https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/commit/911e40563a64c0b6bce4090ad3fe3752bcf685c9
For the love of any and all of the gods, tell me that this never happened.
http://www.greatnorthernprepper.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/22_vs_223_caliber_bullet.jpg
The .22 is on the left.
Please, tell me how that works. Can we make fusion packs out of them too?
Heh, I made the same mistake. The idea apparently is you use the .22 casing to make a jacket for the .223 bullet. Regardless, I don’t think this is a step in the right direction, despite the fact that, before, you just got jackets out of thin air. Before, you could abstract the material for jackets into “lead” under the assumption that “lead” means everything you need to make a bullet, jacket included if jacketed. Now, we have a recipe that’s not symmetrical with respect to assembly/disassembly. Furthermore, no other jacketed ammunition requires any specific material to make the jackets, which makes this a huge nerf to .223 reloading. Lastly, I think it’s silly to assume that you could just shoehorn some lead into a .22 casing to make a bullet. Now, the assumption might be that you melt it down, but if that’s the case, you should be able to use every other casing to craft jackets as well. If we’re going under that assumption, then we should just have a “brass” item (that would be crafted from spent casings) the way we have “lead” now. This would allow the disassembly to be symmetric without any silliness like disassembly of .223 producing .22 casings used to make jackets. But that just gives us another item to take up space for no real benefit.
How does that 3 at the end there change the size so dramatically? Are bullet units logarithmic, or is there is no standardization whatsoever beyond the borders of a manufacturer?
.22 and .223 is just the calibre, that is, the diameter, of the actual bullet. You can see this in the picture. The .223 bullet is a lot longer though, and is designed to have a much higher velocity, thus the larger cartridge is needed for the bigger powder charge.
The names used here are shortforms, their full names generally include the length of the bullet as well, in some form.
But no, there is no real standardization, and to make it even more fun, a certain bullet/cartridge type might have official “names” in both imperial and metric measurements. There can also be types that are very very similar, but not quite, such as the .223 Remington and the 5.56×45mm NATO, where one is perfectly fine to fire in rifles for the other type, but not the other way around. =)
Furthermore, rounds like the .303 British, 7.62x54, and .308 all have very similar bullets but the powder charge, shape of the case, and type of primer all vary.
Technically speaking, the .223 is a civilian version of the 5.56x45mm NATO round.
When you have a designation in that nomenclature, it’s actually relatively simple.
The 5.56 refers to the approximate caliber of the bullet, give or take .1mm because of general silliness and lack of standardization.
The 45 refers to the length of the case, not the entire cartridge. This means that a 5.56x45 will always have a 5.56 caliber bullet, its case will always be 45mm long, but other features including the powder charge, bullet mass, bullet composition, etc. are all variable.
And then you get into the travesty of Imperial designations.
Technically speaking, 7.62x39 (what the AK-47 is chambered for), 7.62x51 (NATO standard full-size rifle ammunition), 7.62x54 (the Russian equivalent), .303 British, .308 (the civilian variant of 7.62x51), .30.06 (the parent of the 7.62x51 NATO which was developed to increase reliability in semi-automatic firearms), etc. are all about “.30 caliber” and are often referred to as such.
Then we get to the current travesty, .22lr vs .223 Remington. As you can see, they are the same caliber, that is the bullets have the same diameter. You can see that in the photo. However, there are many obvious differences.
First of all, the obvious size difference in terms of the case.
Second, bullet mass. Your average .22lr bullet is going to weigh between 30 and 40 grains. An average .223 is going to be in the ballpark of 55-80 grains.
Third, velocity and powder charge. A .22lr will get that 30 to 40 grain bullet to a velocity of between roughly 1000 and 1750 feet per second.
An average .223 has a muzzle velocity of between 2,750 and 3,500 feet per second.
What this means in the end is that a .223 is quite capable of having ten times more kinetic energy when fired than a .22lr. Comparing the two is no more ridiculous and no less than comparing that .223 and a .50 caliber machine gun cartridge.
Unfortunately we don’t have a place to put notes describing the recipe. Might want to look into that somehow. There’s a specific process you can use to make .223 jackets out of .22 casings, it’s not a particularly common tool, but we’re totally abstracting out the tools into the “die and press” item, assuming it has whatever you need to work with ammunition reloading.
RE: this being a “nerf” to .223. It was an oversight in the first place that you were allowed to reload them at all, because no, the “lead” item isn’t intended to be “magic bullet making components”*, just lead. The issue now of course is that .308, .30-06, and other jacketed rifle rounds shouldn’t be craftable, but I’m loath to remove them after it’s been in for a while, so we’re looking at other options for jacketing them.
RE: disassembly, it’s just that the jacket really isn’t reuseable after being pressed. Theoretically you could melt it down for reuse somehow, but we don’t have brass melting options (lead needs a rather small heat source, a campfire can easily do it, brass requires a much higher heat)
*One could even say it’s not a “magic bullet for making bullets” :3
I don’t see why players with the right equipment wouldn’t be able to melt brass. It’s quite possible to walk around with what I presume is a portable nuclear fission reactor (advanced ups). Also, what about “upgrading” ammo, i.e. turning .223 into 5.56 NATO, would that necessarily require destructive removal of the jacket? I would think you could just remove the bullet (jacket included), put some more powder in, and put the bullet back. If that’s the case, that makes the crafting rules even more complicated, and it would be better to just abstract jackets either into the lead item, or into a new brass item.
According to Wikipedia most jacketed slugs are jacketed with copper or steel or something much harder than lead itself. I’ve seen the instructions for how to make these .22 jacketed .223 rounds now, and while it may be perfectly feasible to produce such rounds, I’m not sure how a brittle brass jacket is going to really improve the slug’s characteristics that much.
It’s a nice kludge though, and it makes it so that producing FMJ rounds makes a little more sense, since we actually have to get an extra component in order to craft them.
I’m not saying it’s not possible in principle, just that there’s currently no way to do it. Also please don’t make arguments about “there are high-tech things so anything is possible”. It doesn’t matter that high-tech stuff exists, just having high-tech items doesn’t mean you can do arbitrary other things.
It’s damned if we do, damned if we don’t, because then dissasembling a jacketed round would produce a jacket, which is absurd, and if it doesn’t produce a jacket you’re back where we are now, and even if you had it sometimes produce a jacket, you could then go on to use it for something else instead of a strict “upgrade”.
We could break it down into a multiple steps by having distinct bullet items and recipes for creating each of those, and use those as inputs to the round recipes, but that seems like a great deal of item clutter for a very small benefit.
I think the best option is to make some jacketing options for the rifle rounds, and just deal with the fact that you lose a jacket when disassembling a rifle round.
Rivet: The jacket in this case isn’t there to increase penetration. The issue with modern rifle rounds is that lead/barrel friction would cause the rounds to come apart. Friction between the brass and the barrel is much lower, and the brass won’t melt, so the bullet remains intact even at very high muzzle velocities.
How about an electric ‘crucible’ tool like a portable furnace, that we could put chunks of metal and scrap into and then use it to produce the required materials?
It could also be used to make other little metal things like nails and ball bearings.
[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:6, topic:2477”]Theoretically you could melt it down for reuse somehow, but we don’t have brass melting options (lead needs a rather small heat source, a campfire can easily do it, brass requires a much higher heat)[/quote]We kind of have that with the welder and the scraps>chunks>lumps of steel which has a about 50% higher melting point than brass.
[quote=“Rivet, post:10, topic:2477”]How about an electric ‘crucible’ tool like a portable furnace, that we could put chunks of metal and scrap into and then use it to produce the required materials?
It could also be used to make other little metal things like nails and ball bearings.[/quote]
Perhaps we could make… Rivets.
Rivet gun anyone?
I made a pull request for separate jackets, now you guys should be happy.
Welding together scrap != melting and casting metal
Yes, we COULD add a heating element and a crucible and crap for metalworking, and it’s also a gigantic can of worms we don’t want to get into right now.
The general concept is that you’re scavenging, jerry-rigging and repairing things, we don’t want to wander off into manufacturing industrial goods, there’s no end to it, and we have to draw the line somewhere.
Also rivets aren’t going to work on a jacket for a bullet, unless they’re really tiny rivets I guess? 
It’s possible to melt copper (comparable melting point to brass) with a garden-variety blowtorch running on MAPP gas, just not practical in the slightest.
That said, crucibles would be awesome. I want to cast aluminum out of soda cans in-game as well as in real life.