Quote Originally Posted by Kaptin Keen View Post
There's a thing I've been wondering. In old westerns, from time to time you'll come across a guy loading his shotgun with quarters, or drilling holes in his buckshot and pulling wire through them, and so on. In a near-future book by William Gibson, there is a use-and-discard 4 shot russian weapon firing lenghts of chain.

I'm sure these tricks have been attempted in real life, but since they do not seem to have made it into production, I assume neither chain nor quarters are actually better than buckshot.

But is there any actual science or even amateur testing of this?
Even a 10-gauge shotgun (about the largest you could get until you started reaching specialist levels) only has a .75" bore, and a quarter is closer to 1". Even a penny (at .75") would be too large for anything but a wide-open choke. Thus the only coin you could fire from the largest shotgun is a dime. (So far as I can tell, these coin sizes have been constant, just with changes to the metallurgy over time). If you went to this effort, you'd find them to be very poor ammunition, because they are not ballistically shaped and are big enough to interfere with one another while dispersing. This makes them worse than slugs or ordinary shot.

Lengths of chain would have similar issues. Most chain wouldn't fire well, and you're going to get worse performance. With muzzle-loading shotguns, loading in junk in an emergency is plausible, but as a very last resort.