to-acquire ammunition might prove more robust than regular autolathe shotgun ammunition, although with the penalty of being harder to get than autolathe shotgun ammo. Returning to the improv shotgun itself, adding a welder as the firing mechanism makes it even cruder and more amusing. As would a wire stock made by adding metal rods rather than a wooden stock. Furthermore the two-round capacity would be an actual nightmare since it has an automatic rather than manual feed mechanism. Reduce it to one round capacity to greatly simplify how the weapon could be made; a metal box that holds the cap in place against the end of the pipe, perhaps a simple cam and lever to lock it in place, a little hole drilled in the pipe cap to permit the welding flame to contact the fuel. And, firing this lower-powered ammunition, the improv shotgun won't fail (as much). What a thought.
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