Well, we would need to remember, that we are in the 2070's . .
What do the Gun-Shops have in them?
What can we do with the Nano-Forges?

Homemade explosives are not as easy to make as people like to think. Homemade high explosives and primary explosives certainly are not as safe to make or handle as portrayed in a lot of the bomb-making books.

Fertiliser and Gas.
Several cleaning-chemicals mixed together.
It's scary how easy it can be.
It won't be anywhere near as potent as military grade, but if you can make gallons of the stuff cheap and fast, you don't need potency.
Quantity over Quality always works in terms of sheer destructive behaviour.

Making AmFo is easy to make. And because it so insensitive is is pretty safe. However, because it is so insensitive you need high explosives and primary explosives to set it off in a controlled fashion.

And fulminate of mercury is NOT safe to make in your bathtub.

For rifling a pistol maybe but anything bigger and your talking large specialized equipment. Which in game terms for me translates into Facility level tools. Check out this article on what kind of equipment goes into a barrel shop.



The question of what gun-shops have and what Nano-forges/3-D printing can do is largely covered by the tool rules for me. You have Kits, Shops, and Facilities a forge bumps you up one category. I'm just interpreting what Jobs require what level of tooling based on what I know.

Yes it is the 2070's. But it's not our future. Remember it's not 60 years from today it's 80 years from 1990. It's a world where the internet didn't evolve as we know it. Information was balkanized not democratized. I doubt there was much of an open source movement. There was probably no DIY revolution. No Make magazine, No Instructables, No Arduino, or Adafruit. Hackers went underground and became Shadowrunners. They didn't go mainstream and become Makers.

So, basically, you have one Gun Shop and maybe a Nano-Forge.
You are now equipped equivalently to a Facility. Which is a Weapons-Factory.
Which has everything needed to make rifled barrels. Case closed.

While some are more complicated than others and some more dangerous (any contact explosives, fulminate of mercury, nitrogen triiodide, ect) Certain things should be easy enough to make. Worst case scenario you have thermite and napalm. Best case scenario? Bath tub destruction of C-4 and HMTD. Easy? No. Safe? Try again. Doable? Very. Worth risking to stop people from taking your livelihood? Maybe.

Depends on the home.

Sure all you need to cheaply manufacture weapons is a 150 grand piece of equipment. Plus then you have to figure out the threshold and interval. Say a threshold of 30 and an interval of weeks for a simple single action gun.

Hehe, the first point is better than the second one.

No, it really is easy for a skilled machinist to make the parts for a gun, particularly if he has an undamaged original to use as a model. The questions I would have is how many parts you need (each of which needs to be programed and set-up) and the various finishing processes. For example, machine shops don't do things like heat treating, nitroccarbonizing or anodizing. Without the finishing copies will tend to be not nearly as durable as the original.

Plus you might need to build other machine tools to do things like barrels. And I'd expect you'd want to buy springs and stuff like that.

It certainly might not be cost effective, in terms of the machinists time or the material + consumable cost, but they can make at least mediocre machine guns. Barrel quality (at least until they have worked on it a while) to likely to limit their long range effectiveness, but at close-medium range they will work fine.

Realistically maybe but I was specifically talking in-game.

Everything mentioned you is probably all facility level stuff in the game. Off course there are no in game rules for making guns but you can start with the modification rules and go from there. In-game examples of custom barrel work have a threshold of 16-20 all by themselves.) Most other facility level gun work also has pretty high thresholds. Any threshold over twelve is supposed to take weeks.

I'm not buying what you're selling. Given that nanoforges can produce pretty much anything given appropriate feed stock, and if 3d printers are any indication of time, we're looking at less then 1 hr to produce a complete AK, using blueprints, and all the skill required to push the green button labeled 'start'.

While your logic holds true there have been examples of where SR tech and RL tech aren't lining up, time wise. SR will have something that will just be in the developing stages in 50 years and that someone happens to hammer out now. 3D printing may be one of those things.

And I know that the notion of having to file the edges off of a nanoforge weapons have never come up I can't help but look at 3d printing now and wondering about rifling and such. Just a side thought.

Nano = Magic, hence everything. Provided the parts are small (I remember something bout 1 m² being the maximum) and you don't mind the equivalent of yellow dots on your new toy...

*starts humming*
what shall we do with the nano forges?
what shall we do with the nano forges?
what shall we do with the nano forges, early in the morning?
"let 'er rest, let me sleep, come ask again when the sun goes down again damn it"

Also, i hope you mean 1m³ and not 1m² o.O
And 1m³ is PLENTY for this discussion.
How many rifled barrels can you get into that 1m³ block, if every barrel is only 1m long and 2cm wide?
Enough for a smallish army i'd guess. same with receivers and other such parts. They are small enough.
And if you use the space efficently enough, you won't even lose much of the basic stock needed to feed.

Furthermore: as long as it works without blowing up, who cares if a gun looks like this?
http://craphound.com/images/hellokittyak47.jpg or has Polka-Dots?

Sure, it just means that you need the Large Desktop Forge. Anyway, some actual rules-fu:

There are two mods in Arsenal which essentially come down to making a new barrel, namely Barrel Extension and Heavy Barrel. Both cost as much as the original weapon and require a Facility, i.e. Large Desktop Forge (Arsenal p. 130, "a large desktop forge provides a shop with the capabilities of a facility").
Large Desktop Forge costs 150k ¥, Availability 16R.

Next comes the feedstock, the aforementioned page 130 tells us that:
The costs for feedstock are about the same as for the relevant parts that would be used in a modification without desktop forge support—however, they are acquired through different channels than the standard materials. This can prove more or less difficult, depending on the kind of job and the mechanic’s connections. For rules purposes, assume an Availability rating of 10R for desktop forge feedstock.

In other words, an AK-97 barrel already costs 600 ¥ and has Availability 10R, whereas buying a complete AK would cost the same and just require beating a 4R Availability. And it gets even better:
Another problem for shadowrunners is that the megacorp’s attempts to control the fl ow of desktop manufacturing have led to many laws requiring feedstock to be tagged with stealth RFID tags for identification purposes. As long as just a few parts of an item are made from feedstock, the chances of a critical mass of stealth tags being included in the final product so that it can be identified is fairly low. Making a full item entirely using a desktop forge, on the other hand, will almost invariably mean that it includes enough stealth tags to allow its owner to be tracked down. You can reduce the danger with a tag eraser (p. 320, SR4), but even this cannot give you 100% certainty, especially when it comes to electronic equipment, where the eraser can only be used to a limited extent. The likelihood that an item can be tracked is up to the gamemaster’s discretion.
Characters can obtain “clean” feedstock that does not contain RFID tags, but of course it is heavily restricted and ostensibly forbidden to all but the megacorps. As a general rule, assume an Availability of 20F and a cost modifier of two to five times the standard feedstock price.
(And that is what I meant by "yellow dots", not the actual look of the rifle)

Given that the aim of this thread was finding a way to cheaply equip a militia, I'd say nanotech fails.


Quite a few. But remember that if you put four images on a page, a printer will take ~4 times as long to print the page, and in 3D it is exactly the same. So manufacturing a batch of 10 barrels would be the same as making ten batches of one at a time. The thresholds for the two mods I took as reference are 16 and 20, so be prepared to spend some time watching metal particles melt...

It's not very likely that you are going to be able to 3d print rifle barrels. The stress is really high. Receivers, maybe.

Nano-forges are just magic, so whatever the GM wants them to do is what they can do. In theory, if you are actually controlling the material at an atomic level, you could have it turn out barrels that are optimally smooth, optimally rifled, fully heat-treated and stress relieved, and coated in some sort of diamond-like coating (because real diamonds don't like crazy hot propellent gasses).

Electronics don't like the temperatures in a hot rifle barrel. And solid metal is really a pretty good rf shield. Plus, if you do have a tag in your barrel you'll find it when the barrel fails due to the stress point produced by the inclusion.

They're nanoscale, presumably, but mostly that's what the rules say. But I like the way your points cancel each other out: you can't tag barrels… but you also can't *make* barrels.

No, it all depends on what a nano-forge is. If it's controlling molecular structure by precisely manipulating individual atoms you most certainly can. If it's a fancy 3d printer you can't without a bunch of other steps, if you can do it at all. Things like heat treatment, stress relieving, polishing, etc would be needed at minimum.

If you are supposed to be putting in macro-scale tags then I'd argue it's a 3d printer. And a rifle barrel with random inclusions is going to do a good simulation of a pipe bomb.

I can't shake the feeling that the rules for Nanoforges were just put in so PCs can't make (good) use of them. I mean, what the hell? They create a nifty way to do things, and then make it suck so hard noone will ever use it.

Duh. They're *not* supposed to use it. Just like all crafting rules.

It's nano-magic

There's a barrel for it; it was just getting chambered that day. It definitely takes a different set of machines, as you say, but the thing about a lot of these machines is that they're made out of the same kinds of stuff, and that you can build them with each other, if you know what I mean. Anyway, making a good borer is definitely something, say, you and I could do, and I don't think we're that great.


You can put a borer like that in the back of a pickup, definitely. It's a benchtop device that comes up off whatever you bolt it to, and if you take it down, it's not that much longer than what you bore with it. Still heavy, 'cause it's just giant lumps of steel stock, but you don't have to count the weight of the stands, just the rails and the boring head and the screw gears and whatnot.


Yep, those are the ones! Most of those are dedicated rifle borers, built into rifle factories, so they're not benchtop - and are much higher-quality as a result! - but that's exactly the kind of device you're looking at [minus, at the level we're discussing, the bench or stand]. If that's a facility to you - I'd call it a shop [as you do in 'barrel shop'], but whatever - then there you have it.

I'm not selling anything. It's the way desktop forges are handled in the game. In the game they don't require any less skill and they don't make the job go faster. In fact using a desktop forge means you can't rush the job. That's all as-per the rules on page 130 of Armory. They make up for not having a bunch of heavy bulky machines thats it. And speaking of big heavy machines.



Those aren't benches or stands. Those are large steel rails and they're integral to how those sorts of machine tools function. As are the concrete floors they are resting on. They are needed to keep the machines in alignment. You need a lot of mass to absorb the stress that comes from making repeated cuts in chrome-moly steel. These machines are the very definition of non-portable. To me that puts them well into the category of Facility as defined by the Shadowrun game. As in containing several large heavy immobile machines.

Remember, though, that the big heavy industrial barrel boring machines are that way at least partly because they're expected to turn out thousands or tens of thousands of barrels.

When you're talking a couple hundred at most, more or less hand made, you can get away with basically shop-level stuff that could fit in a garage.

No, the barrels will not be anywhere near as precise as professionally made stuff. Many will probably be slightly off-center. They'll probably jam a lot, and require more maintenance, and won't last all that long. But if you're making cheap weapons purely for occasional defensive use, as opposed to weapons you're expecting to fight a war with, it's fine.



-k

It would seem that way at first. But the difference between large multi ton machine tools and tiny bench top models isn't necessarily the quality of the finished product.

In my experience the big difference is time. Small tools are awkward to work on you need more set up time. You also have to babysit the work more and you often have to move stuff around a lot more. Doing stuff in multiple operations that could be done in a single pass on a larger tool. In game this would be nicely simulated by improper tool penalties.

Either way your talking a lot of time and effort. Not what you want if you need the weapons quickly and cheaply.

You could probably bore the first hole with some variant of a plasma or laser cutter, then smooth the hole by various methods.

But yeah, we always assumed the only way you could have portable "facility" was in a semi-trailer expandable van, and it had to be stationary do do anything.

The easiest way to go around that would be to go for shotguns (they're smoothbore, no worry about riffling) or get some of the absolute worst crappy broken guns you can get your hands on for a penny and use their barrels.

If you're doing it good, a shaddy gunrunner will be happy with thinking he screwed you and made some cash by getting rid of a crate of broken guns, while you'll have a nice pile of gun barrels at a reasonable price.

No idea of how trustworthy the tale is, but I've heard that the soon to be israeli did that shortly after WWII, using the barrel of one decade-old leftover enfield to get the barrel of two SMGs. With the most complex tool involved in crafting the gun being a dentist drill.

Well, my game was last night... So far their plan seems to be even more sneaky than I suspected.

I think they're going to play catch-and-release with gangers. They had a possession-spirit possess the RoadAd and turn her into a Celtic warrior of the school of old, then lined up on the gates awaiting an attack they knew was coming because the neotenous elf snuck into the ganger's turf, getting lucky on some Stealth rolls and the gangers being hilariously unlucky, and observed them preparing to send a group of initiates out to attack while they made a distraction at the front gate. (She was spotted on the way out and tased the guy down even before her big newfoundland could bring him down, stealing his rifle and shit.)

Long story short, the distraction is over in two exchanges of gunfire. They gave the rifle to the spirit possessing the RoadAd, while the farmers, all full of getting-ready-to-lay-down-some-smack, had ten guys with long guns line up beside the gate in two groups of five, shoulder-to-shoulder. Unfortunately, absolutely everybody derped their perception rolls (even the F6 spirit...) and the gangers got into hard cover, then demonstrated that someone's been teaching them a disturbing amount of common fucking sense by opening fire in a coordinated attack - one guy suppressed one line of farmers, the other suppressed another, the third suppressed the troll BowAd and the other two took wide bursts with the burst fire settings on their rifles at the troll. Meanwhile, the Spirit had made her roll to not be completely derped by this, then won initiative and got to open fire before the gangers did, spraying the three of them suppressing the wall with a long burst of her own suppressing fire.

Everybody derped their rolls to not be suppressed, the farmers and the troll went down wounded, the gangers took some stun (because they're wearing some armor,) and then my players went for it. Boy did they went for it. The mage levitated one of the burst fire guys and slammed him into the other so hard I said he Unleashed the Force on the assholes, then the other mage sealed them in ice. The spirit suppressed the three behind the rock again (by this time they had the good sense to drop down for total cover,) while the other guys shot their way out of the ice dome. Then they all broke cover at once, throwing down their guns and legging it.

I figured that would be the end of it. No. They had the Spirit use Movement to slow one of them to a crawl and the blaster-mage used Influence to make them all turn around - long enough for the spirit to slow them all to molasses and the utilimage to drop another ice dome, then the corralled them all up and grabbed them for interrogation.

So now they've acquired six perfectly serviceable - and in surprisingly good condition - Colt M23 rifles with bayonets for the low, low price of free. And since the Jungles won't let these guys be executed, they're going to yell at them and toss them out again, without any of their gear.

Which means they'll be back with more weapons to steal next time. And my players are making plans to ambush the guys who ambush the next shipment and steal their guns, too.

I can't fault their logic. Acquiring stuff by five-fingered discount is always an option.

I had thought about that, too. There's plenty of guns on the other side, they just have to get them. However, if you DO play the gangers smartly, they won't just send a raiding party next time, they should do an all-out assault. Because anything else would be bloody stupid. (In your shoes I would already dread the roll-fest. I did a large-scale attack once in SR3 with at least 20 attackers, and SR3 is pretty quick compared to SR4. It still took for fricken-ever.)

So ideally your players now have to ambush scouts or do their own little raid on the gangers to steal some more guns.

No, they're integral to those specific machines. I hear what you're saying, but, seriously, boring machines do not require benches - "large steel rails" if you'd like to call them that - that size in order to produce the kinds of weapons we're talking about. As I mentioned before, for a professional-quality gun factory ["facility"], yes, by all means they're going to be integral, but those machines will need to produce thousands or millions of parts [with head exchanges, of course!], not dozens or hundreds. The boring machines on the floor at Winchester aren't the boring machines you'd use to make your own rifle; for that, you can indeed use what I would call a "shop," but again, that last bit's a game judgment you'd have to make at your own table; I don't see anything wrong with requiring a "facility" to produce firearms!


Agreed: the difference is huge, particularly in terms of tool passes; like the difference between trying to produce a wooden pulley block with a pole lathe, versus using a 28-piece block factory. Shadowrun's rules don't reflect it well, but this is true in most cases: I could definitely take my entire car apart to its components and re-assemble it with the tools in my garage, but the difference in time it would take if I drove it into a dealership's service department would be extreme. You need a lot of extra dice to reflect this.

And on a long timeline, they could simply maintain whatever status quo they wanted, by allowing enough equipment to reach the gangers that they can hold off their opponents [and not be replaced by someone worse] but not enough that they have the firearms to raid Farmville. And if the balance starts looking bad, the farmers can always sell the gangers back some of those weapons.

Hey, someone should try this on an international level or something. Sounds like a solid long-term plan to me.

The thing is, though, they didn't let any of the guys that saw the front gate run away. The only intel the gang is going to get about what went down is that the newbies and the driver of the pickup (who was out of the engagement area) heard a brief exchange of gunfire, and then zilch.

I'm thinking the gangers will react one of two ways. The first way is that they'll assume their members were geeked, in which case the six brothers will exact retribution by creeping up in the middle of the night, loading a grenade into their M22A2 rifles' underbarrel grenade launchers, shelling the Jungles once and then scarpering.

The far more sane approach is that the gang's troll (ex-UCAS Army Scout and the guy who's actually teaching them some shit) will tell them all to hold it the fuck on and postpone further raids while he scouts the Jungles.

[e]That said, I think I may need to ratchet the gang up a notch. Maybe they need to acquire some wiz support, since the players have so much magic and liberally abuse minds and bodies with it.

I'm not talking about boring machines. I'm talking about rifling machines. And rifling machines absolutely do require benches or rails as I believe they are called when your talking about the super structure of rifling machine's.

Boring as a process can be done on any number of machines. Lathes, mills, drill presses all pretty standard stuff.Those tools work essentially the same way a powerful motor rapidly spins either the tool or the work while the machine slowly moves the tool through its path.

Rifling as a process works quite differently and can't usually be done on any of those standard machines. When cutting or buttoning rifling a powerful mechanical action forces the tool through the barrel while the machine slowly rotates the tool. (or possibly the barrel) Either way instead of rotating thousands of times the it maybe rotates once or twice.

The mechanical stresses are therefor completely different. When the spinning of the tool does most of the work the stress is mostly felt as torque along the axle and bearings of the tool. You have to hold the tool and work securely, but the slides or rails shouldn't feel undue stress. Unless of course you get your feeds and speeds wrong and force the tool. That how table top versions of machine tools can get away with very little in the way of superstructure. But for rifling the whole goal is to force the tool, so all the tourqe is felt in the rails. So you need a very hefty super structure to support the process.

The cutting blade sure, but my forge is not big enough for the rest


Sure that works, if you are willing the recalibrate the whole machine once reassembled. An extremely tedious process, even with AR, reference items, and the machinery required to move a few hundred kilos precise to the millimeter.

Maybe I'm not being clear. A rifling machine is a type of boring machine. [Or can be, at any rate; I'm sure there are other ways to rifle a barrel that I don't know about!] They do, indeed, require benches or rails, as I've mentioned previously, but the rails are integral to the tool, and the tool can be built in such a way as to be removed from its bench, where it will then be attached to another bench before being used to do any work.


And this can be done on a standard railed boring machine, with the proper head and the proper tooling. There's nothing inherent about the rifling process that makes it magically unable to be done with a standard metal shop and standard shop tools, if you're tooled for it.


Not that hefty, no. They used to make rifling benches out of wood. While I'm sure you get a better cut out of factory machines bolted to a shop floor, portable rifling machines exist, and work, and have existed and worked for some hundreds of years now. Normally I'm kind of equivocal about these sorts of things, because there's always a chance I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but I've seen these things, so I know for certain they exist.

The hardest part about building tools from scratch is building the tools to build your tools.


Not that tedious, no; not that much needs to be taken apart, and not that much changes when you put it back together. The machine's self-guiding, so it doesn't change shape and then make you wobbly chair legs: it's just a bunch of rails and gears and screws and lube.

Thanks for the updates - I really wanted to hear what happened. Did your group have fun with it? Did you/they gloss over the arming and training the farmers?

They haven't gotten a chance yet. They took the job, spent the first morning surveying the Jungles, and decided that the first and most important thing to do was get the earthmovers running. They located the shit they needed at an industrial salvage yard on the edge of the part of town where the cops go, went and got it in their armored pick'em-up truck, talked their way past Knight Errant with an argument even I couldn't really fault when they drove an Obviously Armored 20 vehicle into town (well you see, officer, I train exotic security animals, and if a barghest or a hellhound gets ornery in the back of the truck, I want a lot of heavy metal between me and him,) got the shit and went back to start fixing things.

Then Angelrat (the face) decides she's going to prove she's wearing the grown-up pants (even though she totally shops in the kid sizes,) and pulls a stealth job into the enemy turf, where I improvise and they see shit's about to go down.

I have to completely disagree a rifling machine is not a boring machine. Machined rifling is added to an existing hole. It has to be milled (cutting method) or cold forged (button method) on the inside of a long precision cut bore. The rotating tool head of standard boring machine cannot produce the geometry needed for rifling.

It's not magic it mechanical engineering. There is no magic in why you can't use a drill press as a milling machine. You'll blow out the bearings on the press because nobody built it to handle lateral forces on it's cutting tools. They look the same but they are not designed for the same job.

A rifle's helix makes one turn per twelve inches. That means the tool head makes one turn every foot no more no less. What is the lowest rpm on a standard boring machine. At 30 rpm you'd have to be pushing through that barrel at 30 feet per minute. 10 rpm ten feet per minute. Even if your tool head can rotate slow enough to accomplish the job your talking precision rotational control. Not to mention re-indexing your tool for each cutting pass. Most machine tools can do precision control along the x,y and/or z axis I haven't seen many that have high tolerance control on the rotation of a cutting bit.

Can you tool up for something like that sure. Make a sinbar to control rotation. Don't turn on the main motor, run your tool head in neutral, and use your transverse motors to provide your cutting force. If your careful you won't even burn out the motors or permanently screw up your bearings applying force where it's not designed to handle it. But it's finicky pain in the but work.

I've seen wooden rifling machines to, mostly for black powder guns. For hand forged barrels awesome. Not the sort of things I'd want to use for cutting into 4140 steel. I know that in modern times building a reliable rifling machine has historically been the stumbling block in making partisan weapons. A good machinist can always tool up something to get the job done as long as he has basic machine tools. But thats slow expensive artisan level work. Not cheap and easy make do type stuff.

Thing is, we're not talking about turning out high quality barrels for consumer use.

We're talking about producing crap cheap barrels that will last maybe a coupla dozen firefights.

They don't have to be that accurate. They don't have to be durable. They don't have to be at all pretty.

They just have to not rupture when you shoot through them.




-k

I, personally, have made a reliable, quite sturdy semiauto pistol in about 3 hours using drill press, metal bandsaw, vice, tin snips, and a hammer. That's built from the ground up; reciever, bolt, magazine, springs, trigger group, and barrel. Given I was lazy I could have easily halved that by simply buy a whole pile of old barrels in the appropriate caliber.

Note that time would have been halved had I made it full auto. Firearms can be remarkably simple when you get down to it.

Think about it for a second.

You have the trigger group, which for a full-auto open bolt can literally be two pieces of steel and a spring. The bolt? Steel bar with a nub brazed on to act as the firing pin. Reciever? A pipe with a few holes in it for trigger group, magazine, and the bolt handle, a spring inside to drive the bolt forward. Magazine? Square tubing of appropriate length, cut so that you may have feed lips. Insert a piece of hammered sheet metal as the follower, and a spring as the magspring. A few pieces of sheet steel, and a spring gives you the mag well. Barrel? Also easy. Appropriately sized 4140 seamless steel pipe, or you can take a full length barrel of appropriate caliber and cut it into multiple shorter barrels(Like was done for the PPSh with Mosin-Nagant barrels).

Weld/rivet the correct pieces in the correct spots. Congratulations, you now have a simple blowback SMG or machine pistol firing full auto only.





Best part? Under $30 in parts per weapon. Each magazine costs cents. Get even the most basic assembly line up and going, you could probably pump out two or three an hour. No, they are not the most accurate. Yes, I am being less than specific so nobody here gets in trouble with any law-enforcement.


Sidenote: I work with a few friends desiging and making firearms. Our V1 .22LR semi-auto closed bolt version of the above pistol, with unrifled barrel was reasonably accurate to about 25 meters or 75 feet. The V2 carbine model, firing 7.62x25 Tokarev, using rifled barrels, with it's stock, was reasonably accurate(90% of shots from bench in a 25cm diameter circle) was effective out to about 150 meters, or around 450 feet! Penetration tests were also excelent with the V2 model, with Bulgarian surplus penetrating our sheet steel targets out to 60 meters.

Sidenote 2: We're still waiting on the appropriate licensing to test out the V3 select-fire version, firing our own specialized ammunition. The Type 2V1 design is also in progress, a bullpup carbine firing the same ammunition.

Yeah, I think that's probably what I meant by, "the proper head and the proper tooling." You wouldn't just slap a barrel in some random borer and be all like, "What? Why isn't this working?" You'd definitely need to retool, like I've said.


Well, to be honest, I hadn't been imagining using a powered rifling machine, anyway, but that's beside the point: re-gear your borer if it won't operate slowly enough.


All depends on the quality you're expecting to get. I think you can get "make do" quality barrels out of a good machinist; if you think the only kind of barrel rifling a good machinist can product is artisan-level, then we don't disagree that it's possible, we only agree about the resulting quality of the barrel. And I think we actually agree on that, too: a good machinist can always tool up something to rifle barrels as long as he has basic machine tools, but they're going to be comparatively shoddy.

Well due to the fact that I thought it would be entirely possible to build firearms in either a portable shop, or using fairly primitive machines, I decided to go looking for anyone who might have done it recently in a documented fashion, ignoring any historical precedent. My search fu is not that good but one of the first things to come up is this little gem http://www.scribd.com/doc/24050191/Firearm...hine-Supplement. A portable (two men can carry it) low shop footprint rifling machine. It takes up roughly 2'x8' of floor space. Also lets not forget that just about all of these tools use a circulating tank of oil to aid in the cutting procedures so these enormous degrees of torque trying to twist the foundations of buildings into so much gravel simply don't exist.

I see no problem with your players setting up shop and producing firearms, if they have the skill, the desire, and the ability to build/steal/obtain the machinery.

That's exactly the sort of machine I was talking about; nice find! A fascinating read. Interestingly, Webb doesn't even bolt his down to the stand: the torque is taken up completely by the frame of the machine itself.

You could rifle your barrels the old-fashioned way.

Shown is probably a cut-rifling rig, rather than the button or hammer rifling techniques developed during WW2. More or less, they bore a hole first, then use a cutting tool to gouge out the rifling grooves one at a time. Button and hammer rifling came later, which drags or hammers a vaguely gear-shaped chunk of steel through the barrel to "press" the grooves into the inner surface, rather than cutting material away.

Note that cut rifling requires FAR less pressure and heavy machinery, but takes a lot longer to do.


-k

Agreed but do you understand that a standard boring machine cuts by rotating and a rifling machine cuts by pushing? If you didn't rotate the tool on a rifling machine as you advanced it down the barrel you'd should still easily cut a long straight channel. Do that with a mill, a press or most dedicated borers and you'd probably break the cutting tool if not worse. Even if nothing broke your cut wouldn't likely be straight or smooth. And your putting a lot more back-force on your tool carriage then it was designed handle. Think of it like trying to push a snowblower through snow without the auger running.



Yes we do seem to agree. When I wrote artisan level I didn't mean to infer high quality.I meant it as apposed to production level work. Finicky cut by cut type stuff.



That was a good read. But after reading it I still hold that a rifling machine is a facility level of equipment. As are most machine tools with any size to them. I interpret the game rules a shop is the amount of total tooling you can fit in a reasonable sized residential room, back of a step van, or a one car garage with the car parked in it. Plus you have to stock all the common spare parts and you still have room to work. It's portable not just as individual parts but as a whole. That means almost any real world "machine shop" is actually a facility.

A 500 lb machine that takes up 16 square feet of workspace just isn't going to work when you figure out all the other tools an armorer shop is going to need. A drill press, a work bench, hand tools, bench grinder, sewing machine (same skill for making body armor right) lathe and small mill probably to. In the sixth world you'll need all the basic electronics tools for putting in smartlinks, sensors and the like as well. (an those spare parts)

Also Lubrication is assumed. But lubrication doesn't eliminate torque. If there wasn't any torque created the cutting tools would not bite into the metal. Lubrication increases tool life and helps eliminate chatter giving you smoother finishes. The superstructure of the machine is deals with the torque (not the floor). It is of course only designed to deal with the forces the tools is intended to handle. You shouldn't try to mill with a drill press or cut perpendicular to the rotation on a lathe.

The concrete floor that large machine tools are usually mounted on is there for isolating the vibration between machines. And of course for holding them up. Cause Bridgeports aren't light.

There's a lot of reading here so im not sure if anybodys mentioned this and it would be a run in and of itself but have you looked into nanoforges in war! they mention having the forges on the battlefield to make new weapons and ammo so they must be semi portable at least