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Black Powder and Rate of Fire

This fascinating series is a combination of historical seafaring, swashbuckling adventure, and high technological science-fiction. Join us in a discussion!
Re: Black Powder and Rate of Fire
Post by SHV   » Sat Dec 06, 2014 7:41 pm

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"GAU-8 (although the last obviously fires a larger burst for the same trigger action simply by virtue of having a vastly greater rate of fire)."
****
The GAU-8 Avenger:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-8_Aven ... Type_1.jpg
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Re: Black Powder and Rate of Fire
Post by n7axw   » Sat Dec 06, 2014 7:51 pm

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Draken's comment provides food for thought. I find myself doubting that it would be true for fully modern steel alloys, although someone a bit more knowledgeable than I might contradict me here....

We know that Howsmyn's steel is pretty good, but do we have an idea about how close to modern it is?

Also I can imagine lots of situations in combat where you would have to be able to sustain your maximum rate of fire longer than 10 minutes...

Be a dickens of a note to have your barrel melt down on you in the niddle of the action.

Don
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Re: Black Powder and Rate of Fire
Post by Draken   » Sat Dec 06, 2014 9:06 pm

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Military more often use composites and plastics rather than steel. When they're using steel they're mixing it with tungsten so it would have higher melting point and barrel could sustain long period at maximum rate. Tungsten is easy to mine, but to get pure metal we need or strong acids or arc furnaces, both of them are currently unavailable. Low grade tungsten and aluminum are possible to get, but they would be risky to use. Aluminium is very useful metal, if I'm correct it has high melting point, similar to modern steel, but is much cheaper to get. Other solution would be copying M2 Browning design which was great in term of heat management. Composites should be much easier to get, there is no need for electricity in production of them, but it a lot of knowledge about particles, which could be solved by PhD Owl and hints from Merlin, they didn't know how to create polymers until 1950+,cus they didn't have enough understanding of how atom works.
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Re: Black Powder and Rate of Fire
Post by cralkhi   » Sat Dec 06, 2014 10:14 pm

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Draken wrote:Aluminium is very useful metal, if I'm correct it has high melting point, similar to modern steel, but is much cheaper to get.


The melting point of aluminum is quite low (660 C vs 1538 C for iron).

Also, aluminum is cheap now, but that's made using a process that uses huge amounts of electricity, unavailable to Charis. At one time it was more expensive than gold, and that would probably be true for Charis if they know it exists at all (or if Merlin pointed it out).
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Re: Black Powder and Rate of Fire
Post by n7axw   » Sat Dec 06, 2014 10:24 pm

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Hi Draken,

Given what we currently know abot the quality of steel Charis has managed, what would you believe the maximum sustainable rate of fire for the M96s to be?

Don
When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: Black Powder and Rate of Fire
Post by Draken   » Sun Dec 07, 2014 5:53 am

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15 is too much, maybe 12-10 per minute. I'm thinking about typical conditions when there no need to hurry.
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Re: Black Powder and Rate of Fire
Post by Henry Brown   » Sun Dec 07, 2014 8:01 am

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evilauthor wrote:
5-9 rounds per burst. Basically stroke the trigger and then immediately let up. Which AFAIK is true whether you're operating an M249 SAW, a Browning Machine Gun, or GAU-8 (although the last obviously fires a larger burst for the same trigger action simply by virtue of having a vastly greater rate of fire).

But 1 round every 3-4 seconds (10 rounds a minute or less) is hardly machine guns speeds for rate of fire and would be slow even for semi-automatic rifles. I seriously doubt you're going to melt the barrel of even a Safeholdian rifle at that rate of fire in 10 minutes... assuming the rifleman in question doesn't run out of ammo first.

What's the standard ammo loadout for a rifleman in Safehold again? A modern real life infantryman's standard loadout is 210 rounds in seven 30-round magazines. A Charisian Rifleman is going to be using a TEN round magazine which holds larger bullets, and I'm pretty sure I saw a figure somewhere that was substantially less than what a modern infantryman carries.


Your point about ammo loadouts is a good one. I was curious enough to do a bit of online research on cartridge weights. I used the historical 45/70 cartridge as a stand-in for the M-96 round because it seems to be very similar in terms of size.

Due to a fairly large variety of bullet weights, 100 rounds of 45/70 seems to weigh between 11.5 and 13.5 pounds. Call it an average of 12.5 pounds. By comparision, 100 rounds of modern 5.56 mm NATO weighs about 2.7 pounds. So, the ammunition of the M-96 is going to weigh about 4.5 times as much on a per round basis as modern NATO ammo. So yeah, based on these figures I'd say the standard loudout of the Charis infantryman is going to be quite a bit lower than 210 rounds.
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Re: Black Powder and Rate of Fire
Post by Zakharra   » Sun Dec 07, 2014 2:12 pm

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Another problem with high rates of fire is having a cook-off when loading. You might be able to keep the barrel cool enough to keep a high rate of fire, but the receiver isn't being cooled as much or as fast and it heats up -fast-. It's not worth it if you have a machinegun or gatling type that can fire more than 15-20-30-60 rounds or more a minute and has a barrel(s) that can sustain that rate if the receiver overheats and the bullets are set off by the heat of the receive when it's reloaded.
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Re: Black Powder and Rate of Fire
Post by hack12   » Sun Dec 07, 2014 2:21 pm

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The "normal" load of basic ammunition for a "rifleman" are approximately:
Napoleonic Era/American Civil War - 50 Rounds in Ready Pouch plus 60 additional rounds in their packs
World War One - 50-70 Rounds Basic Load (Approx) plus often a bandolier or other additional carrier with 100 Rounds
World War Two - Same as WWI (British WWII era manuals state 50 rounds for each rifleman)
Korea - Same as WW I & II
Modern - 210 Basic Combat Load (7 Magazines with 30 rounds - though most soldiers only load 28 rounds due to feed issues)

The increase in ammo was the reason for the switch to 5.56x45mm is about half the weight of 7.62x51mm during the Vietnam era.

One side note is that generally soldiers and even marines will take as much ammo as physically possible as the basic combat load will last for maybe one firefight. Never forgetting that they also have to carry squad/platoon ammo and combat gear. Most modern light infantry (see Rangers) carry 2 60mm Mortar rounds, 100 rounds 7.62 for M240, grenades, AT-4 (two in the squad), 2-4 grenades of all types, and other assorted goodies. This does not include Javelin systems or other specialized gear.
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Re: Black Powder and Rate of Fire
Post by pokermind   » Sun Dec 07, 2014 4:12 pm

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There were several types of hand cranked 'machine guns.' My favorite is the Gardner this video shows how it works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-x7B-pj3_o note the water jacket to cool the barrels. It was the direct ancestor of the Maxim Gun the first true machine gun.

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