Can we say "paperwork"?

Your point and mine both illustrate the relative complications in developing and implementing a realistic weapon realiability system.

I'm just as happy to assume the PCs have learned something about taking care of their gear and avoid the genuinely crappy Saturday Night specials.

-Siege

My Lee-Enfield doesn't seem to work any better loaded down than it does fully loaded. That rifle has always been very easy-feeding. Again, just my experience here.

Yes. The Mauser C/96 "Broomhandle" and copies could be charger-loaded. Other than that, nothing comes to mind.

Stripper clip, charger... they're the same thing. We tend to call them stripper clips over here, the Brits called them chargers.

Wrong. There's a magazine release lever inside the trigger gaurd of all No.1-No.4 series Lee Enfield rifles (I own a No.1 Mk III, as does Snow-Fox, I believe). You can swap magazines just as easily with those as you can any other firearm that uses a detachable box magazine. The reason they didn't is because the magazines are particularly heavy and well-made, and during times of war, England tended to be under steel shortages. So it wasn't economically viable to even consider just throwing magazines away.

GM discretion. It shouldn't happen all that often. There doesn't need to be rules for weapon reliability or anything like that, IMO. If the player is jacking around, the GM makes him pay for it. 50/50 on a die roll, something like that.

In your opinion. As some people like to point out repeatedly, the rules are abstract. If a player rolls all ones, that certainly can mean a weapon malfunction. It's up to you.

But that does come at a price, which is accuracy. The AK operates well under adverse conditions because it is intentionally built to very loose tolerances. Things don't tend to lock up very tightly, which, in contrast, is one of the reasons why AR15-based rifles tend to be more finnicky. They're also more accurate.

the advantage of greater accuracy in the field for an assault rifle is, IMO, not terribly important. It should function under a wide array of circumstances before it shot be able to hit someone's head at 500 meters. That's why I'm more partial to the AK than the AR15.

Wasn't aware of that. My mistake. Sodding limeys.

Wasn't aware of that either. I'd always been told that the magazine on all the No. 1-4 could be removed, but required some sort of unscrewing or otherwise cumbersome removal technique, and that this had only been intended for cleaning purposes. Again, my mistake. Sodding limeys.

While I understand this approach, I think it removes the slight amount of randomness and degree of uncertainty that should always be in the back of the operator's mind. Still, I don't think there's any elegant way of handling it with rules, which, unfortunately, doesn't leave much room for argument.

There's really no way around the fact that higher skill makes weapon malfunction less likely. You can claim that this is representative of better weapon maintenance or whatever, but that falls apart as soon as your Pistols 8 merc grabs a 60 year old, rusted saturday night special and fires it with ease, but when his completely untrained buddy grabs the merc's perfectly maintained assault rifle, the damn thing jams on the first shot. The probability curve follows user skill, not equipment reliability.

That's where the whole idea of GM fiat comes in. If in certain circumstances it makes more sense for the problem to be user error, then that is what the GM describes as the result of a Rule of Ones event. If, on the other hand, there could be a multitude of different reasons for the botch, then the GM has the ability to use his discretion when adjudicating it. I don't think there should be only one hard-and-fast rule concerning the Rule of Ones that states that the result is always user error.

Yeah, It was a Raygun-ism...i was just trying to make a point about machinepistols...I didn't think it looked that obvious. I was surprised that I hadn't heard of it before. Sneaky Raygun.

They come out pretty easily, though in practice they were only removed for cleaning purposes, as only one magazine was provided per rifle. Looking at some of my references, the whole of the Lee-designed rifles (Lee-Metford MkI to Lee-Enfield No.5) had detachable box magazines that were removable in the same fashion.

Lee's idea was to have a quick means of reloading. But I think when it got around to the cost of producing a lot of extra magazines, it didn't make much sense when you could make probably something like 200-250 disposable 5-round chargers (holding 1,000-1,250 rounds) out of much cheaper, more available metal at the same cost as one Lee-Enfield magazine. Detriment to the end-user is marginal.

I think the right GM is perfectly capable of providing that uncertainty without any more rules to bog the game down with the inclusion of one setence before the game begins. "Remember, guns jam." It really doesn't make any sense to me to have to make up rules for events that are so random. Everyone knows that firearms can jam. GMs who care about representing such events should have an idea of when it is more likely to happen. His players should be prepared for having to deal with that.

Rolling all ones does not necessarily have to mean that the weapon has malfunctioned. But it certainly can mean that.

SR3.38: "If ALL of the dice rolled for a test come up 1s, it means the character has made a disasterous mistake. The result may be humorous, embarassing or deadly. The gamemaster determines whatever tone is appropriate for the situation, the players, and the dramatic or humorous needs of the moment." It can mean weapon malfunction, user error, the second coming of Christ, etc... It doesn't have to mean anything at all if the GM finds that appropriate.

In other words, a good GM levels the playing field.

Yeah. My bad. It's fictional.

For future reference, all firearms with an FCG table at the bottom of the page are fictional.

Actually, none of it is cut and pasted. The image isn't edited at all. According to Stillman (the person I got the image from some years ago), it's a battery-powered, full-auto model gun that was made by Tokyo Marui for some futuristic movie (I don't remember the name). Things like muzzle flash and ejecting empties would be added digitally in post production. If you look closely, you can tell that the "UTL light attachment" is actually a battery compartment. The reason the barrel extension and magazine are there are to make the gun look bigger and more impressive. Same old deal.

I probably could do a better job editing an image these days.

Poseidon is a Japanese airsoft/model company that does exactly that. If you've never played with airsoft, don't knock it. It's a lot of fun and a hell of a lot cheaper than shooting real guns. Plus, you can get them full-auto without any government involvment.

I don't think it would really make much sense in a real gun market. People who are interested in anime guns usually aren't very interested in using real guns. You'll sell a lot more goofy-looking airsofts than you will goofy-looking real guns, mostly because airsofts are a lot cheaper to produce. If it's the look your interested in, it's not very important whether it really works or not.

That pretty much sums it up. What looks somewhat silly to you and I tends to look absolutely cool to people who aren't as gun-savvy as we tend to be.

I think if it were worth it to take a real gun, make it look anime, and sell it in the public market, it would have been done by now. Particularly here in the US, with the whole Hollywood culture and all that. As of now, the only companies I know of that do the sort of thing you're talking about (like Dlask and such) do it for movie productions because those productions can spend inordinate amounts of money on things that do nothing but look cool.

Honestly, I don't think anyone would make any significant amount of money doing it for the public, even here in the US. There are total custom gun companies out there that can fabricate pretty much anything you want, but they are very few. Even then, you're limited to the amount of modifying you can do and you'll still be paying out the nose for it.

Uh... is this a trick question? Of course. In the roles that it makes sense to have a ton of ammunition at your immediate disposal, high caps are obviously a pretty good idea. If they work just as well as other, lower capacity magazines, there's even less reason not to use them.

Wasn't a trick question, but perhaps poorly phrased. What I was actually thinking about is whether standard magazine sizes would be bigger -- would assault rifles average closer to a G11-ish 45 than to 30. And I figured myself that that would be case specific, what kind of use the gun is meant for etc. I think the 45+'s might be more common than they are now IRL, especially with SMGs and ARs firing caseless ammo, and this is reflected in the weapon lists for my games.

Right. Maybe it's just my mag but the feed sticks a little on the enfield when it's full up, I am working on that. Also the "spring" is incredibly simple. hopefully by 2063 they will get htis sorted out. I don't know about late models but as Raygun has already pointed out the earlier enfields had detacxhable magazines, however the 1908 and 1914 patterns of belts used by the british army stored ammo on stripper/charger clips, with no allowances for other box mags. I'm not as familiar with WW2 web systems, with the characteristick two loarge ammo pouches to say how it was stored there, but since stripper clips worked so well in '14-18. By 2062 they might have rifles that use clips, especially for internal mags, they make them easier for reload than feeding bullets one at a time. but most other weapons, just slapping in another magazine is a heck of a lot faster and easier.

Ah. That makes a bit more sense. Unfortunately, in order to take advantage of capacity issues in ways similar to the G11 (or P90), you're not just talking about newer, better magazines, you're talking about entirely different weapon layouts.

With the G11 and P90 layouts, you have the opportunity to store more ammunition because the magazine lies parallel with the barrel axis, astride the barrel, and the weapon is a bullpup layout. So you're getting close to the entire length of the firearm to store cartridges. Unfortunately, the cartridge themselves are stored perpendicular to the bore axis, which means you have to rotate them one way or another before you can feed them into the chamber. With the G11, the rifle's action performs that function. With the P90, the magazine performs that function. Both weapons have apparently run into trouble because of that feature.

In-line feeding is easier to accomplish, and conventional, compression spring magazines are very easy to manufacture and maintain. I think that if cartridges stay basically the same size, magazines will probably stay the same capacity. 30 rounds is enough for most uses, and there are advantages to having several relatively low capacity magazines rather than a couple of high capacity types.

Yeah. It's a leaf spring rather than a coil spring. Most bolt action rifles still use leaf springs for internal magazines. They can be compressed into a smaller area.

I sort of thought about that as well, and decided that technology has advanced sufficiently so that rotating the cartridge is not a major problem reliavility-wise. I have reminded the players that if their hi-cap caseless weapons (which do have a similar layout) should jam in the field, it is very likely that they can't do shit about it there. I figured that the system could be manufactured to be more reliable than they are now, but not neccessarily as simple as cased, in-line feeding weapons are.

The majority of SMGs and ARs firing cased ammunition still have 30-round in-line feeding box magazines as standard in my games.

Too early to think coherently (woke up at 15:40 this morning, yay): Is it feasible to make a stacked (double column?) in-line feeding box magazine with caseless ammunition? The only example of caseless ammunition that I've really looked at, the 4.7x33 for the G11, is almost rectangular in shape, but I suppose there's no particular reason to make all caseless rounds shaped like that (I'm guessing the 4.7x33 was ~rectangular because of the magazine layout).

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any other real limitation to the shape of a caseless cartridge than that the shape should not have sharp angles and the distance from the center-line of the cartridge to the outer edge should remain about the same ("radius") -- this is probably important for the gunpowder to ignite and expand in such a way as to provide maximal push for the bullet, and sharp angles are bad for other reasons as well. So a triangle, which would be the ultimate shape for a double-column box magazine, is probably out. Still, I can't see there being any unconquerable problems in making an in-line feeding box magazine that has at least as much capacity as current AR magazines have for a weapon that fires caseless ammunition.

(Damn my English sucks.)

Okay. I guess that settles that...

Right. The 5.7x26mm Voere UCC, the other caseless cartridge developed thusfar, was round, and was fed using a double-stacked magazine. IIRC, the 4.73x33mm was made rectangular in order to minimize the cartridge's overall size while maximizing powder volume.

I would agree with that. One corner of that chamber is probably going to fail relatively quickly.

Me either. You'd get a shallower magazine, too (like an M1 Carbine mag compared to an M16 mag), but they'll be comparable in length. You'd benefit the most from a helical feed-type.