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Description
Concept I worked on at Sledgehammer Games for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

Property of Activision Blizzard, Inc.

*Edit* A number of people have asked how this works. I'll give a fairly detailed description, but remember this is a FICTIONAL design! All you would-be weapon designers, chemists and engineers, feel free to comment away but this is a design for an entertainment product!

The tube in the back contains "liquid matter." There are two parts to this, the first being a plastic material that makes up the bullet half of the round. The second part is unbonded aluminum and copper oxide. This is the back half of the round, and it is the explosive propellant. Aluminum and copper oxide either burns or explodes when combined depending on the ratios; this is how thermite is made. So the 'liquid matter' tube feeds these ingredients to the printer, which is the removable black thing on top. The printer isn't really a printer, instead it casts sets of four rounds at a time. Remember, each round is front-half plastic, back-half explosive thermite. The rounds look like a blue cylinder, nothing fancy.

After a set of rounds is cast, the four bullets get pushed up to a storage area in the front, where they are queued to be fed into the magazine. The magazine is the black tube with the brass charging handle. When the user needs to reload, the tube is rotated out and pulled back through the queue area. As it is pulled through, the printed bullets get loaded in, all lined up facing forward. This magazine tube is basically a combination of a shotgun tube and a P90 magazine.

Once the bullets are loaded in the tube, they are spring pressed towards the back of the tube, where they are forced out a hole in the bottom into the chamber beneath it (a bit left of the barcode). When a bullet is in the chamber, an electrical primer ignites the back half of the explosive thermite, which in turn sends the front half through the barrel and towards the target. A small vent system clears the chamber of smoke and dust before the next round is loaded. I imagine that by the time you've exhausted the liquid matter tube, you would probably need to clean the chamber out, since tiny bits of melted plastic/matter would start to inhibit the operation.

As for bullet ballistics, that is a complicated science and I'm no expert on it. I imagine that between the bullet being printed with varying density, and the heat of the thermite burning, the projectile could be engineered to become aerodynamic as it leaves the barrel. Sort of how a projectile from a rail gun burns off matter from the friction with the air until it's essentially an aerodynamic spear. Except that this would be moving at a slower speed, but the material of the bullet would be forced into an aerodynamic form because it's a) weaker than the metal from a railgun and b) heated by the thermite already.

The liquid matter tube does contain a limited supply of material to make bullets with, probably equal to 10-20 magazines. Maybe less. But the purpose of it is not to have unlimited ammunition. A soldier carries the ammunition he needs for a mission, not as much as he can carry. Navy Seals take a surprisingly low amount of magazines on missions. The goal here is to a) remove the need for magazine storage on your vest, and b) to make the operation and reloading even simpler and faster for the user with less training. Speed reloading an AR15 can be blazing fast, but it takes a LOT of practice. This design, for the duration of a single mission, requires nothing other than what it already contains.

Description
Concept I worked on at Sledgehammer Games for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

Property of Activision Blizzard, Inc.

*Edit* A number of people have asked how this works. I'll give a fairly detailed description, but remember this is a FICTIONAL design! All you would-be weapon designers, chemists and engineers, feel free to comment away but this is a design for an entertainment product!

The tube in the back contains "liquid matter." There are two parts to this, the first being a plastic material that makes up the bullet half of the round. The second part is unbonded aluminum and copper oxide. This is the back half of the round, and it is the explosive propellant. Aluminum and copper oxide either burns or explodes when combined depending on the ratios; this is how thermite is made. So the 'liquid matter' tube feeds these ingredients to the printer, which is the removable black thing on top. The printer isn't really a printer, instead it casts sets of four rounds at a time. Remember, each round is front-half plastic, back-half explosive thermite. The rounds look like a blue cylinder, nothing fancy.

After a set of rounds is cast, the four bullets get pushed up to a storage area in the front, where they are queued to be fed into the magazine. The magazine is the black tube with the brass charging handle. When the user needs to reload, the tube is rotated out and pulled back through the queue area. As it is pulled through, the printed bullets get loaded in, all lined up facing forward. This magazine tube is basically a combination of a shotgun tube and a P90 magazine.

Once the bullets are loaded in the tube, they are spring pressed towards the back of the tube, where they are forced out a hole in the bottom into the chamber beneath it (a bit left of the barcode). When a bullet is in the chamber, an electrical primer ignites the back half of the explosive thermite, which in turn sends the front half through the barrel and towards the target. A small vent system clears the chamber of smoke and dust before the next round is loaded. I imagine that by the time you've exhausted the liquid matter tube, you would probably need to clean the chamber out, since tiny bits of melted plastic/matter would start to inhibit the operation.

As for bullet ballistics, that is a complicated science and I'm no expert on it. I imagine that between the bullet being printed with varying density, and the heat of the thermite burning, the projectile could be engineered to become aerodynamic as it leaves the barrel. Sort of how a projectile from a rail gun burns off matter from the friction with the air until it's essentially an aerodynamic spear. Except that this would be moving at a slower speed, but the material of the bullet would be forced into an aerodynamic form because it's a) weaker than the metal from a railgun and b) heated by the thermite already.

The liquid matter tube does contain a limited supply of material to make bullets with, probably equal to 10-20 magazines. Maybe less. But the purpose of it is not to have unlimited ammunition. A soldier carries the ammunition he needs for a mission, not as much as he can carry. Navy Seals take a surprisingly low amount of magazines on missions. The goal here is to a) remove the need for magazine storage on your vest, and b) to make the operation and reloading even simpler and faster for the user with less training. Speed reloading an AR15 can be blazing fast, but it takes a LOT of practice. This design, for the duration of a single mission, requires nothing other than what it already contains.