Editing Firearm (section)

===Ammo Storage and Feeding===
This refers to how ammunition is given to the weapon. Also the topic of a /k/ommando's greatest sources of rage; the clip vs magazine misconception. This section will give a short explanation for both.

*Pepperbox - basically the bastard child of a break-action long gun and a revolver; a pepperbox gun has 3 or more barrels loaded and ready to fire, with the gun rotating between the loaded barrels to fire in relatively quick sucession. As this was one of the only ways to get more than a single shot in less than a minute without resorting to carrying multiple guns; the design was wacky but popular during the olden ages (and still today to a limited extent for some pocket pistols). The Empire's Outriders are armed with these weapons if you want a visual of what they looked like. Most pepperboxes where smoothbore since they were made on the cheap and never intended for more than point blank fire.

*Harmonica - Also called a ''slide gun,'' it was a precursor to the detachable magazine, it was basically a reusable steel block with multiple holes drilled into the sides to house preloaded powder and shot alongside percussion caps. While loaded from the side near the hammer on adapted breechloading firearms and manually reset between shots, it still did not solve the problem of gas leakage that plagued early non-muzzleloaders until the invention of brass bullet cartridges.

*Volleygun - A variant of the olden multi-barrel family, the volleygun foregoes single, accurate shots in favor of alpha-striking to saturate the area in lead, having anywhere between 2 to 20 barrels (and you can go well beyond this if your contraption can handle it) and the size ranging anywhere from a pistol to a full-sized artillery piece. As the name describes; it fires all of it's payload in a single volley, basically making it a one-man firing line. This style of weaponry gradually fell out of disuse as more modern firearms were developed (mainly self-loading weapons, which were more reliable and accurate), but is notably still used for the "Metal Storm", a prototype weapon with truly absurd number of gun barrels that go off simultaneously to shred the ever-living fuck out of it's target. The only types still in use today are double barreled shotguns and derringers.

*Superposed load - the disadvantage to using a multi-barreled firearm is that it adds a lot of weight to the firearm. One alternative was to simply stack multiple bullets and charges into the same barrel, and then have the firearm set them off sequentially. The early version of this mechanism was prone to failures, as the bullets were not self-contained and a poor gas seal could result in multiple charges going off, destroying the gun (and the user if unlucky enough) if it was not designed to handle the stress. The King of England was once gifted several such guns and after one exploded killing the guard firing it the whole affair was deemed a very creative attempt at assassination. However, this setup was revived with the invention of caseless bullets and electronic triggers used most prominently in Metal Storm weapons. If combined with multiple barrels, a metal storm weapon can have a bewildering rate of fire. So far the technology is mostly used in multi-shot grenade launchers.

*Bullpup - A bullpup is any weapon where its action is located in the behind the trigger, instead of in front. Bullpups have the advantage of being more compact, whilst still retaining the same ballistic properties of a full-sized weapon as it can use the same barrel length, but the weapon's profile is shorter thanks to the design. However, some of the disadvantages are it not being readily ambidextrous (being that the shell ejection port is directly beside the shooter's face, you cannot switch to a left-hand grip so easily if the situation calls for it. Some bullpups can have ambidextrous controls, but implementing them typically requires tools and is not something you can swap during a fight). One of the more technical problems is weight distribution. Unlike traditional firearms where the weight is typically in the center, allowing both left and right arms to distribute the weight of the gun: most of the bullpup's weight is in the back, so most of the work is being lumped onto the dominant hand, which can cause fatigue faster. The other is poor trigger pull due to the distance from trigger to action, though there are aftermarket kits for many that can mitigate it a good deal. Modern pistols and many SMGs that feed from inside the grip are ''technically'' bullpups, since their magazine and action are behind the trigger and connected by a transfer bar, but they generally aren't counted as such. Despite their on-paper advantages, bullpups have been a hard sell on account of most of their early offerings being either hideously expensive, or finicky garbage, or inciting visceral digust just looking at it, or just straight up not-American enough to make it out of subcommittee at the Pentagon. Their lack of reach with a bayonet is a hindrance (even with modern firearms, room-to-room combat and POW control still use bayonets) while their difficulty with being modular or customizable makes each model a one-trick pony, and ambidextrous usage is very difficult to achieve. On the other hand, a good example is pretty convenient to drop weight and length without losing effectiveness for when space is at a premium.

*Clip - A clip is a device, used for bundling bullets together for immediate use. Guns cannot use clips by themselves, they have to be loaded into a magazine first to be used by a gun. The most common version were "stripper clips": each clip held about five bullets, and to load the rifle you placed the clip on top of the magazine, then squeezed the bullets off the clip into the magazine. Another type, en bloc, was used by the M1 Garand and held eight bullets in a 2x4 configuration. The entire clip was put in the magazine, with the clip being ejected after being emptied. The last kind is the moon (or half-moon) clip, used specifically for revolvers, which holds bullets in a circular formation for loading the chamber up in one go. Clips are still used today, but exclusively to speed up loading external magazines. Filling external magazines generally requires a small disposable tool, which is included in any ammo lot packaged on stripper clips.

*Speedloader - A speedloader is essentially a clip that has moving parts, usually to aid with holding and/or loading ammunition. Two common types exist. The first is similar to a moon clip in that it holds bullets so that they can all be loaded into a revolver simultaneously, but use a locking mechanism to secure the bullets while they are being carried, then release them once they are loaded into the cylinder. While not as fast as a moon clip, it still makes loading revolvers considerably faster. Another type of speedloader is the magazine loader, which is designed to reduce the spring pressure in a magazine, making it faster and easier to load.

*Magazine - The magazine is part of the weapon that houses and feeds actual ammo into the weapon. In the olden days, many guns had magazines that were built into the weapon itself and were fed using clips of ammo that were loaded after the gun ran out. Built-in magazines, however, severely limited the potential ammunition capacity of guns as they cannot be expanded without significantly making the gun larger and was a pain in the ass to reload (such as in the case of revolvers). To counter this; people designed guns whose magazines were detachable from the gun itself. This allowed people to easily expand the ammo cap of a gun, as they only needed to ensure that the extended magazine will fit into their gun and cycle properly, they no longer needed to re-work the entire structure of the gun to enlarge a built-in magazine. It also greatly increased a person's reload speed, as instead of fumbling around with several clips to ram down the gun: they just had to detach a magazine, pull one out of their vest/bag, load it in (charge the gun if needed), and they're good to go. High-capacity magazines tend to take on weird shapes rather than the standard flat box; the most common variant is the drum magazine, but there are also double drums, caskets, and helicals. Typically the weakest part of any firearm. A large part of the misconceptions of the M16 were related to the fucktarded idea that it should be issued with DISPOSABLE MAGAZINES! They were initially not intended for repeated use, empty the mag. Drop it, crush it under your boot, reload a brand new never used mag. Worked well till some bureaucrat ordered reusing them which alongside some other bureaucrats skipping the chrome lining for the barrel and issuing really shitty ammo made with spare parts caused regular failures. Newer iterations of the magazine have since addressed these issues.

*Belts - The belt is what it is; a long belt filled with bullets, which can either take the form of a cloth belt or linked by metallic chains. Belts are the common loading method of most machine guns, who typically have ammunition capacities well beyond 100 rounds. The reason for this is that it simplifies the operation of the gun (since belts do not require them to be fed to the gun with a mechanism like in traditional magazines) and makes them less prone to malfunctions (with a gun designed to shoot continuously; you wanna make sure that there's less critical moving parts to fuck up as it's firing it's 300th round at the enemy). Belts are also much easier to transport, as the belt can be folded several times to make it more compact, versus a solid magazine. This is mostly because until H&K put out their steel high reliability 5.56 nato mag, most magazines couldn't keep up with the fire rate and were too flimsy(The Soviet counterparts that used magazines, used AK pattern magazines which you can open a beer with and then load into the gun). Pretty much every man issued a M249 with the magwell adapter, will attest to how dire you must be for bullets in the air to use it but it's better then nothing when the belt is out and your buddies can toss you a couple mags rather than sitting on your thumb waiting for someone to drop their gun.