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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] A rifle
    [X] Push the boat out, make...
    -[X] The most accurate gun you can engineer

    You can't seduce an Empress with just a normal gun. The world's first proper sniper rifle should do, I think.
     
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    FrangibleCover said:
    [ ] The most accurate gun you can engineer
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    IIRC the Tachibana rifle had the potential to be effective at a shockingly long range, both due to an inherently accurate mechanism, good ammunition, and a good layout for sights. I might be confusing it with the pistol, though. Could we double-down on all of that? Build the version we wanted to build, put in all the extra metallurgy and machining so we can load the cartridge we designed up properly, slap a really high-quality telescopic sight on it with nice adjustment screws. Get it accurate out to a sufficiently long range that we have to get a sniper in from the army special forces to test it because the gun is more accurate than anyone on the team.

    Alternatively, we cram an American 180 into a handgun package and present it alongside literally an entire truckload of ammo :V
     
    You know what? We know full well there's a coup in the works. Let's see if we can't do some damage to it...symbolically, obviously.

    What will you make?

    [X] Write-in: Something else (+1 Stress)
    -[X] A Submachine Gun

    How will you make it?

    [X] Push the boat out, make...
    [X] The most technically advanced gun you can think of

    We want the Empress to put Her foot down and say that the will to defend the people of Akitsukuni (and by extension, the seat of power) comes from Her , not from any proto-fascist upstarts in the Navy. To do that, give Her a gun which She would figuratively use to defend Her people if they are ever threatened--compact, light, but powerful. That it would also be perfectly sized for Her to use personally to defeat people trying to assassinate people in the government should go without saying.

    (Yes, this is inspired by those pictures of Churchill with a Thompson and Queen Elizabeth II with an L85, but sshhh.)
     
    [X] A rifle
    [X] Push the boat out, make...
    -[X] The most technically advanced gun you can think of

    I'm down for codifying the sniper rifle. Get an elite rifleman to shoot the wings off a fly and all that.
     
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    [X] Write-in: Something else (+1 Stress)
    -[X] A Submachine Gun

    [X] Push the boat out, make...
    [X] The most technically advanced gun you can think of

    If the top sticky is accurate, we're at 2 stress, we can afford to push for something crazy, and we do have an empress to impress. That said, I do also like the idea of making the rifle we wished the Tachibana could have been and going full accuracy, both because it was what gave us the first break, and because it seems to fit with that "swordsmith giving the peak of their art" thing.
     
    An idea for a neat gimmick.

    Skeletonize a LMG's receiver so we can show off and engrave every single part of the action. Like how you occasionally see teaching models with partial actions or plastic panels so you can see how they work inside, but a functional gun and all of the engraving.

    Maybe design a fancy new action so the shiny guts don't get dirty, lol.
    Davin Valkri said:
    [X] Write-in: Something else (+1 Stress)
    -[X] A Submachine Gun
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    I was thinking that myself too. I had less symbolism in mine, admittedly, but a really fancy SMG would be a neat statement.

    That said, now that you mention it, I have a feeling that they're looking for innovation here. The thing that's really distinguished Tachibana's guns isn't just that they're beautiful, it's that they're novel in elegantly functional ways. I feel like we should prioritize making this gun functional and allow elegance to flow from its functionality. So, make sure that it's reliable. Make sure it's ergonomic.

    It'd be a crime if this gun sat on a shelf and was never fired. Let's make it just so much fun to shoot that it's always out being a gun as well as an art piece.
     
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    [X] A rifle
    [X] Push the boat out, make...
    -[X] The most accurate gun you can engineer

    We've got a fantastic rifle that we could go even farther than with that nifty ball bearing lock idea, but it will kick if loaded to the extreme, and that would warrant a muzzle device of some sort in all likelihood. Also that load will eat barrels. So we might want to figure out something to make barrels easily replaceable, or we might want to dial that back a bit. The pistol is nice, only a bit sporty, and I, uhhh, don't actually bother caring about shotguns, but I hear they can be neat. There's some early auto-loader shotguns, I think, so there's exciting things happening there.

    We could just try and pull a Tachibana and do that thing where we just find a niche and fill it better than anyone dared hope. There might be some military guys bemoaning the lack of capable Akitsukuni automatics in a variety of niches, but honestly, dealing with military brass that's enthusiastic about small arms seems unappealing, and accuracy is cool and good, and something we've got a good start on.

    (OOC: Yes, let me tell you all about sniper optics from this era and general sniping practice, it's a fascinating ride.)

    Derpmind said:
    The world's first proper sniper rifle should do, I think.
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    There's some good history to sniping before this, but there really is a lot of ballistics that's just waiting to stretch its wings, isn't there?
     
    xthetenth said:
    We've got a fantastic rifle that we could go even farther than with that nifty ball bearing lock idea, but it will kick if loaded to the extreme, and that would warrant a muzzle device of some sort in all likelihood. Also that load will eat barrels. So we might want to figure out something to make barrels easily replaceable, or we might want to dial that back a bit.
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    Recruit the guys that built a teeny naval gun and ask them how we might go about building something like this with the hydraulic recoil absorbers and everything? :p
     
    [X] Write-in: Something else (+1 Stress)
    -[X] A Submachine Gun

    [X] Push the boat out, make...
    [X] The most technically advanced gun you can think of
     
    [X] Write-in: Something else (+1 Stress)
    -[X] A Submachine Gun

    [X] Push the boat out, make...
    [X] The most technically advanced gun you can think of
     
    I really want to make an SMG, but I don't want our first attempt to be the Empress's prestige weapon. That's the kind of hubris that's asking for trouble. If anything goes wrong, it'll be severely stressful, and it just won't be as good as if we had an already solid weapon to build off of.
     
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    [X] A rifle
    [X] Push the boat out, make...
    -[X] The most accurate gun you can engineer

    Yeah, that's a good argument. The submachinegun is higher-risk-higher-reward, but we're already getting a colossal pile of reward. Let's push the state of the art in a direction we already had some designs in. We can do an SMG for the next contract. And there will be a next contract after what we did with the pistol.
     
    Parzival95 said:
    I really want to make an SMG, but I don't want our first attempt to be the Empress's prestige weapon. That's the kind of hubris that's asking for trouble. If anything goes wrong, it'll be severely stressful, and it just won't be as good as if we had an already solid weapon for build off of.
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    I mean, I could change to vote to "start the M1 Carbine 10-15 years early" for the same idea, but I don't know if that's X Rifle or X Carbine (+1 Stress).
     
    Oh man, we already did the illuminated sights on the pistol. I know we'd also be building our first proper optics sight, but maybe we could try for the first illuminated night-sight.

    That accuracy, in darkness. (I don't actually know if that's similar enough to work, I'm not super gun knowledgeable.)
     
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    [X] Write-in: Something else (+1 Stress)
    -[X] A Submachine Gun

    [X] Push the boat out, make...
    [X] The most technically advanced gun you can think of
     
    Davin Valkri said:
    I mean, I could change to vote to "start the M1 Carbine 10-15 years early" for the same idea, but I don't know if that's X Rifle or X Carbine (+1 Stress).
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    It's your prerogative to remember the empress is probably around five foot even and advocate we make the rifle empress-sized, leaning on ballistics for long range accuracy (and giving us an easier time of keeping the barrel nice and stiff so we don't have to play games with barrel harmonics and all that incredibly fun stuff).
     
    FrangibleCover said:
    "It has not escaped Her Imperial Majesty's attention that Her army has bought two new weapons from a very old supplier, nor that they have both been designed by the same person."

    You think about that for a moment. It was definitely Mr. Watanabe's name on the rifle and yours on the pistol.
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    Can I just say that seeing that prick get his comeuppance is immensely satisfying?

    E:
    xthetenth said:
    It's your prerogative to remember the empress is probably around five foot even and advocate we make the rifle empress-sized, leaning on ballistics for long range accuracy (and giving us an easier time of keeping the barrel nice and stiff so we don't have to play games with barrel harmonics and all that incredibly fun stuff).
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    Let's build an anti-tank rifle! The Russians brought out...some sort of AFV in the last war, right?

    [X] Write-in: Something else (+1 Stress)
    -[X] An Anti-Tank Rifle

    [X] Push the boat out, make...
    [X] The most technically advanced gun you can think of
     
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    how about a semi auto carbine?
    it would be something the empress could use herself while being different enough from what the army already has that it might prompt them to order some for their own use.
     
    [X] A shotgun
    [X] Push the boat out, make...
    -[X] The most technically advanced gun you can think of

    Hear me out. Semi/auto shotgun.
     
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