Flame Pistols - any suggestions?

[ffutures]

One of the weapons that appears in several of Weinbaum's Planetary stories is the flame pistol (the name is hyphenated in Parasite Planet but not the other stories):

the experienced Venusian frontiersman is very careful with the flame-pistol.
   It has to be charged with a diamond, a cheap black one, of course, but still an item to consider. The crystal, when fired, gives up all its energy in one terrific blast that roars out like a lightning stroke for a hundred yards, incinerating everything in its path.
[parasite planet]

who'd risk firing a flame-pistol indoors? It would simply blow out one wall of the building.
[ibid]

He was cornered between the monster and an impenetrable tangle of vegetation, so he did the only thing left to do. He snatched his flame-pistol and sent a terrific, roaring blast into the horror, a blast that incinerated tons of pasty filth and left a few small fragments crawling and feeding on the debris.
   The blast also, as it usually does, shattered the barrel of the weapon. He sighed as he set about the forty-minute job of replacing it—no true Hotlander ever delays that—for the blast had cost fifteen good American dollars, ten for the cheap diamond that had exploded, and five for the barrel. Nothing at all when he had had his xixtchil, but a real item now. He sighed again as he discovered that the remaining barrel was his last; he had been forced to economize on everything when he set out.
[ibid]

Inferno burst. The tiny diamond, giving up all its energy in one terrific blast, shot a jagged stream of fire that filled the canyon from wall to wall and vomited out beyond to cut a fan of fire through the bleeding-grass of the slope.
   Idiots' Hills reverberated to the roar, and when the rain of debris settled, there was nothing in the canyon save a few bits of flesh...
[The Mad Moon]

OK, so I have to develop game stats for this thing. In particular I need to explain where it gets its energy from (maybe bond energy or something), why it takes five minutes to reload if the barrel survives, or half an hour if it doesn't, and why the barrel (or in one story the chamber) bursting doesn't kill the person firing the gun.

My description of it in game terms currently reads:

Flame Pistol; Range 300ft radius 20ft, Effect 30; A:I B:C/K C:K
Fires 1 shot per 3 rounds; ammunition industrial diamonds value $10
Barrel (cost $5) shatters on 11-12; changing barrels takes 45 minutes.
Use in confined spaces is not recommended!

I need to change this a little - I think "1 shot / 5 rounds" and "Barrel shatters on 10-11, Chamber shatters on 12" would work for game purposes. It's still way too fast and reliable, going on Weinbaum's description, but I'm not sure that the rules will easily work with something that falls apart more often than not.

The trouble is that it's about as powerful as a War of the Worlds Martian heat-ray, but apparently hand-portable and usable without protective clothing (although I will add a note to the effect that if it's used in confined spaces the flame will spread in all directions, not just forward, which ought to discourage people from trying to use it inside buildings). In destructive power it's comparable to weapons like the Traveller PGMP(?) or Doom's BFG, but it's a pistol sized weapon.

When I ran my play-tests at Dragonmeet someone insisted on firing one of these at night and just after a friendly Martian had jumped into the air. The flame burst incinerated their enemies, the Martian (who was hurtling down to attack the enemies from above) and a large area of the Martian countryside, and was visible well beyond the horizon, which made their attempts to sneak inconspicuously a bit futile.

Any suggestions on ways of handling this would be greatly appreciated. I think, for example, that on Earth the authorities will not take kindly to people carrying around hand-portable weapons of mass destruction.

Comments

[sirernest.livejournal.com]

Could be the barrel suffers terminal material fatigue due to the shot, literally crumbles away when the gun is fired. It's generally not an issue of safety as the debris is carried with the shot.
Supposedly the original designs and materials for this weapons (whoever of whatever species came up with them) allowed for longer-lasting materials but what you can get nowadays (and what you can build yourself - it's easy enough with the right tools and skills) is back-alley junk. Cheaply produced, cheap on the market, with a far too high firepower and in a design easy to produce but not very user-friendly in maintenance. Heck, 90% of these things are designed as one-shots (well, nominally six-shots with the manufacturer's "guarantee" of the barrel lasting up to six shots) and you have to take half the gun apart to replace the barrel. Then comes the fiddly business of putting it all together again. You'd really need two more hands to do it right, especially to keep the parts aligned. You probably could do it in fifteen minutes on a workbench but out in the field? I hope you got experience, patience and it's still early enough for good light.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The difficulty of working without proper facilities can certainly be a contributing factor - thanks!

[sirernest.livejournal.com]

No prob.
It made me think of the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator]Liberator pistol[/url] a bit.

Heck, you could probably even get away with claiming it was originally an excavation tool used in mining and tunnel digging. Until some bright boy got his hands on a box full of these things, replaced the original tripod mount with a crude pistol grip, tied all the control lines, that were making the output in its original function more manageable, back into a crude feedback loop, put a simple trigger on it and successfully marketed it as a personal weapon. It became popular because it was cheap and you could take absolutely anything down with it.

If you want a comparison - it's like somebody selling a gun built out of a pipe (gas, water, maybe scaffolding), the next best rock as projectile and a stick of dynamite as propellant.

[ggreig]

The similar Deer Gun, linked to from that article, looks quite sci-fi.

[johnreiher.livejournal.com]

I agree with sirernest that the Flame pistol is a repurposed excavation tool. Sort of how the paintball pistol was created.

As a weapon, it's a great sledge hammer. It has no finesse, no control, you vaporize everything before you, friend or foe. If the barrel breaks, more often than not bits of the fractured barrel is still in the chamber, and have to be pried carefully from the chamber and the body of the pistol. Normally, changing a barrel is couple of actions, but with a shattered one, you have to disassemble the pistol and chamber and remove every bit, from every crevice. If you don't clean it up thoroughly, you take a chance of a fatal explosion if the diamond fractures incorrectly due to the shards of broken barrel.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That works too - OK, I think I now have some reasonably good ideas how to describe it and explain its more eccentric features, I'll post the full description and stats in a day or two.

[sirernest.livejournal.com]

Sorry to abuse this thread for a non-related comment. Just thought this would be the quickest way of getting the message to you.

A while ago (okay, a long while ago) you had been looking for microscopes to connect to a PC. Dunno if you still need some but I just saw Lidl will be offering some from next monday.
http://www.lidl.co.uk/uk/home.nsf/pages/c.o.20081215.p.Microscope_Set.ar1

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks - I'm pretty much sorted since I got the microscope adaptor for my Nikon, but work may be interested.