Clever Future Weapons

[Nyrath]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Ah' date=' I stand corrected then. *Adds novel to list of books I haven't read yet, which is nearly a book in and of itself*[/quote']

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.

 

Arguably the best "First Contact" and "Space Opera Starship Combat" novel is Niven and Pournelle's THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE.

 

Arguably the best "Alien Invasion" novel is Niven and Pournelle's FOOTFALL.

[ThothAmon]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Knife missiles. Small fast sharp nigh-indestructible (semi)guided projectiles that fly at Mach 10 on an almost inexhaustible power unit. Rudimentary AI that stops them from targeting their user but targets everything else that looks vaguely threatening.

 

Time bomb. Small anti-personnel grenade that teleports everything inside the explosion radius backwards in time by a predetermined amount. Used on conventional planets it can project the target area into vacuum - the planet moves forward on its orbital rotation during the time differential

 

Wormhole projector. Opens the second end of a partially stable wormhole at the projected target location. Resultant gravitational chaos capable of destroying suns, planets or artifical habitats.

[LordGhee]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

from the strageypage.com

 

 

Death Ray Versus MANPADS

by James Dunnigan

June 30, 2005

Discussion Board on this DLS topic

 

 

Raytheon Corporation has developed an anti-missile (of the portable, shoulder fired variety) system for civilian air airports. Called Vigilant Eagle, the system uses a network of heat sensitive missile detectors, mounted like cell phone antenna, all over the airport area. When at least two of these detect a missile launch, a beam of electromagnetic energy fries the missile electronics, causing it to miss. The High-power Amplifier-Transmitter (HAT), does the zapping. This is a large, billboard sized array of small electronic emitters, that can send a powerful bean of electronic in any direction.

 

MANPADS (portable SAMs, or Surface to Air Missiles) are seen as a major terrorist threat against civilian aviation. The air transport industry is looking for a cost effective way to deal with this threat. Vigilant Eagle will cost about $25 million per airport, which is a tenth of the cost for equipping individual aircraft with anti-missile systems. About 70 percent of air traffic in the United States goes in and out of just 30 airports. Vigilant Eagle has been tested successfully, but is relatively new technology. However, this “directed energy” type of weapon is showing up in many areas, and is not some off-the-wall idea. Directed energy devices have been in the works for decades, and are now finally entering service.

 

 

there is also a humve that has a laser on it used for mine clarence.

[Inu]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Raytheon Corporation has developed an anti-missile (of the portable' date=' shoulder fired variety) system for civilian air airports. Called Vigilant Eagle, the system uses a network of heat sensitive missile detectors, mounted like cell phone antenna, all over the airport area. When at least two of these detect a missile launch, a beam of electromagnetic energy fries the missile electronics, causing it to miss. The High-power Amplifier-Transmitter (HAT), does the zapping. This is a large, billboard sized array of small electronic emitters, that can send a powerful bean of electronic in any direction. [/quote'] Now let's see the lawsuits that come the first time it misidentifies a civilian aircraft as a missile (maybe it had an engine flameout, so looks different, or something like that).

 

There are very good reasons why current automated weapons systems are not entirely automated... a human has to pull the trigger. You just can't be sure if the AI is going to make mistakes.

 

Really neat idea, though, I just wanna see a human component.

 

MANPADS

Manpads!

 

Any word gets funnier with 'man' as a prefix. Try it, it works.

 

Manpads is one of the funniest words I've encountered this year. It's a late entrant, but it might just take the sweeps.

[gewing]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

You ain't wrong (on either count). The US versions were the M16A2 - small charge, explodes about hip height and the M2A4, which bounces up over head height before exploding - has a slightly larger charge and larger area of effect.

 

*Regular* mines are the ones that give "the wound" since they blow upwards out of the ground - giving them a good chance of severe damge to location 13: but they don't hit nearly as many people arond them when they go off.

 

That's why s-mines were so feared in WW2 - not because of "the wound" - but because if someone in your squad set one off, you were all potentially in the hurt zone, whereas if he stepped on a conventional APERS mine odds are only he would take "the 30 foot step".

 

As a note, I'm not sure when the "bouncing betty" name came into use - it may actually be vietnam era slang for the M16 series. US troops in Vietnam hated them - a huge number of US casualties came from their own mines. My dad, who had direct personal experience of the WW2 german verson always called them "s-mines" or "those nasty little bastards",

 

cheers, Mark

 

 

the other one that bugged me, maybe even more, is the Toe Popper. Like a big golf tee that has a small shaped charge in it, to blow a hole up through the foot...

 

IIRC, due to material blasted up into the foot, they nearly always result in amputation.

 

 

NOw, I always wondered whether it would work to put one on the end of an arrow:D , but otherwise...

[gewing]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Alas, I fear so. The US development programs has quite powerful, mobile lasers, capable of melting steel. The trouble is that they have a very short effective range, even in normal clear atmospheric conditions - and they require you hold the target still for a while, or carefully track with it so the heat build up. To get explosive heating of anything tougher than, say, water at more than arm's length, you need a laser nearly an order of magnitude more powerful than anything currently under testing.

 

Here's triumphant announcement of successful anti-missile laser tests from last century: http://www.fas.org/news/israel/960209-il-israel.htm. Since then, of course, nada. And I've seen releases like this dating back decades.

 

Specifically, you may be thinking of MTHEL (Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser) developed by (IIRC) Northrop, which had all sorts of claims published about intercepting mortar shells, missiles etc and "shooting them down". However in this case "shooting them down" meant "carefuly plotting the course in advance and setting the test up so that we could track them with a laser, at a relatively close range, so that we had enough time to heat them up". And that from a small-building-sized laser. Northrop was predicting mobile versions ready for the army in 2007. Instead DoD cut the MTHEL program in 2004, essentially killing it.

 

Here's why. "We've been hearing for years that 100 kilowatts is only a year away," says Art Stephenson, the vice president of Northrop's Directed Energy Systems division. "But scaling up that far is a much harder engineering problem than anybody recognized." And not only that - 100 kilowatts is really at the bottom end of the scale - that'd work on short range (a few km) targets in good weather. Tough if there's dust in the air, like (say) Iraq, eh? Realistically, to get quick clean kills at realistic ranges, you need a megawatt laser - and no-one seems to have any idea yet how to build one - or even what you'd build it out of. Standard equipment can't deliver pulsed energy in that range and conventional lasing material would melt if it could.

 

Back in the late 90's, we were promised a megawatt laser operating out of a modified 747 with a range of 200 miles. Remember that guy? All the "artist's impressions?" It was supposed to be ready to enter service in 2005. Instead, in 2005, the team has successfully demonstrated that the laser tracking system works - in a hanger, on the ground, using a benchtop system.

 

Maybe I'm being too sceptical, but I've been hearing "any time, real soon now" for half my lifetime, and while some progress has been made, today, the smallest laser with anything like usable power weighs 310 tons, needs a 6 hour warm-up time and has about the same range as a heavy machine gun. Now that's just not what I'd call a real useful weapon.

 

Battle lasers - including antimissile lasers - *are* under development. But they are not sci-fi type lasers designed to damage the target directly but light delivery systems designed to blind. Think what happens to your nightvision gear when someone shines a 25 kilowatt laser straight into it. For that matter, think what would happen if it was shone directly into your eye. Likewise, IR lasers for plane mounting are being tested - they are designed to blind the heat sensor mounted in the nosecone of an heat-seeking missile - but not to harm the missile itself.

 

cheers, Mark

 

 

Unless I have missed something, they have tested the full power laser modules that will go into the ABL. roughly a megawatt, iirc.

 

Heck MIRACL did some pretto cool stuff in the 80s.

 

I seem to recall that one of the reasons given for cancellation of MTHEL was that it was projected to only have something like 20 "shots" worth of fuel, and since the fuel is basically rocket fuel, it is rather hazardous.

 

 

Lasers have potential for anti-air warfare.

 

I like Electromagnetic guns better, personally. They can actually penetrate armor.

[gewing]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Now let's see the lawsuits that come the first time it misidentifies a civilian aircraft as a missile (maybe it had an engine flameout, so looks different, or something like that).

 

There are very good reasons why current automated weapons systems are not entirely automated... a human has to pull the trigger. You just can't be sure if the AI is going to make mistakes.

 

Really neat idea, though, I just wanna see a human component.

 

 

Manpads!

 

Any word gets funnier with 'man' as a prefix. Try it, it works.

 

Manpads is one of the funniest words I've encountered this year. It's a late entrant, but it might just take the sweeps.

 

 

 

I'm more worried about planes beyond the missile...

 

 

I wonder if two transmitters could be co-ordinated, so that their beams intersect on the target. Each one could be weaker, kind of like what I have read they do in Radiation therapy now.

[Inu]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I'm more worried about planes beyond the missile...

 

 

I wonder if two transmitters could be co-ordinated, so that their beams intersect on the target. Each one could be weaker, kind of like what I have read they do in Radiation therapy now.

That too, good points.

[Lemurion]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Starting at the very top end of the scale-- we go directly to EE "Doc" Smith and the Sunbeam. Basically turns the entire energy of a Sol-type star into a single beam of focused energy. Of course "Doc" was a little over the top in some cases (dropping a planet into a star at 15c is just a little extreme).

 

I particularly liked Heinlein's 30-second bomb from Starship Troopers. The one that said. "I'm a thirty-second bomb, twenty-nine, twenty-eight..." A most excellent psychological weapon.

 

If I remember rightly, the Dallygun was from Gordon R. Dickson's Tactics of Mistake, long before Logan's Run.

[Markdoc]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Unless I have missed something' date=' they have tested the full power laser modules that will go into the ABL. roughly a megawatt, iirc. [/quote']

 

The only info I could find confirmed they had tested the tracking lasers and they worked and had lit up the lasers (for a fraction of a second - the "first light" test was a safety test since the previous generation simply exploded when they tried to turn it on.) However ABL *doesn't* have a megawatt laser - it has a group of 6 100 kilowatt lasers which are all intended to be focussed on a single point. It's not sure if they'll work though - as noted nobody has actually *made* a working 100 kilowatt laser yet. Right now ABL is entering choppy waters - a month ago the white house asked the DoD to consider axing the program citing major delays, cost over-runs and technical difficulties.

 

Linky:http://today.reuters.com/business/newsarticle.aspx?type=tnBusinessNews&storyID=nN30216804&imageid=&cap=

 

My guess is that like MTHEL, it'll die soon.

 

I seem to recall that one of the reasons given for cancellation of MTHEL was that it was projected to only have something like 20 "shots" worth of fuel' date=' and since the fuel is basically rocket fuel, it is rather hazardous.[/quote']

 

Right, the fuel was a major concern, but there were other reasons. The other ones cited were short range, slow response time, "technical difficulties" in getting a laser up to power (as noted the range was less than 5 miles and at that range you needed some time to get heating, making it useless against conventional artillery or modern missiles - or even a nasty enemy firing on you without warning), cost concerns and most of all, weight. The goal was to get the system down to 60 tons, so that it could be transported in three trucks, but they were nowhere near close to that. So you end up with an expensive system with a limited range - that you can't move without a team of engineers to dismantle it and rebuild it at the new site. No wonder they killed it. At least ABL is mobile (at least in theory - no-one has tried firing it from a plane yet).

 

Basically these sound like really cool weapons, where the technology just isn't there yet - and no-one can say when it will be there because it requires a breakthrough in materials design.

 

Cheers, Mark

[LordGhee]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

E.E. Doc Smith lensmen seris has a great list of weapons

 

telepaphy and mind control, and the counter the thought shield.

 

overloading the main engery ordaince of the ships to create the needle engery gun that pop the good guys shields and ships (causing the bad guys gun to overload bu they they where dead anyway)

 

hyper space tube (or tunnel) to travel between gaxalies.

 

 

 

The first fortress moons that travel through space that the sunbeam gun countred.

 

I think they where call negitve spheres guns that shot out black holes that would be tractored / pressered to the target.

 

fleets and holograghic tanks to derect the action

 

all written in 1939, 1947-or so ( he was a phyiicsist who work on the atomic bomb. (as they all did )

 

and the best well read it

[The Mad GM]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

My character Slingshot needs one of these:

 

http://www.defensereview.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=526

 

I like the weapon in "Footfall" that basically consisted of a meteor strike launched from orbit. Like mini-nukes without the radioactive fallout. Admittedly, this works best if the planet in question has a much lower tech level, no space forces, etc.

 

I think most big weapon advances will be in the disabling or containing variety. Until armor gets much better, putting holes in things is not a big problem. Locating which thing to put the hole in is a much bigger problem.

[Lemurion]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

E.E. Doc Smith lensmen seris has a great list of weapons

 

telepaphy and mind control, and the counter the thought shield.

 

overloading the main engery ordaince of the ships to create the needle engery gun that pop the good guys shields and ships (causing the bad guys gun to overload bu they they where dead anyway)

 

hyper space tube (or tunnel) to travel between gaxalies.

 

 

 

The first fortress moons that travel through space that the sunbeam gun countred.

 

I think they where call negitve spheres guns that shot out black holes that would be tractored / pressered to the target.

 

fleets and holograghic tanks to derect the action

 

all written in 1939, 1947-or so ( he was a phyiicsist who work on the atomic bomb. (as they all did )

 

and the best well read it

 

Ah yes, the glory of the primary beam, that was the overloaded weapon, needle-beams were something else again.

 

However, "Doc" wasn't a physicist, but rather a chemist. While he did work on ordnance during WWII, it was on conventional rather than nuclear weapons. In fact, rather than atomic weaponry, he apparently spent most of his career trying to get sugar to stick to doughnuts.

 

He also had a brief career as a bricklayer.

[Nyrath]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

However' date=' "Doc" wasn't a physicist, but rather a chemist. While he did work on ordnance during WWII, it was on conventional rather than nuclear weapons. In fact, rather than atomic weaponry, he apparently spent most of his career trying to get sugar to stick to doughnuts.[/quote']

True. As a matter of fact, the section of the novel TRIPLANETARY about the explosives chemist is autobiographical.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I've always wondered how to build the Master's signature weapon, the Tissue Compression Eliminator, which killed you by shrinking your cells with the ultimate effect of leaving a doll-sized corpse.

[austenandrews]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I'm lazy and didn't check the rest of the thread. Has anyone mentioned this centrifugal slug-thrower?

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I'm lazy and didn't check the rest of the thread. Has anyone mentioned this centrifugal slug-thrower?

wouldn't a slug thrower be pretty useless as a weapon?

 

Unless of course you're firing some sort of bioengineered (or alien) corrosive slugs, I guess.

 

[Kaeto]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I came up with this for a Traveller game using magnetics to spin up the projectiles. The weapon was for use on space ships only and the muzzle velocity was .1 c.

[The Mad GM]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I'm lazy and didn't check the rest of the thread. Has anyone mentioned this centrifugal slug-thrower?

 

Yep. It sounds a little pie-in-the-sky, but what the heck. I keep thinking that round bullets were replaced by their modern conterpart in large measure for accuracy. This seems like a very powerful shotgun more than anything else.

 

I like the lack of a significant heat signature.

[LordGhee]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Hienlien (sorry spell) had a ray in a book that released the surface tension on the body (boom). gory!

[Zeropoint]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I should point out that while a round projectile suffers more drag than a bullet of equal mass and density, and therefore loses velocity faster, they can be quite accurate. High-quaility muzzle-loading rifles firing spherical lead bullets can be very nearly as accurate as modern rifles.

 

Having said that, there are many other problems with that thing.

[austenandrews]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

That centrifuge is going to get awfully hot. How long does it take to spin up, I wonder?

[Nyrath]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

Hienlien (sorry spell) had a ray in a book that released the surface tension on the body (boom). gory!

The Day After Tomorrow (aka The Sixth Colum) by Robert Heinlein.

 

Not too gory, it just converted the hapless soldier into a large cloud of greasy smoke.

[gewing]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

I'd like to play with making a Very "near future" enhanced version of the gyroget carbine or the gyroget grenade launcher. with modern enhanced propellants and such... In some ways it would be like one of the weapons in gurps, but...

The original Gyrojets were generally 13mm diameter, the rifle and carbine versions varied in length of rocket projectile. There was also an iirc 40mm grenade launcher version, and some tiny "swarmjets" that would have been used in a suppressive fire shotgun or machine gun effect.

 

 

 

Imagine a 15 or 20 mm rocket, perhaps 75mm long. This would be fired from a gun at low velocity by a small charge, perhaps throwing it at 2-300 fps(for low recoil). The rocket motor would fire within a few feet of leaving the muzzle, and accelerate it. When I first thought of it, I was thinking of making it a miniature high velocity missile/rocket but they are pretty big.

 

as it is a rocket, it does not instantly reach maximum velocity (why guns still have some advantages) If it hits a target as the motor is still burning, a simple chemical fuse, as on the Raufoss MP .50 round would detonate the remaining fuel. A small bursting charge to increase damage even at long range could be incorporated.

 

It might be necessary to scale it up, I'm literally no rocket scientist.

 

As an alternative to a grenade launcher, in 30-50mm diameter, I think it might have some usefulness.

 

I could, of course, be wrong.

[Markdoc]

Re: Clever Future Weapons

 

It might be necessary to scale it up, I'm literally no rocket scientist.

 

As an alternative to a grenade launcher, in 30-50mm diameter, I think it might have some usefulness.

 

I could, of course, be wrong.

 

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