Alternative Propellants

>>34484848
Cordite has been used as an alternative.

Yes. The answer to your entire paragraph can be summed up with yes.

>>34484848
Yes. Can you get something as stable as smokeless? Probably not.

Personally, I'd love to see an H2O2 rifle. Caseless, sleek, and extremely likely to blow up in your arms if you look at it crosseyed. Perfection.

>>34484848

er yeah, you know black powder and smokeless powder are completely different shits, right? There's one example.

Read this entire fucking article though, seriously:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokeless_powder

>>34484848
Propane rounds when?

>>34484848
What about gasoline?
Could I pour some gasoline into a casing?

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>>34484931
Isn't fossil fuel hard to come by lately?

I saw a Mythbuster's episode where they got a rocket to fly over a mile in the air using dried dog shit.
If we dried shit, would it be enough to propel a bullet?

Firing it would smell like death, though. Especially mag dumping.

Compact shoulder fired gauss rifles when?

>>34484959
Needs oxygen ya goof ball

>>34484959
yeah but it wouldnt be very powerful because it burns too slowly

also you would have to figure out a new way to start combustion since it would ruin primers

>>34484959
>>34484988
>Could I pour some gasoline into a casing?
You can, sure. It won't do anything, because there's no oxygen for it to react with.

Did you guys even pass first year science?

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>>34484991
I didn't make it to high school.

What about the dog shit theory then? >>34484971
If it worked with a rocket it can work with a bullet, right?

>>34485004
>>34484971
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIBfT5gJWSo
Here's the video by the way

>>34484848
>Is it possible to design a cartridge without using gunpowder as the propellant?

kek

>>34484848
Smokeless powder is easy to make and very stable. Spend your time looking for an alternative to lead that can be cast easily and is effective.

>>34484848
Yeah, caseless ammo generally doesn't use normal gunpowder because it doesn't bind so good nor burn right when it's glued together. Modern gunpowder isn't just "gun cotton" like you see on youtube, and black powder is significantly different from either gun cotton or modern commercially produced powders.

Your question is sorta like saying "Hey, cars run on fuel that burns, right? Can I put something other than gas in my car?" The answer is no, but diesel is different from petrol, and diesels run on fucking anything, and there's some engines that run on things like ethanol or hydrogen or whatever other thing that burns and expands.

>>34484920
If you mean that "Browns Gas" junk science shit, you could conceivably make a gun with it, but hydrogen is pretty low-energy stuff. It's a simple atom, H2 is a simple molecule, when stored it's usually pretty cold, it's just not energetic stuff. Its advantages are mostly that it's clean-burning and easy (physically speaking, it's not a lot of steps and can be done with primitive gear) to produce, while the downside is that it's low energy and requires lots of electricity to make.

>>34485004
They would've used a tank of liquid oxygen or NO2 to provide a source of oxidizer for their fuel.

Hybrid rockets can work with pretty much anything that burns - there's examples of them using rubber, PVC, or even wood as a fuel, but it only works because you're allowing it to undergo extremely rapid combustion thanks to a potent source of oxidizing gas.

>>34484848
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi-BDIu_umo

Handheld railguns when

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>>34485053
Darn. Gotcha Thanks for explaining.

>>34485066
literally now, hobbyists have built them. the main issue is that you have to plug them into the wall

>>34484920
>Can you get something as stable as smokeless?

Explosives, such as C4.

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>>34485133
Just get a backpack battery!

>>34485037
>Smokeless powder is easy to make

Sweet. Tell me how. Also tell me how black powder is made, so I can have something to compare cordite with and see if it's as easy to make as you claim.

>>34484848
>while the downside is that it's low energy
SAD!

>>34485046
Nah man, I'm referring to H2O2, hydrogen peroxide. In high concentrations, peroxide will spontaneously decompose into (extremely) hot steam and molecular oxygen in the presence of a catalyst like manganese dioxide or iodide. Rocket monopropellant engines have been using this for a while, but the stuff is so unstable that it's incredibly unlikely to be used for caseless ammunition.

>>34485200
oh

yeah nah running guns on concentrated hair products never EVER baka fampai desuyaro

>>34485200
>H2O2
>literally a liquid between 0 and 150C
How the fuck do you intend to use it in any form of caseless ammunition?

>>34485200
What about Graphene?

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>>34484848
I <3 rail guns...https://youtu.be/Wj1b8wh2Ul4

>>34485275
Wrap it in a combustible case.

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>>34485339
>returning to paper cartridges, but using a liquid instead of a solid

>>34485293
What about it?

>>34484848
yes, the next development is ETC guns.
>>34485144
No because brisance.

>>34485339
>combustible case that can also withstand general abuse while safely containing an extremely volatile liquid
The materials required would be so far advanced that, by then, we'd already have something better.

>>34485293
Graphene is just a form of carbon. It's not an explosive.

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>>34484848
How about a weedeater than flings buckshot instead of rocks?

>>34485338
You can't use rail gun for knocking down a terrorist. Expensive, over powered, hard to operate.

>>34484848
Nothing wrong with gun powder.

What about this:

A bullet where the cartridge is a tiny piece of glass with two chambers, each containing half of a binary explosive.

Instead of a firing pin making a spark it just smashes the glass, mixing the chemicals which explode. thus firing the bullet

>>34488774
What about the glass going everywhere?

>>34488801
I guess you'd still have to have an ejection port and stuff

man I don't know I'm not a gunsmith

>>34484848

I remember reading something a while back, an experiment that involved using a gel-like substance for propellant rather than gunpowder. It would be ignited by an electric charge as opposed to a striker+percussion cap. I believe it was the navy, trying to find better propellants for cannons.

It would be neat to have a propellant with higher energy potential than gunpowder. Heaver bullets for armour penetration/ more Kinetic Energy on target.

>>34488833
Gelignite, maybe?

>>34485275
You don't need to keep it in the case with the projectile, simply store it in a tank in the gun. Heck, you could even store it in the magazine with the projectiles.

>>34488833
The problem with more energetic powders is the peak pressure. While you would get more velocity out of every grain of case volume you would have to have less powder in order to maintain the same pressure profile, assuming similar burn characteristics. Straight walled intermediate cartridges would be neat though.

The navy experimented with and abandoned bulk loaded liquid propellant as it would improve magazine safety and the logistics concerning it, but railguns seem to be the sexier thing now

>>34484971
>>34485021
That's crazy!

The sniper dude is Dave Liwanag, he's a professor at my university.
Stabbed a table with his knife once to get us to shut up.

I remember seeing a documentary once on a gun that could disperse something like, 7 rounds per second. Forgive me because it's been many years and some of this is foggy.

This literally meant that there were 3 rounds travelling down the barrel at any given point in time during operation.

This was made possible because the round didn't use primer and grain powder, it used a chemical reaction as the expansion source, and the chemical was bonded to the rear of the round.

A heat source was used as the prime, so as the bullet would chamber a heat source would prime the rear of the bullet and the round would begin traveling down barrel.

This created a really interesting problem with a cool solution. The rear of the rounds began heating up as the would approach the chamber causing rounds to go off while still in the receiver. a problem you don't really wanna have. kek

So they made a chambering system where the bullet would approach the chamber nose first, and be spun around as it chambered and that would heat up the chemical burner on the rear. Very ingenious and the operation worked.

There was still a significant heating problem though. with 7 rounds passing pers second and having three rounds running through the barrel at all times of automatic operation the entire chambering mechanism would heat up after several seconds of use so even the nose guied approach to chambering couldn't solve the problems.

Primers are like analogue. They may not be the future, but they're pretty fuckin reliable.

>>34488801
>>34488825

I can't think of a reason it couldn't be done with a plastic capsule with the firing pin stand-in focusing on breaching the barrier between the two compartments rather than smashing the whole thing outright.
I don't know much about binary explosives but I imagine the whole charge wouldn't have dimensions too different than normal wadding.

>>34490435
your an idiot kid, primers ARE a chemical reaction that creates a source of heat to ignite teh powda.

i hope your thinking of electric ignition and metalstorm though, that shit was cool back in the day.

>>34485200
>hydrogen peroxide

Kek

>High-concentration H2O2 is referred to as "high-test peroxide" (HTP). It can be used either as a monopropellant (not mixed with fuel) or as the oxidizer component of a bipropellant rocket. Use as a monopropellant takes advantage of the decomposition of 70–98% concentration hydrogen peroxide into steam and oxygen. The propellant is pumped into a reaction chamber, where a catalyst, usually a silver or platinum screen, triggers decomposition, producing steam at over 600 °C (1,112 °F), which is expelled through a nozzle, generating thrust. H
2O2 monopropellant produces a maximal specific impulse (Isp) of 161 s (1.6 kN·s/kg).

Your steam powered gun is subject to squibs and fail.