Ammunition Quality Control

[Tegyrius]

At a match yesterday, I witnessed a new-to-me failure. One of the competitors was shooting a Beretta 1301 Competition. On his fourth round of a five-round stage, the hull separated from the brass. The brass was ejected; the hull stayed in the chamber (and had actually worked its way forward into the barrel a little bit).

This was the shotgun version of complete case head separation, and was not the kind of thing that an immediate action drill would have resolved. On the range, it was a cleaning rod fix. In a fight, the options would have been to transition to secondary or transition to bludgeoning.

As I was discussing the incident elsenet, it occurred to me that in T2k, most small arms ammo is going to use casings that have been reloaded many times beyond their expected service life. Those forum members who reload more than I do can probably tell us what failure modes our characters are likely to see.

(Also, this suggests that unearthed quantities of factory-new ammo will be highly desirable by 2000 due to greater precision, component quality, and quality control in their production processes.)

- C.