Guns, guns, and more guns

[Panda Hermit 98]

Hey there guys, looking for a little bit of RP help here :)

I know very little about guns, and one of my many pet peeves in writing is just winging it and writing about something I don't know about. One of my characters is a Bounty Hunter and as such, she uses guns a lot. Now, I know that this is a Star Wars Roleplay, it's Science Fantasy, why would I want or need to know about guns in an RP such as this?

Well, the simple fact is that many of the weapons in the tech compendium use real life weapons as a basis for their appearance, not to mention the fact that Blasters are most likely an evolved form of Slugthrowers (i.e. conventional weaponry) so it would make logical sense that they would borrow some design aspects and basic concepts. Admittedly, it is flavor text mostly, but I'll be damned if I produce shoddy or boring writing that doesn't reel you in when I could've done something about it!!!

With that in mind, is there anyone on the site you know of that could help me when it comes to gun knowledge? or do any of you guys yourselves know a fair amount about guns and wanna help me? ...I'll give you cookies

 

[Outlander]

Is there anything you need to know specifically? Guns, or blasters here, are a bit of a broad subject.

 

[Panda Hermit 98]

General structure of the weapon, I combine that with my own star wars like vdescription usually

 

[Outlander]

General structure of the weapon, I combine that with my own star wars like vdescription usually

That... doesn't really narrow things down. Do you want to know how blasters work internally? Or the design of blasters? Or something else?

 

[Panda Hermit 98]

That... doesn't really narrow things down. Do you want to know how blasters work internally? Or the design of blasters? Or something else?

Sorry, I was incredibly tired when I wrote that.

Yeah, right now I'm writing a little piece where a blaster rifle has been disassembled and my character reassembles it piece by piece, so it would be nice to know how it works internally, what the different components to it are etc.

 

[Slamdingo]

Well the internal workings can vary from weapon to weapon. To use real-life examples: a Colt 1911A1 and a Nambu pistol (pictured here, left and right respectively). They have things in common and they have differences. You may be able to disassemble and reassemble one blind-folded, but be kind of lost and clumsy handling the other for the first time. They have things in common and they have things that are different about them. They both have a trigger group (the internal workings that you see solely as the trigger), a magazine well, magazine, a firing pin, barrel, and slide. A reasonably experienced firearms aficionado would know what they were dealing with even if they didn't know every last finer point about the particular one.

But then they have differences that make them different. To list a few:

• The Nambu uses an internal hammer as opposed to the Colt's external hammer (meaning you cannot charge it without racking the slide)
• The Colt has two safeties: a switch like the Nabmu and a second pressure-activated safety that is depressed in a proper grip, effectively meaning it can't fire without being held in-hand even with the other safety disengaged.
• Differing calibers with the Colt 1911 firing a .45 ACP, while the Nambu fires a 7x20mm Nambu.

So in essence every blaster you take apart is going to generally have the same components. The differences will come in things like perhaps the gas storage is permanently mounted and needs a smith's tools to extract, or the power pack loads in a different part of the weapon.

Your typical blaster is going to have a trigger group, a chamber for storing compressed gas, a Heter valve for moving the gas into a gas conversion enabler chamber, a power pack that energizes the gas before passing it into a actuating module, and then a prismatic crystal or some sort of focusing lens that the now high-energy and high-pressure gas into the particle beam that does most of the work, and out through the emitter nozzle as that familiar flashing bolt of energy. So if you have to reference the internal workings for whatever reason (such as, say, having it spread out on a sheet for maintenance) then you could touch on these sorts of things.

Another thing to remember is a difference between field-stripping and total disassembly.

A field strip is when you take apart the weapon just enough for cleaning, lubrication, and quick maintenance. Its basically intended so you could quickly maintain your weapon while you are - in the field. Appropriate, no? Its meant so that while you are inside the wire you can perform some simple maintenance on your weapon without being so far into it that if you find your position coming under attack you can still quickly throw everything back together to get in the fight. Most weapons can be broken down for field-stripping without any actual tools. For example you can field strip an M16/M4 and then disassemble the bolt down to its most basic parts with little more than a pen.

Complete maintenance and repair, say if something like your Heter valve or actuating module are needing replaced or repaired, is not something you would do in the field. That is more intensive work that often calls for specialized tools and even express training and knowledge. Barrels misaligned, part of the weapon's frame being cracked through, or things like that can't be addressed with simple field stripping.

So depending on the setting your bounty hunter might just be wiping down various components and applying - whatever passes for CLP in the Star Wars universe - to key components that need it. If they are in a safehouse and reasonably certain they are far from danger then it might be that they are stooped over a faulty enabler chamber trying to fix an obstruction that has been stopping gas from passing properly through the Heter valve and into the chamber. Though if its just for flavor you don't need to focus on too many finer details.

On the matter of how it works that is easy enough. A very rudimentary summary is as follows:

• Semiautomatic Slugthrowers
  
  1. Load a magazine into the weapon (into the magazine well)
  2. Rack/operate the slide or charging handle, drawing the bolt back
  3. Release the slide or charging handle, letting the bolt move forward (for closed-bolt systems), at which point the top round is extracted from the magazine and a live round is now 'chambered'. At this step the weapon is ready fire, barring a safety being active.
  4. Squeeze the trigger, dropping the hammer against the base of the firing pin, and driving the firing pin into the base of the round.
  5. The round fires. Then either recoil or gas from the discharge (these being the two most common) is used to drive the slide back so that the process can be repeated without even needing the operator to manually operate the slide.
  .
• Blasters
  
  1. Load a power pack (as I've always understood how they work, these power packs contain both the gas and battery charge instead of having internal gas chambers in the weapon itself).
  2. Squeeze the trigger, opening the Heter valve
  3. A small amount of gas is released from the pack and through the now open valve, into the gas conversion enabler chamber
  4. The enabler chamber excites the gas particles within and the power pack's battery energizes it in the process
  5. It passes from the enabler chamber into the actuating module, where it is electromagnetically accelerated into a beam of particle energy
  6. The beam of particle energy passes through a prismatic crystal or lens which focuses it into a condensed bolt
  7. The bolt passes through the crystal or lens, down the length of the barrel, and out through the emitter nozzle at the end of the barrel

And here are some handy images for you to use as reference so you can see roughly where things line up in relation to each other.

• Reference 1
• Reference 2
• Reference 3

 

[Panda Hermit 98]

Well the internal workings can vary from weapon to weapon. To use real-life examples: a Colt 1911A1 and a Nambu pistol (pictured here, left and right respectively). They have things in common and they have differences. You may be able to disassemble and reassemble one blind-folded, but be kind of lost and clumsy handling the other for the first time. They have things in common and they have things that are different about them. They both have a trigger group (the internal workings that you see solely as the trigger), a magazine well, magazine, a firing pin, barrel, and slide. A reasonably experienced firearms aficionado would know what they were dealing with even if they didn't know every last finer point about the particular one.

But then they have differences that make them different. To list a few:

• The Nambu uses an internal hammer as opposed to the Colt's external hammer (meaning you cannot charge it without racking the slide)
• The Colt has two safeties: a switch like the Nabmu and a second pressure-activated safety that is depressed in a proper grip, effectively meaning it can't fire without being held in-hand even with the other safety disengaged.
• Differing calibers with the Colt 1911 firing a .45 ACP, while the Nambu fires a 7x20mm Nambu.

So in essence every blaster you take apart is going to generally have the same components. The differences will come in things like perhaps the gas storage is permanently mounted and needs a smith's tools to extract, or the power pack loads in a different part of the weapon.

Your typical blaster is going to have a trigger group, a chamber for storing compressed gas, a Heter valve for moving the gas into a gas conversion enabler chamber, a power pack that energizes the gas before passing it into a actuating module, and then a prismatic crystal or some sort of focusing lens that the now high-energy and high-pressure gas into the particle beam that does most of the work, and out through the emitter nozzle as that familiar flashing bolt of energy. So if you have to reference the internal workings for whatever reason (such as, say, having it spread out on a sheet for maintenance) then you could touch on these sorts of things.

Another thing to remember is a difference between field-stripping and total disassembly.

A field strip is when you take apart the weapon just enough for cleaning, lubrication, and quick maintenance. Its basically intended so you could quickly maintain your weapon while you are - in the field. Appropriate, no? Its meant so that while you are inside the wire you can perform some simple maintenance on your weapon without being so far into it that if you find your position coming under attack you can still quickly throw everything back together to get in the fight. Most weapons can be broken down for field-stripping without any actual tools. For example you can field strip an M16/M4 and then disassemble the bolt down to its most basic parts with little more than a pen.

Complete maintenance and repair, say if something like your Heter valve or actuating module are needing replaced or repaired, is not something you would do in the field. That is more intensive work that often calls for specialized tools and even express training and knowledge. Barrels misaligned, part of the weapon's frame being cracked through, or things like that can't be addressed with simple field stripping.

So depending on the setting your bounty hunter might just be wiping down various components and applying - whatever passes for CLP in the Star Wars universe - to key components that need it. If they are in a safehouse and reasonably certain they are far from danger then it might be that they are stooped over a faulty enabler chamber trying to fix an obstruction that has been stopping gas from passing properly through the Heter valve and into the chamber. Though if its just for flavor you don't need to focus on too many finer details.

On the matter of how it works that is easy enough. A very rudimentary summary is as follows:

• Semiautomatic Slugthrowers
  
  
  1. Load a magazine into the weapon (into the magazine well)
  2. Rack/operate the slide or charging handle, drawing the bolt back
  3. Release the slide or charging handle, letting the bolt move forward (for closed-bolt systems), at which point the top round is extracted from the magazine and a live round is now 'chambered'. At this step the weapon is ready fire, barring a safety being active.
  4. Squeeze the trigger, dropping the hammer against the base of the firing pin, and driving the firing pin into the base of the round.
  5. The round fires. Then either recoil or gas from the discharge (these being the two most common) is used to drive the slide back so that the process can be repeated without even needing the operator to manually operate the slide.
  
  .
• Blasters
  
  
  1. Load a power pack (as I've always understood how they work, these power packs contain both the gas and battery charge instead of having internal gas chambers in the weapon itself).
  2. Squeeze the trigger, opening the Heter valve
  3. A small amount of gas is released from the pack and through the now open valve, into the gas conversion enabler chamber
  4. The enabler chamber excites the gas particles within and the power pack's battery energizes it in the process
  5. It passes from the enabler chamber into the actuating module, where it is electromagnetically accelerated into a beam of particle energy
  6. The beam of particle energy passes through a prismatic crystal or lens which focuses it into a condensed bolt
  7. The bolt passes through the crystal or lens, down the length of the barrel, and out through the emitter nozzle at the end of the barrel

And here are some handy images for you to use as reference so you can see roughly where things line up in relation to each other.

• Reference 1
• Reference 2
• Reference 3

My freind, you are a star, I hate searching the internet for stuff like that because I just find a myriad of stuff I don't need or don't understand, it's so much better hearing someone just talk about it

 

[Slamdingo]

If you ever need more advice or anything like that then feel free to ping me.