Gifted said,
Why bother sealing at all? Use that blowback as part of your action's operation, and make sure it seals tight enough you're not wasting too much.
Definitely a "divergent" idea worthy of pursuit, if we can keep in mind the 50- 60,000 "psi" peak pressures involved in rifles and 15- 25,000 "psi" in pistols.
(Aside) And one of John C. Garand's first semiauto designs was an action that unlocked the breech by the setback of the primer on firing, like a little piston. Talk about divergent thinking.
Gifted also said,
I kind of like the idea of a piezoelectric system. A crystal in place of a primer, and you could make the base much stronger, possibly using higher pressures as mentioned.
Gotta watch that one. I believe most of the high voltage piezo crystals are ceramic, but I could be wrong. You would not want ceramic debris up your bore... can anyone enlighten me on that?
PAShoote commented:
Since when does Uncle Sam care how many of your tax dollars he spends?
I believe one of the original major justifications for going to .308 Win (7.62 NATO), was to save on brass. However, I basically agree with the sentiment that our Government is a bit spendthrifty.
Shauner wisecracked,
How the heck would the kalifornian's micro stamp it?!?!? This would drive the governator and the rest of the libbies nuts trying to figure out this one.
Tee-hee, giggle-giggle, nyah-nyah!
Sharps-shooter quipped,
I'm getting an arquebus, myself. It was that or a .458, and the ammo price was part of what decided it for me.
I agree with what novaDAK said on that one, i.e,
(A)They'd just simply ban them...worked for everything else...
(B) But I think that before we start developing caseless, we'd just use alternative materials like plastic.
I agree on both points. With respect to B, some good starts have been made with AL and steel cases. Despite some of the complaints about aluminum-cased ammo, I don't think these are a result of design concept --to my mind, they're mostly manufacturing problems and problems with tiny extractor hooks ripping off rims. After all, the ammo was designed to be cheap in the first place. I suspect, but cannot document, that some alloys (or future alloys) of almuninum might be suitable for reloadable, Boxer-primed aluminum cases. (I worry a little about the abrasiveness of the inevitable Al2O3 which goes along with every aluminum alloy, though.)
Polycarbonates seem to look promising. Perhaps a sputter-coated thin inner liner of metal might help out here. After all, if you can burn a hunk of hamburger in your microwave without destroying the "microwave-safe" container, somebody must have an idea as to how to make heat-resistant plastics.
And we've been galumphing along with steel cases, which actually seems to work allright in guns which were designed for them, I guess. I note that Wolf was pretty sensitive to the varnish issue and apparently changed the coating to a teflon-like substance in later manufacture.
After all, one of the original designs for an autoloader (the Johnson Autoloader in .276?) had little oiler pads in the receiver which oiled up the cases as they were fed into the chamber to aid extraction. And later, the cartridges were hard-waxed for the same reason, as I recall.
So all in all, I guess if we had to change to something besides brass, we could probably make do. We are fairly flexible what kind of fussin' and fumin' we have to go through to go bang.