"Perfect! Here, this is going to be rough but the good blueprint paper is back at the forge..."
River goes over to one of the coffee tables and squats down next to it, sketching quickly in rough lines; the first picture is definitely pistol-shaped, though rather than a cylinder there's a part labeled 'box', and something that slides back near the top...
"I don't know how that powder works," River explains while she keeps sketching. "And if it's all the same I like having hair and eyebrows a bit too much to try and learn how to produce it. But the inventor of this technology at home had a different solution anyway, can't imagine why no one here thought of it...you coat the bullet in half-finished explosive spells, like this, see?" Second piece of paper: a round bullet and some very precise spell diagrams that each have a single slash through them. "Can't reproduce the rune right on the paper or it'll explode but you get the idea. Then what you do is you etch the other half of the spell into the hammer, and when they make contact you get the explosion. Ever since seeing those Backbiters the design bothered me, it seemed really inefficient for the ammunition they were using - this uses gravity. Tilt the gun to chamber a new round, hold maybe twenty-five, thirty balls depending on how the final design shakes out?"
She looks up at Watson, torn between the joy of design and, well, the bit where she fucking hates this technology. "Big downside: it's gonna kick like a mother fucker. I can make the gun heavier, I can do a bottom-barrel design to help handle recoil, but there's an irreducible amount of arm and back strength you're gonna need for rapid fire. Small upside: kicking like a mother might chamber the new round for you."
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River goes over to one of the coffee tables and squats down next to it, sketching quickly in rough lines; the first picture is definitely pistol-shaped, though rather than a cylinder there's a part labeled 'box', and something that slides back near the top...
"I don't know how that powder works," River explains while she keeps sketching. "And if it's all the same I like having hair and eyebrows a bit too much to try and learn how to produce it. But the inventor of this technology at home had a different solution anyway, can't imagine why no one here thought of it...you coat the bullet in half-finished explosive spells, like this, see?" Second piece of paper: a round bullet and some very precise spell diagrams that each have a single slash through them. "Can't reproduce the rune right on the paper or it'll explode but you get the idea. Then what you do is you etch the other half of the spell into the hammer, and when they make contact you get the explosion. Ever since seeing those Backbiters the design bothered me, it seemed really inefficient for the ammunition they were using - this uses gravity. Tilt the gun to chamber a new round, hold maybe twenty-five, thirty balls depending on how the final design shakes out?"
She looks up at Watson, torn between the joy of design and, well, the bit where she fucking hates this technology. "Big downside: it's gonna kick like a mother fucker. I can make the gun heavier, I can do a bottom-barrel design to help handle recoil, but there's an irreducible amount of arm and back strength you're gonna need for rapid fire. Small upside: kicking like a mother might chamber the new round for you."