Ammunition using propellants other than gunpowder?

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CTDonath mentioned it in his post...IIRC, Daisy (Yes, the BB Gun 'Daisy' Company) experimented with a caseless .22 ammo sometime in the 1960's.

Called it the "VL" round....now what "VL" meant :confused: :confused:
 
No powder cartridge

The idea of an air gun using cartridges containing CO2 behind the bullet has been tinkered with. While it worked, I don't know that the idea ever went very far.

When I was a kid we cooked up a cartridge with a BB propelled by a cap such as used in toy cap guns.
 
Check this out, it's an Australian company called Metal Storm:

http://www.metalstorm.com/

The future of Artillery. No Gunpowder, no breech, no moving parts other than a magazine and a barrel.

TJ
The O'Dwyer design uses a propelant that is either solid or a powder. It is just casesless.

By the way, there is a breech and if there wasn't, then the last shot wouldn't have anything to push off of and contain the expanding gasses. :)
 
Thanks for the replies.

To be more specific though, i was thinking of a self contained cartridge using a propellant other than smokelss powder. Is it even possible?
 
The Babcock air pistol (revolver). It had the pellet and the compressed air inside the cases that were loaded into a cylinder like a regular revolver.

I also vaguely recall an experimental gun for the army that used high voltage passing through a catridge containing water. The water vaporised really fast and was the propellant. I think each round was in a brass cartridge, water and all.
Conceivably the same could be done with shoulder fired guns, but I'm not too sure how much power would be needed and how heavy the power supply would be.
 
There's a Mexican company, I think the name is Aguila. They make rounds filled with an explosive gas. I don't know what it is, but I think the line is called Super Colibri or something like that. $2.50 for 50 rounds of .22LR. They're near silent, but have almost no power (read: will stick in a target barrel, won't cycle an action).
 
Anybody remember the "Mythbusters" episode with the salami rocket? They showed that a model rocket engine in a salami would ignite the salami and provide extra thrust.

Think about that the next time you have a salami sandwich!!

This may be off topic but it's funny!

streakr
 
Anyone ever read Roger Zelazny's (ztl) The Guns of Avalon? The hero needs to conquer a world where gunpowder doesn't explode. He accidentally discovers that jeweler's rouge from another world does.
 
The future of Artillery. No Gunpowder, no breech, no moving parts other than a magazine and a barrel.

Where did you get the idea there's no gunpowder? Metal Storm is nothing more than a modern version of a Chambers Swivel Gun, which had a stack of bullets and powder in the barrel and a fuse designed to set one off after the other. Metal Storm's advantage is extremely rapid fire for use by ships in electronic anti-missile systems and the like. It has no practical application in small arms.
 
GigaBuist:
I have seen a video somewhere of a pistol very similar to that. It fired 3 bullets in succession. High speed camera showed that the bullets hit in nearly the same hole one after the other.

It was a really neat video
 
I would say yes. Take a look at a GyroJet.! Very cool had a buddy who had one but wally-world never had ammo for the thing.. *SIGH*

But the GyroJet did use gunpowder: Conventional nitrocellulose, in fact, cast into a single grain.

Do air rifles count?
 
I read that book. Didn't the troops use FALs? I gave up on the Amber series after a bit.

I hate magic books where they cross over to our world and guess what guns don't work.

Ever read - Brian Daley - where a M113 APC from VietNam lands in magic land and the 50 BMGs work fine -

Oops - thread hijack but we have exhausted the original topic.
 
Spin, spin, spin

Just to round things out, although it did not have a case, Hatcher ("Notebook") reports a centrifugal machine gun where a disc which looked much like a centrigual pump impeller was spun around 1800 RPM IIRC and ball bearings were fed in at the center. French invention, I think. I can provide details if desired.

The GyroJet cartridge looked much like a .45 ACP, but had three or four holes drilled in the back end at an angle to provide spin stabilization. Again, if I recall correctly, the hammer struck the front of the cartridge, driving it back against a fixed firing pin, and as the whole cartridge blew itself forward, it pushed the hammer back down, thereby re-cocking it. On the "chambered" round exiting, a new round popped up from the magazine.

A picture of the GyroJet round (scroll down):

http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.asp?item=61127216
 
How about this...

Take one of those little power pods of compressed air you put into an air gun, find a diameter of pipe to put it into with the puncture hole facing backwards. use a trigger, spring, hammer mechanism to pop a whole in the pods. I have not tried this, and might not, but I think it would work...
 
SPIN OR FIN

Take one of those little power pods of compressed air you put into an air gun, find a diameter of pipe to put it into with the puncture hole facing backwards. use a trigger, spring, hammer mechanism to pop a whole in the pods. I have not tried this, and might not, but I think it would work...

You'll have to either fin it or spin it or get the ruddy bloody hell out of the way of it flying around uncontrolled. I was trying to figure out how to keep fins on it as it cools to below-zero temps as the gas escapes. It will shrink, thereby breaking any glue bonds. The glue will become brittle at the low temps involved, and will lose any adhesion to the cartridge, so good-by fins.

But figuring you punch an .050" hole in it, the resulting initial thrust will be almost 2 pounds. Guessing that a full cartridge weighs about 2 oz (?) the acceleration would be about 16 gee. (Someone check this.)

(They contain compressed CO2 at about 1000 psi, by the way, as well as a small quantity of lubricating oil --not air.)
 
Wandering Afield Some More

Interesting links, mrmeval. We're wandering off the original thread, which was powderless cartridges. I was wondering if someone would come up with azide or peroxide propellants, but Learn2shoot inquired about CO2 rockets, so here we are.

Anyhow I was interested in using the CO2 "Powerlets" directly as both the motor and the missile casing for a rocket, and although I've never tried it, I've thought about it, which is why I made the remarks about the CO2 cartridge freezing up.

When I was a kid (1948 or so) I got a model car into which you could insert one of those seltzer-maker cartridges. (These were a lot shorter than today's Powerlets.) The car had two eyelets on the bottom through which a long string could be threaded. You'd tie down the ends of the string and the kit came with a hand-held spring-loaded puncturing device.

The car would take off and zoom along the string and great fun was had by this old eight-year-old.

So I was thinking of that for an aerial rocket, did some calcs, then thought about the freezing problem. I guess the thing to do would be to insert the CO2 cartridge in one of those Estes Rockets to avoid having the fins attached directly to the steel of the CO2 cartridge.

However, Estes has a rule against using any metal in their models.

TNX for the links. TTFN.
 
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