Basic Trope: A single type of ammunition can work with all types of guns.
- Straight: The 9x19mm MP5 can be refilled by taking ammo from a 7.62x39mm AK-47.
- Exaggerated: Your grenade launcher, flamethrower, and even your alien pulse rifle use 5.56mm ammo.
- Downplayed: Ammunition is categorized as "Pistol/SMG", "Assault Rifle" and "LMG/Sniper" ammo.
- Bullets can be broken down into their base components for crafting other kinds of ammunition.
- Justified: Most weapons follow standardized ammunition and magazine designs.
- Rather than bullets, magazines contain a material that is manufactured into ammunition by the weapon itself.
- Inverted: There's only one weapon, and it takes 5.56x45mm, .45 ACP, 12-gauge shells, 40mm grenades, flamethrower fuel, and has a mount for a rocket.
- Guns can only take ammo from the exact same type - a pearl handled 9mm pistol cannot use the same bullets as one with a black handle despite the two having identical stats.
- Subverted: The 9mm pistol and 9mm SMG take the same round, but the different magazines mean they can't share ammunition.
- Double Subverted: You later find a different 9mm SMG that can take pistol mags.
- Parodied:
- 5.56mm refills the water pistol.
- Abnormal Ammo works for all weapons.
- Zig Zagged: 5.56x45mm refills most rifles, except for certain weapons that require 5.56x45mm ammo from a specific gun to reload.
- Averted: Could be categorized in three ways
- Guns can only use the ammunition they were designed with
- Guns can only use the ammunition and magazine, belt, or clip they were designed with
- None of the guns use the same ammunition.
- Enforced:
- "People will be annoyed when they can't find the right ammo for their gun. Let's make every gun take the same ammo to fix it!"
- After everything else, only 1 byte of RAM was left for tracking ammo count… not enough to track more than one type.
- Lampshaded: "Are you sure this gun takes that clip?" "Trust me. Our ammunition fits in every gun I've ever seen."
- Invoked: A military adopts a new weapon chambered for rounds they already have stocks of or is used by their allies.
- Exploited: When fighting enemies that use 5.56mm, you take a weapon that uses 5.56mm.
- Defied: Designing a weapon so that it's incompatible with the enemy's ammo and/or you can still use theirs.
- Discussed: "I can't give you any ammo because my bullets can't fit in your gun."
- Conversed: "So walking over an AK gives you ammo for your MP5? Don't they use different rounds?"
- Implied: A squadmate can toss you a spare mag to refill your current weapon, regardless of what it is.
- Deconstructed: Two militaries adopting the same cartridge for their weapons allows them to use captured ammo stocks, reducing the logistical burden of the offensive and allowing them to reach the capital much sooner.
- While you can load bullets into any gun which they physically fit, appropriate failure modes will ensue - at least causing a misfire and the worst leading to instant death via the hammer being blown through your eye if you were aiming while firing an overpowered one.
- Reconstructed: While they have the same cartridge dimensions, they did not adopt the same rounds. Slight differences in powder loads, bullet materials, and even magazines bog the invaders down with reliability issues and the logistical chaos allows the defenders, whose weapons were built more sturdily to account for these differences, to turn the tide.
- Played For Laughs: A character is shown using seemingly more and more humorously incompatible ammo to reload their weapons.
- Played For Drama: A character desperately scavenges for ammunition from fallen allies and enemies, finding most are incompatible or would take too much time to repack into compatible magazines.
Back to Universal Ammunition
