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Forum Name: Undocumented Features General
Topic ID: 2207
Message ID: 0
#0, Weapons Tech and the Home Hobbyist
Posted by Gryphon on Jan-26-14 at 03:54 PM
LAST EDITED ON Jan-26-14 AT 09:29 PM (EST)
 
(from the FD "Mojave" thread)

I thought about doing this as an FD, but it seemed a bit too precious somehow, so I'm just going to tell you about it.

>>(Blaster conversions for revolvers are
>>actually a pretty cool tech trick in the UF universe.)
>
>One imagines that that's the domain of some pretty hardcore hobbyists.

Oh, absolutely. Just to give you the flavor, the revolver blaster conversion technology Azula uses was originally developed by Kei Morgan. As a weapons designer, Kei was sort of on the borderline between Super-Hardcore Hobbyist and Actual Professional for most of her Golden Age career. Designing and building weapons was never her actual job, inasmuch as she never received a paycheck or punched a time clock for an arms manufacturer, but she did design a fair number of weapons that ended up being mass-produced by some pretty big names in the field. (It's mentioned in Shepard's 11, for instance, that Gin Shepard's favorite rifle, the M-96 Mattock marksman rifle, was a MorganArms design that was produced by the Wedge Defense Force Armory.)

So it's kind of a grey area as to whether she was really a hobbyist, as such, but she did do most of her work in a home workshop, and apart from the occasional one-off custom build on commission, if she got paid for what she did, it was generally after the fact. Also, quite a few of the things she invented were items for which there was no immediately evident demand, but rather ideas she had and then developed just to see if she could get them to work. The CCRE system was one of those.

>Given the utterly different engineering requirements, if you just want
>a blaster that looks like an old-fashioned slugthrower, it is probably
>easier and cheaper to have it scratch-built by a professional
>blastersmith1 than it is to convert an
>already existing slugthrower into a blaster.

OK, so, quick fake history lesson. In the 21st century, BlasTech (the Corellian company, makers of such giants in the field as the DL-44, the E-series, and the DC-series) came out with the BlasCap, which was marketed as "blaster ammunition for conventional firearms". The idea, basically, was that you would load a regular gun with BlasCaps, and then when you pulled the trigger, what would come out was a blaster bolt instead of a bullet. They touted it as adding a new dimension of versatility to conventionally armed forces etc. etc.

The trouble with the BlasCap was - well, there were actually three main troubles with the BlasCap. The first was that, in practice, it wasn't actually interchangeable with normal ammunition. Turns out firing a blaster bolt through a conventional gun barrel is a) woefully inaccurate and b) pretty bad for the barrel. After farting around with it for a while, BlasTech's engineers sort of solved this by developing an extremely cunning diamond-filament nanoweave barrel liner. This made BlasCaps work great, but also made it impossible, or at least highly inadvisable, to go back to using bullets.

They kept working on it for a while, but none of the later ideas - using nanites to deploy and rescind the lining based on some kind of RF indicator tag in the ammunition, for instance - could actually be made to work in a timely enough fashion without theoretically costing about the same as a battlecruiser, so they eventually just gave up. So it turned out you couldn't switch back and forth on the fly unless you felt like dismantling and remantling your weapon whenever you did it. Replacing the barrel in e.g. a Browning Hi-Power pistol is a fairly trivial task, but not trivial enough that you'd want to be doing it during a firefight.

The second was that the cunning system of microducts built into each round, which were meant to do clever things with waste gases so as to simulate the conventional-ammo outcomes necessary to operate most firearms, were not as universally reliable as they would have liked, such that there were some types of guns that would simply not work when loaded with BlasCaps. Having wasted so much time and money trying to solve the barrel problem, BlasTech's response to this problem was to publish a list of the models affected and call it a day - the "Doc, it hurts when I do this"/"Don't do that, then" solution. Some people in the galactic gun hobbyist community are still sore at them about that.

The third, which likewise no one ever seemed to be able to do anything about, was that they were and are redonkulously expensive. Which isn't really a surprise, when you think about it: Each one is, in effect, a very miniaturized single-shot holdout blaster in the shape of one round of conventional ammunition. There's microcircuitry in there, and a big capacitor, and a tiny tibanna gas reservoir (both of which had to be charged during the manufacturing process), and whatnot. They're insanely intricate little devices. Real marvels of technology, particularly for something designed to be expendable.

The result is that a typical BlasCap small-arms round - a .308 SNS (Salusian Navy Standard) round, say, of the kind fired by an MA5-series assault rifle - costs about a hundred times what a normal cartridge of the same type would cost. Given that the book calls for a Royal Salusian Marine in battle dress to carry 350 rounds of ammunition for his or her rifle, that... adds up a bit. The result of that is that BlasCap ammunition never became standard issue for any member of any organized armed force, anywhere, ever. No government, corporation, or other sponsoring body in the galaxy was ever that fiscally imprudent. Not even the WDF. We just bought everybody DC-15s. :)

BlasTech never took the BlasCap series out of production, because it's a slightly silly point of pride for BlasTech that they never take anything entirely out of production, but they've never sold well, and using them regularly is generally seen by the wider weapons-user community as an affectation or eccentricity. It's like using silver bullets when you're not even fighting werewolves - you're just showing off how rich you are. They're a very nichey niche product, is what I'm saying.

One day around 2100, Kei was playing around in her workshop with some BlasCap rounds and got to thinking about ways she could make them more useful. The first thing that occurred to her was that she could get rid of the second problem entirely simply by putting them in a gun that didn't need to be actuated by its own ammunition, such as the humble revolver, the mechanical working of which are powered by the operator.

That led automatically to a second problem, of course, which is that revolvers don't hold very many rounds. Most hold six, which was a bit of a liability even in a 20th-century gun battle and is just hopeless in a 22nd-century lightfight. She put the project aside and mulled it over for a while, until one day she happened across one of ReRob's engineering teams using a handheld pulse welder. This was an ingenious device, nowadays rarely seen, that used a rotating drum of tiny regenerating power cells (technical name "nanofusion breeders") to provide high-frequency pulses of energy which were then applied to the surface being welded. The rotating drum was necessary because, after discharging its payload in a microsecond burst, each NFB required about 500 milliseconds to recharge. The drum was sized and its turn rate calibrated such that by the time each one came around to firing position again, it would be ready to go.

Well, shit, thought Kei, and she scored a broken PW off Rob's tool crib attendant, took it back to her shop, and stripped it for parts. There were still a number of challenges to overcome - supply of blaster gas, for instance, which she ended up cracking with a very clever high-efficiency cyclonic microturbine and a small pellet of an exotic solid that vaporizes into an excitable gas at certain temperatures - but within a couple of years she'd perfected what she jokingly called "Colonel Colt's Re-Equalization System" (after the 19th-century joke that God made men, but Colonel Colt made them equal).

The upside of the CCRE System is pretty simple. If you take, for instance, an old Colt Official Police double-action revolver (the testbed Kei used for the original development project), fit it with a BlasCap barrel liner, and then load it with six .38 Special CCRE rounds - fifteen minutes' work if you know what you're doing, a couple of hours if you have to figure out how to install the barrel liner for the first time - you have... well, a blaster! Just like that!

A pretty heavy blaster, in fact, gauged strictly by its firepower, and insanely reliable thanks to the simplicity of its mechanical workings. Each CCRE round is good for a hundred firings before its gas supply is used up, and the NFBs work pretty much forever, so they can be reloaded if you have the right tools and access to the required material, too. In tactical terms, with a minuscule amount of forethought, you simply never have to concern yourself with reloading again.

The downside is that the system never actually went into production anywhere, so if you want six .38 Special CCRE rounds for your Official Police, you'll have to dig up the specs online and then make them yourself. But hey, if you've got the time and you're willing to haunt some swap meets and flea markets, you can probably score an old pulse welder for a few hundred credits. They usually had a couple dozen NFBs in them and you only need six that work. How hard can it be?

(NOTE: Quite hard, actually. Apart from the trickiness inherent in this kind of micro-making in the first place, nanofusion breeders can be temperamental little fuckers when they're not in some kind of containment system. People occasionally blow themselves up real good trying to extract them from dead PWs and build them into "blaster bullets". But hey, you can't make an omelet... )

There are other, somewhat less (or at least differently) baroque conversion systems - CCRE II, for instance, involves a tibanna gas reservoir built into the grip, so that the "rounds" only have to contain NFBs and miniaturized blaster guts, and you don't have to hunt down the weird material Kei used for gas vaporization in CCRE I. There's some pretty tricky microplumbing involved in that system, though - and even more so for CCRE III, which puts a single set of miniaturized blaster guts at the root of the barrel and only uses the rotating cylinder as an NFB transport.

Those are "refinements", so-called, made by later developers, anyway. In the original project, Kei was trying to come up with a system that involved as few modifications to the original weapon as possible, such that on a casual inspection, you wouldn't be able to spot it. That is definitely not the case for either of the alternative methods I've just described, particularly the second one.

Azula used CCRE I for That Gun, so technically, to convert it back to firing regular ammunition, she'd just have to rebarrel it (or strip the barrel liner back out, which certain nanites can be programmed to do).

>But that wouldn't be as much fun. :)

No, no it wouldn't. Besides which, going for convenience in such a situation rather misses the point. I mean, if all you want is a blaster that looks like an old-timey gun, buy a Colt M2311A1. Just be prepared for the people on the Sidearm Customization Forum to mock you mercilessly about it. :)

As an aside, the MorganArms production product Kei was proudest of, or at least most amused by, in the old days was the Bryar GP-41. In - coincidentally enough! - 2014, she'd customized a couple of old Bryar Model G blaster rifles for Gryphon by essentially chopping them into pistols, having reasoned that the Model G was a fairly anemic rifle by 21st-century standards, but would make a dandy pistol if the form factor was a little more convenient. These weapons would go on to become so iconic, figuring in so many of his Golden Age exploits, that in around 2200 Bryar introduced the GP-41: a new-production blaster pistol that looked like, but never had been, a modified mid-20th-century Model G.

They didn't sell very well - they were big and heavy by sidearm standards, the mass-produced version wasn't impressively reliable, and a lot of people either didn't trust or never got the hang of the overcharge function - and were out of production again by 2210, but for one brief shining moment, a company was building a mass-market version of a customization of one of the same company's own obsolete products. Kei always considered that a pretty good achievement unlock.

>1If this isn't a word, it should be.

Sure it is. It's the only logical thing to call them!

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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