Chapter 62 – Gunblins

I’d never shot a gun on Earth. I didn’t even like violent movies. I’d certainly never designed one—even as an engineering thought experiment. But, in principle, they were simple devices. And making a cowboy-style lever-powered gun receiver from ceramic and springs used mostly intuitive engineering principles. Move lever: clear chamber, compress spring, set trigger, and load round: pull trigger: release spring tension, strike primer, ignite propellant, bang. Repeat. That’s why they called it a repeater rifle. Or so I had to assume.

We were skipping a few steps in firearms development. The earliest Chinese guns were more like the hand-cannons I’d originally tried to make when I was captured by the javeline, except made from bamboo. Early muskets were a function of shortfalls in material, chemical, and mechanical understanding. I could make up for one with a surplus of the other two, combined with the rapid iteration capability provided by ceramics and the Goblin Tech Tree.

I gave the initial plans to Sally, Neil, and Promo in the morning, and by afternoon, the igni assigned were pulling the first prototype receivers out of the kiln. Promo’s smiths had provided us with spring-wire and smaller gears and jigs, and other parts needed to create an internal magazine and receivers before they moved on to creating prototype ammunition.

Ammunition was another matter that I worried about. Until I remembered that we essentially had it unlocked already, and I didn’t have to do everything myself. I brought Sally over and explained.

“I want tiny rockets that ignite when you hit the back of them." I held my forefinger and thumb up. “This wide, and about twice as long.”

Sally held up her fingers and looked critically at the size. Then she nodded and started whistling for her engineers. They began hammering away, making molds and packing clay while others started stoking the kilns. I watched batches of clay prototypes go in, and by the end of the eclipse, they came out as little ceramic cylinders, pointed on one end and hollow.

Of course, no two were precisely the same size or shape. And it was going to impact their performance and reliability. But as long as they didn’t destroy the ceramic receivers when they ignited, and that was a big ‘as long as’, then they should somewhat function, and they should be somewhat stable.

Who was I kidding? Half of them were going to explode on first firing. The others weren’t going to fire at all. I handed them off to Neil.

He had some scat put on the top of the kiln to dry it, and then had goblins grind it into a more powdery form of the putty before mixing it with the charcoal and sulfur.

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Once the bullets were cooled, some of Neil’s hunters with his bonus to bomb handling carefully packed the compound into the back third and capped it with a small blob of bomb juice-infused icky putty and a small dab of almost-dry clay.

“Looks good, boss,” he reported.

That was a good sign. When the System unlocked technology before it was even tested, it generally meant I was on the right track. I held one of the new micro-rocket bullets and inspected it.

“Nice work, Sally,” I said. She beamed at me.

But now, it did still need testing. The easiest way was actually a modified slinger with a small pin at the front of the sled. It wasn’t a rifle, of course, but I just needed to see how the ammo functioned.

I set up the slinger between two rocks, with a cord tied around the release catch, got to a safe distance, and pulled the cord.

There was a shower of sparks, a fizz, and then nothing else happened. I frowned. I whistled to one of the other goblins and had him run up and reset the sled with a new round. Once he was out of the path, I pulled the cord again. This time, there was a pop, and the round whistled off, leaving a meandering trail of sparks as it flew through the air, twisted, bounced off an adobe wall, and tumbled over the edge of the bluff.

The goblins close to its flight path ducked, squawking in fear, and then rose, cheering. The dichotomy of goblins.

The third round exploded, destroying the entire slinger.

Armstrong laughed. “1 outta 3 ain’t bad, issit?”

“It’s pretty bad,” I said. “When we’re going to be relying on volume of fire, accuracy is going to be a metric of how many shots we can pump out. They’re not going to be reliable enough.”

We tested the rest of the first batch and had 6 more successful ignitions and 9 more misfires. I called Sally over.

“Besides the reliability, accuracy is the biggest issue. Rifling the barrels won’t do much if the ammo isn’t standard”

We needed a goblin solution to a goblin technological quandary. I watched a handful of goblins working at a pottery wheel—where they’d designed the clay to remain stationary while the goblins spun around it. Hmm. We couldn’t spin the rifles around the bullets. But we could take the rifle barreling out of the equation.

“Alright. We’re going to put spirals on the shafts in the clay before we fire them in the kiln. Can you take care of that?” Sally nodded.

I went to Neil next. “We need better than 1 in 3,” I said. We sat down to examine some of the dud rounds and figure out what went wrong. After some testing with expired rounds and very careful testing with some of the duds.

“Clay is too thick at the back,” I said. “It’s acting like a pad instead of a cap. It needs a hole in the middle so the firing pin can actually strike the primer, yeah?”

“Onnit.”

A commotion at the landing strip drew my attention, and I left Neil to his work as I went to see what was going on. One of Eileen’s recon gliders had returned, limping home from Canaveral. I could see a few of the porcine crossbow bolts sticking out of the bottom of the frame, and part of the starboard wing was damaged. I waited as the pilot circled to bleed off altitude and airspeed before coming in and flaring off. Admirable piloting. I was unsurprised to see a hobgoblin wrangler pop out. With their heightened senses at high speeds, they were natural aviators. He chittered back and forth with Eileen, and she came to make her report.

“Piggies smashed up Canaveral, but only a few of ‘em stuck around. Smoke from a camp further north. Betting they want to keep us off their backs while they hit more villages. Reckon we could push what’s left out of the bluff.”

“Well, they’re in for a rude awakening,” I said. “Get some supper. We’ve got an early morning.”