A rechargeable rifle, a launcher or a rechargeable pistol, often abbreviated with "RR" or "RCL" (for ReCoilLess)Is a type of lightweight artillery device or man-portable launcher designed to exhaust some kind of countermeasure such as propellant gas from the rear of the weapon at the time of firing, generating forward thrust that counteracts most of the weapon's retreat. It allows for the removal of much of a traditional cannon's heavy and cumbersome recoil-counteracting equipment as well as a thinner-walled barrel, and thus the launch of a relatively large projectile from a platform which would not be able to handle the weight or recoil of a conventional cannon of the same size. Technically, only systems utilizing spin-stabilized projectiles fired from a rifled barrel are weapons with no recoil,While similar in appearance to a tube-based rocket launcher (since these often work on a reelless launch principle), shells that use conventional gun propellant are fired by a reelless weapon. The key difference from rocket launchers (whether man-portable or not) is that the recoilless rifle or gun projectile is initially started using conventional explosive propellant rather than a rocket engine. Although there are rocket-assisted rounds for recoilless launchers, the detonation of an initial explosive propelling charge often ejects them from the barrel.

Design

There are a variety of rules under which a recoiless gun can work, all requiring the ejection from the rear of the gun tube of some kind of counter-mass to counteract the force of the projectile being fired downwards. The most basic method, and the first to be used, is simply to make a double-ended piston with a traditional sealed breech that fires the same projectiles forward and backward. Such a system puts enormous stress on its midpoint, is extremely cumbersome to reload, and has the highly undesirable effect of potentially launching a projectile just as deadly as the one fired at the enemy at a point behind the shooter where its allies may well be.The most popular system consists of venting some portion of the propellant gas of the weapon to the back of the tank, in the same manner as a rocket launcher. It produces a forward guided momentum that is almost equal to the rearward momentum (recoil) imparted by moving the projectile to the frame. The balance thus produced does not leave much energy in the form of a felt recoil to be imparted to the mounting of the weapon or the gunner. Because recoil is mostly negated, it is not important to have a strong and complex damping mechanism for the recoil. Despite the name, the forces are rarely fully balanced, and real-world rifles recoil noticeably (with varying degrees of severity);