Máquina de Carne - General

November 2024

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Max <maximiliancrichton512@gmail.com>:

Spent casings are quite essential in removing heat from the rifle when firing. I’d assume the Meat Machine has a vastly reduced firing rate in vacuum?

Dan <Dst4cardy@gmail.com>:

If you use something fancier than steel, with 0 thermal expansion and much higher melting point, maybe make the proppellant heat inert and electrically triggered, and use a can of cold spray between reloads, would that take care of heat problems?

Max <maximiliancrichton512@gmail.com>:

Ah, but then it wouldn’t be cheap as dirt.

Alistair Young <us@arkane-systems.net>:

While it’s less than perfectly clear from the current text, it’s an open bolt design, which helps mitigate the cook-off problem.

(It does, however, still have a cook-off problem when fired too much, too fast. Such simplicity of design and assembly has its trade-offs.)

Max <maximiliancrichton512@gmail.com>:

Which leads to an interesting question: how relevant really is rate of fire in the battlefields of the Associated Worlds?

Robert J Houghton <sudragon2k3@gmail.com>:

How big is the chunk of whatever going downrange? How accurate is the weapon? how well can the soph shoot? Are you doing supressive fire? Are you in the enemy’s range?

Yoel Mizrachi <yoelmiz@walla.com>:

“where a gas piston advances them to firing position in the chamber when the trigger is pulled”
The terminology might be different between our modern one and that of the Eldraverse but I believe you meant to say bolt instead of gas piston.
I may explain myself first, the part of modern gun that push a cartridge into the firing chamber and lock it in position is known as bolt. It is the part where the firing pin is housed.
One popular mechanism of auto-loading is called ‘gas piston’, a piston is placed inside a tubular tube parallel to the barrel, the forward side of the tube is connecting to the barrel via small port drilled into the barrel, the pressure built up in the barrel when the gun is fire bleeds to the tube and push the piston – hence ‘gas piston’.
The piston is wither directly connected to the bolt or to a bolt carrier which force the bolt backward after each shot, ejecting the spent case and cycle the feeding processes.
I guess you can referred to the bolt of caseless firing gun the way modern internal combusting engine works – a piston compressing fuel and oxidizer mixture inside cylinder and project it to gun ‘piston’ that displace solid blocks of fuel - oxidizer mixture with bullets attach into similar cylinder.
Again, terminology could be very different in your setting but I thought I should highlight the difference.

Luke <00lukemanuel@gmail.com>:

I’m picturing a long-stroke piston design rather similar to a Lewis Gun in terms of operating system. The first round, since there are no propellant gases yet, is chambered manually with the charging handle, but for the rest the given description seems accurate enough to describe the actuation of a bolt on a long-stroke piston carrier.
I’ve got pretty complete design in my head, using a Lewis-ish action plus a piezoelectric crystal like in an piezoelectric cigarette lighter, and it comes out to around 21 total pieces, not counting the magazine, “optional” furniture, or luxuries like sights.

Yoel Mizrachi <yoelmiz@walla.com>:

I was thinking about something else, hear me out – short recoil action.

One of the many problems involving caseless guns is how to clear dud round/ propellant fragments/ unburned residue out of the firing chamber. Notice that any caseless firing gun have movable firing chamber that isn’t fixed to the barrel, all caseless ammo is of uniform cross-section. The reason – when need to clear the chamber the loading mechanism simply push new round into the decoupled (from the barrel) chamber which push away anything out of the system.

Now, short recoil action could be retracted backward against spring – that how short recoil action, and it could be used for clearing the chamber too. You remove the magazine, pull the charging handle back and lock the bolt against the trigger sear, then rack the barrel backward fast, preferably with the barrel pointing up.

The cheapest way will be to tap the muzzle break into the body several times, the muzzle break end should be thermally isolated or else you have ring shape burns on your left palm.
More advanced models will have 2th charging handle (reciprocating or not) to rack the barrel back and forward.
Racking the barrel several times will loosen the dud round out of the chamber and out of the gun via the empty magazine well.

Since the propellant grain need not be of uniform cross-section those cartridges could be slightly tapered (wider at the primer side than at the bullet side) to ease the clearance.