Does anyone have links or info concerning the weight of ammunition? All I can find is the weight of the bullet, but I don't think the numbers include the cartridge.
Thanks guys.
go to www.cheaperthandirt.com, select ammo, find one like you want to use in your game (boxes of 100 are best, but 50 works fine too) put it in your cart, then estimate shipping, after you put the area code in it will show you the weight of the ammo. 200 5.56NATO was 6.33lbs, 100 rounds of 9mm was 3.3, 50 rounds of 45acp was 2.7
I just checked it doesn't seem to list weight unless ammo is included, so just throw in a box of ammo, check the weight, and then throw some mags in and check the weight again. From above, I threw in a single AR-15 30 round mag, and the total went up to 6.6lbs so 0.3lbs for mag.
For the most part, ammo will be more or less effective based on the construction of the bullet, a 5.56 weighing 110 grains still wouldn't be as effective as a lighter-weight one if it ended up just going straight through the target without breaking up. Might be more effective in thicker targets, but we don't have a good rule-set for that, unlike a good fixed damage chart. For the most part, people will decide based on what has the best performance second and what works reliably in their gun first, because a shot that doesn't fire due to a jam always has a 0.0" wound channel, no matter the bullet. However, in D20 Modern, guns aren't picky about the brand or weight of ammunition they fire, they only care if it is "AET", but not if it is JHP AET or Frangible AET, so that leaves the question of what AET is up in the air.
So, I guess I basically wasted about two paragraphs of tangential thought to say: weight is going to depend a lot on the kind of ammo you pick, even among the same caliber.
grain is (I believe) 1/700 of an ounce.
So, I guess I basically wasted about two paragraphs of tangential thought to say: weight is going to depend a lot on the kind of ammo you pick, even among the same caliber.
437 grains in an oz.
Yes, you have to pick your sample ammunition reasonably, however, most any ammo purchasable in bulk is going to be reasonable. If you really want to take care, look for military surplus stuff. Look for 230 grain 45s, 124 grain 9mms, 55 or 62 grain 5.56 etc.
It is unfortunate, but if you try and splice in realism you will need a different base ammo weight per 100 for every caliber. I suppose you could get it for 9mm, 45acp, 357, 5.56, 7.62x39, 7.62x51, and 12 guage shells, and cover 99% of all situations, plus be easily set to make an educated guess at the rest of them.
edit: and 1/437th? Man... I have heard complaints about the arbitrary sizes of imperial measurements, but that takes the cake, though that could just be because I am used to the mile. Was that how many grains of blackpowder went into an ounce?
What countries are you wanting to know from? There were hundreds of countries involved in the war, though most of the smaller ones probably used weapons from one of the big players.
I would say get it for both .50s as well, because I wouldn't be surprised to see someone thinking the M82 is worth the mobility issues, and the DE is one of the best pistols in the core book.
edit: and 1/437th? Man... I have heard complaints about the arbitrary sizes of imperial measurements, but that takes the cake, though that could just be because I am used to the mile. Was that how many grains of blackpowder went into an ounce?
Of you look back far enough most of the imperal measures make total sense. A grain is directly related to the weigh of a barlelycorn, and an inch was 3 barelycorns long.
If you follow the correct steps, using the correct system, grains work up in a nice even fashion, just not base 10. And often deviaiton from 10 made total sense. Ever head that jingle "2 bits 4bits 6bits a dollar, all for the good king stand up and hollar!' well 8 bits = 1 dollar, but really it came from having a coin of precious metal and needing change, so you would cut it into quarters and have 2bit peices. Much easier than cutting into tenths. Old systems actually made big use of 3s and 4s, because 12 is such a wonderful number to be a factor of, it is just so divisible. They also often had something taht was 2X the value, which actually makes a lot more sense than going up an order of magnitude as far as every day life. You want 1 sack of flour, maybe 2, not 1 sack of flour, maybe 10
Anyways, grains march up in an orderly fashion to equal 480 in an ounce, a troy ounce. (note, 480, divisible by 12, and hence easily divisible in a multitude of ways)
A troy ounce as I said was 480...but that was based on gold. See, gold is soft, and hard to stay in form if it is pure, so for coins it was often NOT pure, it was what we call 22 karat, but really it was 11 parts gold and 1 part something else by volume(see, back to 12)
So, our ounce was switched to 437.X because a 1 troy ounce coin of 22 karat purity which was 480 grains of total weight had 437 grains of pure gold in it. And of course, from city to city, there ended up being a small varaition of about 10% of exactly what an ounce was. Often these trace back to kings minting their coins a bit light of a true ounce to basically make more money from the same lump sum of gold, but everyone knew it, and adapted.
An interesting sidenote, all the really old sysems had ounce which was equal to 4 sheckles, 1 shecke equaled 2 drams, 1 dram = 3 scruples. As close as they could, everone tried to have their sheckels, drams, scruples all match, but grain always varied, because grain was literally that, a grain of foodstuffs.
I mentioned that 1 grain of barely was the base, and that 20 grains of barely equalled 1 scruple, which eventually adds up to 480 ounces, but there is also grains (wheat) which is 24 gains equal one scruple, and in rome they had grains(siliqua) which was the seed of the Carbo tree, of which it took 6 to equal one scruple.
And a scruple, be it 20 barelycorn, 24 wheat, or 6 carbo seeds, was a small fistfull.
To me it makes so much sense to measure weight based on small handfuls of foodstuff, or at least for that to be the framework of how a civilization first starts working out weights and measures on a balance system.
If you look at our life, how we really act it is built much more like the imperial system than like the metric system. I was just at the store buying some socks. They had socks in 3 different pre-packaged quantities, a pair, 3 pair, and 6 pair. Even pair is really two. That to me sure seems a lot like 2 cups to a pint, 4 pints to quart, 3 scruples to a dram, etc.
We don't buy our socks metric style 1 pair or 10 pair (or would metric demand 1 individual sock and 5 pair?)
and if you look back there are a ton of old measures built around exactly what was used, wood being sold in cords, a reasonable sized pile to last a week, things being sold by the barrelful or wheelbarrelfull (2x) distance measured in feet just like at the end of our legs, or stacking barleycorns 3 high. An acre was a 1 furlong (40 rods) by 4 rods, and a furlong was litterally how long of a furrow an oxen could pull the plow for before he needed a break. And rod was the length of stick you needed to have when you walked behind the plow to control the ox. It just makes so much sense to me, I can really see a pair of bronze age farmers bartering a chunk of field like that, laying the driving stick end over end 4 times, to get width, and then having the oxen drag the plow as far as he could to get length.
And guess what? 1 man and 1 oxen could plow 1 acre in 1 day, so even choosing 4 rods rather than 3 or 5 was a very calculated choice.
A mile was 8 furlongs long, and a league was 3 miles long, but a league was also as far as a man could walk in an hour.
Our metric system is all based off of water, yet the old systems were based off of human life and time.
If you say "the village is 5 leagues away" modern man has no idea of how far that is, or if you never use kilometers, saying it is 15km away, he again has no idea, but if you say , it is a 5 hours walk away, you have a good idea.
or if you read that the king gave the peasant who saved him from drowning in the lake 1 acre of land, you have no idea, but if you understand it as "I give you as much land as you can plow in a day!" that makes sense, or, it sure seems more generous than getting 1 of something you don't understand
and even some of the earliest coinage, the sheckle, was a small chunk of copper like a penny equal in value to 6 fistfulls of basic foodstuff, and copper was a key ingredient in bronze.
think how many pennies it takes to make a 15lb corinthian bronze helmet, each penny basically represents one day's meal for an ancient man and his wife, after it was ground and baked into some sort of bread, if 90 pennies = 1 lb, that is enough food for about 3 families to live for one year on. Kind of shows the pyramid of workers needed to support the early professional armies
really, it is history. History was written by war, and war was dictated by weapons so to understand history one must understand war. History is the story of the leaders of men, but to understand the leaders you must know who they led, so their life is best understood in what they did career wise. And for the most part that was produce commodities or trade/sell comodities, hence knowing that an acre wasn't a random choice, but how much land one could plow in a day, or that early weighs were related to small handfuls of grain, to me makes it so visual and so much easier to understand
. What I need is an aproximate weight for the .30-06 sized round (7.92 Mauser, .30-06, 7.5 French, 7.5 Belgian, etc.), the 9mmParabellum, .45 ACP, .223 (5.56 - yeah, we play an alternative reality, the 5.56mm is just emerging), .50 BMG (and 12.7mm), .32, and .30 Carbine.
Thanks.
Here is the round number for GRAINS:
7000gr = 1 pound. That is a lot easier to remember than ounce numbers
A basic number for a pistol clip fully loaded?
A basic number for a rifle clip fully loaded?
You know like a generic 1lb for a pistol mag, 2lb for a rifle mag or something?
If something large needed to be measured, say distance between towns, then leagues and miles were used. A league was 3 miles, the distance you could march in a day. A mile was 1000 paces, which was a left-right-left step, so more similar to two paces the way we use the word today, and it was also termed 5000 'feet' a little conversion gives us the 1 roman pace = 4.8 feet, which ends up being a tad less than the convetional foot. The theory goes that you don't pull off your shoes or sandals, and when measureing using your actual foot, the steps aren't exactly heal-to toe, more of just small steps, or stomps. The word just isn't translated brilliantly. So yes, you can get 5 stomps, based off your foot, almost exactly on target for a pace. One thing they did when trying to be a bit more accurate is have 3 people of varying size do it, and average the results. However, when trying to be exact, they broke out the thumb, palm, forearm system. Remember, the cubit was the distance from the face of the thumbjoint to the elbow.
It is kind of like the butcher measuring meat by the pound back in the olden days before digital readouts, he was a bit sloppy with oz, because he was mostly dealing in pounds and half pounds. That is where 'feet' sits, not all that important, just a small subdivision of the important figure. Now, the gold merchant, he was much more exact with his ounces, because he was measuring in such smaller amounts.
As for heavier calibers such as .50 cal, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.50_BMG does list this.
2 pounds for a rifle magazine of 20 rounds is okay - if that rifle is a .50 caliber rifle with corresponding heavy ammo. Otherwise, 1 pound is a reasonable estimate for 20 rounds of .30 caliber with magazine.
Well. I took an old rifle round (looks like a Russian 7.62mm, although I'm not sure) from WWII I had in my room and weighed it. It weighed 75 grams (on a letter weight). That means 20 rifle rounds should be 1500 grams, which actually is 3 lb. I took a .50 BMG round (I believe it to be a .50, although it could be anything in the same size category) and it weighed 150 grams.
I don't think the weight is broken, as it's not a digital one, and has been working forever.
Another Question: What does ammo cans & ammo belts weigh?
I brought back a few empty ammo crates after my duty period ended, and 26.7 kgs is what it says on the label for the 1000 rounds crate..
We've been using .5 lb. for a small pistol clip (around 5 rounds), 1 lb. for a larger one (8+), and 2 lb. for small rifle (around .30-06) clip (around 20 rounds) and 2 lb. for 'normal' intermediate cartridge clip (30 rounds of .223/5,56mm). I have yet to determine heavy weapons' ammo weight.
Thx mate, works for me
I'd say doing 3 pistol mags = 2 lbs would be a good "rule of thumb" and it makes nice tactical sense too, 1 mag in the gun 2 mags on the belt.
Similarly for a batttle rifle, a single 20 shot mag = 1.5 lbs, or "2 for 3lbs"
If you are doing something smaller, just use the same approximate ammo count, so 40 rounds = 3lbs, be it in 4 10 round mags, 8 5 round stripper clips or whatever.
M-16 ammo, I'd use 1 30 mag = 1lb, or possibly a little bit less, maybe go 6mags = 5lbs. 3 20shot mags = 2lbs if doing vietnam era
AK47 30 round mag, 3 mags = 4lbs, go 1 mag = 1.5 lbs if they insist on buying something in multiples other than 3
Or you could conventinetly say this is how the store sells them, in "battle packs" (although this normally means 200 rounds, maybe call them "conflict packs")
Ammo can of 5.56 = 600 rounds and weighs 25 lbs
Ammo can of 7.62x39 = 500 rounds and weighs 25 lbs
Ammo can of 30-06, 7.62NATO, etc = 400 rounds and weighs 25lbs
And for .50 BMG (I plan on dropping in an M2 Browning HMG for the party MGunner)?
Edit: Just one thing. You made a Vietnam Era M16 mag weigh the same as a pistol mag. Is that on purpose?
Edit: Just one thing. You made a Vietnam Era M16 mag weigh the same as a pistol mag. Is that on purpose?
no, I didn't. That's just the way the numbers work out. As I said before, the lead bullet is going to account for more than half the mass of a loaded mag. 20x(62 grain bullet + 25 grains of gunpowder for 5.56) happens to pretty much equal 15x(125 grain bullet + 5 grains gunpowder for 9mm) which happens to pretty much equal 8x(240 grain bullet + 10 grains gunpowder for a 45)
One thing bothers me though. It would be so much simpler to have a "1 10 round mag of pistol ammo weighs x lb., 1 20 round mag of rifle ammo weighs y lb." etc...
Well, simpler still would be to have just one gun type, and not worry about ammo at all. However, it seemd to me like you were asking for somethign that was fairly realistic. The numbers are what they are. It so happens that you can truthfully lump all the loaded pistol mags together be they a 15 shot 9mm or an 8 shot 45, and you can toss in 20 round mags of 5.56 into there as well.
It also happens that you can lump all the true rifle calibers together in the same way. I suppose if you wanted to slim the system down just a little bit you could treat AK-47 30 round mags just like 20 round rifle mags.
you could then get away with just two catagories
"3 for 2lbs" = all pistol mags, 20 round 5.56 M-16 mags
"2 for 3lbs" = all 20 round battle rifle mags, 30 round AK mags
And then not bother with 30 round 5.56 mags, except 30 rounders are more common than 20 rounders, especially for 5.56 guns other than the M-16
But then a third catagory "1 for 1lb " for 30 round 5.56 mags wouldn't complicate things much more.
I think it is a pretty smooth system really
"1 for 1lb" = all 5.56 and similar assault rifle 30 round mags
"3 for 2lbs" = all pistol mags, of appropraite caliber+capacity combinations (14 rounds of 9mm, 12 rounds of 40SW, 8 rounds of 45)
"2 for 3lbs" = all battle rifle mags and AK mags of appopriate caliber+capacity (20 round battle mags, 30 round AK mags)
From that 3 point framework, you can easily pop to anything else that might be needed if people devate from the norm. For example, someone wants a Sig 225, which is a 8 shot 9mm, simply say each magazine for that is really a 1/2 mag, so they get 6 for 2lbs, and if necessary jump down to 3 for 1lb. If someone wants an SKS, that fires the same round as an SKS, and has a 10 shot internal mag, then just have 3 clips of 10 each = 1 standard 30 round AK mag. Same thing with a 5 shot hunting rifle, that 20 round magazine now is simply converted to a 20 round box of ammo.
If you really insist, you can simply divide out the "bundles" and have a single pistol mag weigh 0.66 lbs and a single battle rifle mag weighs 1.5 lbs
but remember, ammo isn't sold by weight. It isn't like you are going up to the candy counter and asking for a 1/2 pound of jelly beans and a 1/2 pound of gummy worms. You could calculate out that 1 lb = 26 9mm rounds and 1lb = 12 45 acp rounds, etc etc but you don't buy or track ammo by the pound. (you might track it by the ton if you are supplying an army)
Just tell your players thats this is the way the ammo and mags are available, just like you buy eggs by the dozen, even if you only want 8.
Anyway, now that you've made it clearer, I think we'll adopt your system.
Thanks
This site says a round of 5.56x45mm NATO weighs "62 gr (4.0 g)"
4 grams is 0.008818 lb, rounded up to .009 lb.
100 x .009 = .9 lb
6 x .9 lb = 5.4 lbs. Using these stats, 600 rounds of 5.56x45mm NATO weighs 5.4 lbs.
So, how did they get 6.33 lbs?
---
Edit: I think it has something to do with the grain number. Since most of us don't usually hassle with how many grains a particular round has, what do you recommend?
Ditto for shot shells and slugs...i'm starting to be more precise about ammo weight in my game.
How do you factor in those other two variables to get the final weight?
Ditto for shot shells and slugs...i'm starting to be more precise about ammo weight in my game.
I wish I was that far... I am just having trouble getting my group to track ammunition. :P
Still, the other stuff adds up too.
What you can do is get ahold of a reloading manual and look up the different weights of powder and pick whichever one strikes your fancy, then add in the weight of a primer and the case. Each caliber will have it's own case, but primers will fall into one of four catagories.
OR, as I suggested, simply go to www.CheaperThanDirt.com and "buy" a box of ammo, once it is in your cart, go to estimate shipping and get the weight.
now, in some cases the ammo will be in thin cardboard boxes of 20 rounds each carefully stacked, or sometimes it will come thin cardboard boxes with a chunck of strofoam full of holes, with a cartridge in each hole.
Either way, the "packaging" is less negligagble, so just using CTD is going to be the quickest and easiest way of looking up any weight of ammo.
just ignore the price lkst - and it is good enough for any game
all weights are for full rounds - and the weights for belts ect INCLUDE the links
there are some frankly weird calibers included - but all common ones are in there
enjoy
Extrapolate as you will.
1000 rounds of 7.62x39 ammo weighs approx 76 lb and 9.06 oz or 34.73 kg.