Sometimes fun ideas happen at 4:42 a.m.

It’s 4:42 in the morning, my duck boat is on its trailer behind me, the landing is three to five miles out and Ella isn’t the greatest conversation partner. I’m hunting alone and my brain is completely free to wander.

So I started talking to Opus 5.5 on my phone.

The curiosity

I’ve always “kind of” known the details behind recoil. I had a general model of it in my head. Heavier loads hit harder. An increase in any one variable in the round’s makeup increases recoil, with the weight of the gun reducing it.

What got me curious was looking at the numbers on some of my waterfowl shells and comparing them to some upland shells I had on hand. The supposed big 3 inch magnum duck hunting shells I use fire a 1 1/8 oz load of steel at around 1450 fps. The regular 2 3/4 inch shells I use for pheasants fire a 1 1/8 to 1 1/4 oz load of lead at around 1450 fps. Wait a second, isn’t that about the same thing?

The clay target loads I regularly shoot 50-75 rounds of have approximately the same recoil energy as my .30-06 which I try to shoot as little as possible because of how it feels. Why can I rapid fire 3 1/2 shells out of my SBE3 that are producing double the recoil of my 180gr .30-06 rounds?

I wanted a tool that would let me see the math and play around with numbers.

Building by voice

I told Claude what I was thinking of and what I wanted - a tool to compare recoil between two rounds, set up on a new section on my personal site ducktyping.dev.

Having a persistent memory platform like Rill helps so much with these conversations.

We talked through a few details on requirements - easy defaults that can be overridden, what factors to include in the calculation, what the output should look like. I’m not interested in cutting apart shells to weigh the wad and powder but there are people that do.

How does it work?

Go play with it: Where the kick comes from. It’s fun to experiment with I think.

Ideas in the margins

This is a neat utility and a neat exercise but the output isn’t really what I care about or what I wanted to write about.

I wanted to write about where the idea happened and how. Busy hands and a free brain in my Jeep at 4:42 in the morning, normally those are the random ideas that die on the vine.

Now… now that time can be a fun design session and learning conversation and you can have real finished utilities to use as the result of it.

Pretty neat huh?

Happy hunting :) And happy hacking :)