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Gunsmith Katsumi - Akitsukuni Arms Design Quest

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Character Sheet
  • Informational
    • Tachibana Katsumi

    Stress: 5/10

    Accomplishments
    Mechanical Engineering degree
    Got a job in your field
    Type 37 Special Purpose Rifle
    Type 38 Self-Loading Pistol

    Friends
    Maeda Rumi: Your roommate.
    Sanders Clara Rose: A colleague who works for Naylor, Sons & Daughters.

    Coworkers
    Mr. Watanabe: Your superior.
    Mr. Akutagawa: The boss of the company.

    Workshop 3
    Ms. Ikeda Nioh: Chemist. She also seems to be Mr Watanabe's personal secretary, but you're not sure if that's an official position.
    Mr. Yakade Yasuo: Physicist, specialized in ballistics. A living, breathing Technical Appendix C.
    Mx. Kusonoki Mayumi: Has a degree in materials science. Gets a look on their face when they say they know more about wood than anyone.
    Mr. Shiragiku Hideyoshi: Metalworker. Having met him, you've learned why metalworking is a craft and the meaning of the phrase "thinks himself heaven's gift to women".
    Mr. Kashiwa Ichiro: An apprentice gunsmith with a background in carpentry and actually using guns on people.

    Technologies
    Rifles (Familiar)
    Shotguns (Familiar)
    Pistols (Familiar)

    Rotate-and-pull bolts (Practical)
    Straight-pull bolts (Practical)
    Aperture sights (Practical)
    Stripper clips (Practical)
    Lever-delayed blowback operation (Practical)
    Double-stack magazines (Practical)
    Single-action handguns (Practical)
    En bloc clips (Conceptual)
    Simple blowback operation (Conceptual)
    Short recoil operation (Conceptual)
    Toggle-delayed blowback operation (Conceptual)
    Blow forward operation (Conceptual)
    Simple blowback operation (Conceptual)
    Double-action pistols (Conceptual)
    Automatic revolvers (Conceptual)
     
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  • Informational
    • [X] Captain Maruyama, a Navy Officer from the Naval Small Arms Centre who has been made available in the same way.

    [X] Write In: Buy an automatic revolver from Naylor's Lydia to get an idea of how the action works.
    Eukie said:
    If you can find something that's period appropriate and either useful or entertainingly wacky, put it in!
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    So far the requirements sound like we just need an eight-shot rechamber of the Webley-Fosbery Revolver.. It's in-period, and it even has a safety!

    Any chance we could get one?
     
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    [X] Captain Arimoto, an Army Officer who specialises in logistics and has been made available to us by the Army again.
     
    [x] Captain Maruyama, a Navy Officer from the Naval Small Arms Centre who has been made available in the same way.
    [x] You meet a stevadore from the northern parts of Europa, and his most curious pistol.

    Time to pick something odd, but not perculiar.
     
    Rat King said:
    The corporal probably won't have a whole lot of experience with pistols; the Air Observer might, depending on if he survived from the start of the war when people were literally shooting pistols at one another.
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    We're not going to stiff you with someone who has never used a pistol, don't worry.

    Jonen C said:
    Am I correct in presuming that "Period appropriate" would place a Colt m1911 as absolute cutting edge state of the art in availability right now, so something equivalent to a Browning HP would presumably be out of bounds.
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    The Browning P-35 is from 1935. You are in 1912, although you personally think you're in 2538. There's nothing fundamentally impossible about it but designing one will not be easy.

    samdamandias said:
    Any chance we could get [A Webley-Fosbery]?
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    Sure you can, you saw a display of Automatic Revolvers being offered by Naylors Lydia at the trials. Kusunoki and Kashiwa can pick one up from them and you can take it apart and work out how it functions.
     


    Write-In: 8-round magazine requirement? How about 50!

    Also fun: Nothing in the RFP is about stopping power or lethality. "Cartridge should be in wide international service" and nothing else. Load it up with some obscenely hot .22 round, give it a trigger and action that lets you fire as fast as you can pull the trigger, and have people octuple-tap everything. :D Heck, take off the semiauto disconnector thingy and give them a one-handed SMG, if that's possible!
     
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    Okay, I think we could probably try to go for a sort of "modular" design. Essentially, we should start with a basic bitch pistol as a base platform, but then add some kind of mounting system for easy "conversion" into a pistol carbine.
     
    Write-In: Build a pistol that can be operated completely one-handed. Send your person into the trials with a gun in one hand and a sword in the other. Brag about the utility in spec-ops and boarding situations.


    Ramble said:
    Okay, I think we could probably try to go for a sort of "modular" design. Essentially, we should start with a basic bitch pistol as a base platform, but then add some kind of mounting system for easy "conversion" into a pistol carbine.
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    Write-in: Make a revolver with swappable barrels, configurable springs, and something fancy in the cylinder so it can fire literally any cartridge you pick up off the ground.
     
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    What are we to make of Mr. Watanabe's "requirements list"? The one that goes:
    FrangibleCover said:
    Automatic type, revolvers old-hat now
    Clark-style slide
    Similar to 1904 Pocket Hammerless?
    Large magazine (Wilde 1907-type?)
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    Will we be facing pushback within our own company if we don't have these items? Will one of the other workshops be submitting an alternative design?
     
    [X] Captain Maruyama, a Navy Officer from the Naval Small Arms Centre who has been made available in the same way.
     
    ohh a good pistol round we could use is what ever the quest equivalent of .38 special is. It's a popular round and an overall good round for when it was designed and to this day.

    [X] Lieutenant Koda Eijiro, an Army Air Observer who I met at a party.
     
    [X] Handa Ken, an Army Corporal of my acquaintance, about his experiences.

    I'd like to know if my guesses about hand to hand features are reasonable, and also some discussion of practical use of pistols one handed. Maybe if we're real lucky an idea of pistol stocks that suck and pistols stocks that don't suck.

    Sir_Travelsalot said:
    EDIT: Also, the requirement to have specific features to be useful in hand to hand is a bit puzzling.
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    I would expect this to give preference to guns that can't be put out of battery with pressure on the muzzle, since that functionality would make contact shots much easier to pull off. So automatic revolvers and slide-actuated guns with a fully mobile slide might well get dinged, since our hypothetical hand to hand combatant (be they a boarder or a trench raider) would find a greater chance of the wrong person dying if they stuff their gun in their opponent and pull the trigger till one of them stops moving.

    Jonen C said:
    Am I correct in presuming that "Period appropriate" would place a Colt m1911 as absolute cutting edge state of the art in availability right now, so something equivalent to a Browning HP would presumably be out of bounds.
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    The boss mentioned the 1904 Pocket Hammerless, I'm not sure how much else has entered the mainstream that we could get our hands on.



    Our pistol must use a widespread international round, cost less than 200 yen, weigh less than 1 kg, and hold 8 rounds.

    I can't help but think this set of specifications, other than the 8 round mark, is specifying a pistol, and providing exceedingly little constraint past that. A revolver would likely not be ideal with 8 rounds, but I'd expect it's doable especially if you don't mind a comparatively narrow round. A kg and 200 yen is a lot of leeway. Similarly, it must use a pistol round in a category which contains a great many pistol rounds. This does mean we might want to think hard about interchangeable box magazines if we've got room for that much overall system cost.


    For requirements we should hit, a safety preventing accidental firing while loaded is an exceptionally good idea, and presumably includes at least some degree of drop safety as well as a manual trigger/hammer lock.

    Operating in humid and dusty environments but not trapping seawater might be an interesting pair of requirements because dust covers and draining holes are somewhat mutually exclusive.

    One handed and ambi operation and stock fitment aren't too dreadful on the face of them, but think about the implications for the full manual of arms for a semi-auto. Presumably reloading a revolver is entirely off the table, and using a semi is going to be interesting if you get into the full manual of arms and have to worry about racking a slide without some sort of protrusion to hook on one's lower body.

    Sights for 14m, adjustable from 25-150 is unfortunate, potentially a bit bulky. Oh well, we've got per unit budget for it.

    Features necessary to make it useful in hand to hand, I am going to guess, means the ability to withstand some degree of force on the muzzle without unlocking, be it from an actual locking system, fixed barrel, or what have you.
     
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    Something I find fun about this quest is that we're hit with a more outrageous face of the procurement politics than Matsura Asuka has been.
    Sure, they've had to deal with getting stiffed on the competition and stonewalled by the navy due to politics, but there's something delightfully amusing (and disturbing) about procurement politics leading to an order being sent out for just twice as many of the nominally standard service rifle (a literally unusable piece of shit made by the favorites to win the design contest) as the 'special purpose rifle' (produced by a less politically influential company, but actually a good fucking weapon).

    The Kobayashi rifles are going to sit unused in a storehouse forever.
     
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    [X] Captain Maruyama, a Navy Officer from the Naval Small Arms Centre who has been made available in the same way.
    Guy who actually works with small arms yes please.
     
    FrangibleCover said:
    The Browning P-35 is from 1935. You are in 1912, although you personally think you're in 2538. There's nothing fundamentally impossible about it but designing one will not be easy
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    IOW, Hi Power isn't even on the drawing board yet (but might be soon).

    Vebyast said:


    Write-In: 8-round magazine requirement? How about 50!

    Also fun: Nothing in the RFP is about stopping power or lethality. "Cartridge should be in wide international service" and nothing else. Load it up with some obscenely hot .22 round, give it a trigger and action that lets you fire as fast as you can pull the trigger, and have people octuple-tap everything. :D Heck, take off the semiauto disconnector thingy and give them a one-handed SMG, if that's possible!
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    ... kind of wanna breed that with a Broomhandle Mauser just for the sake of having something that will be absolutely guaranteed to be monstrous when converted to schnellfeuer.

    But from a serious perspective, the long grip probably won't work for the Akitsukuni market, so either put the magazines forward of the trigger like on a Mauser (which makes for a ungainly big gun for such a comparatively puny round) or stick to a single one (25 rounds is plenty).
     
    Jonen C said:
    But from a serious perspective, the long grip probably won't work for the Akitsukuni market, so either put the magazines forward of the trigger like on a Mauser (which makes for a ungainly big gun for such a comparatively puny round) or stick to a single one (25 rounds is plenty).
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    How about just giving it a huge long magazine sticking out the bottom of the handle? :p

    Alternatively, invent the quad-stack magazine. :V

    edit:
    xthetenth said:
    I would expect this to give preference to guns that can't be put out of battery with pressure on the muzzle, since that functionality would make contact shots much easier to pull off. So automatic revolvers and slide-actuated guns with a fully mobile slide might well get dinged, since our hypothetical hand to hand combatant (be they a boarder or a trench raider) would find a greater chance of the wrong person dying if they stuff their gun in their opponent and pull the trigger till one of them stops moving.
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    You make far too much sense. I vote that we interpret it as a request for a pistol with a bayonet mounted.

    ...

    Write-in: Make it a gunsword.
     
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    Vebyast said:
    How about just giving it a huge long magazine sticking out the bottom of the handle? :p

    Alternatively, invent the quad-stack magazine. :V
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    Respectively, that would make it a pain to holster and get caught on everything at waist height, and I don't know that hands big enough to wrap around a grip containing something like that even exist.
     
    [X] Handa Ken, an Army Corporal of my acquaintance, about his experiences.

    Might give us an idea of what you actually need in order for a pistol to be good in hand-to-hand, which is a vague requirement.
     
    xthetenth said:
    For requirements we should hit, a safety preventing accidental firing while loaded is an exceptionally good idea, and presumably includes at least some degree of drop safety as well as a manual trigger/hammer lock.

    Operating in humid and dusty environments but not trapping seawater might be an interesting pair of requirements because dust covers and draining holes are somewhat mutually exclusive.

    One handed and ambi operation and stock fitment aren't too dreadful on the face of them, but think about the implications for the full manual of arms for a semi-auto. Presumably reloading a revolver is entirely off the table, and using a semi is going to be interesting if you get into the full manual of arms and have to worry about racking a slide without some sort of protrusion to hook on one's lower body.

    Sights for 14m, adjustable from 25-150 is odd, potentially a bit bulky. Oh well, we've got per unit budget for it.

    Features necessary to make it useful in hand to hand, I am going to guess, means the ability to withstand some degree of force on the muzzle without unlocking, be it from an actual locking system, fixed barrel, or what have you.
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    I have some ideas for safety, the operation conditions points more towards a revolver, operation with only one hand was a big thing at the time the stock is obviously someone in arty wanting a carbine without paying for a carbine. Loading isn't such a issue for revolvers since speed loaders are a thing.

    The sights will probably need to be compromised for a certain range but hand to hand fighting well we need a strong enough grip and a barrel that can take the hits. Funnily enough a revolver with a six o'clock barrel would have a pretty beefy barrel an to support walloping people.
     
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