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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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Vote 2: This time it's personal the 'X's are filled in.

[x] Okay then! Hug Mami, then close your eyes and concentrate.
-[x] Unleash... the chibi.
--[x] See if you can look through the chibi's eyes. Try and get the hang of piloting/controlling it. Have Chibi Brina hug Chibi Mami.
[x] Ah, Homura contacted me. She said she'd be coming for Sayaka's training, and might show up a little early to catch the tail end of our practice session. She was... hesitant about letting Sayaka copy her power, though.
-[x] Any thoughts on what we should cover in today's session for Sayaka? I was thinking we could cover positioning and approach options. Sayaka was far too eager to rush into melee yesterday. And with Homura here, we could also cover teamwork - do a 2v2. I'm sure Homura has airsoft or the like. What do you think?
-[x] Heh. Should we prank Homura and have just our chibi's greet her? Or Sayaka?
[x] Once that discussion wraps up: GOOD MORNING MITAKIHARA!
-[x] How is everyone? Everyone set for the picnic?
--[x] Sayaka, is that training this morning still on?
[x] Privately message Sayaka.
-[x] Sorry about the early wakeup call. It's just, I screwed up, and wanted to make sure you were okay. Clear seeds can dump the grief in them into normal grief seeds on contact. It's not an issue on its own, but if a normal grief seed overfills... the witch in it can rehatch. I am very, very, very sorry about not mentioning it earlier.
[x] Call Nagisa's uncle. Let him know about the plans for the picnic. Ask if Nagisa can attend.
[x] Offer to try working on a tandem attack with Mami. Start by seeing if you can cooperate to make a automatic firing mechanism compatible with Mami's muskets.
-[x] If it works, try scaling it up to full Tiro Finale size. Aim downward, because the ground is pretty much the only backstop that can withstand this thing.
--[x] Let Mami name it.
[x] Greet Homura when she arrives, potentially as two chibis tinkering with a massive autocannon.

My autocorrect tried to correct 'chibi' to 'hobo'.

P.S. Yes, I write all these megavotes on my phone. The omakes, too. I actually do very little for this quest with a proper keyboard.
 
Kaizuki said:
So, a musket is literally a tube that's closed on one end, and you put gunpowder in, a musketball on that, and blow up the powder. We don't know if that's what Mami is doing, exactly... But let's assume that she has two steps:

1. Project musket (project object: musket, project object: musketball, project object: gunpowder, project object: spark-creating device)

2. Trigger spark.

Now, what she asked us to do was to create a firing mechanism, i.e. something that handles the firing and reloading of the weapon, while she'll provide the bullets and weapon. What the hell would that look like? Eh, pretty standard, basically, from what I can tell.



Modified for Tiro, we'd replace the piece that comes forward and fires the bullet with a device that creates a spark -- we could put a piece of flint into the musket itself where the bullets go and have the thingy slam another piece of flint into that, maybe. We'd have to have Mami find a way to bundle the balls and powder charges, but that could be done by wrapping them in ribbons until they're loaded. We don't need an ejection mechanism -- there's no casing to deal with -- so there's nothing troublesome with timing the operation of the spring that loads the bullets or anything. Achieving automatic fire requires that we have some way to tie the operation of the spark-creating mechanism to the force created by the powder going off... ooooooooooooooooooor...



Very, very basic firing mechanism.
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You know, we could probably just take advantage of how hax grief manipulation is to do something like make a tiny grief flame that's constantly moving backwards and forwards (with respect to the orientation of the barrel) by a tiny amount, and then upgrade the giant musket to being belt-fed.

It really all depends on the design of Mami's ammunition.
 
OKAY! MECHANICAL PRINCIPLES OF FIREARMS! I'm going to simplify dramatically here, but the principals should be reasonable.

The simple blowback operation that you use in a handgun doesn't scale. The gas is trapped in the chamber by the expansion of the cartridge against the walls of the chamber, which is held in place by the breech. In a simple blowback gun, the breech is held in place only by inertia, and we count on fine tuning of the momentum of the bullet in relation to the mass of the breech block so make the breech take long enough to start blowing back that the bullet is out of the gun by the time the breech blows back far enough that it releases the gas seal. The simple blowback action does not scale - as the cartridge gets more powerful, the bolt has to get heavier to stay in place long enough, and beyond medium-sized handgun cartridges your gun simply ends up being too big to be usable. There's a trick you can use to get it up to 30mm, specifically to fire before the bolt is all the way back in place and so you have to overcome the forward momentum of the closing bolt before you can start blowing it back, but that's super finicky and still only gets you up to a light autocannon.

One step above that is recoil operation, where you let the recoil of the gun carry the barrel and the breech backward as a single unit until the bullet is out of the barrel, at which point the barrel slams into a stop against some obstacle while the breech continues back under its own momentum and opens the gun. This is how most modern handguns work; the barrel on a stereotypical M1911 goes back about a quarter of an inch, and then the slide assembly (the whole top of the gun, basically) goes back maybe two or three inches. That opens the breech and cycles the gun. This works up to big machine guns.

Then you get into gas operation, where the bolt is actively locked and you take gas pressure off the end of the barrel to unlock it and blow it backwards once the bullet's most of the way out of the gun. This works up to big machine guns.

Past roughly 30mm, all of these stop working because the masses and forces involved are just too big for any kind of reasonable operation. At that point you need to get into autoloaders and rotary guns, which don't capture any energy from the actual firing of the weapon and instead operate a traditional locking breech with electrical or hydraulic actuators. In 900mm we'll have to go this route. We should be thinking naval artillery, not handguns:
 
justinkal said:
You know, we could probably just take advantage of how hax grief manipulation is to do something like make a tiny grief flame that's constantly moving backwards and forwards (with respect to the orientation of the barrel) by a tiny amount, and then upgrade the giant musket to being belt-fed.
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You're not wrong. I'm just saying if we want to do it traditionally AF then yeah. But, yes. The only issues are that that belt would be hella fucking ginormous, and it'd be a bit interesting to deal with a belt fed musket.

Apart from that, it's possible that Mami could handle the actual firing.
 
Vebyast said:
OKAY! MECHANICAL PRINCIPLES OF FIREARMS! I'm going to simplify dramatically here, but the principals should be reasonable.

The simple blowback operation that you use in a handgun doesn't scale. The gas is trapped in the chamber by the expansion of the cartridge against the walls of the chamber, which is held in place by the breech. In a simple blowback gun, the breech is held in place only by inertia, and we count on fine tuning of the momentum of the bullet in relation to the mass of the breech block so make the breech take long enough to start blowing back that the bullet is out of the gun by the time the breech blows back far enough that it releases the gas seal. The simple blowback action does not scale - as the cartridge gets more powerful, the bolt has to get heavier to stay in place long enough, and beyond medium-sized handgun cartridges your gun simply ends up being too big to be usable. There's a trick you can use to get it up to 30mm, specifically to fire before the bolt is all the way back in place and so you have to overcome the forward momentum of the closing bolt before you can start blowing it back, but that's super finicky and still only gets you up to a light autocannon.

One step above that is recoil operation, where you let the recoil of the gun carry the barrel and the breech backward as a single unit until the bullet is out of the barrel, at which point the barrel slams into a stop against some obstacle while the breech continues back under its own momentum and opens the gun. This is how most modern handguns work; the barrel on a stereotypical M1911 goes back about a quarter of an inch, and then the slide assembly (the whole top of the gun, basically) goes back maybe two or three inches. That opens the breech and cycles the gun. This works up to big machine guns.

Then you get into gas operation, where the bolt is actively locked and you take gas pressure off the end of the barrel to unlock it and blow it backwards once the bullet's most of the way out of the gun. This works up to big machine guns.

Past roughly 30mm, all of these stop working because the masses and forces involved are just too big for any kind of reasonable operation. At that point you need to get into autoloaders and rotary guns, which don't capture any energy from the actual firing of the weapon and instead operate a traditional locking breech with electrical or hydraulic actuators. In 900mm we'll have to go this route. We should be thinking naval artillery, not handguns:
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The plus side, of course, is that our grief doesn't need to capture any energy to work. We can just straight up will it to move the way we need it to with bullshit magic.
 
Torgamous said:
Isn't this solvable with grief's unnaturally malleable physical properties?
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Not actually a bad idea, but it'd probably more than quintuple the mass of the canon. Maybe?
Redshirt Army said:
The plus side, of course, is that our grief doesn't need to capture any energy to work. We can just straight up will it to move the way we need it to with bullshit magic.
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Exactly. We and Mami also appear to be able to make arbitrarily high-strength materials. So this is probably the right approach both for simplicity and adherence-to-physics. In fact, since we can manipulate grief directly, we don't even need to deal with things like locking the breech - we just let it flow around the next shell and load as it's added, then make it solid as Mami fires. Or, even better, just cap the end of the chamber in a layer of grief that's permeable in only one direct, so we can load shells but the gases are captured for firing.
 
Vebyast said:
Past roughly 30mm, all of these stop working because the masses and forces involved are just too big for any kind of reasonable operation. At that point you need to get into autoloaders and rotary guns, which don't capture any energy from the actual firing of the weapon and instead operate a traditional locking breech with electrical or hydraulic actuators. In 900mm we'll have to go this route. We should be thinking naval artillery, not handguns:
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What about when you take into account that MAGIC offers you materials which are better than anything obtainable via mundane methods?
Kaizuki said:
Apart from that, it's possible that Mami could handle the actual firing.
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She asked if we can make a firing mechanism for the automatic version.

I'm looking at the 10-50 Tiro Finale per second range of "fully automatic" :V
 
Kaizuki said:
There's still limits on it, right? And if it stops being feasible at 30mm normally...

Ah, but what if we did something more like a revolver, @Vebyast? If we hook the drum up to a motor for rotation, have the firing mechanism toggle on and off on a cycle hooked up to that same motor...
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That limits our firing rate to how effectively Mami can make ammunition in a cylinder rotating at high speeds. If we make a mechanism where the ammunition can be more simply dispensed, it reduces her mental load, likely meaning faster firing.

Also there are issues with making a tight enough seal and having something with that much inertia spinning and stopping in place, but grief bullshit solves those.
 
Hum, Mami's probably manufacturing loose powder inside the chamber of her gun right now. Any sort of revolver cannon or even most autoloaders require cartridges; the brass not only provides the gas seal, but is also rigid and provides stuff for the mechanical bits to grab on to and manipulate. Working with bags of powder is far more nasty and I don't even know if there are any autoloaders in use that do it. Working with loose powder is flat-out impossible and we stopped doing it in the 1800s or earlier. Even for a griefy autoloader we may have to ask Mami to bag her powder before handing it off to us, or we might have her continuously filling a hopper that we manage using Grief.

edit: Yeah, better to ignore existing actions and just go maximum grief mode. Mami fills a tank with propellant and stacks up shot in a tube and concentrates on keeping those full, we use Grief to grab an appropriate amount of powder and pull it out by budding a bag off the side of the powder tank, we slip a round of shot through Griefy breech block and then merge our bag of powder in after it.
 
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Vebyast said:
Hum, Mami's probably manufacturing loose powder inside the chamber of her gun right now. Any sort of revolver cannon or even most autoloaders require cartridges; the brass not only provides the gas seal, but is also rigid and provides stuff for the mechanical bits to grab on to and manipulate. Working with bags of powder is far more nasty and I don't even know if there are any autoloaders in use that do it. Working with loose powder is flat-out impossible and we stopped doing it in the 1800s or earlier. Even for a griefy autoloader we may have to ask Mami to bag her powder before handing it off to us, or we might have her continuously filling a hopper that we manage using Grief.
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In theory, couldn't we replace the powder completely with something like a grief construct designed to make an explosion every 0.03 seconds, plus another grief construct which feeds into the chamber the ammunition which Mami produces?
 
Vebyast said:
Hum, Mami's probably manufacturing loose powder inside the chamber of her gun right now. Any sort of revolver cannon or even most autoloaders require cartridges; the brass not only provides the gas seal, but is also rigid and provides stuff for the mechanical bits to grab on to and manipulate. Working with bags of powder is far more nasty and I don't even know if there are any autoloaders in use that do it. Working with loose powder is flat-out impossible and we stopped doing it in the 1800s or earlier. Even for a griefy autoloader we may have to ask Mami to bag her powder before handing it off to us, or we might have her continuously filling a hopper that we manage using Grief.
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I'll note that propulsion is one of the things we don't need to rely on Mami for. The projectile needs to be ribbons so we aren't shooting things that dissolve into angry ghosts after 100 meters, but we can just make grief that continually explodes, no problem.

E: ninja'd
 
Redshirt Army said:
I'll note that propulsion is one of the things we don't need to rely on Mami for. The projectile needs to be ribbons so we aren't shooting things that dissolve into angry ghosts after 100 meters, but we can just make grief that continually explodes, no problem.
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Hum, that's also interesting. Starting to get into "why is Mami even involved" territory, though. ehhhhhhh.
 
Vebyast said:
Hum, that's also interesting. Starting to get into "why is Mami even involved" territory, though. ehhhhhhh.
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I'll point out that Mami is making all this stuff out of ribbons, then. Her making powder is actually far less likely then her making pseudo detcord for each shot. I think discretizing it is gonna be a smaller issue then you think.
 
Onmur said:
"Meguca are turbolesbians, basically."

"W-what?! But I like Kyousuke!"

"Do you? Do you really?"

"Yes!"

"Really? How do you know? It's not like you've actually gone out with him."

"I... I..."

"Look, the sooner you accept it, the better."

"I'll show you!"


"IN YOUR FACE! I had a date with Kyousuke~! It was so amazing, and he was such a gentleman and so nice and we went to dinner and then..."

"What."

"What."

*Looks*

"Shakes head*

"Shit, I'm a miracle worker."
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And from then on, Sayaka had more and more difficulty using magic until she became a normal human again, her potential burned up.

"Well...um...so that's decontracting down...What if I..."

"Sabrina, we are not starting a females-seeking-males dating service for Witches."
 
Vebyast said:
Hum, that's also interesting. Starting to get into "why is Mami even involved" territory, though. ehhhhhhh.
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This. See, what I'd suggest here is to have Mami bundle up the powder charge and ball with ribbon until it's in the barrel. I think we could do a chain gun loading mechanism with that... All that takes is a motor and some gearwork, and it should be upscalable.
 
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