Firearms advice thread

true, I guess it's a matter of perspective, artillery has typically been where battles are won or lost, even if not necessarily by way of wounds inflicted, I know artillery was absolutely king of the battlefield by the battle of Konnigratz in 1866, and in the US Civil War, Prussian guns made by Krupp mopped the floor with the Austrians, and Pickett's charge was basically blended by Union guns.

I say the late 1800s because of the American Civil War; though it isn't a European battlefield, casualty breakdowns give something like 94% by bullet, thanks to the Minie ball. Artillery didn't really become a huge killer until around WWI with the accelerating development of high explosives and explosive shells.

It's a bright idea as making miniatures using a 3D printer. No one mentions it but you easily shit out a bunch of lower receivers and what not with injection molds, assuming you can get your hands on them.

>Artillery didn't really become a huge killer until around WWI
pretty much this. Before then battles were won or lost with men - either with pikes, swords or guns. Artillery was simply support - albeit powerful support.

Once you get to WW1 with fast firing artillery extremely widespread, and accurate fire all sort of ruthless tactics like box barrages, creeping barrages and the like cause massive casualties.

Read "And now it can be told" by Philip Gibbs to get an idea of just how terrifying and powerful WW1 artillery was. They could literally put up a wall of exploding artillery, through which you couldn't move (and if you did you ran the very high risk of not making it to the other side).

By WW1 they could find your position, box you in with walls of exploding artillery on all sides, then do sweeping barrages on your position until everyone inside was dead. The only thing that helped was deep, concrete dug-outs and even then some of the heavier artillery like the 21cm Morser could still make for a very bad day.

Learning about the different types of artillery in WW1 became vital to survival - combatants talk about whiz-bangs, coal-boxes, among many others. They became acutely in tune with the sound artillery made when it came in. They knew when to dive for cover and when it didn't matter what they did and was down to luck...

>it's not necessarily silly to carry multiple guns, the issue is that wheellocks were EXTREMELY expensive, itd be like towing 6 hondas behind your truck in case you ran out of gas
This analogy has me laughing for a solid minute already

Were autorevolvers ever viable?

Auto revolvers saw more use than people think, but that use was pretty much strictly on a range. The closest the concept ever got to military use was the Webley-Fosberry, and I've actually handled one in my line of work, but a fighting gun it is not. They reportedly recoil very softly and are very accurate, but the system is just way too exposed to the elements for serious use.

As for the more modern Mateba/Unica. I have no experience with them, but from what I've gathered they're perfectly serviceable civilian target/defense revolvers. Big and expensive and complicated, but they work well and are very well made.

As far as their being "viable" in terms of offering anything over a conventional semi-auto, not really, they're just way too machining intensive and offer basically nothing over a regular auto-loader, even assuming reliability issues weren't present.

Would you consider damage drop off at range to be a good foundational mechanic to differentiate a matchlock from a crossbow and by extension bows?

Exactly how difficult is it to home make a gun from scratch, including powder, bullets and all? Any type of gun really, even just a musket. Asking for a junk heap setting - no working goods but tons and tons of scrap.

>Not OP
It really depends on your ingenuity and how much mechanical knowledge you have.
youtube.com/watch?v=sIhGCRIQnCA
youtube.com/watch?v=Ud5dh4pA-zA
youtube.com/watch?v=r7me_z0Qdcs
I'd say availability of materials and tools is what is going to limit you the most.

it's not a bad idea, and of course you can play with it to suit the balance of what youre building, but theres not a good mechanical way to differentiate the type of damage a gun, even an early one, does in comparison to any bow, at least without getting into sperg tier complexity of rules. I think the best way to differentiate the two is to make reloading a matchlock a very time consuming process, making it more like a power you get to use every so many rounds, rather than expecting it to be a weapon that gets used every round like gunslingers in pathfinder. A longbow is capable of firing many more times in a minute than a matchlock, but one hit from a matchlock (which were usually firing around .75 caliber lead balls) and anything under 400lbs is donion rings, so i'd say use it like a free "kill this motherfucker dead' chance at the start of combat (assuming youre dealing with a conventional party style encounter).

You can build a single shot 12ga shotgun using supplies you can buy right now at home depot, namely 3/4in pipe some fittings, a nail and a rubber band, is it safe? fuck no, will it still kill earth's mightiest warrior dead with a square hit to the chest? you bet your ass it will.

Swing by the /hwg/ thread once in a while, I think you like it. Right now it’s mostly some autist bitching but in general it’s pretty comfy historical discussions.

...

Do you know why Japan went to a 7.7mm cartridge from 6.5? Post WW2 people switched from 7.62 to 5.56/5.45mm since a single soldier could carry more ammo. Why did the Japanese go in the opposite direction during the later part of WW2, especially since most of them were small guys

If reload time is your only differentiation then guns are nothing more crossbows with smoke. At least when crossbows with complex reloading mechanisms are included.

Ian, is that you?

not so much just reload time, as a factor of damage vs reload time, for example, a musket should basically cold roll a human sized creature rolling say a d12 with a hefty modifier on top of that like +6, and should ignore armor thats not magical or very extreme, going off touch AC for example, but that's balanced by not being able to be used as much as a crossbow or bow

Combat data they were receiving from China afcter invading them in 1937 indicated the 6.5mm round wasn't as effective terminally as they would have liked, especially at distance the long, well stabilized heavy bullets would pretty much pass through without yawing or fragmentation. They developed the 7.7x58mm cartridge essentially to increase that lethality at range they observed in cartridges like 7.62x54r and .30-06. However they never really made enough of them and for the duration of ww2 the Japanese military was using a mix of guns in both cartridges

also, bear in mind the 5.56mm and similarly sized cartridges were based on mathematically analyzed combat data that was gleaned from thousands of after action reports in ww2, and even then it took some time to sell the upper echelon of officer's that they were the right choice, post ww2 NATO standardized on battle rifles in 7.62x51mm. Ballistic effectiveness is an easy sell to a military establishment, especially one as hidebound as Imperial Japan's

Your comment made me think that (It might be more /k/, honestly.) it might be a fun collective project to make a book that's whole purpose is that if you got thrown back in time to say, The Roman Republic, the book has the information to kick-start modern civilization. Stuff like Penicillin cultivation, black-powder firearms, and maybe the Bessemer Process.

Dude I fucking wish, that man is my inspiration

The main obstacle to making firearms assuming you have material and machine tools of at least 19th century levels of sophistication is going to be the quality of said materials, steel for smokeless powder is a tricky business, so much as screw up a heat treat and you have a grenade, a good example would be the early 1903 springfield rifles where that defect sometimes occured. Low pressure cartridges are much easier to make, in a junk heap setting it'd likely be tons of shotguns and tube receiver 9mm submachine guns. Assault rifles need good quality steel for their barrels and locking surfaces, but receivers and what not don't require much in the way of sophistication, so theyd be around but used by more organized or proficient groups.

So basically, they'd be making a bunch of black-powder Luty's?
Nice.

>d&d
Ah now I don't even have to feel bad about calling your advice shit.

AVE NEX ALEA

my bad for using the most well known TTRPG to explain my point brochacho

not blackpowder necessarily, anybody with a chemistry set can make basic smokeless powder theoretically, plus blackpowder is just too gross for any kind of autoloader to work for long, trust me I cleaned a customer's muzzleloader today lol

Greetings fellow /k/omrade
Truly the cube smiles upon us.

Do you know common types of jerry-rigged weapons? Stuff you could make in a prison? Stuff that could be sold for very cheap?

My players are in a crime/ mafia campaign and I want to give them access to firearms, but not good guns yet. I want there to be a progression between "you guys need to save every bullet and use all of your surroundings" to "so you need to go downtown to pick up a package, do you take your tank or that aircraft carrier you put wheels on?"

Also, are there any "names" for weapons that you know? The guns are sold out of a hardware store that's been wire tapped. Id like there to be key words that can be used to mean specific types of guns, without outright saying "please supply firearm"

U can make slam fire shotguns out of pipes and a nail

most of the time a criminal organization will just use cheap stolen guns, if you wanna stick to makeshift, google "zip guns" for some ideas of what makeshift pistols are like, or brazillian makeshift firearms. More likely theyd be using some cheapo hi-point or Jimenez 9mm's, that whoever they got them from calls "Glock 40 problem solvers"

Use trucks of peace instead

What kind of pistol did Arizona lawmen have around the 1870s?

Why not just damage itself? Matchlocks were generally very dangerous.

BIG IRON

Yes the character of I am asking this question for is inspired by both that song and One by Metallica because he's an immortal soldier who feels the effects of every time he's died as if he was alive.

That sounds pretty damn cool. I'd buy it. It would be more marketable as a post apocalypse jumpstart guide than a timetravelling alt his jumpstart guide I reckon. Either way it would be great for genuine survival nut /k/ommando or just some fa/tg/uy who wants to run a related game.

Do you have relative penetration data for various kinds of common handgun and rifle ammunition?

Also, what are some fun gun malfunctions that could happen on a Critical Failure?

Not OP, but a soldier.

Common gun malfunctions, loosely ordered from not so bad to very bad.

Failure to feed, solved by cycling the gun again, manually.
Failure to eject, a casing is stuck somewhere inside, usually solved by cycling the gun, perhaps many times or accompanied by shaking the gun upside down, or physically removing the casings by hand or tool.
Failure to extract, a casing is stuck in the chamber. Usually requires a tool to remove.
Weapon explosion, usually there's something in the barrel or the weapons integrity has failed. The gun explodes, sometimes injuring the user.

How often would you have time to do maintence between patrols or other sorts of missions? How long could you hold off on them before it became critical and possibly facilitated an "oh shit" in the field repair?

1) The most basic maintenance is field stripping your weapon, wiping off critical pieces and oiling it all up. This won't take many minutes even if you're very through and you can just about always spare this time. If you can't, you're not sleeping and you'll pass out before your weapon becomes a problem.

2) There are too many factors to say, generally. It depends on weapon model, terrain (mud, sand, etc), how much you shoot, what kind of lubricant you have, the quality of your ammo, temperature, etc.

In my experience, in "normal" temperate climate with daily usage of the weapon, if you can do a 5 minute clean every day and a 15 minute clean once every week, you're not going to have any problems with your weapon unless something unexpected happens. The five minute clean every day isn't vital, but it significantly cuts down on subsequent cleaning times.

I wanted fun ones though, like that SMG on ForgottenWeapons that could fail by having the front half of the gun detach.

What one was that?

What's the difference between a Musket and Fusil?

Yugoslav M56

Thanks /k/-bro this has been a cool thread

Do you have any idea why Revolving Rifles and Lever Actions are never really seen in fiction? They seem to get skipped over a heap.

Which is a pity, I do love the look of those weapons.

>How silly would it be for my character to carry an Arquebus and like, five or six pistols that he could fire and toss aside before resorting to his sabre?
Not silly at all but this style of combat was reserved for the cavalry. With arquebus and saber attached to the saddle, you can even fire two pistols at once.

I think Billy the Kid and Blackbeard carried like 5 or 6 pistols.

Is it possible in any way, shape, or form to develop something even resembling Gun Kata?
Something which turns the use of firearms into a (martial) art form?

I know that during the American civil war casualties by bullets were greater than casualties by cannon, but cannons at that time were still deadly enough to decide the field and outcome of a battle.

Compare the first day of the Battle of Shiloh, which was essentially a infantry slog in the middle of some of the roughest terrain encountered during the war (and relatively few artillery casualties were sustained by either side), to the Battle of Gaines Mill, where up to 70% of the confederate casualties were caused by attacking across open fields against the entrenched artillery of the entire Army of the Potomac.

The terrain and strategic deployment of the guns ultimately decide the deadliness of artillery (and we see this lesson played out throughout the 19th century, from the Crimean war to the Russo-Japanese war).

>Gaines Mill
Fuck, I meant the Battle of Malvern Hill

How much damage should a rifle do relative to a pistol? GURPS has it about double. I have seen a lot of systems do 2d6 (average 7) versus 2d8 (average 9) for a pistol. I'm a game where humans have 3 to 9 hit points how much damage do you think guns should do? And sinces it's meant to be a highly lethal zombie apocalypse system where firefights are rare anyway, should I just do a location- based injury system with % incapacitation?

Has anyone considered how various tactics in warfare could affect how guns are used. One of the things that bothers me is in fantasy settings the fighting is always between humans or humaniods so it's just bog standard combat.

I'm no soldier or tacticians but I imagine if there were things that could bum-rush an entrenched position and tear people to shreds with claws or whatever that would make you reconsider your tactics.

An idea of mine was something like a ranger type dude who uses up-armored war dogs (just enough armor to cover their chest area) and then sic them on people and come up behind them to shoot/stab anyone that was pinned or mauled enough to not be able to fight back.

Alternatively, something like pic-related or even just thralls who come running in packs of 5 or more to claw and bite at any opponets in their way and are smart enough to move on to a next target and flank as well.

Related; when did it switch to people dying from being shot as opposed to infected bullet wounds?

I think in the first example you gave, you would actually see an increase in fortifications. If they can bum rush and likely win against trenches with emplaced machine guns and artillery, they can without a doubt ambush and overwhelm patrols. My guess is that raised fortifications would be a major part of tactics, as well as armored vehicles built for area denial (think Malcador Defender as opposed to most other tanks) and an emphasis on SMGs and MMG/HMG emplacements.

Blind guess here, but probably when penicillin became cheap and available.

I would imagine if you could shell an area the melee wave isn't going to work. In my mind it's areas where you can't get weapons like that to bare either because you can't or you don't want to damage the area with overwhelming firepower so maybe you have a dense forest or city area where you unleashe dogs/whatever that attacks in a pack and forms the initial charge of an assault or something like that.

This video may cover it:
youtube.com/watch?v=qiV-CUPTc2I

Essentially the fusil was the firing mechanism of the more modern musket. After a while all muskets had them and the term was no longer needed (although fusiliers get their name from it - being the units who got the newer muskets with fusils first)

They call it "Drill"
Firing in ranks, reloading drills, stripping and cleaning drills, blind-stripping, firing exercises etc.

When you go into the jungle you use all the "katas" you learned in training to kill other people before they kill you.

Depends on the caliber and power of the specific rifle and pistol. A .22 rifle will be less powerful than a .50 cal pistol (although it will have a longer range).

Pistols generally have a limited range due to not having a scope or a longer barrel.

If we're talking about a standard 9mm pistol vs a 7.62mm or .308 Rifle the difference is really where you get shot.
Getting shot in the head with either could kill you, same with getting it in a vital organ.
Getting shot in the foot or arm with a pistol probably wont kill you, although it could get an artery which would kill you from blood loss unless you got decent medical attention.

If the .308 had a hollow point like most hunting rifles, it wouldn't matter where you got shot - the bullet would cause so much damage the muscles around the wound would start to die and you would get complications that would end up being fatal without serious medical attention.
Even getting shot in the foot with a hollow point .308 could well mean death without immediate medical attention.

So with your system, where humans have 3 to 9 HP, I would do the location based injury system and % incapacitation.
Make a 9mm pistol do D6 damage and a .308 rifle to 2D6

Watch this.
youtube.com/watch?v=wXwPtP-KDNk

Bringing that up, a tactic could be to have a curtain of fire around the trenches when an attack is spotted, and then to have marksmen pick off survivors. Granted, given larger numbers, that job would probably fall to machine guns.

Something to note as well, apart from the caliber of the round and weapon it is fired from, something you touched on being the different types of round. A hollow point will cause soft tissue damage, same as any other round (granted, much worse damage) but it is entirely possible to have rounds of any type go clean through and cause comparatively less damage. For example, if I had somebody in front of me at 5m, a round from a 9mm pistol will likely do more damage than a 5.56mm round from a rifle, but at 50m, the rifle will start to do more harm, causing fragmentation, whereas the pistol round will loose enough speed and accuracy that it likely won't hit, and then won't do as much harm. Anything beyond 50m mind as well be 50AU for a pistol, and that's where rifles and shotgun slugs (to some extent) start to take over.

What are some plausible firearms related fuckups that a competent character could make?

Not OP.

With an unfamiliar firearm it's possible to mix up your controls & hit the magazine release instead of the safety or something.

You could load the gun with a type of ammo that gun doesn't particularly like.
As an example, I have a Turkish Mauser rifle that will shoot just about any 8mm ammo you throw at it, while I have another, Yugoslav, Mauser of very similar design that refuses to feed soft-point rounds. For someone that doesn't know that particular rifle very well, it wouldn't be a stretch to load it with the wrong type of ammo unknowingly and have to unload it in the middle of a rather hairy situation.

Well, are they immune to panic and fear, like typical heroes?

>handle an AR for the first time and accidentally drop the magazine when trying to keep finger away from trigger, scaring the bejeezus out of me hearing it suddenly clack against the counter

>handle an M1 carbine for the first time and accidentally click on the safety instead of releasing magazine for a quick examination due to it having the earlier push button safety instead of the later rotary
Not my finest day all those years ago and explains my preference for paddle releases

How did the main rifles of WW2 compare to each other? Do you think the US could have done as well as it did supposing they kept the Springfield on as their standard issue firearm?

>or would you be better off firing it and then drawing your melee weapon?
This, in fact it was basically standard procedure.

Not very, but they still kind of work.

The "gun itself isn't hard. The bullet would be a challenge but doable. The powder is a bitch but black powder is easy enough, the igniter is where it gets tricky.

>in fiction
Ignorant writers?

You are correct in your reasoning, different scenarios call for different tactics, sometime far outside the norm. During the gulf war at some point during the battle of a city I forget the order went out for allied troops to fix bayonets due to the close fighting, this was a problem as some nations had dropped bayonets entirely and thus their rifles had no lugs and they had to settle for taping combat knives to their rifles.

The only real standouts are the semi autos, however the enfeild had a large magazine capacity and a smooth action and design that allowed for a interesting and useful shooting technique, the mauser was more finely designed, the Mosin is as simple as it gets, and the french rifles were actually rather well designed.

Thinking that the handloads that were acquired from your friends or that one guy at a gunshow or in a shady as hell alleyway won't either cause excessive wear on the parts with some breakage after a while, explode because they were some stupidly hot loads the rifle or pistol was never meant to take or they were underloaded with the bullet never exiting the barrel and then possibly bursting the barrel or cause the whole thing to explode on the next round (or two, there's some pretty nutty pictures of barrels completely filled with bullets) because you weren't paying attention and only heard it go "pop!" instead of "BANG".

A bolt action to semi automatic switch is a good one but it's not really a war winner, especially with total war on this scale. The US dominated due to strategy, logistics, numbers of men, air superiority, industrial superiority, etc. Not small unit tactics.

As to comparing bolt actions- there's a lot to say about each but the actual difference isn't that big. This is often the case between weapons of the same category from the same time. Trying to realistically differentiate between them wouldn't yield anything in all but the crunchiest of RPGs. How does "Increase daily chance of malfunction by 1% after 1000 rounds without cleaning" or "Increase accuracy by 1% beyond 500 meters" sound?

>How does "Increase daily chance of malfunction by 1% after 1000 rounds without cleaning" or "Increase accuracy by 1% beyond 500 meters" sound?

I think the difference is bigger than you might think; Mosins are clunky as fuck with their big rimmed casings, and can be a pain in the ass to load. The difference in quality between sights (M44 made in a tent vs. pre-war armory k98) could also definitely qualify for at least a +/-1 to hit in a d20 system as well.

That's a nice picture, thanks. %%Also%% I need to %test% spoilers, sorry.

The fuck. [s]spoiler[/s]

user, tough your flopping around is kinda of cute, I can only suffer it for a brief time. Press CTRL + s to spoiler, alos you can highlight and press ctrl+s to spoiler the highlight.
Like this hope it helps.

Control s ,dude.

Had a question about canons. Ahenever I used them in games, I generally integrste them into my lime infantry, but I always hear about artillery being it's own groups. Seems effective when I use it how I do, was wondering if it was ever used in real life how I've used it in games.

>and toss aside
This is the only part that's even a little silly - you put them on a cord and keep them on your person for after-action reloading, but otherwise having multiple single-shot pistols was a common tactic

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavus_Adolphus_of_Sweden#Military_innovator

Third paragraph,
>His artillery were themselves different—in addition to the usual complements of heavy cannon he introduced light mobile guns for the first time into the Renaissance battlefield. These were grouped in batteries supporting his more linearly deployed formations

Really, it depends on the army, time, situation and type of cannon. Both, really.

bummmb

Like most things it varies a lot by time period, people and technology like most things. Cannons have been used in basically every single way by some group at some point.

Any thoughts on the various iconic fantasy races and firearms of various sorts? As firearms are almost always done, even in fiction, with the basis of 'These were made by humans'. But fictional races don't always line up with that. Dwarves have a low centre of mass, toughness and stability beyond what a human can manage while elves have incredible coordination and fantastic eyesight (Doubly so in low light). I'm curious about how that would play with adoption/usage of firearms.

Interesting, not really a /k/ person but how do the guns differ to cause those sorts of differences?

Seems like I need to distrupt this serious discussion with some retarded frogposting

Revolver rifles were in Arcanum! In reality they're just revolvers with a long barrel and stock though, meaning they keep most of the revolver's downsides. Clumsier reloads, you're probably still firing a smaller cartridge, you don't have that good seal for velocity, etc.

Lever actions had a similar situation - feeding your ammo into a tube means you're limited to using rimfire cartridges, which were usually pistol rounds and often burn their propellant incompletely due to the nature of the rimfire design. Once you've emptied the tube you're forced into a slower reload cycle before you can continue firing, but you could fit more rounds.

Both revolver rifles and lever actions are very well suited to cavalry operations because you can share your ammo between your rifle and pistol, and the limitations of the weaker rounds and slow reloads can be overcome with a get in close and get out fast doctrine. They're not suited to infantry fighting on the field or in trenches though, and so as cavalry became obsolete so too did the lever action.

Dwarves don't like firearms because ventilation underground sucks and you'll just suffocate on the gases. If they used ranged weapons it'd probably be a crossbow for the flatter firing arc due to low ceilings. Whether they'd have many crossbows is a good question since tunnels would limit how many troops can effectively participate. I'm guessing more shield wall type tactics since you can rely on the tunnel walls to prevent yourself from being flanked, but short spears or swords/axes instead of the long spears of a phalanx.

Elves won't like firearms because they're loud and visible, with muzzle flash and smoke ('smokeless' powder is only smokeless relative to the early black powder). Most of the advantages of firearms (faster to produce, easier to train in usage, effectiveness for siege operations) are less relevant for a species characterized as being long-lived, stealthy, and reclusive.