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The propellant in Roger's original rounds had been an advanced smokeless powder. From the perspective of the Marines with their electromagnetic bead rifles, long-range grenade launchers, and plasma rifles, that propellant had been a laughable antique. Something dating back to the days when humans were still using steam to make electricity. But that same propellant was far, far out of reach of the Mardukans' tech base, so Dell Mir and the Marines had accepted that black powder was the only effective choice for a propellant.
Black powder, however, had its own peculiar quirks. One, which was painfully evident whenever someone squeezed a trigger, was the dense cloud of particularly foul-smelling smoke it emitted. Another was the truly amazing ability of black powder to foul a weapon with caked residue, and that residue's resistance to most of the Marines's cleaning solvents. Old-fashioned soap and water actually worked best, but the Bronze Barbarians' sensibilities were offended when they found themselves up to their elbows in hot, soapy water scrubbing away at their weapons with brushes and plenty of elbow grease.
But the biggest functional difference between black powder-loaded rounds and the ones Roger had brought out from Old Earth with him was that black powder exploded. More modern propellants burned—very rapidly, to be sure, but in what was a much more gradual process, relatively speaking, than black powder's ... enthusiastic detonation. While nitro powders might well produce a higher absolute breech pressure, they did it over a longer period of time. For the same breech pressure, black powder "spiked" much more abruptly, which imposed a resultant strain on the breech and barrel of the weapon.
Not to mention a particularly nasty and heavy recoil.
Fortunately, the old axiom about getting what you paid for still held true, and the Parkins and Spencer was a very expensive weapon, indeed. Part of what Roger had gotten for its astronomical purchase price was a weapon which was virtually indestructible, which was a not insignificant consideration out in the bush where he tended to do most of his hunting. Another part, however, was the basic ammunition design itself. The Parkins' designers had assumed that situations might arise in which the owner of one of their weapons would find himself cut off from his normal sources of supply and be forced to adopt field expedients (if not quite so primitive as those which had been enforced upon the Marines here on Marduk) to reload their ammo. So the cases themselves had been designed to contain pressures which would have blown the breech right out of most prespace human firearms. And they had sufficient internal capacity for black-powder loads of near shoulder-breaking power.
In fact, the power and muzzle velocity of the reloaded rounds, while still far short of what Roger's off-world ammunition would have produced with its initial propellant, had been sufficient to create yet another problem.
The rounds Roger had started out with had jacketed bullets—old-fashioned lead, covered in a thin metal "cladding" that intentionally left the slug's lead tip exposed. On impact, the soft lead core mushroomed to more than half-again its original size and the cladding stripped back into a six-pronged, expanding slug. The main reason the cladding was necessary, however, was because the velocity of the round would have "melted" a plain lead bullet on its way up the barrel, coating the barrel and rifling in lead. Modern chemical-powered small arms ammunition was manufactured using techniques which were a direct linear descendent of technology which had been available since time immemorial: copper or some other alloy was added to the outside of lead bullets by a form of electroplating. But Mardukans didn't have electroplating, and it was a technology there'd been no time to "reinvent," so the humans had been forced to make do.
There'd been three potential ways to solve the problem. The first had been to reduce the velocity of the rounds to a point where they wouldn't lead the barrel, but that would have resulted in a reduction in both range and accuracy. The second choice had been to try to develop a stronger alloy to replace the lead, but since that wasn't something the Mardukans had ever experimented with, it would once again have required "reinventing" a technology. Finally, they'd settled on the third option: casting thin copper jackets for the rounds and then compressing the lead into them. There was an issue with contraction of the copper, but the compression injection—another technique garnered from pump technology—took care of that.
So the rounds were copper jacketed—"full-metal jacketed," as it was called. They weren't quite as "perfect" as Roger's original ammunition, of course. Every so often one of the bullets was unbalanced, and would go drifting off on its own course after departing the muzzle. But however imperfect they might have been by Imperial standards, they were orders of magnitude better than anything the Mardukans had ever had.
Now Roger cycled the bolt and popped up the ladder sight. The sight—a simple, flip-up frame supporting an elevating aperture rear sight and graduated for "click" range adjustment using a thumbwheel—was necessary for any accurate really long-range work. Elevating the rear sight forced the marksman to elevate the front sight, as well, in order to line them up, thus compensating for the projectile drop. It was another contraption the humans and Mardukans had sweated over, but once the design was perfected (and matched to the rounds' actual ballistic performance), the Mardukans had had no problem producing it.
But the sights weren't exactly a one-size-fits-all proposition, because everyone shot slightly differently, if only because everyone was at least slightly different in size, and thus "fitted" their weapons differently. As a result, the sights of any given rifle were "zeroed" for the individual to whom it belonged, which meant this rifle was zeroed for Julian, not Roger. Given that the range was about two hundred meters, the bullet could actually miss by up to a meter even if Roger's aim was perfect according to Julian's sight. But there was only one way to find out how bad it really was, so Roger calculated the wind, let out a breath, and squeezed the trigger.
The recoil was enough to make even him grunt, but he'd expected that, and he gazed intently downrange. Although the rounds were comparatively slow, they weren't so slow that he could actually watch them in flight. But the surface of the ocean swell was sufficiently smooth for the brief splash—to the left, and over by about half a meter—to be clearly visible.
"Told you it was the sight," Julian said with a slight snicker.
"Bet you a civan he makes the next one," Despreaux countered.
"As long as you're referring to the coin and not the animal, you're on," Julian replied. "Crosswind, rolling ship, bobbing barrel, and an unzeroed rifle. Two hundred meters. No damned way."
"You make a habit of underestimating the prince," Cord observed. Roger's asi had been standing behind Roger, leaning on his huge, lethal spear while he silently watched the children play with their newfangled toys. "You don't tend to underestimate enemies twice, I've noticed," the shaman continued, "which is good. But why is it that you persist in doing so where 'friendlies' are concerned?"
Julian glanced up at the towering native—the representative of what was little better than a hunter-gatherer society, who was undoubtedly the best-read and probably best educated Mardukan in the entire expedition. As always, his facial expression was almost nonexistent, but his amusement showed clearly in his body language, and Julian stuck out his tongue at him.
"That was my zero shot," Roger a