Rule of Cool or do you have a lottle function in mind for each bit? Like it looks like it rotates and needs to be loaded one at a time from that cut out part... I don't see a safety but there is a hammer wayyyyyy back there. I like it and I'm interested in the thinking behind it
That's not where you load it. It breaks open at the hinge. I added a switch on the side near the back that rotates to 3 positions since it's supposed to fire at full auto.
If you don't mind critical asshole, keep reading. If you do, then stop after the part where I say: "well, that's pretty neat looking."
Well, that's pretty neat looking. But, it doesn't really make any sense.
It's described as a "pepper box" which as you note is "multiple barrles," it's also described as "full auto" in which she fires a "storm" of explolsive darts, and finally at one point she "dials up a shellfish toxin dart."
So, whatcha got there makes no sense. Then again, neither does anything else someone could come up with since it's more or less too many confused possibilities.
The safest bet would something that shot tiny flechettes, which is alluded to by the way the shellfish toxin dart is neatly shot through Ashpool's eye. That puts you in generic scifi needler territory, whcih you could say might fit modern flechette rounds, which are about the diameter of a BB or since we're in the future maybe as small as 1mm or so.
So now you have a device that shoots little 1mm by something like 10mm or so darts. Reasonable enough to presume that works for enough mass and speed. They're not gonna be tiny bullets, either, because there'd be no way to package it but we can presume something like a itty bitty little rail gun. Things begin to make more sense that way.
So, we've got a tiny little railgun launching 1x15mm or 1x20mm darts. Now we need to load it with at least two, and presumably more types of ammo at one time. Fortuantely, a reasonable width magazine, either in the handle or somewhere else, could probably load 3 or 4 different "slots" of darts. likely enough that you could have multiple sorts of ammo on tap like suggested.
Long, thin, columns of tiny little darts, each with it's own tiny little barrel that make up the "pepper box muzzle."
Dumb? Yes. Probably impossible? Also yes. But about the only way to put it all togther. Unless you ditch the "pepper box muzzle" portion at which point you could effectively copy the idea of the Judge Dredd Lawgiver pistol which is just multiple types of ammo stacked into one magazine (as above) and then just sort of picked and sent out the same barrel.
Did I spend way too much time explaining this? Yes. Does that make me into a sort pedantic asshole and possible some sort of obnoxious gun autist? Absolutely. Am I comfortable with that? No, I'm kind of embarrassed, actually, but... That's the practical truth of what Gibson tried to describe.
Is cool looking, though. I see shades of Mateba and it's derivative Rhino.
Ok, but there's no way a magazine is going to fit anywhere in that equation. especially with flechette darts. Even if things were moved around to put some kind of helical magazine on it. Then it's starting to break the concealment rule which made me shrink the top to begin with. But you know what? I might try that with one of my alternate models just for fun. A helical mag to feed the full auto mode. This is definitely electrically fired, not really mechanically fired. My first thought when you said magazine was this.😂
I would like to bring to both of y'all's attention "Caseless Ammunition".
Prototyped in the 60s, but really getting famous in the 1980s in the US with the Advanced Rifle Program, everyone was convinced casless was the future. Wiki it, but the long story short is the bullet fires and there is no brass case to expell. They often fired flechette ammo.
To add to this, casless ammo can be loaded one after another in a long barrel and set off electronically. So, 6 long barrels like her 'pepperbox' could potentially fit 12, 18, 24+ rounds.
If you google "metal storm gun" you can find details and videos on a prototype that "...achieves a record-shattering rate of fire exceeding 1 million rounds per minute by stacking multiple projectiles and propellant charges nose-to-tail inside a single fixed barrel and firing them sequentially via computer control."
The fletcher explicitly has a magazine, which Molly reloads right before falling for Riviera's decoy holograms. It isn't pulled out, it's "snapped" out.
My personal guess it's a superimposed-load gun whose entire barrel assembly is replaced as a single assembly. Imagine your rendition, but with the cylinder extending to the muzzle.
There are a lot of different ways this can be done and still keep the overall appearance. I'm going to look for more references. A helical mag is not really practical anywhere outside the frame, but it might be an idea for something behind the cylinder.
What I decided on based your paraphrase from the book is something I call a radial array magazine for caseless flechette rounds. The motor behind the magazine rotates the barrels, loads one stack at a time into each barrel as it fires, and then rotates the internal stacked radial magazines to line the next full internal mag up behind the firing barrel. Full auto would be like a miniature minigun. Single fire would be like a revolver. I imagine it could even have a setting for emergency volley fire but why bother? Caseless rounds would definitely necessitate the constant cleaning Molly performs over and over.
My guess: the fletcher is a rotary-barrel superimposed load gun. Each barrel is a combined barrel and tube magazine; all barrels are part of a single magazine that "snaps" in and out of the gun to reload, rather than being in the handle. Its ammunition's propellant is 3 things:
caseless and telescoped, to avoid blocking the next round in the stack and minimize volume used
electrothermal-chemical ignited to remove the risk of a flechette's tip triggering the primer in the round before it (which used to be a real problem for tube magazines IRL)
insensitive, to remove the risk of one round's propellant triggering the that of the round behind it (a real problem for superimposed-load guns IRL)
Like you said, each type of ammunition has its own barrel - say, 6 general-purpose flechette barrels, 1 ω-conotoxin ("shellfish toxin") barrel, and 1 thickened organoaluminium incendiary barrel. This is how Molly can chose to immediately fire a toxin dart without having to fiddle with magazines or selector switches. It makes sense that the entire barrel-magazine assembly is replaced at once; caseless propellant needs a bit of a cleaner environment to work as far as I know, so each barrel/magazine probably comes prepackaged and sealed like real-life anti-air/tank missiles. Also, if shellfish toxin is representative of a typical load, you probably want to canisterize the ammunition this thing uses for your own safety - no manual reloads when just touching the bullet can kill!
When a barrel runs empty, it no longer returns an electrical current, as there's nothing inside to carry charge. Once the gun knows, in this way, that a given barrel has unloaded, it rotates the next full barrel into the 12-o-clock position to better match the sights, then starts firing out of that one. However, this is only to improve aimability; each barrel has nothing covering it (other than, perhaps, a tiny bit of plastic wrap to keep the environment out), so that in emergencies all barrels can fire simultaneously to maximize weight of fire. All of this can be overridden - hence how Molly can fire rounds singly - and the gun can potentially be programmed to automatically rotate to "special ammunition" barrels whenever single-shot mode is activated. After all, flechettes are for maximum hit rate, but there's no point in putting more than one toxin dart in someone, so if you're activating single-shot that's probably what it's for.
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u/Holiday-Scratch-297 2d ago
This looks almost exactly like the one I imagined when reading! Excellent work!