Ammunition Quality Control

[castlebravo92]

You can reload shotgun hulls. Eventually the plastic will fail, but those can be replaced with cardboard.

You can reload steel case ammo, but I think it splits sooner than brass.

Brass work hardens (literally, gets harder the more it's worked) when fired, and so you can anneal it to get more life out of it, but brass also lengthens with each firing (which is why you'll typically have to trim cases you are reloading to get them back to proper length), so you're losing brass with each firing, and eventually the case walls will get too thin and you'll get a rupture.

Manufacturing brass isn't THAT challenging for a decent machinist. Modern brass is basically progressively punched from brass discs using a hydraulic press. Primer cups are probably (IANAM) more difficult to manufacture than the brass itself. The bigger problem (IMHO) would be an industrial scale source for smokeless powder and reliable primer compound given that you basically need a chemicals manufacturing industry that was pretty much located next to all the oil refineries, and unlike new brass manufacturing which could be supported by any decent city, you can't just stand up a nitric acid and ammonia to explosives industry with some grad student chemists. You kind of need the nitrate sources.

[Tegyrius]

The relative difficulty of reloading steel-cased ammo makes me wonder if Western weapons and calibers might actually be desirable among the Pact forces who are operating farther to the west.

I also wonder if shotgun reloading would be relatively rare due to the combination of low military utility and high per-round materials consumption.

Opinions, guys?

- C.

[castlebravo92]

Originally Posted by Tegyrius

The relative difficulty of reloading steel-cased ammo makes me wonder if Western weapons and calibers might actually be desirable among the Pact forces who are operating farther to the west.

I also wonder if shotgun reloading would be relatively rare due to the combination of low military utility and high per-round materials consumption.

Opinions, guys?

- C.

Well, shotgun shells don't use a whole lot of powder (12 gauge is roughly the same as a round of 5.56mm in terms of power if fast power is used in the shotgun shell). Typically they will use a lot of lead, but then one can substitute almost anything for lead in a pinch for birdshot, at least, with varying effectiveness.

re: brass vs steel, soft steel would be just as easy to manufacture new as brass would, with the bonus that steel is a lot more common as a scavenged material. I don't really see a huge advantage there for the WP nations converting over to NATO calibers. IIRC (too lazy to re re-research it again), brass glides better and won't fuse to the chamber like uncoated steel will though, which is one of the reasons why the Russians lacquer coat their steel ammo, so that is an additional supply chain complexity.

I think a few WP countries manufactured brass ammo for 7.62x39mm as well in more limited quantities.

[Raellus]

For damaged brass (e.g. dented, torn) or cartridges that have already been used 2-3 times and are too worn for reloading, how viable would it be to melt them down and then use the recycled brass to stamp (or whatever the correct machining term is) "new" cartridge cases? Obviously, it would be considerably more labor and resource-intensive, and take longer, but would it be possible in the Twilight World?

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