I happened to be in downtown Knoxville yesterday with some time to spare, so I swung by Organized Play to see if there was anything I could waste some money one (coincidentally, there was, but such things are not hard to find in that store).
Morgan, the owner, greeted me as I came in with a "So what’s new in the world of firearms this week?", to which I responded, "Oh, not much, what’s new in the world of games this week?", which also received a, "Not much," though he did end up showing me a rather interesting massively-multiplayer online first-person shooter game re-enacting World War Two on a one-half scale map of Europe* that I might have to look into if I have any spare time after mowing, Tribes-ing, and maybe developing a new product (oooh) this weekend.
Anywise, another of his customers was on the way out of the store during this conversation, but turned around and asked, "Oh, you’re into firearms?" and before I could pipe up, Morgan said, "Oh, yeah, he runs a really popular gun blog online at wallsofthecity.net; you should look into it."
The conversation rapidly went down some various twists and turns**, but I think that marks the first time outside of the gunblogger/owner community that someone not only connected me to my site, but also directed others to it and said positive things about it at the same time. Granted, the first part is entirely on me – I do not exactly run around advertising that I am the writer here (that is kind of like being a poet who reads his verse in public) – but the latter parts were all kinds of shiny.
Yes, my ego could use a little stroking, but if you are looking for a Knoxville-local comic and/or gaming shop that actually pays attention to its customers, we have been tremendously pleased with Organized Play; as an apparently new walk-in customer once said when he thought no one could overhear him, it is kind of like The Comic Center out of The Big Bang Theory
(* – Apparently the game also includes as-realistic-as-you-are-likely-to-find-in-a-video-game ballistics for all of the historically-accurate firearms and other weapons (which is why Morgan thought I might be interested in it), up to and including calculating the angle of descent of an incoming round against the angle of a tank’s glacis plate to determine likelihood or depth of penetration, and then not only modeling the spalling of the round, but having that shrapnel do its own damage in turn. Kind of impressive.
** – I am typically a little wary of those questions, but in this particular case, the customer was asking whether or not it would be possible for him to take a double-barreled shotgun, remove the shot and powder from its shells, and replace them with some kind of lower powder charge and a small wooden stake for vampire-slaying (he is, apparently, a LARPer, and wanted to know if this was physically possible so he could simulate it for his character in the game). The consensus in the shop, myself included, was that a charge sufficient to penetrate a vampire’s chest would probably also demolish the stake in question, which lead us down the path of considering whether or not you could drill out a kind of "cup" in shotgun slugs and then seat some kind of small stake-ish thing into that. Unfortunately, these were "old school" vampires, so the Monster Hunter International
In case your LARPer friend actually reads your blog, I’d like to suggest he read an article I posted a while back on anti-vampire shotgun loads.
Ooh, I’ll play this game.
Grab you a box of saboted slugs – Remington Copper Solids, Hornady SSTs, whatever – as a starting point.
Wood bullet with a heavy metal base or core (thinking DU or Tungsten to get mass back up to penetrating levels), in place of the standard sabot.
It’d totally work. Sabot holds it together while in the barrel, discards when out. With a heavy core it’ll have a good ballistic coefficient and retain plenty of downrange energy, and should be pretty stable.
And for what it’s worth, Hornady SSTs will punch out a 2MOA group from a rest out to about 200yd.
I am reminded of this Sluggy Freelance from many moons ago…
You could also a very dense wood such as ironwood which can have a Janka hardness of up to 5000 meaning it takes 5000 lbs of force to drive a 11.28 mm steel ball halfway into the wood.
Wood that dense is very heavy for it’s size and I bet could withstand the blast force and penetrate at close range. Course, if a vampire is in close range you’re probably dead anyway.
I think the shotgun shell modification could be done, with a little experimentation and uncertain results as to effective range. I’d probably look for a bow first.
@ Instinct:
Ironwood is sturdy stuff, no doubt, but the density I’m finding is just a hair over 1g/cm^3 (1.15-1.3), whereas lead is 11-some. Tungsten and DU are both around 19g/cm^3.
Look out, there’s going to be a math post coming once I remember all my old volume formulas.
Oh great, now I am actually going to have to dust off my math skills from a former life.
@ Erin Palette: My only concern about that kind of payload is that the holy wafer would turn into so much powder, and the rosary beads might not fare a whole lot better. Shotguns have a lot of pressure in the tube, and there is a fine line to be tread between “dialing back your load that it does not destroy your payload” and “incapable of penetrating ribcages”.
@ ZerCool: Yeah, that was my general idea with the drilling out of the slugs. ‘Course, given the pressures involved, I would imagine the cup might just collapse on itself if you formed it too small… SAAMI pressures for 12 gauge runs somewhere around 11,500 PSI, which is bound ot be uncomfortable.
@ bluesun: Let me check my notes…
@ Instinct: Well, given that 12 gauge bores are about .65 inches in diameter, and given the SAAMI specs, if you did a full-up load on them, ironwood would still probably lose. It might turn into the mother of all vampire OC spray, but I am not sure what the penetration would end up being.
@ weambulance: Bows were my first idea, but he seemed fixated on firearms. I guess there is a matter of training/skill points or somesuch for the RPG.
I wonder if this is one application where the GyroJet concept actually makes sense – the rounds from that thing were kind of useless at short range due to the time it took for them to get up to full speed, but if you want to snipe vampires (which seems like the only reasonable way to go about whacking them in my books), a rifle-caliber rocket round comprised of a nice, solid, ironwood stake tipped with some kind of formed metal to ensure penetration?
That could have merit…
From what I know about theology, the Host is the Host regardless of what form it’s in, so it shouldn’t matter if the Body of Christ is a wafer or a fine powder. If a boojum is vulnerable to implements of faith, it’s reasonable to believe that it would take damage from an aerosolized Host.
Good point about the powder charge vs. wooden pellets. If that fails, then I suppose we go back to the Mark 1 model, which is making lacquered flechette rounds…
Yeah, but powder has crappy ballistics
. ‘T’would make good OC-spray equivalent, but not much else.
On the flip side, according to the Episcopalian teachings I was brought up with, fire is one of the few “acceptable” ways of disposing of the Host once it is consecreated (the others being consumption and burying), and the same for bibles and such. I am not sure if the chamber of a firearm when it is being fired constitutes “fire”, but seems close
.
I would wager you would have better luck employing old communion chalices as the aforementioned PowrBall concept, what with their pure silver/gold nature, the fact that they are consecrated and blessed out the wazoo, and have been holding consecrated and blessed materials for years.
Personally, I tend to prefer the ‘verses where the religiosity of the objects in question have no bearing… seems less cheaty
.
I warned you…
OK, we’re going to use a 20ga sabot slug, since those are easy to work with (i.e., I know close dimensions).
A Hornady SST slug is ~.45cal, 250gr. We’re going to change to metric dimensions because that’s simpler math:
.45cal = 11.5mm diameter.
For the sake of round numbers (and because I’m not cutting open a $3 shell to measure), we’ll say the bullet is 22mm long and is composed of a cylinder and a cone of equal height (11mm) with a constant density.
Cylinder volume = pi*r*r*h = 3.14*5.75*5.75*11 = 1141mm^3
cone volume = 1/3*pi*r*r*h = 1/3*3.14*5.75*5.75*11 = 380mm^3
total volume = 1521mm^3 or 1.52cm^3.
If that’s lead, we’re talking 11g/cm^3 or about 17g/262gr for the bullet.
We can find a happy balance between nice dense wood cone (ironwood, as mentioned in a previous comment, at 1.2g/cm^3) and tungsten cylinder at 19g/cm^3.
The exact modeling is more than I want to do, but if we convert just the cone – about 1/4 of the volume – to wood, its mass is now .46g, about 1/9 of what it had been. Changing the cylinder to tungsten gives us a mass of 21.7g and total mass of 22.2g, so we’ve more than made up the mass lost by putting a wood tip on.
If we go further back and say the cylinder is now in two pieces, one of tungsten and about 8mm long, and the remaining 3mm made of ironwood, the results are such:
830mm^3 tungsten @ 19g/cm^3 = 15.78g
690mm^3 ironwood @ 1.2g/cm^3 = 0.83g
total mass = 16.61g, or about 256gr.
Looks pretty good to me!
Yeah, that “cup” concept seems more and more required for this particular concept… Will tungsten engage the rifling properly, or will it just shred it? I mean, we are talking about shotguns, so rifling is optional, but this is not going to be a “normal” Brenneke slug, so Lord knows what its ballistics will be like without the spin…
@ Linoge:
I based my numbers on the 20ga Hornady SST, which is, if memory serves, a .45 or .50cal slug in a plastic sabot. So no issues engaging the rifling.
Or if you prefer area-effect, just make up some tungsten-cored wooden balls and load up some canister…