Chapter 40 A spot of Mechanics (Patreon)

Poppy frowned at the spot where, until moments ago, a small pile of prototype black powder had rested. The green orc reached up and scratched his thinning hair. “Huh. I expected more boom.”

Nathan stepped up next to the alchemist. “Yeah, it’s not quite done yet. If you mix it even finer that’ll help. The other thing that needs to happen is to grain it. You mix in a little bit of water. The goal is more of a putty than a slurry. Then you rub it through a mesh screen or squish it into cakes and crumble them. You might need to heat it a bit to dry it out.” He gestured at the metal sheet. “Carefully, of course. You want little grains, and for them to all be about the same size. I think the smaller they are, the more boom you get.”

Poppy pursed his lips. “Why does making it in grains help it explode? Seems like you would fit less material in the same space if it’s not a powder.”

“The saltpeter dissolves a bit in water, so I think it helps mix all the components even more finely and keep them from separating. Having them in grains means there’s a little bit of space between them, like you said. So if a grain here burns,” Nathan held up a fist in front of his left shoulder. “It doesn’t just burn the grain next to it, here,” Nathan put another fist in front of his face. “But because there’s space between this grain and the one under it, it also means that the next grain over gets lit at the same time.” Nathan moved his right hand to be in front of his right shoulder. “So when a fire starts at one side it gets to the other side faster, and you get a boom instead of a woosh.”

Poppy nodded, his face impressed. “You’re good at explaining these things. Have you done some teaching?”

Nathan snorted. “Yeah, a little bit. Not on how to make explosives though, that would have been much more fun. Now, about that primer mix…”

Beatred had been lurking against the back wall, but now she spoke up. “So we can make the explosives, and I expect Poppy will need to experiment with them. What about me? I can tell you that I’m not going to make one of these right the first time off.” She gestured to the large slate, where Nathan’s crude diagram of bullet mechanics still rested.

Nathan nodded, turning back. “Right. Yeah, we can talk about the primer later. And that’s a problem that can be solved by a simple heat enchantment too.” He pointed at the metal rod that Poppy had used to light the gunpowder. “Before we can really get going on making the guns we need to test stuff out. Do some experiments, and that will require some prototypes.

“We probably want to start with just a simple barrel that needs to be loaded by hand with just some loose powder and a small ball of lead to act as a bullet. Light the powder with a small hole and then you can start getting a sense of how much powder is right, and how tightly the bullet needs to fit. That sort of thing. Get the exact ratios of bullet weight to powder weight to barrel size nailed down first.

“I think you guys will need to work together a fair amount to make sure you’re not going down the wrong path. You need to figure out the details of the casing and bullet before you can really start going on gun design.” Nathan laid out a few more suggestions for a scientific approach to figuring out the right numbers.

Then he turned back to the slate, picking up the chalk again. “I think we should aim for two different designs of gun and cartridge. The first uses a cylindrical cartridge, where the cartridge is the same diameter as the bullet all the way back. This will go in a short-barreled handgun, meant to be used to shoot a lot at close range. Smaller barrel, less powder, lower power. There’s a few ways to design it, but the one that we’re most likely to use is a simple revolver.” Nathan was sketching out a classic old-west style revolver as he talked, including the trigger guard, handle and hammer.

“The trick here is that there’s this central cylinder which can hold multiple bullets. Between six and nine, usually. There's one barrel, but when you fire it automatically rotates so that the next cartridge is in line with the barrel. The internal mechanism is kind of tricky, since what actually shoots the bullet is this hammer coming down on the back of the bullet. Either it’s got a pin that hits the primer, or we just seal it with thin paper and the pin is enchanted. But you want it to fire when you pull this trigger here, which requires a sort of catch and level thing here, with a spring somewhere in the handle that pulls it back into place…”

Nathan looked back from his increasingly detailed drawing to see Beatred watching intently, fascinated. Poppy was looking a little boggled.

Beatred stepped forward, taking the chalk from Nathan. “It looks like you’d have gaps in your barrel here and here, where the cylinder lines up with the barrel and where the hammer goes into the barrel. Wouldn’t that explode your hand? And how does the cylinder rotate automatically?”

Nathan shrugged, pointing. “That’s why it’s lower power. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just close. And the hammer needs to be heavy and the pin small so it doesn’t get blown back. I think you put something like a gear on the back of the cylinder, then you stick a piece on the lever attached to the trigger so that pulling the trigger automatically rotates the next cartridge into place.”

Beatred was nodding. “Looks tricky. The sort of fine work that you don’t get to do very often on weapons. But critical to this thing working. Ok. You mentioned two designs. This one looks great, what’s the other one?” She handed him back the chalk.

Nathan had to stoop low to access a clear space on the board. “It’s called a rifle. Meant for long-range accurate shooting. Long barrel, lots of powder, strong explosion. You make a cartridge where the bullet is smaller than the body of the cartridge, so you can fit more powder in and make your bullet go faster. It also means that there’s less air resistance on the bullet so it’ll fly farther.” Nathan sketched out the cartridge, showing where the casing widened out to hold more powder.

“Because you have more powder, you need a stronger chamber. The design we’ll almost certainly use is called a bolt action, where you put a cartridge into an opening, then push this lever forward. The bolt, here, moves the bullet into the chamber. Then the lever rotates down a quarter turn and the bolt screws into the back of the chamber, forming a really good seal. The firing mechanism is simple - the trigger just pops the pin through the bolt and into the back of the bullet. You can either feed cartridges in by hand, or you can make magazines that go in the bottom. They’ve got a spring in them that pushes cartridges up into the gun. So to reload you just turn the bolt a quarter turn, pull it back, then push it forward and screw it back in.”

Beatred looked enlightened. “It screws into the back, that’s elegant! How do you clear the casing after the cartridge goes off? It needs to be gone, yes?”

“I’m not sure about this one, but I think you put a little lever here that engages when you pull the bolt back. It just flicks the casing out sideways. I can get you a better answer later.”

Beatred didn’t mind, just looking over the diagram with a hungry gleam in her eyes. “Why does the back look like this? I notice you don’t have a handle on it.”

“Oh, because the cartridge is bigger and shoots the bullet harder there’s a lot of recoil, pushback from the gun firing. You brace this part against your shoulder.” Nathan looked around the room and grabbed a broom. He aimed it at Poppy, who was watching with an amused look on his face. “See, so when the gun fires and jerks in your hand, it’s braced against your shoulder.” Nathan jerked the broom to simulate recoil.

Then he paused and took a breath, halting the frantic torrent of words. He looked over the diagrams, trying to think of important details he’d forgotten. There were a hundred important details he hadn’t gotten to yet, but this would be enough to get started. Oh!

“One more thing for now. The bullet itself is made of lead. It’s softer than the steel of the barrel, so it’ll engage with the groves to spin properly without messing them up. It’s also easier to make a bunch of, to reload empty cartridges.”

Beatred was nodding along, pursing her lips as she thought about Nathan’s point.

{Low-tier Lecturing 3 achieved!}

It was Poppy’s turn to interrupt. “It’s getting a bit late. Come on up to my place, I’ll make dinner.”

They followed the orc through another door and up a flight of stairs. It seemed that Poppy lived above his shop, and he busied himself in the small kitchen while they continued talking.

It seemed like it wouldn’t be easy to make mercury fulminate, which was the simplest primer that Nathan knew of. The problem wasn’t the mercury - it was the nitric acid. Really, Nathan should have asked after nitric acid first, since guncotton might have been a better propellant than gunpowder. The basic problem was that they didn’t have sulfuric acid in any quantity. Sulfuric acid was the starting point of most of chemistry, including nitric acid. Nathan didn’t remember different ways to make sulfuric acid.

For now, that was a rabbit-hole. Maybe he could shepherd Gemores alchemists into better living through chemistry later. For now, they needed to use materials that were already on hand to make power multipliers for Nathan’s friends.

Beatred and Poppy were discussing their first priority, which was the development of a standard casing and bullet size. Beatred needed to make some casings before Poppy would have an appropriate way to test if his powder was good enough, and Beatred needed to know the size of the cartridges before she could get started on proper gunsmithing.

They asked Nathan a dozen more questions about the mechanics of various designs, or other ways to do things. Nathan had to face up to the fact that while he remembered a lot of useful information from Earth’s history, he did not have hands-on experience with this stuff.

But that’s why he’d asked Kadid for the introduction. He didn’t have the tools, time or experience to make his knowledge a reality. These two did. There were risks, but Nathan thought he’d done pretty well at mitigating them. Actually…

Nathan spoke up. “Is it possible that I could ask you both to install some more security on your stores? I’ll help pay for it.” He dug for his money again.

Poppy was dishing up the food, which looked like a reheated stew, pulled from a sort of enchanted preservation box and heated in a pot. He raised his eyebrows as Nathan put some more coins on the table. “I won’t turn that down for sure and certain. Appreciate the thought of security, though the best security will be preventing people from learning what we're doing.  Don’t go telling people and we should be good about it in the streets.”

Beatred took her bowl and a spoon. “I should ask old man Buscar if he’s interested in sellin’ his shop. It’s right next to mine, got a nice workspace. You interested in movin’ down? Safer near the Adventurer’s guild. Not a lot of thieves want to run into a Gemore Adventurer.”

Poppy hesitated, clearly thinking about it. He handed Nathan his bowl and got his own before speaking. “Maybe. I’m not really focused on Adventurer supplies, but it’s lucrative for sure and certain. If these ‘guns’ go well, then sure. If they’re as effective as Nathan says they are… we should also think about building some kind of self-destruction enchantment in. Who are you thinking of bringing in to do enchanting?”

Beatred pulled a face. Nathan wasn’t sure if it was from the stew or the idea of needing an enchanter. It wasn't a great stew.

“I can handle a simple enchantment like the firing pins. For something delicate like a  self-destruct we’d need a real enchanter. I’d say we go for Aunt Herdin, but we’ve got to convince her it’s worth coming out of retirement. We can trust her farther than we can trust me, and she’s forgotten more about real enchanting than I’ve ever learned. We’ll talk more about it next time.” She took another bite and grimaced. “We can get excited all we want, but until I witness a piece of metal flying faster than sight I’ll have reservations.”

The conversation quickly drifted onto more mundane topics around being a craftsperson in Gemore. There was another guild called the “Crafter’s Guild” which organized the various Artisans of Gemore. Aunt Herdin had stepped down from the role of Guildmistress a few years ago and been replaced by a man named Vint Anisal who’d been a stonemason. Both Poppy and Beatred complained about the taxes that he’d allowed to be levied on the crafters in the past few years.

That led to a discussion of the governance of Gemore, which was a topic Nathan hadn’t had a chance to learn about. He’d heard of the Council, and apparently it was their lead governing body. There were seven guilds and each guild had a Guildmaster who sat on the Council. Nathan asked about the guilds and got a quick rundown from Beatred.

Four of the guilds were focused in Gemore - the Adventurers, the Guard, the Crafters and the Traders. Nathan was a little bit confused at the overlap between the Crafters and Traders or the Adventurer’s and the Guards. He asked, and the response was rather simple. The Guards and the Crafters were responsible for most things inside the walls of Gemore, while the Traders and Adventurers managed safety and kept everybody outside of Gemore’s walls linked together.

The three other guilds were centered on the villages that surrounded Gemore, farming and gathering raw materials. The Village guild was almost more of a sub-council, with one Village head elected as representative and heavily overseen by the council of Village heads. They were primarily concerned with what happened inside village walls.

Meanwhile, the Farmer’s guild oversaw… farming. And herding, apparently. The Gatherer’s guild oversaw collection of mundane raw materials that weren’t food. Mining, quarrying and lumber, primarily.

Every guild had its own way of selecting a guildmaster, but many of them seemed to run on personal connections. From Beatred and Poppy’s description, you’d never become Guildmaster of the crafting guild without being a crotchety old mastercraftsman who’d been around for longer than anybody could remember.

Beatred wanted to stay and go over some details with Poppy. Nathan was starting to feel like a third wheel, so he bowed out to return to the Adventurer’s Guild.

It was dark outside, and as Poppy let Nathan out of the front door, he realized that he was alone. Nobody was escorting him. If there were agents of Giantsrest in Gemore that wanted to capture him, this was their chance.

Overall Status:

{Status of Nathan Lark:

Permanent Talent 1: Magic Absorption 3

Permanent Talent 2: High-tier Regeneration 3

Talent 3: None

Class: Spellbreaker Juggernaut level 43

Class skills:

Stamina: 523/530

Juggernaut's Wrath

Antimagic Momentum

Raging Thrill

Juggernaut's Inertia

Unarmored Resilience

Utility skills:

Mid-tier Focused Mind 10

Mid-tier Earnestness 2

Mid-tier Sprinting 2

Mid-tier Spellsense 1

Mid-tier Notice 1

Low-tier Identify 7

Low-tier Dodging Footwork 8

Mid-tier Enhanced Memory 4}

Low-tier Lecturing 3}