The basic design is indeed simple: a metal tube closed on one end, with a bullet on the other. The closed end is called the base of the cartridge and in most designs is not really closed but has a pocket drilled in it. This pocket is called the primer pocket and, as you might guess, is where the primer goes. The primer pocket is connected to the interior of the cartridge by either a single hole or a series of smaller holes. These holes, called flash holes, allow the fire from the primer to reach the powder charge in the cartridge. When the flame of the primer reaches the powder charge the charge ignites and the gasses released push the bullet down the barrel and toward the target.
A loaded round consists of the cartridge case, the bullet, the powder charge and the primer. Sometimes if the case is large and the powder charge is small, there may also be a filler to fill the empty space inside the case.
Let's look at the base of the case. If the case has a rim or lip around the base it is called a rimmed case, such as the .30-30, .38 Special and .45 Long Colt. If the case has no rim but instead a groove cut around the base it is called rimless, such as the .223, .308 and .45ACP. If it has a very small rim and a groove it is called semi-rimmed. The rim and the groove are both used to extract or pull the cartridge out of the firearm. As you might expect, the piece of the rifle that extracts the cartridge is called the extractor. There are two types of cartridge which it is hoped the citizens of Grantville will avoid, but they probably won't. These are the rebated, where the base is smaller than the body of the cartridge: this is found in the modern .41 Action Express. And the belted, where a belt, or extra thick ring is formed around the cartridge just in front of the extracting groove. Belted cartridges are found today in a number of high-powered rifle cartridges such as the .375 Holland and Holland, the .458 Winchester and the .460 Weatherby.
Rimmed cases work best in single shot designs and rimless cases work best in magazine designs. It is of course possible to make a rimless cartridge work in a single shot or a rimmed case work in a magazine design, but it takes a little extra design work. The rim around the base of a rimmed cartridge stops the cartridge from going too far into the chamber of the rifle and positions the base or head of the cartridge where it can be supported by the bolt and struck by the firing pin. This positioning is called head space. Rimless cartridges head space upon their shoulders, that portion of the front of the case where it narrows down to the neck that accepts and holds the bullet. It is likely that black powder fouling will give trouble in this area. This fouling would prevent chambering a new cartridge very quickly. This is even more of a consideration for machine gun use.
Now we will move toward the other end of the case. The body of the case will, in most cartridges, have a slight taper to aid extraction. The front of the case is the next area we need to look at. If the case is relatively the same size from the base to the bullet, the case is called a straight case. We know it has a very slight taper but it is still called straight. If, on the other hand, the bullet is much smaller than the case and the case is squeezed down to hold it, this is called a bottlenecked case, or necked case. Examples of a straight case are the .45-70, .30 carbine and most pistol cases. Examples of necked cases are the .30-06, 8mm Mauser and most modern rifle cartridges. Necked cases allow greater powder charges without making the cartridge case overly long and fragile, and aid in "internal ballistics"—how well the powder burns inside the cartridge case.
The bullet is held in the mouth of the cartridge and may be either lead or jacketed lead. If jacketed, it has a thin layer of copper around it to protect the bore of the rifle from lead fouling. Lead fouling is lead scraped off the bullet as it goes down the barrel, and can affect the accuracy of the weapon. The faster the bullet goes, the more chance of fouling. So with a necked case and a heavy powder charge, a jacketed bullet may become a necessity.
The cartridge case can be made from a number of different metals, but a mix of 70% copper and 30% zinc with some trace elements has been found to be the best. (Today, it's commonly called "cartridge brass.") Pure copper cases tend to be too soft and steel cases give problems in forming and can scratch gun chambers.
[One other topic that we decided was outside the scope of this article is the availability and production of brass. At the time of the RoF, zinc was not known as a separate element, mostly because its boiling point was higher than the melting point of its ore. But—vastly oversimplifying—the zinc ore mixed with melted copper would produce brass, and this had been known since Roman times.]
Now what size of cartridge?
Again the firearms round table has major differences of opinion. Some want a straight copy of some of the famous black powder cartridges. Others want a new design.
One thing to keep in mind is black-powder fouling. Those tiny pieces of carbon and unburned sulfur will soon coat the inside of the barrel and can reduce accuracy very quickly. If the rifle is not cleaned regularly, this fouling will attract moisture and rust, soon destroying any accuracy the rifle ever had. The smaller the bore of the rifle the sooner the fouling has an effect on accuracy. So for this reason, along with others, most of us agree that any rifle chosen should have a bore size equal to or greater than .30 and that .35 or larger would be better.
Some of the sizes that have been mentioned are:
The .45-70 which is an excellent choice in that there are undoubtedly examples on hand since it was making a comeback as a hunting round at the time of the Ring of Fire The .45-70 was the standard American military cartridge for over twenty years. It is 2.1 inches long, rimmed, and is called a straight-wall cartridge (almost straight; a little body taper aids feeding and limits powder fouling being blown back into the action).
A .577 or .58 caliber straight-walled cartridge for use in a trapdoor conversion of the SRG with existing barrels or new barrels made on existing SRG tooling. The British used a cartridge of this type in their Snyder conversion of their Enfield rifle muskets, and it had a reputation as a highly effective round. But it suffers somewhat in long-range performance in comparison to smaller caliber cartridges such as the .45-70 and wouldn't work nearly as well for machine guns.
We have already mentioned the new cartridge formed by necking up the 7.62x39mm to a larger caliber. It should be noted that the Russians have done exactly that with their 9x39mm which was just coming into use as a sporting and military round at the time of the Ring of Fire. As a black powder number this should give a hitting power close to the old .38-40 Winchester cartridge, which was an excellent hunting caliber for medium game.
Both the .32 Winchester and .38-55 Winchester have been discussed amongst the group. Both of these were originally black powder numbers and can be formed from a standard .30-30 case. Both have a reputation as proven "game-getters" and hunting rounds.
Another caliber discussed is to make a case that matches the .30-06 in base size, either rimmed or rimless, and neck it to take a .375 caliber bullet. This would closely match the 9.5x60mm Turkish Mauser cartridge, which was an excellent military cartridge designed right at the end of the black powder era on our time line.
As you can see, we at the firearms round table have given Eric and the other writers in the 1632 series a lot of choices, but very little cohesive advice on choosing the new SRG-2. It is said that if you get six gun people in a group they will give you ten opinions. We proved that to be true.
So here are our individual opinions: (In alphabetical order)
Leonard Hollar: Here's a thought. There is, and has been since the 1980s, a form of black powder firearm called the in-line rifle. These things are, at least as nearly as I can tell, a hybridization of a bolt action rifle and a muzzle-loader. The powder and shot are loaded from the muzzle and a bolt is worked at the breech end to insert a cap (Or, in some cases, a disk.) When the trigger is pulled a firing pin is struck and the rifle fires. Well, yeah, I know, that's really over simplified but bear with me for a minute, please.
What if . . . These rifles were manufactured with the ability to modify them as ot
her technology catches up. Use a standard bolt, as would be used with cartridges, but with the bolt face modified to hold a cap as the in-line does now. The breech is designed so that it could be drilled out to form the chamber for a cartridge at a later time. The area in the stock below the bolt could be gouged out to accept the parts for a magazine and then covered over with a plate to insure proper bolt operation. I even believe that by using preloaded cartridges made of stiffened paper, with a copper washer for a gas seal included in the wrapping, the rifle could be built as a single shot breechloader from the start and then converted to metallic cartridges when they become available in mass quantities by changing the bolt and installing the magazine hardware.
Bob Hollingsworth: I think the SRG replacement should be a single shot and more specifically either the Remington rolling block or the Martini/Peabody type using a .375 caliber bullet and load much like the 9.5 mm Turkish Mauser. I believe that the difference in the amount of machine time and different materials needed to produce a repeater can best be used building additional individual rifles, and improving USE crew-served weapons. With the advent of serviceable self-contained metallic ammunition, more machine guns become do-able, even with black powder propellants. In test after test, machine guns have been shown to out-perform much larger groups of individual marksmen. I should much rather field sixty single shot armed men with a supporting Gatling gun than a like number of men with bolt action repeaters without the Gatling or its analog. Should the decision be made to retain .58 caliber bore size and ballistics not dissimilar to the current SRG performance, then modification of SRGs to make trapdoor style single shots is the preferred follow-on weapon. It must be recognized that this will limit the effectiveness of any machine gun that must use the standard rifle ammunition.
John Rigby: I feel that the USE should begin development of a single shot breech-loading firearm based on the H&R break open shotgun/rifle design. This action is of simple design and has the advantage of a separate barrel assembly which will allow a single action type to be used in a variety of roles (battle rifle, shotgun, sharpshooter's rifle, etc.). A variety of examples of these weapons should exist in the RoF to use as patterns. I also feel that the SKS is a weapon worth building and that some manufacturing time should be committed to it, initially to work out the tooling and develop some prototypes for testing. As the SKS became viable the single shot rifles could be moved to secondary troops and the barrels replaced with ones which would take the SKS ammo.
Philip Schillawski: The primary military benefit of a breechloader is allowing the soldier to reload from the prone position. This benefit is so massive in terms of preserving troops that I think it outweighs all the other factors in deciding when and with which design to replace the SRG. I don't think cartridge production will take that long to accomplish, so I recommend going with the trapdoor design immediately upon sufficient cartridge production being available. To minimize the time to get the breechloaders in the hands of the troops, I'd start by switching all new rifle production to .577 trapdoors, and converting existing stocks of SRGs as rapidly as possible.
Only after all the soldiers in the army no longer have to stand up to reload would I consider a completely new design. At that point, I would go with a Lee bolt action because I think the need to redesign the SKS to use longer, rimmed cartridges with black powder makes going the SKS route a long-term proposition. The Lee action achieves the highest rate of fire of any hand-powered action. The rear locking lugs of the Lee design make cleaning and swabbing out the chamber area much easier (and without removing the bolt) than is possible with a front-lug action like the Mauser, a considerable advantage for a black powder (BP) rifle. The machining of a Lee action is also about as simple as is possible for a bolt-action. The rifle could be initially produced using a rimmed BP cartridge—just neck up the .303 British—and changed to smokeless powder when that option becomes available. (The rifle could be easily converted to a rimless cartridge at this point as the Lee bolt has a replaceable front component and it is necessary to do barrel replacements at this point anyway to change to a smokeless rifling twist from the BP rifling twist).
Tom Van Natta: I favor going straight to a repeater. Tooling up to make a rifle of any type is a significant investment, because it means no rifles are being produced in this period, and costs quite a bit of money. The plan with the least retooling, a good initial rifle, and the best future rifle without extensive retooling is a SKS-type, initially with the human hand powering the repeating part, in the future with smokeless propellant gasses turning it into a semi-automatic or full automatic rifle. The SKS is the immediate predecessor to the AK-47, the most popular rifle ever made.
John Zeek: I favor the .375 SJ, that cartridge based on a rimmed .30-06 case that has been necked up to .375. I also think the USE should adopt not one new rifle but two. One would be the standard infantry rifle and would be based on the rolling block design. This rifle could be manufactured by many down-time gun makers and would arm the majority of the army. A carbine for mounted troops could be based on the same design. The other design I like is a copy of the Lee bolt action. This could be manufactured in the shops in Grantville and in down-time shops that had been equipped with more modern machinery. Again a carbine to the same design is possible. I also like the idea of a black powder modified SKS for the existing SKS rifles only. They could be used as special issue weapons for marines or naval boarding parties that need a lot of firepower.
In conclusion, it's apparent that we don't agree now. But we are still working and in future articles we will strive to come, eventually, to a logical, well-thought-out replacement for the SRG.
Comment by Eric Flint:
They probably never will agree. Why should they? The human race has now had centuries of experience with gunpowder weapons, in the course of which umpteen jillion variations have been produced, all with their own advocates and detractors—not to mention manufacturers and buyers.
I've never seen any reason that a fictional universe should be any neater and tidier than the real one, leaving aside the obvious need to simplify a story somewhat to make the plot coherent. I imagine what we'll see in the 1632 universe, when it comes to which guns get developed, is much the same as we've seen in the real world: Some people go ahead and make Gun X and others make Gun Y and still others make Gun Z, and then they get used (or not used) by Armies A or B or C depending on factors I, II, and III.
(Not to mention corruption, bribery, etc., etc.)
The great value of these ongoing discussions and debates by the firearms round table is not so much the conclusions they come to—or don't, as often as not—it's the discussion itself. That allows me or any other writer in the series to make an intelligent and informed decision whenever we decide that the storyline needs to introduce a new element concerning firearms. Instead of sucking it out of our thumb by inventing a weapon that any knowledgeable person would instantly recognize as ridiculous.
The Grantville Brickmaker's Primer
By Kerryn Offord
[Author's note: This article assumes that there are two thousand pounds to the ton, and a standard construction brick with pointing is 9" x 4.5" x 3" (121.5 cubic inches) and weighs eight pounds.]
Making bricks is easy you say. Mankind has been making them for millennia. You dig up some clay, mold it to the desired shape, and then fire it until it is hard. Easy, straightforward, anybody could do it. Right?
Wrong. Problems can occur in the preparation of the clay, the molding of the bricks, the drying of the bricks and the firing of the bricks. If any step is not performed correctly, then the finished product will be unsatisfactory.
Take the early European colonies in American as an example. In 1633 Wouter Van Twiller, the governor appointed by the Dutch West Indian Company, started construction of his private residence on Manhattan Island. This fact is interesting not just because it was the first brick building in America, but that the bricks were all imported from Amsterdam. This suggests that the c
olony was unable to produce good quality bricks. We find that fired bricks probably weren't produced in America until 1650 when the New Haven colony fired their first bricks. It's not that the colonists didn't try to make bricks earlier. Rather, the problem is that until New Haven in 1650, they didn't have any brickmakers, and the earlier attempts resulted in inferior bricks that were mostly unsuitable for construction. Having people who know what they are doing is important for the production of useful construction bricks. This is a problem facing the people of Grantville. Brickmaking in the Grantville area of West Virginia died out in the late nineteenth century, so there is little chance any current resident has sufficient experience of brickmaking to be useful. This means that Grantville will be depending on the skills of down-timer brickmakers.
This presents a new problem. Brick is not a popular construction material in Thuringia, the area in Germany where Grantville has been deposited by the Assiti shard. This means that there will be few brickmakers near Grantville, but more importantly for the short term, there will be no infrastructure in place for the production of bricks in volume. There will be no large stockpiles of clay dug up last autumn and left to weather over the winter. There will be no drying sheds, nor will there be permanent kilns. Worse still, there will be insufficient dry wood, the fuel of choice until the nineteenth century, available for firing bricks. Any brickmakers in the area will be refugees or itinerant brickmakers moving from job to job. Either way, without up-time assistance, they will be unable to produce bricks in any volume until the brickmaking season of 1632.