Wednesday - January 30, 2013

Looking To The Future, Darkly

Short of starting a civil war ( a post for another day ), what will you do when the next generation of gun control laws get passed?

What will you do for a rifle that obeys the law, when

• All weapons are limited to a 10 round magazine
• but detachable magazines are outlawed
• All rifles must have barrels longer than 17”, thus outlawing the 16” and 16.5” ones popular right now.
• All rifles must have an overall length greater than 37”, thus outlawing today’s minimum length guns
• All semi-automatic rifles are banned
• No civilian firearm can be chambered for any present or past military cartridge (this law is not uncommon in the world)

Yeah, I think thoughts like that. If you think we’re in dark days now, just wait another 3 years. It’s going to get worse.

But should those rules come to pass, I’ve already figured out a solution. Which in itself shows you just how pointless gun control is: not matter what kind of gun I am allowed, I will figure out a way to load and fire it quickly.

Here’s a modernized version of a 120 year design, a beefed up and modified version of a Taurus Thunderbolt rifle, which itself is a clone of the 1877 Colt Lightning rifle.

Colt came out with the Lightning pump action rifle way back in the day to compete against Henry and Winchester, who had the lever gun market locked up. The pump stroke is only 2”, so this action cycles very quickly. Internally it isn’t much different from a lever gun. In trained hands a Lightning can fire 10 shots in less than 2.5 seconds.

OK, now let’s modernize it. The medium size receiver Colt was never chambered for anything more potent than the black powder driven .45 Colt. That’s just about the lowest pressure cartridge still on the market. So let’s amp it up somewhat. Plus, in this plan for the future exercise, all military cartridges from anywhere, past and present, have been banned. So we can’t use the .45 Colt.

There is a newer generation of extreme modern pistol cartridges that run at full modern rifle pressures. The .454 Casull, the .460 Linebaugh, etc. Great for hunting bears at 200 yards, but way too much gun for using in the home. And home defense is half of what this daydream rifle is about. So let’s meet halfway between the .45 Colt, and the .454 Casull. Why not? After all the Casull almost is a .45 Colt; it just uses a stronger and slightly longer version of the Colt’s case, then runs it at 4 times as much pressure. So ... Drew whispers to his crack team of product liability lawyers ... we’ll make our own cartridge. It will be too long to fit in .45 Colts, and will operate at up to standard magnum pressure: 35,000psi. We’ll beef up the Taurus so that it can safely eat this ammo even at 43,000psi, and we’ll proof test the rifles at 53,000. That’s a full 50% more than the ammo spec calls for ... and since we’re the ones also selling the ammo, we’ll try to keep the home defense product line well below that pressure level. Less BOOM that way. And even though the cartridge we’re designing is a magnum version of the old .45 Colt, we won’t use the “m word” anywhere. Just in case of twitchy DAs. No, we;ll look at things from the other end of the table, and call it the .451 CSR. No, not “Cane Spirit Rothschild”, that delightful Caribbean libation. “Colt Short Rifle”. And that turns out to be just the kind of gun we’re building.

We’ll lop almost 9” off of the Taurus design’s barrel, going with a 17.25” tube, which makes the government happy. If we have to we can beef up the barrel, but it probably won’t be necessary. We’ll cut down the stock too, so that the gun is 37.25” long even when the butt plate is removed. And we’ll sell the gun with a 1.25” recoil pad installed. So it will be 38.5”, and the government will be even happier. While we’re at it, we put a handguard/palmswell on the pump’s forend. And we put a classic pistol grip stock (the legal kind) on the back. Both of these make holding the rifle easier, but they both reduce perceived recoil.

Now for the sneaky part. We’re going to tighten up the rifling in the barrel. Instead of spinning the bullet at a leisurely 1 turn in 38” like the .357, or a relaxed but still sedate 1 turn in 16” like the .45 Colt, ours will spin the bullets just as fast as modern high powered rifles. 1 turn in 9” should be fine. What’s the point of this? SF/M. Surface feet per minute.

Huh? Imagine you are a microscopic bacterium. (try seeing yourself from Hillary’s point of view) Imagine that you are clinging tightly to the side of a bullet that gets fired from a gun. Amazingly, that bullet manages to fly through the air for a full 60 seconds before it lands. How far have you traveled? That’s SF/M. SF/M=PI*d*RPM/12, but we don’t have RPM. We have muzzle velocity and we have rifling twist (quick side note: while the forward velocity of a flying bullet decreases rapidly, the spin imparted on it when fired never decreases), so we derive (and bypass) RPM with SF/M = PI*d*MV*60/twist.

Ok, fine, Mr. Formula, but who cares? Well, you the prospective gun owner ought to. The faster you can spin a bullet, the more stable it will remain when something interrupts it. Said another way, bullets that spin faster penetrate in a straighter line. Faster spin also causes stronger deformation on contact (mushrooming). We’re building a moderately powered rifle, fully expecting that it be used indoors for home defense. So let’s try to avoid shooting through the bad guy and the wall behind him into Mrs. Tucker’s house next door. She gets so cranky when that happens!

There is a special line of heavy, strong bullets on the market for today’s monster pistol cartridges. We’re not going to use them for HD. We’re going to use medium weight hollpoints that were designed to do their job at 900fps. And then we’re going to fire them at 2000fps and spin them at nearly twice the rate. That gives us a SF/M number far above what the bullets were designed for. That means they will hit , mushroom, and practically explode. Wounds will be very shallow, only 4-6” deep, but the impact craters will be immense. You betcha: we’re blowing the bad guys up as well as blowing them away.

Sure, this is all just a daydream on my part, but the cartridge design will work as I said, the rifle can be built as I said, and little lightly built hollow point pistol bullets work as I described when you shoot them too fast and too spinny. They will fly to pieces.

On the other end of things, if you load this cartridge down with 300grain bullets, you can expect about 1870-1950 fps. That makes the .451 CSR considerably better as a short range big game hunting cartridge, and nearly the equal of a .45-70 using standard factory 300 grain bullets. Which is plenty enough to hunt deer, elk, or bears out to 150 to 200 yards.

Lastly, I’d build in a tube feeder for the magazine. something either like Henry’s loading button and spring slide lock, or a tube within a tube like Remington used on it’s rimfire rifles back in the 60s. You can reload the whole tubular magazine in just over a second. Make up a little cylinder thingy, kind of like a pepper grinder that holds 6 columns of 5 rounds each; a whole in the underside fits over the end of the magazine tube. Spin the top to line up a cylinder full of cartridges, and in they go. Do it twice - press, twist click, twist click, release - and you’ve got a full magazine. Carry 20-30 rounds on your hip in a holster the size of a medium flashlight. Easy design. You could even make a slapper button on the top to get them all moving. Or a coil spring and plunger per cylinder.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/30/2013 at 01:20 PM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control •  
• Comments (14) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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