The she-elves who had accompanied me got comfortable. Ki’Amura slunk into the corner and mostly disappeared in the shadows. Tavorwen looked over the samples of Durithana’s work hanging on her wall, blades, buckles and archer bracers and other metal plates to reinforce specific places of weakness in elven leather armor.
A couple of minutes later, Durithana emerged from the area of her forge.
“Oh! My favorite customer!” Durithana greeted me. “What can I do for you? Anything wrong with your weapons?”
I greeted her with the elven salute.
“No, for now my weapons are good.” I assured her.
“…’For now’? What is that supposed to mean?” Durithana pressed.
I sunk onto one of the stools she had around the workshop, pulling my sniper onto my lap. “This might sound weird, but I spoke with X’Thallion.”
Durithana blinked and I couldn’t tell if she was impressed or not. “And…?”
I guess it wasn’t as strange as I’d thought for someone to speak to a God here on Elendel. That would make this easier.
“Well, X’Thallion said that my weapons ‘They won’t be enough in the coming days’.” I explained. “I was wondering… You’ve been following my designs in creating my firearms. I think that you’ve done enough that we might be able to start looking at modifying the engineering I’m familiar with to integrate elven ingenuity and magic.”
Durithana watched me for a second then smiled broadly. “Oh? I did not expect to be making such attempts for another year or so. My sketches are still rough on my ideas. I’ll need some more time to iron out the fine details.”
She turned and pulled a few sheets of parchment out and rolled them out. One was a sketch for what looked like a new sniper, while the others were two sheets for combat rifles and one had three different iterations of handguns.
“I admit, it is hard to really know what will and won’t work. Halivax had to see a healer for her hand after trying your small, er, handgun. I haven’t dared try the larger weapons, lest I break my shoulder.” Durithana confessed. “But here are my ideas.”
I looked at her. “What do you mean, she needed to see a healer?”
Durithana seemed surprised. “Halivax, the one who tried to fire you weapon… Her hand was injured when she attempted it. I don’t think any elf could fire your weapons, like you do, without suffering injury.”
I gave her a doubtful look, “Really? I mean, the guns kick, sure. But surely you could fire at least one shot without hurting yourself.”
Durithana looked me over, “If you don’t mind, how much do you weigh?”
“Um, I’m not sure how to convert my weight to your units of measure.” I confessed.
Duratnana scowled, “This is an ingot of iron, how much would you say this weighs.”
I judged, “Probably between 2 and 3 pounds. Probably 2 and a half pounds.”
I was glad for field training where I’d learned to gauge a lot of things like weight, distances, heights and such.
“Pounds? That is roughly one Stone in our measure,” She explained.
“Stones, huh?” I did some mental math. “Let’s see, I weighed 210 lbs, so that would be… Around 82-83 stones.”
She nodded, “Elves weigh between 20 and 40 stones, with most being on the lighter side. We are not built nearly as sturdy as you are. I’m guessing your muscles and bones are far denser and stronger than ours, and that’s why you can handle the force of these weapons.”
I realized that my matrons had all felt incredibly light in my hands, and if they weighed a quarter of what I did, that would explain a few things.
“But if your bones are so frail, how can you handle wielding a sword, or a hammer?” I demanded. I’d seen her swinging pretty hard.
“Well, we have to be careful. I could really hurt myself if I’m not careful. And most swords are sharp enough the only real impact in wielding them are when direct blocks occur and elven swordsmen strive to divert and redirect attacks as opposed to direct blocks.” Durithana explained.
I guess that did fit what I’d seen. Sword strikes were always bumped aside or diverted as opposed to fully blocking them, though I’d thought that was more a result of the speed at which elves fought, but if that was because they’d injure themselves fully blocking that also made sense.
I guess if that was their problem, there was a solution.
“Well, if you wanted to test my weapons, a standard practice back where I’m from is to make a clamp that you can affix the weapon to a table you can weigh down and then you can use a cord to pull the trigger and fire the weapon. That way you can test the weapon.”
Durithana thought for a moment. “You know, that is a simple solution. I guess I’m used to weapons for which that isn’t really an option. That wouldn’t really work for a bow. I’ve had to have archers test my bows, because while I may have the muscles for swinging a hammer, I lack the muscles used for bowmanship. But since the action on your weapons is more mechanical and automatic, that would work.”
I was looking over her designs.
“I think you’ll discover the direct blowback problematic with these higher caliber rounds.” I reminded her. “You have to use the weight of the slide, here, to allow the pressure to drop to a safe level, or when you cycle the round it could cause serious issues, if not detonating the chamber entirely once the slide starts to move.”
Durithana nodded, “You mentioned that before. And I saw a touch of that when your smaller weapon failed during that test.”
I remembered and rubbed my hand without really thinking about it.
“That’s why I designed this bit here.” She pointed, “It is passed the point where the pellet will have left the cartridge, and it will bleed off a lot of that force before it can cause such problems. I will have to make several iterations, most likely, to narrow down exactly how much force should be bled and how quickly, but with the ability to fire at a test table, that is well within my capacity.”
I looked around the room. “Do be careful. I wouldn’t fire it in here. The round could ricochet around and harm, if not kill, you. Or it could go out and hit a random passing maiden.”
Durithana nodded. “I think, Calinar could make rounds with a short enough period before the conjuration expires that the round would dissipate immediately after leaving the tube, but before it had time to strike anything… unless someone was fool enough to walk directly in front of the tube as we tested it.”
I blinked, “Well, that would be more safe than using blanks.”
“What’s a blank?” Durithana questioned.
“Oh, it’s where you use paper wadding or chalk to block the end of the chamber instead of the bullet. This means you can get roughly the same blowback, but the paper or chalk disintegrates or doesn’t have enough force to do any damage. They are used for performances or training.” I explained.
“Strange.” Durithana muttered. “Performances… why wouldn’t you just use illusions-Oh, right. No magic where you are from.”
“So, I guess if your blowback bleeder works, and that facilitates the blowback on the higher caliber that could work, but one thing I don’t think you are considering in either of these designs is the importance of barrel length.” I cautioned. “Longer barrels make aiming easier, increase accuracy, and increase the velocity of the round leaving the barrel. The shorter the barrel will lighten the weapon which will make it easier to carry, but lighter weapons have more recoil.”
Durithana started scribbling down notes even before I finished. “Good to know, alright… So, aiming… Why does the length help that?”
We spent the better part of an hour discussing how the physics of firearms worked. I luckily understood the math well enough to walk her through it. We discussed everything from recoil reduction techniques to rifling and propulsion methods.
“Your people have this calculated very precisely.” She noted. “I still wonder why…. Oh, yes. No shaping magic. Do they really make such precise crafting with a hammer and anvil?”
“Oh, no,” I assured her. “We have… devices… that are able to do much of the high precision work for us. For example, cutting out precise pieces is done with a device that holds the metal we are working with entirely immobile then has an arm that either spins a drill or something like a file at thousands of rotations in a minute and cuts away what we don’t want.”
“Like a crafting golem?” She tried to relate.
“I’m not sure… but that sounds close enough.” I conceded.
“That could make sense,” She muttered. “Then crafting something as intricate as my bleeder would be quite difficult and probably rife with points of failure. You can’t even control the precise composition of your metals, can you? Wouldn’t impurities be the bane of your existence?”
I thought about how best to answer that. “We’ve learned how to control a lot of the fine details of the construction, starting with components. So we can heat them hot enough to remove impurities and then keep them in a clean environment to make sure that impurities can’t slip their way back in.”
“Sounds lengthy and overly delicate.” Durithana noted with disapproval. “I’ll stick to my methods.”
I went back to her sketches. She had modified them a bit, the ink overlaying over ink, but I could tell what was older and newer by the glistening of the ink.
“Are you using the same cartridges I’ve been using for these?” I wondered. I couldn’t tell exactly what her scale was.
“Um, no. I can’t see why you’d use the measurements you do. I guess it might make more sense with your forms of measurement, but I have sized most of your rounds up slightly for these designs. Added a few notches to the rounds. But it seems more intuitive. I moved your diameter from just over three notches to five notches for your largest pellets. I adjusted the compound measurements to keep the force at least equal, but I think in general… if I understand this math correctly… your pellet velocity will increase, and your pellets will hit harder.” Durithana admitted.
I liked the sound of that. “So how long do you think until these will be ready for field testing?”
Durithana floundered for a second. “Well, much of the designs are purely theoretical. It’ll take a lot of trial and error. A lot.”
She rubbed the hinge of her jaw and her ear lobe. “If I’m being honest, it will take me about a year to make, though… If I can get those assistants helping me, I can probably cut that down to like half or a third.”
I thought for a second. “Well, so long as they are done before the Respite ends, hopefully that will be enough.”
“Okay, now. Tell me everything about using your weapons.” Durithana pressed. “Everything that is a problem with them, be it the ones I have made you or your ones back where you came from.”
I found myself going on rants about everything from grips, to getting hit by brass, to recoil. Durithana scribbled notes on each of them. Her brow furrowed as she thought about how to resolve them.