Jump to content

Aluminum Bullets


Govir

Recommended Posts

I'm relistening to Alloy of Law, and something jumped out at me as being odd. It was the scene where Wax is trying to determine the Aluminum alloy used in the guns and bullets. It seems to be a metal that he's not familiar with, and it's brought up a few times later (like when he visits Ranette).

Do we ever find out what the other metal in them is (I've read all of Era 2, but can't remember it specifically)? It seems like a brand new thing (making guns and bullets out of aluminum), starting with the Vanishers, so I was wondering if it could be Trell's metal, since that group is involved with them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I believe the gist of it is that aluminum in and of itself cannot be used in guns, as it simply wouldn't work as the basis for a bullet. I don't know the real mechanics, because I'm no gun expert. But it has to be a variation of sorts of the metal in order to function as a bullet. Someone else with more weaponry knowledge can explain this in greater detail.

But that is a good catch. I say good job finding that on your own.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

well, aluminium is a poor choice of material for a weapon because it has bad mechanical properties for it. You can counter that with some alloying. it is also very light, meaning the bullet won't have much power or range. that you can't change, unless you alloy it so much that it's no longer aluminium.

the ressulting weapon is still good enough to kill, of course.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The allot that the gun is made of is a real life alloy. Wax mentions "Ekaboron" which is another name for scandium, and that is used in real life in the frames of guns because of its strength and light weight. The percentages are even the same. 

The bullets though? That's never identified. And scandium alloys still aren't doable for bullets or gun barrels/chambers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Calderis I think you're right. All the passages so far in this relistening have been about the gun, not the bullets. The way Wax mentioned Ekaboron made it seem like he was grasping at straws, and therefore was not likely to be true. But with real world knowledge backing up the existence of an alloy, and its usage, it seems like his hunch was right.

Thanks as always for the info!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

41 minutes ago, Unlicensed Hemalurgist said:

Perhaps "aluminum bullets" are just ordinary lead bullets plated in a thin layer of aluminum to block A-Steel and A-Iron from affecting the lead cores that do the real damage?

Unfortunately a thin layer doesn't work. 

Quote

Questioner

In Allomancy, aluminum won't be able to be pushed or pulled, right?

Brandon Sanderson

Right.

Questioner

So if you put a piece of steel like a gun barrel, and then you surround it with aluminum, can you still push the gun barrel?

Brandon Sanderson

The aluminum will add some interference, it's gonna depend on how thick the aluminum is. It's probably unfeasible. That is a viable concept, I don't think it's feasible on a gun barrel.

source

 

Edited by Calderis
Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 hours ago, Govir said:

I'm relistening to Alloy of Law, and something jumped out at me as being odd. It was the scene where Wax is trying to determine the Aluminum alloy used in the guns and bullets. It seems to be a metal that he's not familiar with, and it's brought up a few times later (like when he visits Ranette).

Do we ever find out what the other metal in them is (I've read all of Era 2, but can't remember it specifically)? It seems like a brand new thing (making guns and bullets out of aluminum), starting with the Vanishers, so I was wondering if it could be Trell's metal, since that group is involved with them.

So what's going on here is that I think Sanderson is leaning on the fact that there have been real world succesaful experiments with aluminum alloy guns/bullets, but they have really bad properties compared to more conventional materials so engineers and metalurgists don't really bother pursuing the concept. Loosely documented hobbyist experimentation indicates, yes, it is possible some type of aluminum alloy and tempering process could theoretically eventually produce aluminum alloy guns and bullets with almost as good of properties as conventional methods. It's highly unlikely anyone IRL will ever find them because it's not economically viable or beneficial to invest huge amounts of R&D into making a fundamentally inferior product.  It's not a completely satisfying answer, but I think it is perfectly reasonable and at least loosely supported by real world testing and analysis, so it could be much worse.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 hours ago, Firerust said:

I believe the gist of it is that aluminum in and of itself cannot be used in guns, as it simply wouldn't work as the basis for a bullet. I don't know the real mechanics, because I'm no gun expert. But it has to be a variation of sorts of the metal in order to function as a bullet. Someone else with more weaponry knowledge can explain this in greater detail.

But that is a good catch. I say good job finding that on your own.

In principle you could make bullets out of aluminum, but it would be both more difficult and potentially more likely to damage the gun because aluminum is almost two times harder than lead, meaning that if there were even the slightest size discrepancy between the diameter of the bullet and the barrel, it runs the potential to destroy the barrel; because lead is so soft, this is less of a problem because it has more give to it. At least that’s my understanding of it. Lead is also much denser than aluminum, meaning that a bullet made of aluminum would be significantly lighter than one of the same size made of lead, which can lead to aerodynamic problems.

Edited by Fanghur Rahl
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Spoolofwhool said:

A general thought is that aluminum in the Cosmere has stronger mechanical properties than real world aluminum, as it seems to withstand stresses which aluminum normally cannot do, even with alloying.

Not really. The most we’ve ever really seen aluminum put through any kind strenuous treatment is Vasher using Nightblood, aluminum sheath and all, as a weapon. But really, that wouldn’t be expected to do that much damage; humans aren’t really tough after all. You could easily make a stabbing weapon out of aluminum if all you wanted to stab was unarmored flesh.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 minutes ago, Fanghur Rahl said:

Not really. The most we’ve ever really seen aluminum put through any kind strenuous treatment is Vasher using Nightblood, aluminum sheath and all, as a weapon. But really, that wouldn’t be expected to do that much damage; humans aren’t really tough after all. You could easily make a stabbing weapon out of aluminum if all you wanted to stab was unarmored flesh.

Read my WoBs above about gun and aluminum coatings. 

We still don't make gun barrels and chambers from the aluminium-scandium alloys that we make the frames from, because stronger though they are they still aren't a reliable option. 

Brandon made references in the guns specifically that they are a real world alloy. He also says that coating the barrel in aluminum wouldn't be enough, so the barrel must be as well... Either those guns are liable to tear themselves apart under the forces involved in firing, mainly because unlike steel which will warp and bend aluminum cracks and shatters, or aluminum is by nature stronger or less brittle in the Cosmere than in reality 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

39 minutes ago, Calderis said:

Read my WoBs above about gun and aluminum coatings. 

We still don't make gun barrels and chambers from the aluminium-scandium alloys that we make the frames from, because stronger though they are they still aren't a reliable option. 

Brandon made references in the guns specifically that they are a real world alloy. He also says that coating the barrel in aluminum wouldn't be enough, so the barrel must be as well... Either those guns are liable to tear themselves apart under the forces involved in firing, mainly because unlike steel which will warp and bend aluminum cracks and shatters, or aluminum is by nature stronger or less brittle in the Cosmere than in reality 

I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just saying that if you really wanted to, and you didn’t care about the drawbacks, you could probably do it in principle. I mean if nothing else you could certainly do it musket style.

Edited by Fanghur Rahl
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Calderis said:
2 hours ago, 1st of Lunch said:

Not a big deal.

I don't think anyone knows what those words mean here. 

I do have to admit that the reason this popped into my head as possibly being Trell's metal was because I thought Trell's metal was also not able to be pushed / pulled by Allomancy. But then I remembered that Atium was pushed and pulled all the time, so it's not a property of the "God" Metals. The spikes we see later on are hard to push / pull because they are Hemalurgic spikes.

I think Calderis is right, it's an aluminium-scandium alloy, with maybe a bit of fantasy shenanigans (i.e. slightly different properties) to make it work for the whole gun.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The thing is, even if the aluminum-alloy bullets aren't as good as normal world bullets, in world it is worth the trade off because you sacrifice perfect bullets for anti-allomantic viability. So even if we don't know the exact alloy, I don't have a huge problem with it. Plus, we've never seen a situation where aluminum bullets are used for like sniping or something that would really require the bullets to be really aerodynamic. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Jumping in here, but Ive delved a bit of research on this sort of thing in the past (was doing my own bullet casting and looked into making silver bullets and such, even made some gallium ones). 

Couple things:

On Alloys: Aluminum alloys, both inside and outside the aerospace industry, is comparable to a pretty wide swath of Steels in terms of both tensile and yield strengths, brittleness, etc. The Real world differences these days are more and more economical than functional (and titanium owns a lot of the market share where they'd make sense for us); hell, there are even heat treatable alloys. For some comparison, there are functional aluminum engine blocks, and a gun barrel is never going to see those kind of cycles. 

But on NEEDING alloys, keep in mind that we can successfully make guns from common 3D printed plastic these days, and wood guns/cannons have been a thing historically; arguably there are Fireworks that accomplish it in a cardboard wrapper.  It mostly has to be a lot thicker than the equivalent steel, and it will have some limits on the type and size of load you could put in.  I assume it would also fatigue and fail faster, but that's not going to be any more dangerous than the rest of the 19th century manufacturing that could potentially explode at any moment anyway. On scadrial they'd be well worth it even if they were literally single-use, just a bullet with a disposable firing mechanism wrapped around it (would make a certain amount of economic sense).  That's all just a question about the gun body and really just about the barrel if single-shot guns are good enough.  We standardize pretty heavily to certain gund designs and Gun materials because we have standardized down to the micron on Bullet design and standards, because tiny variations can have such huge (and dangerous) consequences.  That's also something we expect today but likely didn't/couldnt back in the 19th century equivalent to era2.

As far as the bullets go, so long as they are of a softer alloy than the barrel they will function without danger.  The practical issue fabricating them has more to do with non-standard casting contraction than with the final behavior.  The biggest issue for aluminum bullets is the weight issue, they would be too light to have any sort of comparable range even with good aerodynamics on the bullet.  BUUUUT, that's again all just relative to an equivalent steel bullet, not to the whole ballistic range.  If it would me Id design the aluminum bullets to something on the larger bore side of things, and then fill them with a heavier mass (non-metallic if you can find one).  It wouldnt be as dense as lead but it would improve the function, and if you find something dense enough that's non-metallic you dont really have to worry about the thickness of the Aluminum layer, it's there more for structural support (and you'd want it to fragment on impact).

 

My biggest Cosmere question is how much alloying can you even do before it looses it's Investiture inertness?  Duralumin is 95% aluminum (and in fact one of the early attempts at hardened Aluminum) so that much clearly makes it a different metal.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Chaos locked this topic
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...