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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30023 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Can you 3D print gunpowder?

I think @gattsuru or Beej once pointed to a furry who had figured out how to make guncotton at home all electrochemically and such, so...sort of, yes.

Cathode_G! (cw: sfw as explosives can be on direct link, but the rest of his feed does have furry porn) Absolutely fascinating guy.

I'm by no means an expert, but AFAIK making a case that can provide an adequate seal without breaking (and be cycled in without jamming and extracted without breaking, perhaps creating an obstruction in the barrel...) is far harder than making a simple gun.

It isn't actually that hard. It's simple drawn brass. https://www.petersoncartridge.com/technical-information/drawing-brass/

In addition, you can actually just turn a cartridge on a lathe from brass bar stock. Or mild steel. Both will work and while it's not as efficient as drawing brass, all you need is a lathe.

And each cartridge can be reloaded multiple times with equipment that is basically ubiquitous in the US.

I guess you'd be incentivizing revolvers though.

Polymer cases would provide substantial weight savings (and reduce how much brass you need), but I don't think anyone has cracked the problem, or at least hasn't come up with anything commercially viable.

True Velocity has apparently nailed it down for .308 and .50 BMG. The recent-ish US Army trials that produced the XM5 and XM250 almost had the 6.5x51mm be adopted in a polymer case.

Cathode_G does also have a non-corrosive primer (as above, link has no nudity, but be prepared for furry porn elsewhere on his feed) recipe, though most disposable guns in a highly restricted regime will probably just stick with the corrosive but dead-simple matchhead.

Primers are also kinda like the lye in cathode_g's guncotton formula; they have too many industrial and home uses to effectively ban. Even China still has them in common use for construction. If you don't want to bother with chemistry or corrosive primers, there's literally millions of these things out there.

Brass cases are obnoxious, but I'm not convinced they're the right decision rather than the available one. SuckBoyTony's done some interesting things with manufacturing polymer cases, and there's a lot of design space ignoring cases entirely that's largely unexplored because it makes so little sense these days. If you're custom-casting and electroplating bullets in mass, you could start experimenting with wacky designs like the Daisy V/L, Activ-style shells, or gyrojets, or truly caseless ammo... but unless you have absolutely no access to spent brass, it's mostly just coming up with new ways and reasons for the ATF to shoot your dog.

Ten years ago, I'd make that argument, but the state of the art in disposable firearms hasn't been the Liberator as zip-gun-adjacent for the better part of the intervening period. The undercovered part of 3d2a analysis is that you don't just have zip-guns-but-worse and lovingly-crafting custom 1911s; there's a lot of capability to make hipoint-grade guns that fall in the middle. That space is largely underexplored in the United States (again, because you can buy a HiPoint, or because the ATF will shoot your dog, or both), but a good deal of it is potentially highly lethal, often in ways that would not be great to find out the hard way (further information not available here).

((But, yes, the OP's gun-free magic wand also needs to handle zip guns, in the same way it needs to handle people buying aluminum-grade CNCs for 1k and steel-grade ones for 8k. But the OP's not really engaging with the core point enough for this objection to really be relevant.))))

That space is largely underexplored in the United States (again, because you can buy a HiPoint, or because the ATF will shoot your dog, or both), but a good deal of it is potentially highly lethal, often in ways that would not be great to find out the hard way (further information not available here).

AR-15s are a coordination mechanism, not a strategic weapon, but no common knowledge of the shape of the possibility-space exists. Even within the gun culture, it appears that everyone visible is completely unaware, fixated on antique memes and larping.

The basic problem is that secret black-ball deterrence doesn't exist. If you don't pull the ball out of the jar, people won't believe it exists. if you do pull it out, the presence of a black (more accurately light-to-medium grey) ball makes deterrence moot.

It's a wicked problem. The Red memeplex is optimizing for low memetic cost, and so has little pressure to evolve under current conditions. Blues are reasoning off the memes they see, not the memes that logically follow, so detect no incentive to maintain current conditions.

Ok, but I feel like we're going in circles, here

What I see is the goals changing whenever he fills it. First it was gunpowder, then it was primers, and then it was casings, now it is casings that are direct analogs for modern ammunition. What is next, anti-tank rockets?

Concerning brass casings through, it isn't as deniable but any machinist puts together far more complicated presses than what is needed for a punching and drawing brass casings.

What is next, anti-tank rockets?

Even launchers* can be 3D-printed now.

*(Not the rockets themselves, mind you, though I once saw a video about making rocket motors at home out of sugar and kitty litter.)

There is a 3d2a guy working on electronically primed polymer cased ammo. Very much a hobby project on a shoestring budget. One of the NGSW program entries used polymer ammo but the army went with Sig (to go with their Sig pistols and Sig LPVOs), you can buy polycased 308 ammo right now. The other area people go to for impractical is barrel rifling which at this point is mostly solved with electrochemical machining, at least for the lengths of things like the FGC which are designed around zero access to firearms parts regimes.

Brass is cheap and reusable though -- I think the sort of people you'd wanna worry about shooting back when you try to take their guns very likely have thousands of loaded rounds + tens of pounds of powder + many primers that will last them quite long enough to be a serious nuisance.

but nobody is making all-polymer cases

Steyr has done it before with their ACR entry, Textron did it with their LSAT (which became the ammunition for their NGSW rifle, since withdrawn).

They're far from the first plastic cases; Dardick managed to get 95% of the way there in 1960 but his design makes certain compromises that make getting to 100% difficult (their triangular geometry prevents most naive approaches to seal the bottom of the case). People have tried to 3D print these cases but they can't take the pressure.

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