Expected ammunition malfunction rates

ID:34546
 
Sep 5 2007, 9:59 am (Edited on Sep 5 2007, 10:10 am)
Keywords: design
I did a little research on incidences of ammunition failing to fire and ultimately came up with the following figures. Feel free to harvest these figures for any modern-themed combat game you have. I can't, of course, guarantee perfect verisimilitude.


High-explosive, target practice, chemical, HEAT, HEP artillery shell
        Dud                     2.5%    (1 in 40)
        Misfire                 0.5%    (1 in 200)

Armour-piercing artillery shell
        Failure to penetrate    2.5%    (1 in 40)
        Misfire                 0.5%    (1 in 200)

Cluster, flak, flechette artillery shell
        Failure                 2.5%    (1 in 40)
        Misfire                 0.5%    (1 in 200)

Delayed fuse artillery shell (exception)
        Dud                     7.5%    (3 in 40)

Rocket
        Dud                     1.5%    (1 in 66)
        Limited effect          1.0%    (1 in 100)
        Misfire                 0.5%    (1 in 200)

Landmines, hand grenades
        Dud                     2.5%    (1 in 40)

Tube-launched grenades
        Dud                     2.5%    (1 in 40)
        Misfire                 1.0%    (1 in 100)

Incendiary grenades (exception)
        Dud                     10%     (1 in 10)

Flares, pyrotechnics
        Dud                     2.5%    (1 in 40)
        Limited effect          2.5%    (1 in 40)

Illumination artillery shell
        Dud                     5%      (1 in 20)
        Limited effect          2.5%    (1 in 40)
        Misfire                 0.5%    (1 in 200)

Man-portable bombs
        Dud                     2.5%    (1 in 40)

Bullets (small arms)
        Misfire                 0.1%    (1 in 1000)



Derived loosely from http://www.army.mil/usapa/epubs/pdf/r75_1.pdf

I assume in most cases that the stated figures for reportable percentages mean "unusually large numbers of misfires per lot, potentially demanding corrective action". Thus, without having access to any standard deviation data in reported results, I simply assumed that the "actual" malfunction rates were one half of the "unusually large" malfunction rates, except when it contrasted with my common sense or where it would be too rare to be meaningful (e.g., bullets probably misfire considerably less than 1 in 1000, but anything less than 1 in 1000 would be almost entirely unperceivable during gameplay).

In all cases, the assumption is that these are military-specification. Civilian-grade ammunition should be inferior. Match-grade ammunition should be superior.

Disclaimer: This information is intended for game design purposes only and is not to be considered representative of reality. The author implies no warranty for this information.
Sep 5 2007, 11:21 am
Games should also account for conditions in the likelihood of misfire. For example, repeated firing without clearing cleaning the barrel and firing devices will lead to higher rates of misfire. Increased heat from repeated firings increases the likelihood of early ignition and misfire. Very humid, dusty, or sandy environments increase the likelihood of particulate in mechanical systems and increase the rate of failure and misfire.
Sep 5 2007, 11:23 am
The day that authors put this on every thing they write,

Disclaimer: This information is intended for game design purposes only and is not to be considered representative of reality. The author implies no warranty for this information.

is the day of the apocalypse.



Disclaimer: This information is intended for Hypothetical thinkers, and information given is forward looking, and contains no warranty or guarantee.
Sep 5 2007, 12:47 pm
I put that specifically to cover my ass in case anyone would be stupid enough to try to use the information I presented as fact in a real-life conflict situation. That disclaimer's intended more for high-school-graduate-level military strategists than it is for game developers. ;-)
Sep 5 2007, 5:41 pm
That's actually pretty snazzy you took the time to help out anyone wanting to take the time to design a system that would be somewhat realistically based.
Sep 5 2007, 7:47 pm
Have you spent any of this free time on your project (Newtopia) or are you just meandering off? =P

Anyway, I like it and will probably add it to future projects (if I can).
Sep 5 2007, 8:20 pm
You, my friend, have skills as a modeler.
http://www.janes.com/careers/
Sep 6 2007, 3:25 pm
@Squeegy: I don't really have much free time, lately. I have a lot of stuff to take care of at the moment. Roofing, haircut, finishing off the last bits of my high school (frickin' hate CAPP), and job.

Newtopia's current TODO item is a big mother, so I'm holding off on it until I can get a workable way of getting it done. Specifically, I need to find a way to reduce each and every turf and its contents into a DMM-like symbol table so I can save all non-temporary variables to DMM without any information loss. To do this, I have to find a way to recognise terrain that is an exact copy of other kinds of terrain. The "brute force" algorithm would be fast for the first 100 iterations or so; most of the tiles would probably be the same so I would have to perform around 1~2 operations per turf. Each time I encountered a unique turf compared to the existing ones, however, every subsequent turf would require one more operation to check. By the last row of the map I could be performing in excess of 60 to 80 operations per turf, depending on how much information is already on the map.

Since I haven't come up with anything that's more elegant than that, I'm liable to go ahead and implement it, but right now I'm playing Incursion : Halls of the Goblin King, and I'm trying to get Interstellar Inc.'s components system working before switching back to Newtopia.

I've never stopped working on my (non-BYOND) space sim's design notes, and when I was reviewing the firearms_malfunctions.txt, I noticed I have everything about firearms-related malfunctions (including jams, failure to load ammunition, firing multiple shots in semi-auto mode, etc.) but nothing about ammunition-related malfunctions.
Sep 10 2007, 10:22 pm
In case people don't actually know the actual mechanics involved, I should point out that when a gas-blowback (or otherwise recoil-operated) semi- or fully-automatic weapon misfires, it jams. Usually the jam is as easy to clear as tapping the side of the gun then pulling on the cocking hammer or slide while inverting the gun so the ejector port is immediately facing the ground, but this alone can be fatal in a battle situation and takes up precious seconds of time.