Sunday, December 2, 2018

Small Arms notes - action and magazine

The rules for Twilight: 2000 ignore some methods of firing guns and means of loading/storing ammunition in the gun that were obsolete by the time of that game, but would still be in use during the Vespers War era. As such, here's a quick summary of types of action and types of magazine.

Actions are noted in the ROF column. A number is an automatic weapon, while letters are per the following section:

SS - Single Shot - This is a firearm that does not have a magazine. It fires one round per fire action and then must be reloaded. As much as possible, I'll note how the chamber is managed in a note.

BA - Bolt Action - This is a firearm that uses either a rotating bolt or a straight pull bolt. The shooter manipulates the bolt to open the chamber, extract the fired cartridge, and load an unfired cartridge in the chamber, with the bolt cocking the firing piece at some point in its motion. It fires one round per fire action, but does not need to be reloaded until its magazine is empty.

LA - Lever Action - This is a magazine-fed firearm that uses a lever under the trigger to work the bolt and chamber. Like a bolt action, it fires one round per fire action and only needs to be reloaded when the magazine is empty.

PA - Pump Action - This is also magazine-fed. It has a sliding handgrip under the barrel that's manipulated to work the action. It can fire up to three rounds per fire action.

SA - Semi-Automatic - This is the most common action nowadays, where gas from the fired round is used to cycle the action and eject the spent cartridge while loading a new one. It can fire up to five rounds per fire action.

SAR - Single Action Revolver - The earliest revolver type, where the hammer must be manually cocked for each shot. One round per fire action.

DAR - Double Action Revolver - An evolved revolver type where pulling the trigger first cocks the hammer and then releases it. Three rounds per fire action.


In addition to the action, the magazine is an important factor in a firearm's ease of use. Magazine types are noted in the Ammo column after the number of rounds contained.

(no suffix) - Box magazine - A detachable container of rounds that can be replaced swiftly by the user. For one action, the gun can be fully reloaded.

i - Individual - Rounds must be loaded one at a time, either because the gun is a single shot or because it has a magazine that can't be rapid-loaded, such as a tube magazine. Up to three rounds can be loaded in a single action.

R - Revolver - A firearm with a cylinder that holds the rounds and rotates to present them to the firing system. These are highly variable in their reload rate. With a speedloader, all rounds can be reloaded with one action. Without a speedloader, most revolvers can be reloaded at three rounds per action. Some older revolvers with awkward loading systems will be noted as Slow Reload, and they reload at two rounds per fire action.

B - Belt - Primarily a system for machine guns, this is a fabric belt or metal links holding the rounds together, pulled through the gun by its firing system. It requires two actions to load a new belt, though the gunner can be assisted by a second person to do it in a single round (using one action from each of them).

c(x) - Clip - On many late 19th-century and early 20th-century firearms, a fixed magazine was filled by clips, either a stripper clip (where the bullets were pushed from the clip into the magazine) or an en bloc clip (where the entire clip was loaded and the empty clip ejected once all the bullets were fired). The clip will load (x) rounds per action. Usually, this is the magazine capacity, but not always - for example, an SMLE rifle has a magazine of 10c(5), meaning that it can hold 10 rounds, but it loads 5 rounds per action.

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