Editing Firearm (section)

===Types of Rounds===
Apart from the traditional type of rounds, here are some unique ones for reference.

*Blanks - What you commonly see loaded in movies. Blanks are basically that; the round has a primer and powder, but the bullet is just a paper or plastic sheet (or "wad") designed to keep the powder in, so you get the sound of a gun going off, but not the damage. That said, blanks ''can'' still kill people, that wad is still powerful enough to liquefy organs and break bones if you were dumb/desperate enough shoot someone with a blank at close range (plus the gas itself is hot enough to cause severe burns at that range). Movie armorers make a point of demonstrating this with things like fruit before letting anyone touch blank firing guns. This is why instead of blank-firing guns, actors will use flash paper guns at close range for safety. There's also blank ammo specifically designed to make as much noise as possible for the purpose of disorienting and intimidating people in an area. In a military sense blanks do have a use: typically for turning your rifle into a grenade launcher, using the expanding gases to launch a grenade held at the muzzle by a cup. Blanks can't cycle a gun's firing mechanisms in the same way as standard bullets can, so self-loading guns that fire blanks have to either be made specifically to fire them or be equipped with an adapter that compensates for the reduced pressure.

*Caseless - An old but futuristic concept, a caseless round has everything required for the bullet to be launched, inside the bullet itself. [[Memes|That's 65% more bullet, per bullet.]]This removes the need for guns to eject spent shell casings after every shot, reducing weight and ammo costs. While this has been pioneered since WW2 and a few prototype examples for it were already developed (like the G11); caseless rounds are still determined to be too unreliable for field combat use in comparison to traditional ammunition, so as of today their use is largely limited (mainly to grenade rounds like the Russian VOG-25 grenade). Their biggest disadvantage is that ammo cases normally transports a large amount of heat out of the weapon, and, if you have paid attention in your physics class, you know that heat always has to go ''somewhere'', so with caseless ammo, it naturally goes into the weapon, making it prone to overheating and dangerous cookoffs, unless the ammo somehow counteracts this, making it more complex and therefore expensive in the process, and if you've at one point in time interacted with any branch of a national government, you know that the word "expensive" usually spells doom for any project that it is attached to.

*Gyrojet - A unique but largely impractical cartridge in the gun circuit, WH40K's famous [[bolter|boltguns]] run on the same concept as the gyrojet. Basically, the bullets are miniature rockets that build up speed as they travel, capable of exceeding the speed of sound after traveling 60ft. While the idea sounds cool; gyrojets were ''required'' to gain minimum distance to achieve their full effect (if you fired at point-blank for example, they didn't really do much), had a design flaw in their propulsion system that made the rockets prone to corkscrewing off-course, and were highly temperamental to environmental conditions, not to mention the costs. At the end the concept was a bust as it didn't really do a lot that couldn't be achieved with traditional small arms for cheaper. Still GeeDubs thought it was nice and became the basis of how boltguns work, where it's largely the same but with more techno-flubdubbery and "because future".

*Magnum - Unlike what vidya gaems portray, magnums aren't really super-mega handguns of death. A magnum round is basically a parent cartridge that's been enlarged so it does more damage due to a combination of larger mass and more powder used (so it flies faster and hits harder), and this can be anything from the .357 magnum handgun round used by revolvers, to the large caliber .338 Lapua and Winchester magnum rounds used for precision sniper rifles.
** Special - An earlier equivalent. The only two to see continued existence are .38 special and .44 special which also went from black powder to smokeless powder, both of which coincidentally have even longer magnum variants; however both are lengthened only as a safety precaution to make them different, as smokeless powder left plenty of room for more powder.

*Overpressured - Designated as "+P", overpressured rounds still uses the same cartridge (unlike the magnum), but is loaded with higher-pressure powder that releases more energy when fired. It sounds like a nice way to up your damage, but guns have a level of pressure they can tolerate, and if your gun isn't designed to do such and you use +P rounds; you run the very high risk of destroying your gun (and the rest of your body if you're that unlucky). There are guns that are proofed to fire +P and +P+ ammo but it is typically used in SMGs. Certain batches of surplus ammo will blow up guns because they were made to be used in more robust SMGs and not commercial pistols, poorly stored, or just plain poorly made.

*Subsonic - Rounds designed to shoot slower than the speed of sound to prevent creating the loud cracking sound a projectile makes when it goes beyond 345m/s, making them more stealthy. There's three ways to go about this. The first is to put less powder in the round, or use specialized one that explodes with and imparts less energy (although this may cause problems for self-loading guns, who are not designed to cycle using less powerful ammo). The other is to make the bullet much heavier than usual so the standard powder load doesn't have enough energy to have the bullet break the sound barrier, although this translates to slower projectile speed and lower range, but increased chances of armor penetration as heavier bullets retain energy much more efficiently than lighter ones. The last is a combination of the two methods. Subsonic munitions are primarily used in silenced weapons for their sound-reduction benefits (the most extreme case of which is that only the cycling of the gun can be heard, the gunshot is virtually inaudible), although some take advantage of certain subsonic rounds' heavy bullets and low-energy for defeating armored opponents at close range (as the lower energy translates to lower chances of overpenetration, which AP bullets have a tendency of doing when tearing through non-armored parts of the body).