h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A rifle is a firearm that is more efficient than a shotgun or a machine gun. It is longer than a pistol.
The rifle gets it's name from it's barrel. It has grooves on the inner surface. These grooves cause the bullet to spin around its own axis as it leaves the barrel. This spin that the bullet gets is the reason for the rifle's range.

The spin imparted to the bullet stabilizes it over long ranges because of the law of conservation of angular momentum. (need to explain this)

The rifle is a nasty killing weapon, and the bullet once it enters the human body, can do a lot of damage. In some cases, the bullet makes a little hole going in and a large hole going out. In others, it tumbles upon entry, making a key hole wound. When it contacts organs or bones, it's path may be diverted. It is possible for a bullet, like any projectile, to be slowed or stopped by clothing, personal affects, and armor.

To understand this, consider a top spinning on the floor. Now, place your finger gently on the head of the top, retarding its angular velocity. What happens is that the tip of the nail of the top starts revolving in an ever increasing radius, until the top topples. Exactly the same thing happens when a rifle bullet enters a human body. (this might be better off upstairs, near the angular momentum comment. But there is a problem with it. As neat as it is, it does deal with the fact that outside of the laboratory, the bullet often does what it pleases.)

There are two basic types of rifle action:

1. The ones you have to load for every shot.

2. The ones that you load once per magazine and the mechanism does the work for you as long as you pull the trigger.

(re: the following, see comments below.)
Assault Rifles are essentially machine guns with rifled barrels. This has obvious advantages over non-rifled machine guns as the bullets are noticably more accurate. Some better known types of assault rifle are the M-16 and the AK-47. (this paragraph has serious deficiencies.
Most machine guns have rifled barrels. Though the usefulness of the rifling is debatable and diminishes over the period of use of the weapon, the fact is that you will not find a smoothbore machinegun that has not been "shot out", which would strongly suggest that the operator did not have a spare barrel or didn't care.)

Sniper rifles, on the other hand, are rifles designed to hit targets over great distances, usually with only one shot. Sniper Rifles are either Bolt Action or Semi-automatic weapons, but are never fully automatic, due to the inaccuracy this would cause. Sniper rifles are built to carry, or have built into them, scopes that magnify the target, giving the sniper an easier time of hitting the target.
Probably the best known Sniper Rifle is the PSG1, a 'real life' sniper rifle that has appeared in the popular games Metal Gear Solid, and Metal Gear Solid 2.

Special thanks to Wills, who began this entry but left before its completion.

MY Comment on the above: Sniper rifles are usually modified battle rifles or modified hunting rifles. With very few exceptions, a military or police sniper will not be issued a custom rifle because of the expense. Among the exceptions are the issuance of some Weatherby rifles to U.S. military snipers during Korea and Vietnam, but I don't think that needs to be dealt with in this entry.

The "Assault Rifle" tag is practically useless. It has taken on a political smear taint in the US legislatures and it's definition depends upon what one had for breakfast.

The Ak-47 is basically a "machine carbine" according to the old British terminology. It uses Sub-rifle ammunition and in it's use, it is a large submachinegun. You will not find a scope on an AK-47 or a AK-74. The Dragunov or SVD sniper rifle resembles a large AK-47 and shares some principles, but it uses the old 7.92 ammunition.

"Battle rifle" is a better term than "assault rifle" because it does not carry the nasty and emotional issues with it.

The M16 and other rifles using the 5.56mm cartridge barely qualify as "Battle rifles" because the cartridge is a glorified "varmint round" that was designed for range and penetration in a bolt-action or single shot rifle with a very large scope that was and is used against small animals considered to be a nuisance. The effectiveness of the round is still being debated, though rarely by those who have been shot with it.

The 7.62 is still considered to be one of the most effective rounds currently in use. It is lighter to carry than the .30-06, the .303 and the 7.92, and while the recoil is punishing, it is not as bad as the older, heavier calibers. It is quite a bit louder, though.

The concept of "power" in a firearm is a nebulous one that is beloved of ad writers, media hacks, novelists and movie makers.
Over the long range, depending upon the terrain, the weather, and the design of the load of propellant in a cartridge, a bullet, no matter how dense or possessed of spin and velocity, is influenced by gravity and will soon begin to drop. Thus, it's trajectory is a curve, rather than a straight line. The spinning itself contributes to this. That is why the "effective range" of a cartridge is not the same as the distance the bullet can travel. If you shoot at an upward angle, that slug may come down a mile or two away. It will be spent (lacking in velocity) by the time it gets there, but it will definitely surprise you when it arrives.

9mm submachinegun slugs have been known to travel half a mile from a police assault course range and break windows and pierce siding in homes.

The "penetrating" abilities of a rifle bullet are often exaggerated, too. A single pane of glass has been shown to deflect a high velocity bullet such that a target just a couple of feet beyond the glass has been missed. Modern auto glass or thermopane sandwiched glass can truly make a sniper's life interesting.

Ow. Brain hurt.
I've been away /far/ too long... you'll have to talk me through this... since you're gonna' help with this, what needs changing/modifying/updating/removing ASAP in your opinion?

I'll leave you alone for the moment. It has been a week for me, too.
Basic suggestion is to yank entry from PR and bop it into AWW, so that the suggestions from the other researchers do not seem to be ignored.
They are talking about esoterica.
As I said before, I think the original naive enthusiasm of the entry needs to be improved or enhanced, so that it is similar to some of the earlier entries on the site that make the assumption that the person who is reading the entry has never visited earth.

Most of the dreck I typed up there was to explain certain weaknesses in the entry.

If you wish, I will come up with an outline, a bare bones, so to speak that we can flesh out gently.

Please feel free to ask for an explanation of anything not clear.
I've been a firearms dork for so long I don't remember when I wasn't.

Okay then. If you can put up a 'bare bones' framework on it then we'll expand as we go.

As a side note, I, like many people, learned about firearms fro computer games, movies and books, but I have done some real shooting (.22 calibre and airguns) so I know about some of what I talk about. I was quite suprised with the supposed level of background info in the MGS series with regards to weapons... If it's all accurate, I can get a ton of info from it.

As a second note, should we mention Carbines?

Carbines are a little irritating.
Some countries refer to submachine guns as machine carbines.

Originally speaking, a carbine was a shortened rifle, of the same caliber, used for cavalry and scout troops.

Once the effect of the muzzle blast from the shortened barrel was understood, the ammunition was then a shorter version of the full-powered ammunition.

In this century, the carbine has become a separate entity, like the M1 carbine, which used pistol-type ammunition. Many modern carbines fire the 9mm, which makes life real interesting, because a selective fire pistol caliber carbine is thus a submachinegun.

The "assault rifle" is a strange case, too. Because the label is plastered on practically anything from light machine guns to carbines,
mostly based on their appearance, the true carbine nature of such things as the AK-47 and the M16 is obscured.
And it also leads to such absurdities as the CAR-15, which is basically a carbine version of the AR-15, but is described as a submachine gun by people who should know better, like the Infantry Museum at Ft. Benning.

For our current purposes, I think that dealing with the carbine would just confuse things unnecessarily.

Yeah, I guess so... but I guess now it gets complex: As you said, most weapons now have rifling, so how do you classify a modern rifle? My personal definition of a rifle is anything that is designed to fire single shots, usually over long distance. An assault Rifle is basically a Machine Gun. For me there's no real difference between the two, but for some reason (and this is contrary to personal experience) for me any 'bullpup' weapon classifies as a Machine Gun (I've seen bullpups with rifling).

You think that's anywhere near close?

Bare bones:
Actions
l. Muzzle loaders
2. breech loaders
3. magazine loaders:
A. single shot per cocking:
a. lever action
b. bolt action
c. pump

B. semi-automatic.

(I'll leave automatic alone for the moment, because that is machine gun territory, but most machine guns have rifled barrels. Sgt. Carlos Hathcock had great success using an M2 Browning .50 heavy machine gun with the sear fixed at single shot as a scoped sniper weapon.)

Basic types:
1. hunting
2. target
3. military
a. battle
b. sniper

Basic types of ammunition:
1. solid
a. ball
b. spitzer
2. expanding
a. hollow point
b. hollow nose
(I think it would be unnecessary to get into tracers and armor-piercing and phosphorous rounds.)


If you want to get really technical, a slug-barrelled shotgun is a rifle.
A .410 or 16 gauge slug can rival a rifle within a hundred and fifty yards, with a scope.
But I don't think we need to deal with that.

Slug barrelled Shotgun?

Yes. Most modern shotguns have replaceable barrels and one of the available barrels is a slug barrel.
It usually has rifling for the last five inches of the tube, but some from Mossberg and Ithaca have full-length rifling.
This is to fire a long lead thing called a slug. It is used to hunt deer and as a defensive round. Some of the Fiocchi and Winchester brand sabot slugs are very accurate.


Silly question, where do you live?

Near Liverpool, England. Anyone who owns a Shotgun round here's gonna' be in big s**t in the morning... The biggest thing anyone's got here are .22 Rifles.

Anyway. What I didn't get was the 'Slug-Barrelled' bit. I know that the slug is basically a solid shotgun shell (normal ones disperse, as you most certainly know) but I've never heard of a Slug-Barrelled Shotgun. Is that just for slugs? I can't imagine it having much use with a 'normal' shell...

It isn't, but it doesn't make much difference. Modern "shot" is held in a cup until it leaves the barrel. Depending upon the distance of the target, the cup may leave the shot and drop away or it may stay with the shot, just a short distance behind and encounter the target, also.
The choke on a modern shotgun is designed to modify the pattern of the shot and a slug barrel would probably impart a little spin to the cup but send the shot pattern spinning a bit, too, probably widening it.

Please remove my name from the entry.
Please don't put my name to something I haven't seen.
Please show me what you are going to put my name on.

Sorry about that, I've taken care of it!
Also, I've taken 'Rifles' out of the Peer Review until we've done some more with it.

Thank you. Talk more later. I'm under some heavy medication at the moment, in prep for a minor operation early next week.
They're going to pull all the teeth on my upper jaw and five on the bottom.

Yikes! Why!?

Wow. Sorry to hear that Tonsil. I remember a few years ago a dentist strapped me into his chair, injected me with valium, stuck a vr-type helmet over my head a played me repeats of Lovejoy whilst drilling out ten teeth, almost to the root.

It can't get *much* worse than that, can it?

Well, I guess he could have been playing Soap.

"A rifle is a firearm that is more efficient than a shotgun or a machine gun."

Not for pigeons it isn't.

The teeth on the top are open nerves, broken and split...
On the bottom I have a laid-down wisdom tooth on the left, next to a split molar.
Our family has a history of tooth problems...My father got his all pulled in when he was 33. I'm seven years past that.
I have bravely and stupidly put up with almost a decade and a half of intermittent pain. Recently it has become unbearable and the dentist says I have an ongoing infection in a couple of teeth.


A rifle is a bit of handheld artillery.
Like a howitzer, it has a grooved barrel.
It's accuracy in many ways is determined by who is using it.
Like cars, a finely tuned one owned by a particular person can do tricks under certain conditions, or an almost wrecked piece of junk that can be coaxed along by an expert or a dangerous thing to even load, owned by someone who should know better.

Good luck my friend, hope it all goes well.
Frogbit