Clever Future Weapons

[Guest Suleyman Rashid]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Given the choice, you really should read Niven's RINGWORLD, as it is a classic. Can't miss with a novel that was made into an RPG. And near the end it shows a weapon so powerful that your jaw will drop. It is the best "Big-Dumb-Object" SF novel.

 

 

Speaking of Niven and weapons, has anyone mentioned the Finnagle Bullet yet?

[Nyrath]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

In Iain Bank's AGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND, there is a bizzare weapon called "The Lazy Gun" (actually there were originally eight of them). It is a relic of some hyper-advanced civilization who apparently had a puckish sense of humor.

 

There had been eight Lazy Guns. A Lazy Gun was a little over half a metre in length, about thirty centimetres in width and twenty centimetres in height. Its front was made up of two stubby cylinders which protruded from the smooth, matt-silver main body. The cylinders ended in slightly bulged black-glass lenses. A couple of hand controls sitting on stalks, an eyesight curving up on another extension, and a broad, adjustable metal strap all indicated that the weapons had been designed to be fired from the waist.

There were two controls, one on each hand grip; a zoom wheel and a trigger.

You looked through the sight, zoomed in until the target you had selected just filled your vision, then you pressed the trigger. The Lazy Gun did the rest instantaneously.

 

But you had no idea whatsoever exactly what was going to happen next.

If you had aimed at a person, a spear might suddenly materialise and pierce them through the chest, or some snake's spit fang might graze their neck, or a ship's anchor might appear falling above them, crushing them, or two enormous switch-electrodes would leap briefly into being on either side of the hapless target and vaporise him or her.

 

If you had aimed the gun at something larger, like a tank or a house, then it might implode, explode, collapse in a pile of dust, be struck by a section of a tidal wave or a lava flow, be turned inside out or just disappear entirely, with or without a bang.

 

Increasing scale seemed to rob a Lazy Gun of its eccentric poesy; turn it on a city or a mountain and it tended simply to drop an appropriately sized nuclear or thermonuclear fireball onto it. The only known exception had been when what was believed to have been a comet nucleus had destroyed a city-sized berg-barge on the water world of Trontsephori.

 

Rumour had it that some of the earlier Lazy Guns, at least, had shown what looked suspiciously like humour when they had been used; criminals saved from firing squads so that they could be the subjects of experiments had died under a hail of bullets, all hitting their hearts at the same time; an obsolete submarine had been straddled by depth charges; a mad king obsessed with metals had been smothered under a deluge of mercury.

 

The braver physicists - those who didn't try to deny the existence of Lazy Guns altogether - ventured that the weapons somehow accessed different dimensions; they monitored other continua and dipped into one to pluck out their chosen method of destruction and transfer it to this universe, where it carried out its destructive task then promptly disappeared, only its effects remaining. Or they created whatever they desired to create from the ground-state of quantum fluctuation that invested the fabric of space. Or they were time machines.

 

Any one of these possibilities was so mind-boggling in its implications and ramifications - provided that one could understand or ever harness the technology involved - that the fact a Lazy Gun was light but massy, and weighed exactly three times as much turned upside down as it did the right way up, was almost trivial by comparison.

 

Unfortunately - for the cause of scientific advancement when a Lazy Gun felt it was being interfered with it destroyed itself; what appeared to be a matter/anti-matter reaction took place, turning the parts of the gun not actually annihilated into plasma and causing a blast of the sort normally associated with a medium-yield fission device; it was this kind of explosion which had devastated Lip City, though most of the subsequent illnesses and deaths caused by radiation had resulted not directly from the initial detonation but from the scattering of fissile material from the cores of the City University Physics Department's research reactors.

 

 

As you can imagine, entire nations plot and scheme in desperate attempts to capture one of these things.

[Cancer]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

This is actually old tech ... I recall reading about a WW2 explosive (I think called Nipolit?) that had decent mechanical properties (I have the impression that it was like bakelite or other high-density hard plastic). Making blast grenades out of the stuff consisted of casting it to the right shape and screwing in an igniter fuse.

 

Seems like you could generalize this idea. Posit explosives (or incendiaries, or gas generators, or other unautomated weapons systems) that have adequate mechanical properties, and then make normal household items out of the material, use those for sneaky sabotage tasks. Make the trigger a microchip in the item, and bingo. As explosives (etc.) it might not be the greatest, but for the stability, concealability, etc., it's a valuable weapon system.

 

I mean, imagine a 4-place set of cheap dinnerware, oversize coffee mugs ... hardside CD cases ... exterior trim on an automobile ... all of it explosives. Maybe this is more pulp concept than Star Hero concept, but I'd think Q would be delighted.

[gewing]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I don't think you're wrong. The FN Herstal played around with this before coming up with current 40 mm grenade launcher. The problems were two-fold (but only one of them technical).

 

First off, the extra weight in terms of propellant. As they add more stuff into soldiers' kit, weight is becoming a major problem. The feeling was that the extra weight needed to gave you better range/speed (mostly useful against lightly armoured targets) would be better used for a bigger grenade, since the main point is still killing infantry.

 

Given the recent suspension of the US army's OICW program, it looks like they may have been right, although of course that's mostly political, over the XM8. But they dropped the 20 mm grenade because you needed a near hit with that (lethal radius was a half meter, or about 18 inches) and now there is concern that the 25 mm grenade is still not lethal enough.

 

Secondly, accuracy problems - since the rocket kicks in once the missile has left the barrel and builds up speed progressively, manufacturing constraints were *extremely* tight. Any deformation or nonstandardisation in ammo had a major effect on accuracy (as did strong wind and rain, but then that's always a problem). It wasn't an insoluble problem, but it did mean a higher reject rate and thus more expensive ammo.

 

So for now, everyone has dropped the gyrojet for an electronically detonated grenade (25 mm for the US, for now, 40 mm for everyone else)

 

cheers, Mark

 

 

THe company that developed the Gyroget(or people who did), iirc demonstrated a 40mm grenade version. I think it was Marquandt?

 

FN has been playing with "HIgh impulse weapons systems" Seem to be LOOONG recoil grenade launchers, to get the recoil down to where a human can stand it.

 

The first was afaik Samourai, a 76mm grenade launcher with about a 300 meter range.

 

More recently they have demonstrated a 40mm one that uses the High Velocity! round from the Mk19, so about 3x the velocity of the normal M203. Supposedly nice and flat out to 300 meters, aim and hit.

 

I am avidly waiting for the XM25 to be field tested. I hope it works as well as they project, but suspect they will end up building most of the grenades with simple impact fuses, not the expensive time airburst fuses.

 

I haven't seen any details on the French 35mm grenade for their Papop, similar to OICW.

[gewing]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

This is actually old tech ... I recall reading about a WW2 explosive (I think called Nipolit?) that had decent mechanical properties (I have the impression that it was like bakelite or other high-density hard plastic). Making blast grenades out of the stuff consisted of casting it to the right shape and screwing in an igniter fuse.

 

Seems like you could generalize this idea. Posit explosives (or incendiaries, or gas generators, or other unautomated weapons systems) that have adequate mechanical properties, and then make normal household items out of the material, use those for sneaky sabotage tasks. Make the trigger a microchip in the item, and bingo. As explosives (etc.) it might not be the greatest, but for the stability, concealability, etc., it's a valuable weapon system.

 

I mean, imagine a 4-place set of cheap dinnerware, oversize coffee mugs ... hardside CD cases ... exterior trim on an automobile ... all of it explosives. Maybe this is more pulp concept than Star Hero concept, but I'd think Q would be delighted.

 

 

IIRC they did a squeezable explosive in toothpaste tubes during WWII. I think it even worked on teeth!

[Old Man]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I am avidly waiting for the XM25 to be field tested. I hope it works as well as they project' date=' but suspect they will end up building most of the grenades with simple impact fuses, not the expensive time airburst fuses. [/quote']

 

Actually I understand the current problem with the XM25 is the lethality of the round. 20mm is just too small to be an effective grenade, apparently.

[Markdoc]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Actually I understand the current problem with the XM25 is the lethality of the round. 20mm is just too small to be an effective grenade' date=' apparently.[/quote']

 

You are correct. In fact, so correct, they've already dropped it. They upgraded to a 25 mm grenade, but now the buzz is that may be too small as well - we'll know soon enough, I guess, since they've had the new ATK XM25 for testing since at least May, IIRC.

 

cheers, Mark

[gewing]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

You are correct. In fact, so correct, they've already dropped it. They upgraded to a 25 mm grenade, but now the buzz is that may be too small as well - we'll know soon enough, I guess, since they've had the new ATK XM25 for testing since at least May, IIRC.

 

cheers, Mark

 

Yeah, they also had to lower the velocity a bunch, so the range is only about 600 yards instead of 1000. The original High velocity 25mm for the Xm307 OCSW is iirc 1390 fps!

 

Maybe the French were right in the first place, their similar PAPOP system uses a low velocity 35mm, I think they aimed for a range of about 300-350 meters.

[Bismark]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Check out the Australian take on the OICW idea - the experimental AICW, with a seriously lightened (it would have to be ) Steyr AUG-derived assault rifle mounting a Metal Storm 'roman candle' electrically fired grenade launcher on the top (there is some info on this at the well known site for afficianados of firearm pr0n - http://www.world.guns.ru).

[Foxiekins]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

One thing I came up with for Sci-Fi was an improvement over gunpowder... Or nitrocellulose...

 

What *is* state-of-the-art propellant based on these days, anyway...? Cordite was in back around WW2, right...?

 

Anyway, the stuff I came up with had around 12 to 16 times the energy density of nitrocellulose... And it was in the form of a gel...

 

One of the nastier weapons used a rotary mechanism... A round would fire, and the rotation of the block would carry the chamber around to where it would vent, another round would be loaded, propellant gel would be pumped in behind it, and then it would fire again... It would send 7mm diameter, 7cm long projectiles of spent uranium downrange at 100 rounds per second, and at just over Mach 5... Military weapon, of course... Gunneys were infamous for saying "Go Go Speed Racer" before sending a barrage downrange..

 

There was also the Plasma Carbine... It had a paraboloidal compression chamber, with an ellipsoidal focussing chamber, arranged so that the focus of each was at the same point, in the center of the throat between them... The plasma, driven by microwaves, would hit speed of sound as it passed through the throat, and accelerate hypersonic afterward... It produced a converging tidal bore pulse that tried to punch through anything in the way, and was fairly successful given that it used a mix of deuterium and helium 3, and was designed for a micro-fusion event to occur in the throat as the weapon fired... Nasty...

[BigJackBrass]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Hm, dropping into this one a bit late, so apologies if anyone has already mentioned this:

 

K.W. Jeter wrote about a fantastic device in his novel "Death Arms," the C.I.A. Slow Bullet. Essentially it's a bulky gun that fires one, very slow moving bullet. But the bullet is large, and almost impossible to stop. Once it has acquired its target the bullet continues forwards towards it, drilling its way through obstructions it cannot negotiate. Sooner or later it will catch up with whoever it was fired at, and when it reaches close range an automated voice starts announcing that this is not a violation of the target's civil rights. Then it kills them.

 

Sooner or later one of my players is going to get on the wrong end of such a thing.

[Manic Typist]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I'm guessing it had seeking, right?

[gewing]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

One thing I came up with for Sci-Fi was an improvement over gunpowder... Or nitrocellulose...

 

What *is* state-of-the-art propellant based on these days, anyway...? Cordite was in back around WW2, right...?

 

Anyway, the stuff I came up with had around 12 to 16 times the energy density of nitrocellulose... And it was in the form of a gel...

 

One of the nastier weapons used a rotary mechanism... A round would fire, and the rotation of the block would carry the chamber around to where it would vent, another round would be loaded, propellant gel would be pumped in behind it, and then it would fire again... It would send 7mm diameter, 7cm long projectiles of spent uranium downrange at 100 rounds per second, and at just over Mach 5... Military weapon, of course... Gunneys were infamous for saying "Go Go Speed Racer" before sending a barrage downrange..

 

There was also the Plasma Carbine... It had a paraboloidal compression chamber, with an ellipsoidal focussing chamber, arranged so that the focus of each was at the same point, in the center of the throat between them... The plasma, driven by microwaves, would hit speed of sound as it passed through the throat, and accelerate hypersonic afterward... It produced a converging tidal bore pulse that tried to punch through anything in the way, and was fairly successful given that it used a mix of deuterium and helium 3, and was designed for a micro-fusion event to occur in the throat as the weapon fired... Nasty...

 

 

Plasma and fusion guns are high potential...

 

The gel propellant gun is pretty good, but why bother to use a gel? If the materials technology improves enough to handle the pressures and temperatures, just use high explosives. IIRC the blast front from them moves at something like 20k fps... Conventional powders are limited to the rate of expansion of their gasses, no more than about 7000 fps.

 

Liquid propellant guns have been proposed, that would mix a hypoergolic (I think is the term? for self detonating?) binary propellant in the chamber. The energy level iirc could be higher than conventional powders. In addition, theoretically (I have doubts) more propellant could be pumped into the bore to continue/maintain the pressure curve as the projectile travels down the barrel.

 

A simpler system called Electro thermal Combustion? would use solid, liquid, or gel propellant, but "ignite" it by passing a very high voltage charge through it. This would vaporize it, starting the expansion and detonating it. This is supposed to have significant advantages in energy available. In addition, it might be possible to use further pulses of high voltage electricity as the projectile progresses up the bore, to increase the temperature/energy of the propellant gasses as they expand.

 

One major problem with your gun is simple physics. a 7mm x70mm depleted uranium projectile at mach 5 would have a HUGE amount of recoil.

 

Make it a vehicle mounted gun...

[Foxiekins]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Plasma and fusion guns are high potential...

 

The gel propellant gun is pretty good, but why bother to use a gel? If the materials technology improves enough to handle the pressures and temperatures, just use high explosives. IIRC the blast front from them moves at something like 20k fps... Conventional powders are limited to the rate of expansion of their gasses, no more than about 7000 fps.

 

Liquid propellant guns have been proposed, that would mix a hypoergolic (I think is the term? for self detonating?) binary propellant in the chamber. The energy level iirc could be higher than conventional powders. In addition, theoretically (I have doubts) more propellant could be pumped into the bore to continue/maintain the pressure curve as the projectile travels down the barrel.

 

A simpler system called Electro thermal Combustion? would use solid, liquid, or gel propellant, but "ignite" it by passing a very high voltage charge through it. This would vaporize it, starting the expansion and detonating it. This is supposed to have significant advantages in energy available. In addition, it might be possible to use further pulses of high voltage electricity as the projectile progresses up the bore, to increase the temperature/energy of the propellant gasses as they expand.

 

One major problem with your gun is simple physics. a 7mm x70mm depleted uranium projectile at mach 5 would have a HUGE amount of recoil.

 

Make it a vehicle mounted gun...

 

Erm... NitroMethane Gel *is* a high explosive... It's a gel so it can be pumped into the chamber, and metered as desired, as well as a slightly different mix being a blasting explosive you can apply with a squeeze bottle... The metered propellant weapons are actually obsolete at the time of the campaign, but some folks insist on using old, tried and true designs, particularly since they can take blasting gel sold on the market, mix in a chemical additive or two, and use it in the weapons... Something like black powder enthusiasts or folks who own Mausers today... This is, of course, talking about the hand held, single shot versions... The version I referred to *is* a vehicle mounted weapon... Didn't you notice the part about the rotary mechanism, and 100 rounds per second...? The thing masses around 40 kilograms dry... It's designed to draw propellant from a vehicle's central store, which also serves to charge the propellant wells of infantry weapons in the field if need be... Those fire the same ammo, just with a lot less propellant so the recoil is managable, and tunable to the setting you want...

[Dale A. Ward]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Erm... NitroMethane Gel *is* a high explosive... It's a gel so it can be pumped into the chamber' date=' and metered as desired, as well as a slightly different mix being a blasting explosive you can apply with a squeeze bottle...[/quote']

If I'm not mistaken, the military first used this stuff during the Viet Nam War. I recall seeing video of it in use...

1) the soldier sticks his bayonet in the ground to make a nice hole

2) he fills the hole with gel from a squeeze bottle

3) sticks a det cap in the gel and unspools about 20 yards of wire as he steps away from the hole

4) then he attaches the wire to a small detonator

 

"Fire in the hole!"... voila, instant foxhole.

 

I'm really not sure if this technology remained in use very long, though. From what I recall of soldiers from that era, there weren't many that I'd have trusted with a bottle of that stuff.

 

(No offense intended to anyone who actually WAS a Viet Nam soldier, but my opinion stands.)

[Hierax]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I liked the STAR HERO "Fast Neutron Rifle" that went right through people with light or no armor but fried those in heavy armor -- i.e., rebel scum like on Hoth against fully armoured stormtroopers, so you could fire through your mass of cheap light troops without worrying about "friendly fire" and hit the bad guys easily. (NND vs. <5 DEF Armor)

[gewing]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Erm... NitroMethane Gel *is* a high explosive... It's a gel so it can be pumped into the chamber' date=' and metered as desired, as well as a slightly different mix being a blasting explosive you can apply with a squeeze bottle... The metered propellant weapons are actually obsolete at the time of the campaign, but some folks insist on using old, tried and true designs, particularly since they can take blasting gel sold on the market, mix in a chemical additive or two, and use it in the weapons... Something like black powder enthusiasts or folks who own Mausers today... This is, of course, talking about the hand held, single shot versions... The version I referred to *is* a vehicle mounted weapon... Didn't you notice the part about the rotary mechanism, and 100 rounds per second...? The thing masses around 40 kilograms dry... It's designed to draw propellant from a vehicle's central store, which also serves to charge the propellant wells of infantry weapons in the field if need be... Those fire the same ammo, just with a lot less propellant so the recoil is managable, and tunable to the setting you want...[/quote']

 

 

I like the Binary liguids better, they are relatively safe and non=toxic until mixed under pressure.

 

I read the write up of your weapon, and had flashbacks to when I bought Image Comics...

 

Wetworks specifically.

[CorpCommander]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I liked the STAR HERO "Fast Neutron Rifle" that went right through people with light or no armor but fried those in heavy armor -- i.e.' date=' rebel scum like on Hoth against fully armoured stormtroopers, so you could fire through your mass of cheap light troops without worrying about "friendly fire" and hit the bad guys easily. (NND vs. <5 DEF Armor)[/quote']

 

It would never be fielded. Think of the lawsuits! Also, energetic neutrons are scattered by other neutrons and they won't know the difference between "hard" armor or soft tissue.

[Old Man]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Well, they will in the sense that they are more likely to interact with larger/denser atomic nuclei. When they do, what you get is 'bremmstralung', a sudden shower of charged particles that are more dangerous than the original particle would have been. Bremmstralung is actually a problem in space travel--either you shield the hell out of your spaceship so as to have enough shielding to stop both cosmic rays and the bremmstralung they create, or you just don't armor anything and let the rays in. Generally the latter strategy is used for weight reasons.

[Nyrath]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I may be wrong, but I think that bremsstrahlung only occurs with charged particles, neutrons won't cause it. As a side note, bremsstrahlung is the technique used by the x-ray tube inside the machine at the dentist's office. An electron gun fires a beam at a metal plate, creating x-rays by bremsstrahlung .

 

Bremsstrahlung occurs with armor made of dense elements, like metal or lead. This is because such materials stop charged particles quite quickly. Armor made of paraffin, ice, plastic, or other un-dense material stops the charged particles but does not cause bremsstrahlung .

 

So for an explorational spacecraft, you can do like old man says: lots of paraffin or no armor at all. This is because almost all of the naturally occuring radiation in space is from charged particles.

 

But that don't work with warships. In space war one has un-natural man-made radiation, mostly x-rays from nuclear explosions. You need lots of lead shielding to stop that.

 

So on your warships you'd first have a layer of lead armor, which is covered by an outer layer of paraffin. The outer layer stops the charged particles without creating any bremsstrahlung, and the inner layer stops the nuclear radiation.

 

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3y.html#radarmor

 

The thread hijack is over. Readers who were interested in hand-guns as opposed to space warships can now wake up from their naps.

[Old Man]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

No, silly, I was interested in hand guns that can take out space warships.

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I am still trying to wrap my head around capital warships with wax armor.

 

"Captain! Nuclear torpedos inbound! They've managed to breach point defenses!"

 

"Brace for impact... and relax Ensign... we're sitting safe behind almost 2 meters of solid parrafin armor"

 

 

Somehow deosn't track for me...

[Old Man]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

"Realistic" space combat can look really weird. My understanding of the current state of affairs is that it's a lot like really fragile submarine warfare--it's next to impossible to detect an opponent unless they do something active, but it's really easy to take out an opponent with lasers or what amounts to BBs. And then if all this is happening in orbit, instead of deep space, and it matters what part of the planet is underneath the combatants, it gets stranger.

[CorpCommander]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Sorry but Star Hero games that sound like the following are going to be pretty damn wierd.

 

Sonar: "Conn! Sonar! High-output reactor contact bearing 72 by 180 by 45, range one point five mega meters!"

 

XO: "Damn they've spotted us! We can't stand up against their rays! Captain, what are we to do?"

 

CO: "In the brig, you still have those men we picked up?"

 

XO: "Sir, you mean the three men in the tug, the butcher, the baker and the Candlestick Maker?"

 

CO: "That's them! Space the first two but bring me the third. I think he can help us out here!"

[sinanju]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

It would never be fielded. Think of the lawsuits! Also' date=' energetic neutrons are scattered by other neutrons and they won't know the difference between "hard" armor or soft tissue.[/quote']

 

So use the "gamma knife" model used for radiation treatments in the medical field. Aim a large number of less-than-deadly beams of radiation at a target. Only in the tissues where they converge does the radiation concentration reach a level sufficient to kill the cells.

 

On the battlefield, you have a large number of energy weapons networked together. They all aim at the same target, fire, then aim at the next target, etc. This way you can sweep the beams through your own troops without harming them, zapping only the bad guys.

 

Well...mostly, anyway.