Cartridge (firearms)

A cartridge (also called a round or a shell) is a type of ammunition packaging a bullet or shot, a propellant substance (usually either smokeless powder or black powder) and a primer within a metallic, paper, or plastic case that is precisely made to fit within the firing chamber of a firearm. The primer is a small charge of an impact-sensitive or electric-sensitive chemical mixture that can be located at the center of the case head (centerfire ammunition), inside a rim (rimfire ammunition), or in a projection such as in a pinfire or teat-fire cartridge. Military and commercial producers continue to pursue the goal of caseless ammunition. A cartridge without a bullet is called a blank. One that is completely inert (contains no active primer and no propellant) is called a dummy.

Some artillery ammunition uses the same cartridge concept as found in small arms. In other cases, the artillery shell is separate from the propellant charge.

In popular use, the term "bullet" is often misused to refer to a complete cartridge.

Cartridge

Cartridge may refer to:

Media

Cartridge (surname)

Cartridge is a surname in the English language, and is considered to be an English surname. The name is thought to be possibly a variant form of the surname Cartwright. According to etymologist P. H. Reaney, the earliest record of the surname Cartridge is of John Carkerege, in 1522 (in Canterbury). The surname Cartwright is derived from two Middle English elements: cart, carte + wright, meaning "craftsman". The name is first recorded in the 13th century, although the vocabulary word does not date before the 15th century. According to Reaney, the earliest record of the surname Cartwright is of John le Cartwereste, in 1275 (within the Subsidy Rolls of Worcestershire).

References

ROM cartridge

A ROM cartridge, sometimes referred to simply as a cartridge or cart, is a removable enclosure containing read-only memory designed to be connected to a consumer electronics device such as a home computer, video game console and to a lesser extent, electronic musical instruments. ROM cartridges can be used to load software such as video games or other application programs.

The cartridge slot could also be used for hardware additions, for example speech synthesis. Some cartridges had battery-backed static random-access memory, allowing a user to save data such as game progress or scores between uses.

ROM cartridges allowed the user to rapidly load and access programs and data without the expense of a floppy disk drive, which was an expensive peripheral during the home computer era, and without using slow, sequential, and often unreliable Compact Cassette tape. An advantage for the manufacturer was the relative security of distribution of software in cartridge form, which was difficult for end users to replicate. However, cartridges were expensive to manufacture compared to making a floppy disk or CD-ROM. As disk drives became more common and software expanded beyond the practical limits of ROM size, cartridge slots disappeared from later consoles and computers. Cartridges are still used today with handheld gaming consoles such as the Nintendo DS and available as downloads in the Nintendo eShop for systems in the Nintendo 3DS family.