Aluminum Jackets

[Moose]

Hi guys. I was thinking about the use of aluminum in the Alloy of Law. Having pure aluminum bullets, gun barrels and other major gun parts like your bolt will cause a lot of reliability issues for that weapons system. Aluminum is a very soft metal and has a low melting point. That is bad news for the important parts of a firearm that move and generate a lot of heat. The Bolt and Barrel on guns is usually made of some alloy of steel. Also aluminum bullets will be relatively soft witch will make them deform on impact giving the low penetration on an armored target. A good suit of body armor would defeat the bullet leaving your enemy alive. I was thinking on how to get around these problems and I have an idea. Give any steel part on your gun an aluminum jacket. Also do the same for you Bullets have a steel core sounded by an aluminum jacket. I think this might be a way to get a reliable aluminum gun that wont stop working in the middle of an alamantic gun fight because your barrel melted.

Thoughts.

[name_here]

I don't think aluminum automatically blocks allomantic effects when present in any quantity. I'd guess aluminum oxide has no blocking effect at all, because no one in the Final Empire noticed odd behavior with sapphires. Granted, they're small, but over a thousand years I'd expect someone to have noticed something funky with them, given the amount of jewelry the average noble allomancer encounters.

Plus, being imbedded in a living creature supposedly prevented metal objects from being affected by allomancy, and we know for a fact that's not true. I suspect aluminum has a blocking effect proportional to thickness, if it blocks iron and steel at all. We only have confirmation of blocking emotional allomancy and being unaffected by the external physicals, after all. I suspect that if this would work, Wax would have assumed that Miles' gun was just lined with aluminum, not made from it.

[Voidus]

I think someone brought this up a while ago, the problem is that you'd need to have such a thick jacket for it to be practical that it would just be easier to use pure aluminium, if you only had a thin coating then it would deform and erode potentially exposing the underlying metals and as soon as they're even partially exposed then it's worthless, the bullets in particular I suspect would need a quite thick jacket for them not to suffer enough damage that they could be pushed.

[Aethling]

An Aluminum frame should effectively protect all the internal non-aluminum parts from being affected. Besides, there are some fairly strong aluminum alloys. They might not be exactly right for the timeframe, but it is fantasy. Make a barrel out of ceramics, and you would have a decent allomantically inert weapon.

[king of nowhere]

it was specified that "some" of aluminium's alloys are also allomantically inert, and the guns were made with some of those alloys. it was also said that they would wear out faster, but i suppose if you can afford an aluminium gun hen having it melted and recasted every once in a while would be a trivial matter.

And it is one important reason I like sanderson's work so much that he takes the time to address those kind of issues. My suspension of disbelief is pretty low on scientifical inconsistencies.

As far as aluminium jackets go, they would probably need to be too tick. We don't know if a lead bullet encased in aluminium foild becomes allomantically inert, or if there is a partial shielding depending on how tick is the aluminium foil, or if aluminium foil will only block emotional allomancy. maybe any item big enough to make an aluminium foil worthwhile would also be too big to be pushed effectively.

Also, ceramic weapons may be more effective. I think it was experimented in the real world because they could pass metal detectors, and they worked ok, but I'm not sure. However, you don't want to drop one of those.

[Inkthinker]

Ceramic firearms are too advanced a tech for Alloy, but maybe Brandon will approach the idea in the modern or future series. I wouldn't mind seeing ceramic knives.

And yeah, I think Brandon sidestepped a bit by stating that an alloy which is sufficiently composed of aluminum would be inert (or so weak as to be undetectable or uneffectable), so guns may be case of an alloy rather than pure aluminum.

And then mentioned, it's known that aluminum firearms don't put up with a lot of abuse (or have a long service life), that's one of their downsides (also expense) which helps balance them in game terms. It's why everyone doesn't have an aluminum gun... their only real advantage is the way in which they're immune to Allomancy, and that's not a problem in most scenarios. While Iron/Steel Allomancy isn't exactly rare, it's not common enough to be a constant problem for people using firearms.