Kaidan Alenko (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
not_a_whiner) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh2013-05-28 02:00 pm
not_a_whiner) wrote in fandomhigh2013-05-28 02:00 pm
Entry tags:
Combat Tech, Tuesday Morning (1st Period)
The Danger Shop had been set up like an ordinary gun range this time. Sure, Kaidan knew they had a real one in the building, but he wasn't going to take risks with the lives of the students.
"Today, we're going to be talking about bullets," he said. "Projectiles. You had a shot at trying out some last week. We were just focusing on something else back then. Anyway, we've been attacking each other with projectiles for a very long time. It started with pebbles in slingshots."
He picked up the slingshot just in case someone hadn't seen one before. "Slingshots are heavily dependent on manpower. Your average human can't generate enough velocity to fire one very far. Eventually the powers of physics do their work and the bullet gets slowed down by friction and pulled towards the earth by gravity. We figured out some tricks to distribute and amplify the power we put into hurling a projectile - that's how we got bows, for instance. Still, firing one is hard work, it takes a lot of concentration, you have to compensate a lot for wind and friction and other forces."
Kaidan dropped the slingshot. He held up a bullet instead.
"Then firearms came into the picture. Someone had the bright idea of putting gunpowder into a long tube, dropping a bullet in it and firing it. That didn't work well, of course," he hastened to add. "You need to make sure you're holding the bullet down properly on top of the powder. If you don't, the whole thing would explode inside the tube. You also need to make sure the bullet seals well with the tube, or your gunpowder is going to seep past it and your accuracy will be shot. Anyway, a few centuries later, someone came up with the idea of firing conical bullets instead. Some time later, someone elaborated on the design by giving the bullets a copper casing. Copper doesn't melt as easily as lead, which means you can fire a copper-cased bullet at higher velocity."
Once again, the item in Kaidan's hands was dropped back onto the table. "Then, at least in my time, we found out about mass effect technology. We scrapped the gunpowder end of the equation and fitted our projectiles in a mass accelerator instead. It's much more accurate: you're not reliant on unpredictable combustion reactions. Not only that, but it's faster, too. We were still stuck with a problem though: namely, you can only carry so many bullets with you."
He picked up an imposing-looking weapon with a futuristic design, reached back, and pulled out... a block of solid metal. "Then we realized that if we no longer need gunpowder and we can hit higher velocities, we don't need to rely on the old bullet designs either," he said. "Every time we need to fire, the rifle shaves off a minuscule bit of matter from this block. It then fires it with a high enough velocity to do considerable damage. The only drawback from this system is that it generates a lot of heat, so you can't just go spraying away - you need to make sure it doesn't overheat."
He put the rifle back down.
"Same thing as last week, but now we're keeping an eye on something else," he concluded. "I want you to pick from this stack of weapons and that stack of bullets and try 'em out on those targets over there. They're 3D, so you can check out the damage afterwards."
"Today, we're going to be talking about bullets," he said. "Projectiles. You had a shot at trying out some last week. We were just focusing on something else back then. Anyway, we've been attacking each other with projectiles for a very long time. It started with pebbles in slingshots."
He picked up the slingshot just in case someone hadn't seen one before. "Slingshots are heavily dependent on manpower. Your average human can't generate enough velocity to fire one very far. Eventually the powers of physics do their work and the bullet gets slowed down by friction and pulled towards the earth by gravity. We figured out some tricks to distribute and amplify the power we put into hurling a projectile - that's how we got bows, for instance. Still, firing one is hard work, it takes a lot of concentration, you have to compensate a lot for wind and friction and other forces."
Kaidan dropped the slingshot. He held up a bullet instead.
"Then firearms came into the picture. Someone had the bright idea of putting gunpowder into a long tube, dropping a bullet in it and firing it. That didn't work well, of course," he hastened to add. "You need to make sure you're holding the bullet down properly on top of the powder. If you don't, the whole thing would explode inside the tube. You also need to make sure the bullet seals well with the tube, or your gunpowder is going to seep past it and your accuracy will be shot. Anyway, a few centuries later, someone came up with the idea of firing conical bullets instead. Some time later, someone elaborated on the design by giving the bullets a copper casing. Copper doesn't melt as easily as lead, which means you can fire a copper-cased bullet at higher velocity."
Once again, the item in Kaidan's hands was dropped back onto the table. "Then, at least in my time, we found out about mass effect technology. We scrapped the gunpowder end of the equation and fitted our projectiles in a mass accelerator instead. It's much more accurate: you're not reliant on unpredictable combustion reactions. Not only that, but it's faster, too. We were still stuck with a problem though: namely, you can only carry so many bullets with you."
He picked up an imposing-looking weapon with a futuristic design, reached back, and pulled out... a block of solid metal. "Then we realized that if we no longer need gunpowder and we can hit higher velocities, we don't need to rely on the old bullet designs either," he said. "Every time we need to fire, the rifle shaves off a minuscule bit of matter from this block. It then fires it with a high enough velocity to do considerable damage. The only drawback from this system is that it generates a lot of heat, so you can't just go spraying away - you need to make sure it doesn't overheat."
He put the rifle back down.
"Same thing as last week, but now we're keeping an eye on something else," he concluded. "I want you to pick from this stack of weapons and that stack of bullets and try 'em out on those targets over there. They're 3D, so you can check out the damage afterwards."
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