Jacks Complete
April 29th, 2006, 08:55 AM
I originally posted this elsewhere:
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We have these new cake fireworks that fire multiple rounds per lighting. They are pretty common now. Imagine one of these aimed down a street. Fairly useful for stopping the approaching swarm, even the most foolhardy or brave would be put off, at least the first time.
Now, imagine taking one of these devices, and de-re-constructing it. Remove the sealed lid, to reveal one of an array of launchers. Remove the ball and store for later - it's a hard coated (probably laquered) BP star. Replace it with a small projectile made of an air rifle pellet (or something larger if available and there is room) and replace the sealed top, carefully replacing the glue so it looks like an innocent firework. Repeat semi-randomly until you are really bored. Now, you have a machine gun. Sure, it won't stop armour, but against a massed rank of attackers you would certainly have a heck of an impact. Even against a skilled enemy, they would keep under cover for the duration, and the noise and flash-bangs that were left would add a bit of drama to the proceedings, as well as cover any other weapons fire.
Taken to the logical conclusion, however, we can get a whole lot better.
Buy some good drill bits of a size to suit whatever projectiles you have handy. Get a large block of steel, and drill vertical holes in the block, in an array. Put them far enough apart to ensure they aren't likely to breech into one another, and far enough from the edge to stop it bursting out. Now carefully drill a small hole from the side, aiming for the bottom edges of the first line of "barrels". You should be able to get a few of the barrels to have linked touchholes. Switch to a longer drill bit of the same diameter. I'm sure you can see where this is going. Once all the barrels are linked, you can start adding the propellant of your choice. I suggest small charges of fast burning powder. Ensure the touchholes are filled first.
Now add a projectile to each barrel. You could use shot if you wanted, with a wad under it, but this is a multi-barreled weapon that will fire all barrels in a rank at the same time. It *is* a shotgun. It just fires 10 by 10 (for example) .38 lead balls at the same time. Unlike a shotgun, or a Claymore, however, it will have a lot less divergence (though this will depend on how you drilled the holes - hand drilling will be a lot more wobbly than a pillar drill, and a milling machine is likely to be perhaps too accurate!) Fletchettes might be a good idea...
Test fire a pattern at two or three layers of paper at various ranges to get an idea of what your new toy will do. (Anchor it down well, have a good backstop, wear protection, etc.) Then think about where you can deploy it, and at what range. The real joy of this is that at 100m, where a grenade or pretty much anything else will be totally un-noticed, this thing will still frag. In fact, it should be about the same as a short smoothbore firearm round at that range, if you could get 100 people to fire at the same target at the same time.
An improvement might be to leave one chamber empty, and drilled right through, for use as an aiming device. Look through it, or pop a laser pointer or some cheap optics in there. And make sure to fire remotely.
A further improvement would be to stack the charges and have each barrel chain fire - an extra round per barrel every fraction of a second. Just like a roman candle. So you might be able to stack 4 rounds in your stack of barrels, though accurately drilling the touch holes might be difficult. Add a few bits of quick match to connect the touchholes, and suddenly there are 4 volleys of 100 rounds coming down the range in well under a second - no time to take cover, and even the best body armour isn't likely to save you from that density of lead, as it doesn't cover everywhere. Even an armoured bank car would have to stop, as the "bullet-proof" window would be mostly white and cracked, if not totally chewed through.
I figure that with 2 grains of Bullseye per ball the effective range should be 200 yards. YMMV.
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Using metal tubes might work well, actually. Certainly be a simple thing to wire the fuses into the small holes you made for the touchholes, though the welding might be tricky to avoid trashing the strength. Sorting some steel plugs that would slide in would be an easy answer to that, though, as you then weld round the bottom edge, and the heat only affects there.
If you go for the shotgun in some chambers/barrels, it would probably be a bonus for when targets get closer, as you will get more spread. The idea behind this is to let you have your cake and eat it. Remember that using something as big as an oxygen cylinder for a single shotshotgun is going to be quite noticable, but then it is dead. With this cake launcher, you can selectively fire all or just one. Using electric ignition would allow you to fire ranks of whatever you wanted, at whatever rate you wanted. And the barrels could be different sizes, too, of course. A big giant fragging shotgun cylinder could be surrounded by perhaps 20 smaller barrels, 6 directly attached, and then 2 attached to each of those in a smaller size again.
Mixed charges could include a smoke generator or two, chemical weaponry, noise makers/flash bangs, sudden flame bursts, shot, flechetes, even small grenades. One that might be fun would be a series of wads with caltrops loaded on top. Lethal, yes, but onto a hard surface like tarmac they would destroy tyres and feet.
You might even make some barrels point off more than slightly, in a known direction, such that a few shots can go towards another alley, or whatever.
The Cake Launcher - your flexible yet remote friend.
----
We have these new cake fireworks that fire multiple rounds per lighting. They are pretty common now. Imagine one of these aimed down a street. Fairly useful for stopping the approaching swarm, even the most foolhardy or brave would be put off, at least the first time.
Now, imagine taking one of these devices, and de-re-constructing it. Remove the sealed lid, to reveal one of an array of launchers. Remove the ball and store for later - it's a hard coated (probably laquered) BP star. Replace it with a small projectile made of an air rifle pellet (or something larger if available and there is room) and replace the sealed top, carefully replacing the glue so it looks like an innocent firework. Repeat semi-randomly until you are really bored. Now, you have a machine gun. Sure, it won't stop armour, but against a massed rank of attackers you would certainly have a heck of an impact. Even against a skilled enemy, they would keep under cover for the duration, and the noise and flash-bangs that were left would add a bit of drama to the proceedings, as well as cover any other weapons fire.
Taken to the logical conclusion, however, we can get a whole lot better.
Buy some good drill bits of a size to suit whatever projectiles you have handy. Get a large block of steel, and drill vertical holes in the block, in an array. Put them far enough apart to ensure they aren't likely to breech into one another, and far enough from the edge to stop it bursting out. Now carefully drill a small hole from the side, aiming for the bottom edges of the first line of "barrels". You should be able to get a few of the barrels to have linked touchholes. Switch to a longer drill bit of the same diameter. I'm sure you can see where this is going. Once all the barrels are linked, you can start adding the propellant of your choice. I suggest small charges of fast burning powder. Ensure the touchholes are filled first.
Now add a projectile to each barrel. You could use shot if you wanted, with a wad under it, but this is a multi-barreled weapon that will fire all barrels in a rank at the same time. It *is* a shotgun. It just fires 10 by 10 (for example) .38 lead balls at the same time. Unlike a shotgun, or a Claymore, however, it will have a lot less divergence (though this will depend on how you drilled the holes - hand drilling will be a lot more wobbly than a pillar drill, and a milling machine is likely to be perhaps too accurate!) Fletchettes might be a good idea...
Test fire a pattern at two or three layers of paper at various ranges to get an idea of what your new toy will do. (Anchor it down well, have a good backstop, wear protection, etc.) Then think about where you can deploy it, and at what range. The real joy of this is that at 100m, where a grenade or pretty much anything else will be totally un-noticed, this thing will still frag. In fact, it should be about the same as a short smoothbore firearm round at that range, if you could get 100 people to fire at the same target at the same time.
An improvement might be to leave one chamber empty, and drilled right through, for use as an aiming device. Look through it, or pop a laser pointer or some cheap optics in there. And make sure to fire remotely.
A further improvement would be to stack the charges and have each barrel chain fire - an extra round per barrel every fraction of a second. Just like a roman candle. So you might be able to stack 4 rounds in your stack of barrels, though accurately drilling the touch holes might be difficult. Add a few bits of quick match to connect the touchholes, and suddenly there are 4 volleys of 100 rounds coming down the range in well under a second - no time to take cover, and even the best body armour isn't likely to save you from that density of lead, as it doesn't cover everywhere. Even an armoured bank car would have to stop, as the "bullet-proof" window would be mostly white and cracked, if not totally chewed through.
I figure that with 2 grains of Bullseye per ball the effective range should be 200 yards. YMMV.
----
Using metal tubes might work well, actually. Certainly be a simple thing to wire the fuses into the small holes you made for the touchholes, though the welding might be tricky to avoid trashing the strength. Sorting some steel plugs that would slide in would be an easy answer to that, though, as you then weld round the bottom edge, and the heat only affects there.
If you go for the shotgun in some chambers/barrels, it would probably be a bonus for when targets get closer, as you will get more spread. The idea behind this is to let you have your cake and eat it. Remember that using something as big as an oxygen cylinder for a single shotshotgun is going to be quite noticable, but then it is dead. With this cake launcher, you can selectively fire all or just one. Using electric ignition would allow you to fire ranks of whatever you wanted, at whatever rate you wanted. And the barrels could be different sizes, too, of course. A big giant fragging shotgun cylinder could be surrounded by perhaps 20 smaller barrels, 6 directly attached, and then 2 attached to each of those in a smaller size again.
Mixed charges could include a smoke generator or two, chemical weaponry, noise makers/flash bangs, sudden flame bursts, shot, flechetes, even small grenades. One that might be fun would be a series of wads with caltrops loaded on top. Lethal, yes, but onto a hard surface like tarmac they would destroy tyres and feet.
You might even make some barrels point off more than slightly, in a known direction, such that a few shots can go towards another alley, or whatever.
The Cake Launcher - your flexible yet remote friend.