Needle guns
il...@rcn.com
not talking about tranquilizer darts - those are perfectly sensible,
and can be made more science-fictiony, like "mercy needles" in
Niven's ARM stories: they are made of solid tranquilizer and dissolve
inside human body.
What I am talking about is guns which are supposed to create major
mayhem by firing ridiculously huge numbers of ridiculously small
flechettes. Best example is AM-280 in Chtorr books. AM-280 is a
(barely) human-portable weapon. Its ammo is 0.7 gram steel needles -
and it fires *three thousand* of them *per second*. If you have to use
it standing up, you must lean forward and fire very short bursts,
otherwise you'll end up on your ass. IOW, it's a weapon which can
reduce an unprotected human to shreds in half a second, but can be
stopped by fairly thin armor, and impossible to carry with any
meaningful ammo load.
In Man-Kzin Wars one popular human weapon during First War is
strakkaker - again almost too heavy to handle, most people use both
hands and a shoulder strap to aim it. Strakkaker fires glass needles
coated with Teflon. One burst will impressively "strip all vegetation
from a boulder" (actual happening in one book), or will flense
whichever side of an unprotectes kzin faces the shooter. Something as
simple as sheet metal, let alone kzin battle armor, will stop it cold.
I brought up these two examples because they are major parts of the
respective stories, described in detail. But all sorts of needle guns
and flechette guns often pop up in SF combat - at least in mention.
Despite being so easy to defend against, they are hardly ever used in
real world.
Don Bruder
il...@rcn.com wrote:
The "power" of projectile weapon, be it a needle gun or a catapult, is
a function of the mass of the projectile, and the speed at which it
impacts. It's a *LOT* easier to fling a bazillion 0.7 gram needles at
velocities sufficient to overcome many types of what would SEEM at first
glance to be "protection" than it is to chunk a single massive boulder.
Add in the "tornado" effect (broom-straws punched through 2x4s, 2x4s
punched through solid concrete walls, etc) that can be achieved with
small cross-section but ultra-high-speed projectiles, and it *CAN* be an
effective weapon.
Problem is making a "real world" version that can deliver more than one
or two effective shots worth, and, as you mention, make it "man
portable". As of right now, we just plain don't have an "energy dense"
enough power source to do it practically.
--
Don Bruder - dak...@sonic.net - If your "From:" address isn't on my whitelist,
or the subject of the message doesn't contain the exact text "PopperAndShadow"
somewhere, any message sent to this address will go in the garbage without my
ever knowing it arrived. Sorry... <http://www.sonic.net/~dakidd> for more info
Scott Golden
> One silly idea a lot of SF writers seem to love is "needle guns." I am
> not talking about tranquilizer darts - those are perfectly sensible,
> and can be made more science-fictiony, like "mercy needles" in
> Niven's ARM stories: they are made of solid tranquilizer and dissolve
> inside human body.
>
> In Man-Kzin Wars one popular human weapon during First War is
> strakkaker - again almost too heavy to handle, most people use both
> hands and a shoulder strap to aim it. Strakkaker fires glass needles
> coated with Teflon. One burst will impressively "strip all vegetation
> from a boulder" (actual happening in one book), or will flense
> whichever side of an unprotectes kzin faces the shooter. Something as
> simple as sheet metal, let alone kzin battle armor, will stop it cold.
>
> I brought up these two examples because they are major parts of the
> respective stories, described in detail. But all sorts of needle guns
> and flechette guns often pop up in SF combat - at least in mention.
> Despite being so easy to defend against, they are hardly ever used in
> real world.
>
>
Most SF writers -- and I'm including most "hard SF" writers here --
write about possibilities, not probabilities. A lot of the phenomena and
technology described is possible, given current knowledge, while the
probability that said phenomena will ever occur -- or that said
technology will ever be invented -- may be very low. It's called
"speculative fiction" for a reason.
And, yes, some of the technological inventions that SF writers create in
their heads _are_ silly. Hard SF writers don't get off the hook on this;
although the probability for real world versions of their tech may be
higher, it's far from 100%. But I'm guessing that the group can, and
will, list many SF tools & tech that are a lot sillier (and a lot less
likely to ever be produced in the real world) than needle guns.
JXStern
>One silly idea a lot of SF writers seem to love is "needle guns."
It would seem that a needle would have relatively less aerodynamic
friction, tho achieving that and stability are counter-efforts.
Flechettes presumably would have fins, fwiw. I guess that much of the
virtue of both is that they seem more novel than bullets.
J.
Howard Brazee
the AK-47. Cheap, reliable, but not suited for any type of
precision.
Jaimie Vandenbergh
wrote:
>In article <1158958119.9...@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
> il...@rcn.com wrote:
>
>> One silly idea a lot of SF writers seem to love is "needle guns."
[snippage]
>Problem is making a "real world" version that can deliver more than one
>or two effective shots worth, and, as you mention, make it "man
>portable". As of right now, we just plain don't have an "energy dense"
>enough power source to do it practically.
ObSF: A very fine example of the larger end of the spectrum is seen
towards the back of Snow Crash. Man portable (just about), with the
attendant tiny nuclear power generator dunked in the sea over the side
of the boat to keep its temperature under control.
Cheers - Jaimie
--
"the average homeowner should expect to repair direct
meteor damage every hundred million years."
-- http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030506.html
GSV Three Minds in a Can
wonderful person JXStern <JXSternC...@gte.net> said
They lack stopping power though, unless you coat them with neurotoxin or
summat. I mean the ultimate extreme is a needle so fine that it goes
through both the atmosphere, and the victim, with no drag at all. You
could use neutrinos, yes? The problem is, the victim likely wouldn't
notice they'd been shot .. OTOH the innocent bystanders behind him would
be OK too.
--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
6,632 Km walked. 1,126Km PROWs surveyed. 20.4% complete.
David Johnston
>In Man-Kzin Wars one popular human weapon during First War is
>strakkaker - again almost too heavy to handle, most people use both
>hands and a shoulder strap to aim it. Strakkaker fires glass needles
>coated with Teflon. One burst will impressively "strip all vegetation
>from a boulder" (actual happening in one book), or will flense
>whichever side of an unprotectes kzin faces the shooter. Something as
>simple as sheet metal, let alone kzin battle armor, will stop it cold.
>
Does it say that? Because the "teflon" coating seems to me is
intended to imply that it has some armour penetration ability. It
wouldn't really work, but it is true that if you can just get a needle
going fast enough it can poke a hole in just about anything.
Robert Sneddon
<how...@brazee.net> writes
>One could say that the weapon of the 2nd half of the 20th century is
>the AK-47. Cheap, reliable, but not suited for any type of
>precision.
The analysis that I find myself agreeing with is that the weapon of the
20th century is the RPG-7, not the AK-47. It can be operated by someone
dumber than a bag of spanners, it almost always works, it's cheap and
packs a punch that returns the small investment in its manufacture and
cost.
http://www.exile.ru/2004-April-29/war_nerd.html
As for SFnal weapons, I'd tend to regard smart ammo fired from smart
weapons the way to go. It means the shooter only has to pull the trigger
once to have a high probability of hitting what they are aiming at
rather than having to carry a sackful of magazines for a bullet-hose.
I've got a BOTE design for a "non-lethal" stun round fired from a 40mm
shoulder-mounted launcher. It has an airbag packed in the front plus
laser-designated target-seeking and a small hybrid rocket motor in the
back to stretch its range to about 100 metres. This could be built today
for use in riot control. The rounds would cost about five hundred
dollars a pop though even in quantity. They could be recovered and
reloaded, of course.
--
To reply, my gmail address is nojay1 Robert Sneddon
Howard Brazee
<fr...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>One could say that the weapon of the 2nd half of the 20th century is
>>the AK-47. Cheap, reliable, but not suited for any type of
>>precision.
>
> The analysis that I find myself agreeing with is that the weapon of the
>20th century is the RPG-7, not the AK-47. It can be operated by someone
>dumber than a bag of spanners, it almost always works, it's cheap and
>packs a punch that returns the small investment in its manufacture and
>cost.
Without agreeing, I note that it fits my description perfectly. In a
discussion of needle guns, we see the value of cheap and easy over
precision.
Peter Meilinger
> What I am talking about is guns which are supposed to create major
> mayhem by firing ridiculously huge numbers of ridiculously small
> flechettes. Best example is AM-280 in Chtorr books. AM-280 is a
> (barely) human-portable weapon. Its ammo is 0.7 gram steel needles -
> and it fires *three thousand* of them *per second*. If you have to use
> it standing up, you must lean forward and fire very short bursts,
> otherwise you'll end up on your ass. IOW, it's a weapon which can
> reduce an unprotected human to shreds in half a second, but can be
> stopped by fairly thin armor, and impossible to carry with any
> meaningful ammo load.
To be fair, was it designed for use against humans? The Chtorran
worms aren't armored, after all. They might or might not be able
to "evolve" armor if needed, or be replaced by something that can,
but that might not have been known when the AM-280 was developed.
On the other hand, it took whatsisname a lot of time to put that
one worm down with his AM-280, so maybe it's not so useful
after all.
On the gripping hand, the worms are ridiculously hard to kill
because the author says so, so anything less than a flame-
thrower might just not be enough. And with a flame-thrower,
you get an angry worm who's on fire for at least a few seconds,
and dealing with that's gotta suck.
Pete
James Nicoll
GSV Three Minds in a Can <G...@quik.clara.co.uk> wrote:
>Bitstring <avm8h2tk3bv9sl1qh...@4ax.com>, from the
>wonderful person JXStern <JXSternC...@gte.net> said
>>On 22 Sep 2006 13:48:40 -0700, il...@rcn.com wrote:
>>
>>>One silly idea a lot of SF writers seem to love is "needle guns."
>>
>>It would seem that a needle would have relatively less aerodynamic
>>friction, tho achieving that and stability are counter-efforts.
>>Flechettes presumably would have fins, fwiw. I guess that much of the
>>virtue of both is that they seem more novel than bullets.
>
>They lack stopping power though, unless you coat them with neurotoxin or
>summat.
Do they? I play with something like needlers from time to
time and with enough v, a small m can still have enough Ek to ruin
someone's day, with the added advantage that friction will make the
projectile look like a blaster bolt.
The problems I am aware of are: power supply, waste heat
from the acceleration process and friction between the bullet and
the air (To the point where my first suggestion produced something
that would basically explode when you pulled the trigger).
--
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)
Nancy Lebovitz
Scott Golden <gyps...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> >
>Most SF writers -- and I'm including most "hard SF" writers here --
>write about possibilities, not probabilities. A lot of the phenomena and
>technology described is possible, given current knowledge, while the
>probability that said phenomena will ever occur -- or that said
>technology will ever be invented -- may be very low. It's called
>"speculative fiction" for a reason.
>
>And, yes, some of the technological inventions that SF writers create in
>their heads _are_ silly. Hard SF writers don't get off the hook on this;
>although the probability for real world versions of their tech may be
>higher, it's far from 100%. But I'm guessing that the group can, and
>will, list many SF tools & tech that are a lot sillier (and a lot less
>likely to ever be produced in the real world) than needle guns.
>
gun from (iirc) the Flash Gordon movie. It was pure special effect,
with no hint of technological feasibility.
--
Nancy Lebovitz http://www.nancybuttons.com
http://nancylebov.livejournal.com
My two favorite colors are "Oooooh" and "SHINY!".
Stephen Rush
> I've got a BOTE design for a "non-lethal" stun round fired from a 40mm
> shoulder-mounted launcher. It has an airbag packed in the front plus
> laser-designated target-seeking and a small hybrid rocket motor in the
> back to stretch its range to about 100 metres. This could be built today
> for use in riot control. The rounds would cost about five hundred
> dollars a pop though even in quantity. They could be recovered and
> reloaded, of course.
There is already a "nonlethal" round for the M-79 grenade launcher. It
might be called a ballistic blackjack, a sack of birdshot propelled by a
small powder charge. Short range, but people hit with it take a
while to get up. The problem is the same as that of a plain old manual
blackjack: it's easier to kill with it than not to.
Don Bruder
<3fp8h2d65mae5e8a6...@newsposting.sessile.org>,
Jaimie Vandenbergh <jai...@sometimes.sessile.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:00:43 -0700, Don Bruder <dak...@sonic.net>
> wrote:
>
> >In article <1158958119.9...@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
> > il...@rcn.com wrote:
> >
> >> One silly idea a lot of SF writers seem to love is "needle guns."
> [snippage]
>
> >Problem is making a "real world" version that can deliver more than one
> >or two effective shots worth, and, as you mention, make it "man
> >portable". As of right now, we just plain don't have an "energy dense"
> >enough power source to do it practically.
>
> ObSF: A very fine example of the larger end of the spectrum is seen
> towards the back of Snow Crash. Man portable (just about), with the
> attendant tiny nuclear power generator dunked in the sea over the side
> of the boat to keep its temperature under control.
Ah, yes... "Reason". Nifty little toy, that!
Liked pretty much all the rest of Snow Crash, too... Since I was driving
pizza delivery at the time I first encounterd it, the opening *REALLY*
snagged my attention :) So much so that I couldn't resist pasting "Cosa
Nostra Pizza" over the company logo on my nametag, and added "The
Deliverator" under my name. Was rather surprised when every now and then
one of my customers actually "got it". My ride wasn't *QUITE* the
fire-breather Hiro's was, but I did consistently turn in the quickest
delivery times and highest "total $$ of business that passed through my
hands" per night numbers of any of our drivers. And for many of the same
reasons that Hiro was good at it: I knew my town like I know the back of
my hand, and I wasn't afraid to make use of every shortcut, back alley,
and "go around instead of through the traffic light" trick available.
Hint to pizza drivers who may be reading: 4 back-to-back stop signs a
block over are almost always faster to get through (even with the "go a
block out of the way", a proper stop at each, and "a block back to your
street") than one stale green or yellow traffic light 3 blocks ahead,
but a red light a block ahead is as good as a green directly in front of
you most times. :)
Robert Sneddon
<sjr...@comcast.net> writes
>On Sat, 23 Sep 2006 02:09:13 +0100, Robert Sneddon wrote:
>
>> I've got a BOTE design for a "non-lethal" stun round fired from a 40mm
>> shoulder-mounted launcher. It has an airbag packed in the front plus
>> laser-designated target-seeking
>
>might be called a ballistic blackjack, a sack of birdshot propelled by a
>small powder charge.
My design concept allows a longer effective range, from five metres to
a hundred. Unintelligent stun rounds like the birdshot bag or the baton
round are either limited in range or over-effective at short range.
They're also inaccurate. My round seeks a laser target which can be more
precisely placed on an individual in a crowd, as well as being directed
to the abdomen or leg region of the target rather than the face or
heart. The airbag is controlled by a terahertz radar proximity detector
that blows it at the appropriate time to deliver a limited amount of
energy to the target, not the all-or-nothing of a simple ballistic
round. The rocket motor allows sustainable flight to the target at a
distance and being a hybrid this means it can shut off if used at short
range. All this could be built and deployed today, no exotic materials
or technologies required.
Of course if the airbag doesn't deploy properly then at short ranges
it's likely to go straight through the target... simplicity has its
benefits sometimes.
Paul F Austin
"Don Bruder" <dak...@sonic.net> wrote in
The real problem with needle guns is lack of lethality. The militaries of
the world tried to develop flechette arms during the sixties and seventies
and discovered that the lethality is lacking. Trying to fix the problem with
hand-wavium doesn't work. It is _not_ a lot easier to fling a bazillion
needles. It's in fact easier to fire a few, genuinely lethal projectiles.
And in the cases given (shooting at very large animal targets), historically
heavy game has been taken with heavy bullets which maintain their mass and
momentum to penetrate deeply. The notion of depending on "erosion" to flense
away flesh to get to the vitals is kinda dumb. A bullet with a strong, heavy
core that penetrates (and explodes?) is much more effective.
Paul F Austin
"James Nicoll" <jdni...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:ef25fr$m79$1...@reader1.panix.com...
> In article <Z4YW83BD...@from.is.invalid>,
> GSV Three Minds in a Can <G...@quik.clara.co.uk> wrote:
>>Bitstring <avm8h2tk3bv9sl1qh...@4ax.com>, from the
>>wonderful person JXStern <JXSternC...@gte.net> said
>>>On 22 Sep 2006 13:48:40 -0700, il...@rcn.com wrote:
>>>
>>>>One silly idea a lot of SF writers seem to love is "needle guns."
>>>
>>>It would seem that a needle would have relatively less aerodynamic
>>>friction, tho achieving that and stability are counter-efforts.
>>>Flechettes presumably would have fins, fwiw. I guess that much of the
>>>virtue of both is that they seem more novel than bullets.
>>
>>They lack stopping power though, unless you coat them with neurotoxin or
>>summat.
>
> Do they? I play with something like needlers from time to
> time and with enough v, a small m can still have enough Ek to ruin
> someone's day, with the added advantage that friction will make the
> projectile look like a blaster bolt.
>
> The problems I am aware of are: power supply, waste heat
> from the acceleration process and friction between the bullet and
> the air (To the point where my first suggestion produced something
> that would basically explode when you pulled the trigger).
Terminal effects depend on depositing energy _in_ the target. IRL,
flechettes failed the lethality test because they over-penetrated and took
much of their vaunted kinetic energy with them. The same thing applies with
small, light bullets versus slow, heavy ones. The killing mechanism of
projectiles is disruption of deep tissue. If the projectile either passes
through without slowing or dumps its energy on the surface, it's less
effective than one that penetrates deeply. And stops.
Joseph T Major
news:1158958119.9...@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> One silly idea a lot of SF writers seem to love is "needle guns." I am
> not talking about tranquilizer darts - those are perfectly sensible,
> and can be made more science-fictiony, like "mercy needles" in
> Niven's ARM stories: they are made of solid tranquilizer and dissolve
> inside human body.
Then there were the "needle guns" in the later Dorsai series. Dickson
had these handwavium generators that neutralized all explosives, so the
Dorsai, Friendlies, etc. all used spring-loaded guns that fired needles.
That is, not even the shock value of being taken down by a bazillion needles
chewing you up.
He makes a lot of poor Tam Olyn hobbling around with one knee all banged
up because of a needle through it, which implies that their reconstructive
surgery is also nothing to brag about.
Any other examples?
Joseph T Major
Martin Kaletsch
> <il...@rcn.com> wrote in message
> news:1158958119.9...@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
>> One silly idea a lot of SF writers seem to love is "needle guns." I am
>> not talking about tranquilizer darts - those are perfectly sensible,
>> and can be made more science-fictiony, like "mercy needles" in
>> Niven's ARM stories: they are made of solid tranquilizer and dissolve
>> inside human body.
>
> Then there were the "needle guns" in the later Dorsai series. Dickson
> had these handwavium generators that neutralized all explosives, so the
> Dorsai, Friendlies, etc. all used spring-loaded guns that fired needles.
> That is, not even the shock value of being taken down by a bazillion
> needles chewing you up.
<snip>
> Any other examples?
Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius carries a air-powered needle gun, but he usually
fires poisened needles or needles equipped with tranquilizers or other
interesting substances, IIRC.
At one point in the books he shoots someone through the eye from a short
distance to make it a sure kill.
Of course JC is not realy hard-SF. ;-)
--
Martin Kaletsch
ThePunisher
news:qnv8h2hf1dvir3p4h...@4ax.com
Teflon? amour penetration ability? where'd you get that idea from? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teflon#Properties_and_applications
--
ThePunisher
Jordan
Paul F Austin wrote:
>
> The real problem with needle guns is lack of lethality. The militaries of
> the world tried to develop flechette arms during the sixties and seventies
> and discovered that the lethality is lacking. Trying to fix the problem with
> hand-wavium doesn't work. It is _not_ a lot easier to fling a bazillion
> needles. It's in fact easier to fire a few, genuinely lethal projectiles.
> And in the cases given (shooting at very large animal targets), historically
> heavy game has been taken with heavy bullets which maintain their mass and
> momentum to penetrate deeply. The notion of depending on "erosion" to flense
> away flesh to get to the vitals is kinda dumb. A bullet with a strong, heavy
> core that penetrates (and explodes?) is much more effective.
Though note, the flechette round _did_ work for tank guns as an
anti-infantry weapon. There, of course, each "needle" was a LOT
bigger.
- Jordan
GCL...@yahoo.com
il...@rcn.com wrote:
> One silly idea a lot of SF writers seem to love is "needle guns." I am
> not talking about tranquilizer darts - those are perfectly sensible,
> and can be made more science-fictiony, like "mercy needles" in
> Niven's ARM stories: they are made of solid tranquilizer and dissolve
> inside human body.
>
> What I am talking about is guns which are supposed to create major
> mayhem by firing ridiculously huge numbers of ridiculously small
> flechettes. Best example is AM-280 in Chtorr books. AM-280 is a
> (barely) human-portable weapon. Its ammo is 0.7 gram steel needles -
> and it fires *three thousand* of them *per second*. If you have to use
> it standing up, you must lean forward and fire very short bursts,
> otherwise you'll end up on your ass. IOW, it's a weapon which can
> reduce an unprotected human to shreds in half a second, but can be
> stopped by fairly thin armor, and impossible to carry with any
> meaningful ammo load.
Much depends on the technologies and intended applications. The main
drawbacks of a smaller projectile are the tendency to tumble in flight
and reduced armor penetration (any weapon which imparts its energy to
one big projectile will impart more of its energy to that one big
projectile than to each one of a number of smaller ones). The first is
partially overcome by the shape of the projectile (a needle) and the
second is not very relevant against unarmored or very lightly armored
targets (as are most troops).
Essentially, a "needle gun" is a longer-range, higher-tech shotgun.
Yours Truly,
Geo. C. Lee
Peter Meilinger
> Then there were the "needle guns" in the later Dorsai series. Dickson
> had these handwavium generators that neutralized all explosives, so the
> Dorsai, Friendlies, etc. all used spring-loaded guns that fired needles.
> That is, not even the shock value of being taken down by a bazillion needles
> chewing you up.
>
> He makes a lot of poor Tam Olyn hobbling around with one knee all banged
> up because of a needle through it, which implies that their reconstructive
> surgery is also nothing to brag about.
>
> Any other examples?
The spetsdods in Steve Perry's Man Who Never Missed and its
sequels. Little dart guns that were glued to the back of your
hands and activated by touching the barrel with a fingertip.
The darts themselves weren't anything to write home about,
but they could be filled with various drugs or with explosives.
IIRC they were specifically shown as not penetrating armor,
but the folks who used them were very, very good shots
so anything less than completely sealed armor was no
defense.
As for the medical tech, Sleel gets his arm blown off during
one fight but they just pop him into the medical whatsit to
get it grown back. Don't remember how long it took.
Pete
Robert Sneddon
Peter Meilinger <p_mei...@hotmail.com> writes
>Joseph T Major wrote:
>> Any other examples?
>
>The spetsdods in Steve Perry's Man Who Never Missed and its
>sequels. Little dart guns that were glued to the back of your
>hands and activated by touching the barrel with a fingertip.
The hippies in Philip E. High's "Double Planet" had charm-bracelets
with miniature weapons like axes and swords, but they were real and
powered in some way, able to kill with a flick of the fingertip.
Paul F Austin
"Jordan" <JSBass...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1159018290.9...@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
There was less there than met the eye. The flechette (beehive) round
developed for the 105mm L7 gun was intended as an improvement on cannister.
Unfortunately, cannister worked better. The flechettes (a lot of them) bent
on firing. Think of it as a bunch of bent nails flying your way. It's a
sobering thought but a cannister round is more lethal.
DJensen
An early chapter of Bear's _Queen of Angels_ features a flechette
pistol. If I'm remembering correctly, each flechette was a couple
centimetres long, and twisted to make fins (and to help the ammo screw
into its target, I suppose).
--
DJensen
David Johnston
Mythology. I don't think it actually works but people have been
talking about teflon coated armour piercing bullets for a very long
time.
il...@rcn.com
> heavy game has been taken with heavy bullets which maintain their mass and
> momentum to penetrate deeply. The notion of depending on "erosion" to flense
> away flesh to get to the vitals is kinda dumb.
Which David Gerrold understood. The only time in the entire series a
Chtorran is brought down by an AM-280, it took *a lot* of firing. First
James McCarthy blew off the Chtorran's eyes, then shredded the arms,
then ruined its mouth. IIRC, he was working on the legs when the
Chtorran plopped on top of him. No wonder they stuck to flamethrowers
after that!
AM-280 had very lethal and gruesome effects on human targets, though.
_ berge @hotmail.com.invalid Eric D. Berge
wrote:
>
>Mythology. I don't think it actually works but people have been
>talking about teflon coated armour piercing bullets for a very long
>time.
There are armor-piercing bullets that are teflon coated, but the
armor-piercing properties are due to the very hard alloys that the
bullets are made of, which is tough on the rifling of the gun. The
teflon coating serves to mitigate the damage to the barrel rifling ,
and also, IIRC, to help the bullet engage the rifling.
walt...@mindspring.com
John Carter books)
and about the only authors that wrote authoritatively and accurately
about weapons were Robert Heinlein and H.B. Piper. Now we have John
Ringo and David Weber. Eic Flint does his research, too. Needles would
be short-ranged at best, not having the mass to carry far through just
plain air. A look at one of the very available ballistics tables (e.g.
Gun Digest) on centerfire ammunition would show the problem. As for the
Chtorr, a number of readily available rifles and shotguns would do one
a world of hurt. Did y'all know Remington made some full automatic 12
gauge shotguns for the SF types? 8 rounds in less than 4 seconds would
ring anything's bell.I gave up reading the series when I gathered an
organic being was supposedly able to stand damage that would seriously
affect an Abrams tank. Yeah, right. And spring-powered guns. A spring
made of unobtanium wound up by King Kong? I never bothered to do te
math to see what power a spring would have to have to launch say a 100
grain slug to perhaps 2000 fps in a matter of inches. And thaose value,
troops, is pretty minimal for a combat weapon. Weaker than a WW2 M1
carbine, which isn't even legal for deer. As for bean bag guns, RPGs,
etc, forget it. If I was in the zone and saw someone unlimber either of
those with hostile intent they'd be full of holes right quick, whether
it be 22 , 10mm, 30-06 or 12 gauge. Anybody remember the Gyrojet? It
was inaccurate at long range and at close range the rocket hadn't had
time to accelerate to a speed sufficient to do deadly harm. Teflon
bullets - the idea of the teflon is to lubricate passage through woven
Kevlar armor. AP bullets for small caliber weapons are copper jacketed
steel-cored. Or pay more money for a tungsten carbide core and a higher
sectional density so the bullet will carry its velocity better. AK47?
It's cheap and it's reliable and over 300 yards forget it. Get an M14
or the equivalent; that baby will shoot right through the tree your bad
guy is hiding behind, or the wall, or the car, save the engine. And
reach out better than 800 yards, if you can do your part.
my 2 cents worth, Walt BJ
Matthias Warkus
> I've been reading science fiction now for about 62 years (not counting
> John Carter books)
> and about the only authors that wrote authoritatively and accurately
> about weapons were Robert Heinlein and H.B. Piper.
Sure their writing authoritatively and accurately was based on real
authority and accuracy and not just a case of Tom Clancy Effect?
mawa
Stephen Rush
I don't know about Piper, but Heinlein was a naval officer before he
contracted typhoid fever and had to resign. This was in the thirties,
before antibiotics.
Joe Bednorz
>I've been reading science fiction now for about 62 years (not counting
>John Carter books)
>and about the only authors that wrote authoritatively and accurately
>about weapons were Robert Heinlein and H.B. Piper. Now we have John
>Ringo and David Weber.
David Drake, both for future sci-fi and fantasy hack-and-slash
weapons. I'm currently reading "A History of Warfare" by John Keegan.
Drake's "Kingdom of the Isles" seems to draw a lot on the warfare of the
Greek and Roman empires. And accurately as part of the stories, not
just slopped on after the fact.
As for the future sci-fi, Drake seems to use contemporary tank weapons
as his basis for destructive power, with sci-fi explanations. That it
makes it seem accurate. That it seems futuristic may be due to
contemporary ignorance of the power and lethality of conventional
weapons. His story about a main tank gun easily taking down a flying
saucer protected by energy shields is a case in point.
(That "contemporary ignorance" includes my own. Recently I've been
seeing just how much military technology I thought were recent
inventions were actually extensively used in WWII. Not jets (or even
napalm). Things like frequency hopping radar, "Bouncing Betty"
landmines, shaped charge warheads, proximity fuses, cluster bombs, IFF,
solid shot armor piercing ammunition, homing torpedoes, etc.)
You don't even have to take my word for it. A lot of Drake's work is
made available for free on the WWW by Baen. Start here:
<http://www.baen.com/library/ddrake.htm>
"The Tank Lords" is a novella and probably best illustrates the sci-fi
aspect of my point. It takes place in Drake's "Hammer's Slammers"
universe.
"Redliners" is another novel that does this well.
The Hack and Slash aspect is probably best illustrated with "The Lord
of the Isles" series. Free Samples (not complete texts) available here:
<http://www.webscription.net/chapters/Tor/1011255000.htm?blurb>
Second best would be the Belisarius series (not to be confused with
"The General" series, which is based on Belisarius life.) Available as
above:
"An Oblique Approach"
"In the Heart of Darkness"
"Destiny's Shield"
are the first three books in the series. Co-written with Eric Flint,
if that helps.
"The General" series is co-written with S. M. Stirling. The story of
Belisarius but with gunpowder technology. (Crude and inaccurate
description.) Free samples available as "Conquerer" and "Warlord" here:
<http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=DDrake>
The good news is that "Conquerer" and "Warlord" each consist of
multiple books that were originally published separately. So almost all
of the first book in each collection is available online.
"The Chosen" is the next book in "The General" series. More
references to the Second World War than I can get, and I get a lot of
references to WWII. Free Samples also available as above.
S. M. Stirling is probably the best WWII alternate history author
there is today. (If you think Eric Flint "does his homework," then S.
M. Stirling is a professor.) Combining him with David Drake is
perfection. Spoiler sample: Gur znva cybg bs "Gur Thaf bs Aninebar" vf
hfrq nf n zvabe ohg vzcbegnag cybg cbvag. Vg'f qbar fb jryy gung vg'f
abg gur fyvtugrfg ovg wneevat jura erpbtavmrq. (Use
<http://www.rot13.com to decrypt.)
The best part is that the weapons tech is realistic, i.e. not a magic
wand the protagonist waves to make everything good and right.
There's enough good stuff right there to keep you reading for months
or years. If it gets you to buy some books that's even better, because
you'll know you're not wasting your money. It also rewards Baen/Tor for
publishing good books and making stuff available for free on line.
Something I think should be encouraged.
P.S. There's a lot of free samples collections of short stories
available here:
<http://www.webscription.net/catalog.asp>
The beauty is that not getting all the short stories doesn't hurt the
enjoyment of the short stories you do get to read. For you I recommend
starting with the short story collections edited by Drake.
--
SF at Project Gutenberg: <http://thethunderchild.com/Books/OutofCopyright.html>
Baen Free Online SciFi: <http://www.baen.com/library/>
Baen Free SciFi CDs <http://files.plebian.net/baencd/>
SciFi.com classic/original: <http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/archive.html>
Free Samples: <http://www.webscription.net/catalog.asp>
All the best, Joe Bednorz
Joseph T Major
news:pan.2006.09.24....@comcast.net...
>
> I don't know about Piper, but Heinlein was a naval officer before he
> contracted typhoid fever and had to resign. This was in the thirties,
> before antibiotics.
Tuberculosis, actually. This doesn't invalidate the point.
Joseph T Major
ThePunisher
news:1159071740.8...@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com
> Teflon bullets - the idea of the teflon is to lubricate passage through
> woven Kevlar armor.
>
No, it's not.
--
ThePunisher
Jeff Stehman
@rcn.com says...
> > Which David Gerrold understood. The only time in the entire series a
> Chtorran is brought down by an AM-280, it took *a lot* of firing.
Wasn't McCarthy supposed to fail? I thought he was given the AM-280
because it looked impressive but wasn't effective against worms.
--Jeff Stehman
il...@rcn.com
> Chtorr, a number of readily available rifles and shotguns would do one
> a world of hurt. Did y'all know Remington made some full automatic 12
> gauge shotguns for the SF types? 8 rounds in less than 4 seconds would
> ring anything's bell.I gave up reading the series when I gathered an
> organic being was supposedly able to stand damage that would seriously
> affect an Abrams tank.
Where did you see that? As I recall, a direct hit with an RPG would
kill a Chtorran quite thoroughly.
Peter Meilinger
He was supposed to fail, yes. Or expected to, at least. I'd swear I
remember McCarthy thinking to himself that if any projectile weapon
could kill a worm, it'd be the AM-280, though. On the other hand,
even if I'm remembering correctly that might be McCarthy being
incorrect rather than Gerrold stating a fact through his character.
Again, though, the worms are specifically defined as being harder
to kill than Earth animals.
Pete
Justin Fang
<walt...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>I've been reading science fiction now for about 62 years (not counting
>John Carter books)
>and about the only authors that wrote authoritatively and accurately
>about weapons were Robert Heinlein and H.B. Piper. Now we have John
>Ringo
Didn't John Ringo have rifles whose ammo used tiny antimatter charges to
accelerate projectiles to fractional-c speeds? Since the primary enemy of
that series used troops consisting largely of unarmored organics, I never
saw the point of those.
--
Justin Fang (jus...@panix.com)
John Schilling
<pfau...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>"Don Bruder" <dak...@sonic.net> wrote in
>> il...@rcn.com wrote:
>>> One silly idea a lot of SF writers seem to love is "needle guns." I am
>>> not talking about tranquilizer darts - those are perfectly sensible,
>>> and can be made more science-fictiony, like "mercy needles" in
>>> Niven's ARM stories: they are made of solid tranquilizer and dissolve
>>> inside human body.
...
>> The "power" of projectile weapon, be it a needle gun or a catapult, is
>> a function of the mass of the projectile, and the speed at which it
>> impacts. It's a *LOT* easier to fling a bazillion 0.7 gram needles at
>> velocities sufficient to overcome many types of what would SEEM at first
>> glance to be "protection" than it is to chunk a single massive boulder.
>> Add in the "tornado" effect (broom-straws punched through 2x4s, 2x4s
>> punched through solid concrete walls, etc) that can be achieved with
>> small cross-section but ultra-high-speed projectiles, and it *CAN* be an
>> effective weapon.
>The real problem with needle guns is lack of lethality. The militaries of
>the world tried to develop flechette arms during the sixties and seventies
>and discovered that the lethality is lacking.
When and where was this discovery made? Who are the people who got shot
with flechette weapons and what fraction of them survived?
What the militaries of the United States and Soviet Union, and to the best
of my knowledge absolutely no others, discovered, was that flechettes and
the weapons that fired them were inaccurate, unreliable, and expensive.
There were, concurrent with this discovery, many learned pronouncements
that if accurate, reliable flechette weapons were fielded, they would
not be any good because they wouldn't be sufficiently lethal. Learned
pronouncements, are not discovery.
And this version, is not new. Pretty much every new infantry weapon
since Thog put away his trusty spear and adopted the newfangled bow,
has been characterized by a lighter, faster projectile than that which
came before, and has been met with learned pronouncements that such a
dinky little projectile could never deliver a lethal blow.
They tend to be adopted anyhow, on account of their being better suited
to deliver at least *some* sort of hit to a target that's trying not to
be hit. There's predictions of doom, and resentment among the troops
saddled with the newfangled weapons, on account of the things obviously
not being lethal enough to do the job. Come the war, endless stories
about how the bad guys keep taking hits and kept on coming.
Come the peace, we get to hear the other side's war stories, and they
tend to cast whatever newfangled weapon is used against them as an
unstoppable death ray. By the time the historians get the matter
settled, it's reasonably clear that the truth is somewhere in the
middle but that the smaller, faster projectiles are in fact lethal
enough to get the job done when they hit and far more likely to
score that hit.
Next generation, they are the benchmark that everyone swears by, the
proven solution that must not be abandoned for the newfangled, still
smaller and faster projectile that is being foisted on the troops.
Exceptions to this rule are few and far between, and there's no real
reason to believe flechettes are going to be on that short list. As
far as they got before being abandoned on grounds of reliability,
accuracy, and cost, flechettes fit the usual pattern precisely.
>Trying to fix the problem with hand-wavium doesn't work.
In science fiction, handwavium always works. In real engineering,
matters of reliability, accuracy, and cost, are often amenable to
technological improvement.
>And in the cases given (shooting at very large animal targets), historically
>heavy game has been taken with heavy bullets which maintain their mass and
>momentum to penetrate deeply. The notion of depending on "erosion" to flense
>away flesh to get to the vitals is kinda dumb. A bullet with a strong, heavy
>core that penetrates (and explodes?) is much more effective.
True enough, except that "inadequate penetration" was *never* one of the
criticisms of flechettes. Quite the opposite. They were always deemed to
be insufficiently lethal against human opponents, on account of their
penetrating too *much*.
Shoot a Chtorran, or a tyrannosaur or whatever, with a flechette, and
you get a tenth-inch hole clear through it. Actually, the fins will
probably cut a quarter-inch path unless and until they shear off, and
when they do the whole thing tumbles and starts doing some serious
meat-grinding. So the question is, how tough do you make the fins?
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-718-0955 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
Karl M Syring
> True enough, except that "inadequate penetration" was *never* one of the
> criticisms of flechettes. Quite the opposite. They were always deemed to
> be insufficiently lethal against human opponents, on account of their
> penetrating too *much*.
I think, the Steyr ACR flechette gun is deadly enough:
http://www.steyr-aug.com/acr2002.htm
The drawback is AFAIK that the darts are very expensive.
Karl M. Syring
--
James Nicoll
John Schilling <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote:
>
>And this version, is not new. Pretty much every new infantry weapon
>since Thog put away his trusty spear and adopted the newfangled bow,
>has been characterized by a lighter, faster projectile than that which
>came before, and has been met with learned pronouncements that such a
>dinky little projectile could never deliver a lethal blow.
>
>They tend to be adopted anyhow, on account of their being better suited
>to deliver at least *some* sort of hit to a target that's trying not to
>be hit. There's predictions of doom, and resentment among the troops
>saddled with the newfangled weapons, on account of the things obviously
>not being lethal enough to do the job. Come the war, endless stories
>about how the bad guys keep taking hits and kept on coming.
>
>Come the peace, we get to hear the other side's war stories, and they
>tend to cast whatever newfangled weapon is used against them as an
>unstoppable death ray. By the time the historians get the matter
>settled, it's reasonably clear that the truth is somewhere in the
>middle but that the smaller, faster projectiles are in fact lethal
>enough to get the job done when they hit and far more likely to
>score that hit.
Except, and I only mention this because I still find it
baffling, bows and arrows in the New World. Bows show up up
north three thousand years before they show up on the East
Coast of North America. Three thousand years!
--
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)
glas...@gmail.com
> As for the medical tech, Sleel gets his arm blown off during
> one fight but they just pop him into the medical whatsit to
> get it grown back. Don't remember how long it took.
IIRC, about six months. He had to wear a prosthetic sleeve over it,
sort of like an arm-shaped arm-sized waldo, in the meantime. As the
arm grew back more and more, they kept swapping sleeves.
--
Chuckg
William F. Adams
> The real problem with needle guns is lack of lethality. The militaries of
> the world tried to develop flechette arms during the sixties and seventies
> hand-wavium doesn't work. It is _not_ a lot easier to fling a bazillion
> needles. It's in fact easier to fire a few, genuinely lethal projectiles.
> heavy game has been taken with heavy bullets which maintain their mass and
> momentum to penetrate deeply. The notion of depending on "erosion" to flense
> away flesh to get to the vitals is kinda dumb. A bullet with a strong, heavy
> core that penetrates (and explodes?) is much more effective.
That said, a beginning of a counter-example is the American 180 .22LR
machine gun w/ a ROF of 1500 RPM and drum magazine holding 177 rounds
it could be (and was) used to chop a hole through a brick wall which a
man could get through.
William
Robert Sneddon
<jdni...@panix.com> writes
> Except, and I only mention this because I still find it
>baffling, bows and arrows in the New World. Bows show up up
>north three thousand years before they show up on the East
>Coast of North America. Three thousand years!
What's really strange is that it was over a thousand years before the
proto-Canucks invented the arrow to go with the bow.
William F. Adams
> The spetsdods in Steve Perry's Man Who Never Missed and its
> sequels. Little dart guns that were glued to the back of your
> hands and activated by touching the barrel with a fingertip.
> The darts themselves weren't anything to write home about,
> but they could be filled with various drugs or with explosives.
> IIRC they were specifically shown as not penetrating armor,
> but the folks who used them were very, very good shots
> so anything less than completely sealed armor was no
> defense.
Class II armor required one to take a shot at thin folds such as behind
the knee, Class III armor was proof against darts except... In _Black
Steel_ explosive rounds were used in one scene, while _Brother Death_
has actual ``armor-piercing'' rounds where one gets few shots than
normal (I think this was the case w/ the exploding rounds as well), but
sufficient to overcome ``armorweave'' and to give the client a hole
through a sensitive part of her anatomy.
Anyone know what happened to that series? It seems to pick up w/ a
``Galaxy Ranger'' set of stories which are okay, but the author seems
to've ducked out on the near immortality promised in the near future of
the original set of stories as well as the repercussions of the
discovery of the ability to walk through walls.
William
glas...@gmail.com
> Class II armor required one to take a shot at thin folds such as behind
> the knee, Class III armor was proof against darts except... In _Black
> Steel_ explosive rounds were used in one scene, while _Brother Death_
> has actual ``armor-piercing'' rounds where one gets few shots than
> normal (I think this was the case w/ the exploding rounds as well), but
> sufficient to overcome ``armorweave'' and to give the client a hole
> through a sensitive part of her anatomy.
Both the explosive and the armor-piercing rounds seemed to be recent
technology developed only for the later books, and not available during
the first trilogy set during the revolt against the Confederation.
Which makes sense -- up until Khadaiji founded his resistance fighters,
spetsdod use was anything but widespread, and even that much was
intended only vs. defense against unarmored street criminals and the
like. The matadors were the first bunch of people to try and use them
as serious weapons.
And yes, due to needing an extra-large compressed-gas reservoir to fire
them at higher velocity, and larger warhead size, a spetsdod magazine
could hold fewer 'special' darts than they could normal
chemical-payload darts.
> Anyone know what happened to that series? It seems to pick up w/ a
> ``Galaxy Ranger'' set of stories which are okay, but the author seems
> to've ducked out on the near immortality promised in the near future of
> the original set of stories as well as the repercussions of the
> discovery of the ability to walk through walls.
In Perry's defense, the near-immortality was promised to arrive at a
minimum of 80 years in the future after the time the novels were set,
so all of the cast would be having grandchildren by then. If not
great-grandchildren. So even if the books had continued in the
'present', as opposed to historical flashback novels, it still wouldn't
be showing up for a while.
As for the walking through walls -- the limited dimensional travel via
Zonn artifacts was always described as dangerous, unreliable, and based
on very-incompletely-understood [technobabble] that the Relevant
Authorities would take years, if not decades, to fully figure out.
As for what happened to the series -- a novel called _The Musashi Flex_
has come out, or is supposed to come out (I'm not clear which) this
year. It's set in the same universe but it's a 'historical' novel set
in the past, and AFAIK doesn't involve any of the main cast. Although
it may have an ancestor or two. I think its about the founding of the
Siblings of the Shroud, or the development of the 97 steps, or
somesuch.
--
Chuckg
Tim McDaniel
Robert Sneddon <fr...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In message <ef8mr5$mgu$1...@reader2.panix.com>, James Nicoll
><jdni...@panix.com> writes
>
>> Except, and I only mention this because I still find it
>>baffling, bows and arrows in the New World. Bows show up up
>>north three thousand years before they show up on the East
>>Coast of North America. Three thousand years!
>
> What's really strange is that it was over a thousand years before
>the proto-Canucks invented the arrow to go with the bow.
Proto-Canucks with proto-gun control?
"Bows don't kill people. Arrows kill people."
--
Tim McDaniel; Reply-To: tm...@panix.com
John Dallman
> That said, a beginning of a counter-example is the American 180 .22LR
> machine gun w/ a ROF of 1500 RPM and drum magazine holding 177 rounds
> it could be (and was) used to chop a hole through a brick wall which a
> man could get through.
Indeed, but how many people bought it?
---
John Dallman, j...@cix.co.uk, HTML mail is treated as probable spam.
Ingot
"Peter Meilinger" <p_mei...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1158977294.0...@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> il...@rcn.com wrote:
>
> > What I am talking about is guns which are supposed to create major
> > mayhem by firing ridiculously huge numbers of ridiculously small
> > flechettes. Best example is AM-280 in Chtorr books. AM-280 is a
> > (barely) human-portable weapon. Its ammo is 0.7 gram steel needles -
> > and it fires *three thousand* of them *per second*. If you have to use
> > it standing up, you must lean forward and fire very short bursts,
> > otherwise you'll end up on your ass. IOW, it's a weapon which can
> > reduce an unprotected human to shreds in half a second, but can be
> > stopped by fairly thin armor, and impossible to carry with any
> > meaningful ammo load.
>
> To be fair, was it designed for use against humans? The Chtorran
> worms aren't armored, after all. They might or might not be able
> to "evolve" armor if needed, or be replaced by something that can,
> but that might not have been known when the AM-280 was developed.
>
> On the other hand, it took whatsisname a lot of time to put that
> one worm down with his AM-280, so maybe it's not so useful
> after all.
>
> On the gripping hand, the worms are ridiculously hard to kill
> because the author says so, so anything less than a flame-
> thrower might just not be enough. And with a flame-thrower,
> you get an angry worm who's on fire for at least a few seconds,
> and dealing with that's gotta suck.
You're right.
Best if the worm is pinned.
William George Ferguson
>One silly idea a lot of SF writers seem to love is "needle guns." I am
>not talking about tranquilizer darts - those are perfectly sensible,
>and can be made more science-fictiony, like "mercy needles" in
>Niven's ARM stories: they are made of solid tranquilizer and dissolve
>inside human body.
>
>What I am talking about is guns which are supposed to create major
>mayhem by firing ridiculously huge numbers of ridiculously small
>flechettes. Best example is AM-280 in Chtorr books. AM-280 is a
>(barely) human-portable weapon. Its ammo is 0.7 gram steel needles -
>and it fires *three thousand* of them *per second*. If you have to use
>it standing up, you must lean forward and fire very short bursts,
>otherwise you'll end up on your ass. IOW, it's a weapon which can
>reduce an unprotected human to shreds in half a second, but can be
>stopped by fairly thin armor, and impossible to carry with any
>meaningful ammo load.
>
>In Man-Kzin Wars one popular human weapon during First War is
>strakkaker - again almost too heavy to handle, most people use both
>hands and a shoulder strap to aim it. Strakkaker fires glass needles
>coated with Teflon. One burst will impressively "strip all vegetation
>from a boulder" (actual happening in one book), or will flense
>whichever side of an unprotectes kzin faces the shooter. Something as
>simple as sheet metal, let alone kzin battle armor, will stop it cold.
>
>I brought up these two examples because they are major parts of the
>respective stories, described in detail. But all sorts of needle guns
>and flechette guns often pop up in SF combat - at least in mention.
>Despite being so easy to defend against, they are hardly ever used in
>real world.
The needle gun as a 'puff the magic dragon' type saturation attack weapon
is relatively recent in SF, although needle guns have been around as
referenced weapons for over half a century.
The needle guns I grew up with, back in the 50s and 60s, were not high
volume burst weapons, but semi-automatic weapons. They were almost always
civilian anti-personnel weapons, not military weapons, and they fell
roughly into two categories. One type (for instance, the needlers in the
Andre Norton story Catseye, and other Central Control stories) fired a
needle that delivered a chemical payload, generally some form of neurotoxin
designed to either incapacitate temporarily or to kill. Another type (for
instance, Bigman Jones' needle gun in Asimov's Lucky Starr stories)
functioned as a sort of rail gun, and delivered the needle at hypersonic
speeds. It would either explode on impact or vaporize on impact, in either
case imparting kinetic energy into the impact point. Both types were
ineffective against even light armor, but both types depended on accurate
targeting by the user, and were not designed for military use.
Someone (James Nicoll, I think) mentions elsewhere in this thread about the
RPG-7 having become the weapon of choice in current guerilla warfare
situations. In the Rosinante books, the backstory is that personal armor
had developed in effectiveness to the point that soldiers were using them
as anti-personnel weapons rather than anti-vehicle weapons (of course, once
PAPA reaches a certain point, it is, in effect, a vehicle).
--
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
(Bene Gesserit)
William F. Adams
> William F. Adams wrote:
> > Anyone know what happened to that series? It seems to pick up w/ a
> > ``Galaxy Ranger'' set of stories which are okay, but the author seems
> > to've ducked out on the near immortality promised in the near future of
> > the original set of stories as well as the repercussions of the
> > discovery of the ability to walk through walls.
>
> In Perry's defense, the near-immortality was promised to arrive at a
> minimum of 80 years in the future after the time the novels were set,
> so all of the cast would be having grandchildren by then. If not
> great-grandchildren. So even if the books had continued in the
> 'present', as opposed to historical flashback novels, it still wouldn't
> be showing up for a while.
Fair enough, but the ``Galaxy Ranger'' books take place at least 100
years down the timeline --- there's specific mention of the protagonist
having been trained by a master who had ``fought the legendary Matador
Saval Antoon Bork to a standstill''.
> As for the walking through walls -- the limited dimensional travel via
> Zonn artifacts was always described as dangerous, unreliable, and based
> on very-incompletely-understood [technobabble] that the Relevant
> Authorities would take years, if not decades, to fully figure out.
Right, the ``Galaxy Ranger'' books are set decades later.
> As for what happened to the series -- a novel called _The Musashi Flex_
> has come out, or is supposed to come out (I'm not clear which) this
> year. It's set in the same universe but it's a 'historical' novel set
> in the past, and AFAIK doesn't involve any of the main cast. Although
> it may have an ancestor or two. I think its about the founding of the
> Siblings of the Shroud, or the development of the 97 steps, or
> somesuch.
Interesting and something to look forward to. His prequel stuff like
_Omega Cage_ or _97 Steps_ has been enjoyable.
Thanks!
William
Paul F Austin
"John Schilling" <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote
> "Paul F Austin" <pfau...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
>>The real problem with needle guns is lack of lethality. The militaries of
>>the world tried to develop flechette arms during the sixties and seventies
>>and discovered that the lethality is lacking.
>
> When and where was this discovery made? Who are the people who got shot
> with flechette weapons and what fraction of them survived?
The discovery was made in the mud patch in South East Asian (as far as
USians are concerned). Ian Hogg discussed some of the findings about
flechette lethality (in beehive rounds) in his Ballentine book on Artillery.
>
> What the militaries of the United States and Soviet Union, and to the best
> of my knowledge absolutely no others, discovered, was that flechettes and
> the weapons that fired them were inaccurate, unreliable, and expensive.
>
> There were, concurrent with this discovery, many learned pronouncements
> that if accurate, reliable flechette weapons were fielded, they would
> not be any good because they wouldn't be sufficiently lethal. Learned
> pronouncements, are not discovery.
See above about SEA. The US Army apparently collected a fair amount of
information on terminal effects there. It can't have been a fun job.. You're
right as far as I know that only the Sovs and the US put much research into
flechette rounds.
The USA also did lethality studies on pigs which the PETAphiles probably get
retrospective vapors over. At the peak of the flechette fashion, there were
multiple theories on wounds and incapacitation. Some of them involved
hand-waving about "hydraulic shock" that favored very high velocity
projectiles. Later data pretty much disproved the notion.
John, I don't follow this last bit very well. I'm not suggesting a return to
.65 caliber mine' balls any time soon. Yes, the trend for the last century
has been for smaller caliber rounds. There're logistical reasons, tactical
reasons and training reasons why they've been effective but that's no reason
to say (approximately) that "they said Galileo was mad but he wasn't so I
must be right".
There's also solid reasons why a flechette is less effective than current
generation bullets. And will remain so in the future.
Hit probability doesn't really go up much. At close ranges (say 300m and
under), modern small caliber rifles are about equal to a flechette arm
(recoil impulse is manageable for most shooters and the trajectory is flat
enough to eliminate much in the way of range adjustment).
As far as long range shooting is concerned, flechettes do have somewhat
higher muzzle velocity, flattening trajectory and minimizing cross-wind
deflection but... There's a hard upper limit on projectile velocity from
powder guns that's only a low multiple of current rifle bullets and in any
case, the real challenge in long range shooting is to estimate target
position accurately. Even with LASER rangers, mirage is still a big problem.
These kinds of limits are the reason that the USA has been developing
programmable fuze grenades for long-range engagements. Bullets (or
flechettes) just can't be improved enough to be worth the cost of change.
>
>
>>Trying to fix the problem with hand-wavium doesn't work.
>
> In science fiction, handwavium always works. In real engineering,
> matters of reliability, accuracy, and cost, are often amenable to
> technological improvement.
>
>
>>And in the cases given (shooting at very large animal targets),
>>historically
>>heavy game has been taken with heavy bullets which maintain their mass and
>>momentum to penetrate deeply. The notion of depending on "erosion" to
>>flense
>>away flesh to get to the vitals is kinda dumb. A bullet with a strong,
>>heavy
>>core that penetrates (and explodes?) is much more effective.
>
> True enough, except that "inadequate penetration" was *never* one of the
> criticisms of flechettes. Quite the opposite. They were always deemed to
> be insufficiently lethal against human opponents, on account of their
> penetrating too *much*.
I addressed that specifically in another post in this thread:
"Terminal effects depend on depositing energy _in_ the target. IRL,
flechettes failed the lethality test because they over-penetrated and took
much of their vaunted kinetic energy with them. The same thing applies with
small, light bullets versus slow, heavy ones. The killing mechanism of
projectiles is disruption of deep tissue. If the projectile either passes
through without slowing or dumps its energy on the surface, it's less
effective than one that penetrates deeply. And stops. "
>
> Shoot a Chtorran, or a tyrannosaur or whatever, with a flechette, and
> you get a tenth-inch hole clear through it. Actually, the fins will
> probably cut a quarter-inch path unless and until they shear off, and
> when they do the whole thing tumbles and starts doing some serious
> meat-grinding. So the question is, how tough do you make the fins?
If I were to shoot a carnosaur, I think I'd want an explosive round.
Actually, I'd like to do the shooting from behind armor, thank you very
much. A Bradley seems about right. A burst 25x137 rounds would settle the
hash of anything on feet.
Paul F Austin
"Justin Fang" <jus...@panix.com> wrote
> <walt...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>>I've been reading science fiction now for about 62 years (not counting
>>John Carter books)
>>and about the only authors that wrote authoritatively and accurately
>>about weapons were Robert Heinlein and H.B. Piper. Now we have John
>>Ringo
>
> Didn't John Ringo have rifles whose ammo used tiny antimatter charges to
> accelerate projectiles to fractional-c speeds? Since the primary enemy of
> that series used troops consisting largely of unarmored organics, I never
> saw the point of those.
It gives a clean kill.
Andrew Plotkin
> glas...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > As for what happened to the series -- a novel called _The Musashi Flex_
> > has come out, or is supposed to come out (I'm not clear which) this
> > year. It's set in the same universe but it's a 'historical' novel set
> > in the past, and AFAIK doesn't involve any of the main cast. Although
> > it may have an ancestor or two. I think its about the founding of the
> > Siblings of the Shroud, or the development of the 97 steps, or
> > somesuch.
>
> Interesting and something to look forward to. His prequel stuff like
> _Omega Cage_ or _97 Steps_ has been enjoyable.
_The Musashi Flex_ is out, and I read it a few weeks ago. I had no
idea it was tied to any other books, but it still worked fine as a
novel. A guy winds up putting together a martial art of N steps. I
thought it was reasonably realistic. I mean, I thought it was
realistic, as far as I understand martial arts. (Not very, but I
practiced aikido for a couple of years.)
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.
John M. Ford, 1957-2006
glas...@gmail.com
> Fair enough, but the ``Galaxy Ranger'' books take place at least 100
> years down the timeline --- there's specific mention of the protagonist
> having been trained by a master who had ``fought the legendary Matador
> Saval Antoon Bork to a standstill''.
Bleedin' heck, I didn't even know /about/ these 'Galaxy Ranger' books,
much less that they were a century in the future of the Matador novels.
*doh!*
Your objections suddenly come into much clearer focus for me, and my
arguments against them, not as valid as I thought.
I hate it when that happens. *g*
OTOH, at least this conversation has told me that, contrary to my
suspicions, the _Musashi Flex_ actually is worth checking out. I
shall go to the bookstore soon.
--
Chuckg
Bill Snyder
Is there additional handwavium involved to make them recoilless, or
does anyone who fires one of these thing wind up with a shoulder
that's dislocated by about half a county's worth? (Not that he'd be
bothered for very long by that, probably, what with the muzzle blast
and the radiation and all . . .)
--
Bill Snyder [This space unintentionally left blank.]
Jorge Mataleo
> _The Musashi Flex_ is out, and I read it a few weeks ago. I had no
> idea it was tied to any other books, but it still worked fine as a
> novel. A guy winds up putting together a martial art of N steps. I
> thought it was reasonably realistic. I mean, I thought it was
> realistic, as far as I understand martial arts. (Not very, but I
> practiced aikido for a couple of years.)
Steve Perry is a silat guy; he used to post over in rec.martial-arts
pretty frequently.
il...@rcn.com
> > accelerate projectiles to fractional-c speeds? Since the primary enemy of
> > that series used troops consisting largely of unarmored organics, I never
> > saw the point of those.
>
> It gives a clean kill.
For very strange definitions of "clean"
glas...@gmail.com
> >> Didn't John Ringo have rifles whose ammo used tiny antimatter charges to
> >> accelerate projectiles to fractional-c speeds? Since the primary enemy of
> >> that series used troops consisting largely of unarmored organics, I never
> >> saw the point of those.
> >
> >It gives a clean kill.
>
> Is there additional handwavium involved to make them recoilless, or
> does anyone who fires one of these thing wind up with a shoulder
> that's dislocated by about half a county's worth? (Not that he'd be
> bothered for very long by that, probably, what with the muzzle blast
> and the radiation and all . . .)
Actually, the antimatter wasn't used as explosive propellant, it was
used to fuel a miniature antimatter power plant. The rifles
themselves were gravitic railguns, that fired slugs of ultradense metal
at velocities sufficient to -- and this was explicitly stated in the
text -- attain escape velocity from Earth.
Which makes you wonder why in the name of God anybody ever issued these
things for use on a planetary surface, yes. Especially vs. an opponent
who fought via the 'unarmored Zerg rush' tactic, using hordes of drones
with short-range shotgun-type weapons!
--
Chuckg
GSV Three Minds in a Can
wonderful person Paul F Austin <pfau...@bellsouth.net> said
{huge snip}
>If I were to shoot a carnosaur, I think I'd want an explosive round.
>Actually, I'd like to do the shooting from behind armor, thank you very
>much. A Bradley seems about right. A burst 25x137 rounds would settle the
>hash of anything on feet.
I think you're being unreasonably gung-ho .. I'd do it from the air .. a
helicopter gunship, or even an A10.
I can see a brontosaurus falling on your Bradley, or stomping you into
some bottomless mudpit, where your fossilised remains will intrigue
future palaeontologists. 8>.
--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
6,632 Km walked. 1,126Km PROWs surveyed. 20.4% complete.
Derek Lyons
>Bitstring <Ir0Sg.37502$KR1....@bignews2.bellsouth.net>, from the
>wonderful person Paul F Austin <pfau...@bellsouth.net> said
>{huge snip}
>>If I were to shoot a carnosaur, I think I'd want an explosive round.
>>Actually, I'd like to do the shooting from behind armor, thank you very
>>much. A Bradley seems about right. A burst 25x137 rounds would settle the
>>hash of anything on feet.
>
>I think you're being unreasonably gung-ho .. I'd do it from the air .. a
>helicopter gunship, or even an A10.
Nuke them from orbit...
D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.
-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL
Paul F Austin
"GSV Three Minds in a Can" <G...@quik.clara.co.uk> wrote in message
news:r64687BO...@from.is.invalid...
> Bitstring <Ir0Sg.37502$KR1....@bignews2.bellsouth.net>, from the
> wonderful person Paul F Austin <pfau...@bellsouth.net> said
> {huge snip}
>>If I were to shoot a carnosaur, I think I'd want an explosive round.
>>Actually, I'd like to do the shooting from behind armor, thank you very
>>much. A Bradley seems about right. A burst 25x137 rounds would settle the
>>hash of anything on feet.
>
> I think you're being unreasonably gung-ho .. I'd do it from the air .. a
> helicopter gunship, or even an A10.
>
> I can see a brontosaurus falling on your Bradley, or stomping you into
> some bottomless mudpit, where your fossilised remains will intrigue future
> palaeontologists. 8>.
Isn't a 30x173 "too much gun"? Besides, there's no "fair chase". Damn
unsporting, that.
Stephen Rush
Wasn't there a story called "A Gun For Dinosaur", about a time-traveling
safari guide? IIRC, the agency had physical criteria for their clients,
one of which was being big enough to absorb the recoil of a .600 Nitro
Express without getting knocked on your ass. I can't recall if the guide
carried a rocket launcher to back you up if you didn't place those two big
bullets perfectly.
Phillip Thorne
wrote:
>Another type (for instance, Bigman Jones' needle gun in Asimov's Lucky Starr stories)
>functioned as a sort of rail gun, and delivered the needle at hypersonic
In the 1980s cyberpunk anime "Bubblegum Crisis," the primary weapon in
Priss's hardsuit is such a weapon: an EM accelerator (railgun,
coilgun, gauss gun; whatever), presumably, that fires metal(?) needles
about 8 inches long.
(The Knight Sabers are a female mercenary-ish group, and their
powered-armor "hardsuits" are form-fitting, with weapons integrated
into the forearms. On some of the suits, the right sleeve is longer,
and is tipped with a waldo-hand and the weapons muzzles. Priss's
needle-ammo must fit a magazine somewhere near the elbow.)
Why she bothers is unclear, since the needles seem unable to penetrate
the armor of any Boomer she encounters; instead, they stick there like
porcupine quills in a rhino. (The villain that really likes showing
off snatches the needles out of midair.)
ObWritten, I can't think of any examples that haven't been already
named.
/- Phillip Thorne ----------- The Non-Sequitur Express --------------------\
| org underbase ta thorne www.underbase.org It's the boundary |
| net comcast ta pethorne site, newsletter, blog conditions that |
\------------------------------------------------------- get you ----------/
James Nicoll
Phillip Thorne <tho...@underbase.org> wrote:
>
>In the 1980s cyberpunk anime "Bubblegum Crisis," the primary weapon in
>Priss's hardsuit is such a weapon: an EM accelerator (railgun,
>coilgun, gauss gun; whatever), presumably, that fires metal(?) needles
>about 8 inches long.
>
>(The Knight Sabers are a female mercenary-ish group, and their
>powered-armor "hardsuits" are form-fitting, with weapons integrated
>into the forearms. On some of the suits, the right sleeve is longer,
>and is tipped with a waldo-hand and the weapons muzzles. Priss's
>needle-ammo must fit a magazine somewhere near the elbow.)
>
>Why she bothers is unclear, since the needles seem unable to penetrate
>the armor of any Boomer she encounters; instead, they stick there like
>porcupine quills in a rhino. (The villain that really likes showing
>off snatches the needles out of midair.)
>
pretty she was being watched from orbit was to duck under a bridge,
swap IDs and then walk out. If there'd been _any_ foot traffic, this
might have worked but it's "One person goes in, another person exits."
I guess it's better than the Fleisher Superman cartoons, where
he'd change in a supply closet, backlit against its transluscent
window. What _did_ the rest of the Planet think he was doing when
they could see him ripping his clothes off?
David Johnston
Nicoll) wrote:
>>
> As I recall, her idea of preserving a secret ID when she was
>pretty she was being watched from orbit was to duck under a bridge,
>swap IDs and then walk out. If there'd been _any_ foot traffic, this
>might have worked but it's "One person goes in, another person exits."
She shook observation by hopping into a passing truck.
WaltBJ
relating the US Army search for the 'perfect' infantry rifle covering
flechettes, etc. They tested a bunch of them but didn't find a
satisfactory one. FWIW there was a flechette warhead for the 2.75/70mm
rocket. It had to delivered so the dispersal took place at the right
point. ISTR once they were used up no more were ordered. The 105mm
beehive round contains lots of flechettes and I think that one is still
in service.
Walt BJ
Joseph Nebus
> I guess it's better than the Fleisher Superman cartoons, where
>he'd change in a supply closet, backlit against its transluscent
>window. What _did_ the rest of the Planet think he was doing when
>they could see him ripping his clothes off?
It'd be hard for them to say without the Hayes Office objecting.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Howard Brazee
>> I guess it's better than the Fleisher Superman cartoons, where
>>he'd change in a supply closet, backlit against its transluscent
>>window. What _did_ the rest of the Planet think he was doing when
>>they could see him ripping his clothes off?
>
> It'd be hard for them to say without the Hayes Office objecting.
Somebody wrote a speculation that the world is playing along with
Superman, as long as he's having fun doing good, we are safe from him.
glas...@gmail.com
[re: Priss of the Knight Sabers]
> Why she bothers is unclear, since the needles seem unable to penetrate
> the armor of any Boomer she encounters; instead, they stick there like
> porcupine quills in a rhino. (The villain that really likes showing
> off snatches the needles out of midair.)
Somebody should give the girl a 40mm grenade launcher and accompanying
shaped-charge antiarmor grenades for her birthday.
--
Chuckg
ghostwriter
Navies use them all the time, they are called shotguns. Here only an
fool would wear heavy armor(at least without breathing/swimming
support), and there are LOTS of important gizmos that the defending
troops are not interested in putting holes into. With lots of corners
and bulkheads to hide behind a clean hit is difficult to get so splash
impact ammo is useful. There is a effective limit to the ratio of speed
to weight but I suspect that has more to do with the limits of power
delivery systems (chemical propellants) than it does with absolute
performance.
Hunters also use them and they are extremely useful against game that
is small and difficult to hit like birds.
We use beads rather than needles because we dont have the material
science to make needles that fly straight and dont bend when fired or
if they hit off center. Also the surface area to mass ratio is best for
a bead and so they give the best flight pattern. More importantly
nylon beads can be churned out of a plant faster than you can blink,
needles with stabilizing fins arent nearly as easiy to make.
I could however imagine a period when a recoilless splash weapon is
needed and needles have a much better dynamic flight path than any
bead. Of course I could see canister shot being loaded into a high
penertration gyrojet type projectile rather than bother with the
expensive low accuracy needles.
That does remind me of the idea I once had, the rather than have a
laserblaster that seems to miss 9 out of 10 shots it would make more
sense to have a rotating reflector similar to what is on a check out
lane so the the laser impact could be shaped. Then rather than a bolt
of laser energy you would get a thousand needles in a controllable
pattern.
Ghostwriter
Par
> On 27 Sep 2006 01:58:30 -0400, nebusj-@-rpi-.edu (Joseph Nebus) wrote:
>
> >> I guess it's better than the Fleisher Superman cartoons, where
> >>he'd change in a supply closet, backlit against its transluscent
> >>window. What _did_ the rest of the Planet think he was doing when
> >>they could see him ripping his clothes off?
Maybe we were shown a split microsecond image of what was too fast for
the actual people present to spot? Boring, I know.
> Somebody wrote a speculation that the world is playing along with
> Superman, as long as he's having fun doing good, we are safe from him.
Now I'm imagining the agency responsible for producing new and crazier
super-crooks for the big S to apprehend. And the serious, humorless men
in dark suits that come and talk to you if you say something nasty about
him in a public forum.
/Par
--
Par use...@hunter-gatherer.org
> That's what redundant power supplies are for, after all... i
I thought they were for blowing the fuse on one when you disconnect the other.
-- Dave Brown & Calle Dybedahl
Ingot
"James Nicoll" <jdni...@panix.com> wrote
> I guess it's better than the Fleisher Superman cartoons, where
> he'd change in a supply closet, backlit against its transluscent
> window. What _did_ the rest of the Planet think he was doing when
> they could see him ripping his clothes off?
They probably needled him about that.
DougL
> On Mon, 25 Sep 2006 22:44:06 -0400, "Paul F Austin"
> <pfau...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> >"Justin Fang" <jus...@panix.com> wrote
> >> Didn't John Ringo have rifles whose ammo used tiny antimatter charges to
> >> accelerate projectiles to fractional-c speeds? Since the primary enemy of
> >> that series used troops consisting largely of unarmored organics, I never
> >> saw the point of those.
> >
> >It gives a clean kill.
>
> Is there additional handwavium involved to make them recoilless, or
> does anyone who fires one of these thing wind up with a shoulder
> that's dislocated by about half a county's worth? (Not that he'd be
> bothered for very long by that, probably, what with the muzzle blast
> and the radiation and all . . .)
Just the heavy powered armor that also let them survive things like
having a skyscraper fall on them.
BtW, as others have pointed out the armor was powered by the
antimatter, not specifically the gun which just used the armor's power
also.
I haven't read the entire series but: the presumed reason for the
really high velocity is that (a) the humans are using a LOT of ammo,
enough that weight matters even with the powered armor, (b) while the
targets are unarmored they are also tough, (c) some of the aliens do
have armor or ride vehicles, and (d) some of the gear is IIRC
deliberately suboptimal.
People without the powered armor use conventional guns, grenades,
mines, and artillery (lots of artillery) to some effect.
DougL
David McMillan
> Bill Snyder wrote:
>> On Mon, 25 Sep 2006 22:44:06 -0400, "Paul F Austin"
>> <pfau...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>>> "Justin Fang" <jus...@panix.com> wrote
>
>>>> Didn't John Ringo have rifles whose ammo used tiny antimatter charges to
>>>> accelerate projectiles to fractional-c speeds? Since the primary enemy of
>>>> that series used troops consisting largely of unarmored organics, I never
>>>> saw the point of those.
>>> It gives a clean kill.
>> Is there additional handwavium involved to make them recoilless, or
>> does anyone who fires one of these thing wind up with a shoulder
>> that's dislocated by about half a county's worth? (Not that he'd be
>> bothered for very long by that, probably, what with the muzzle blast
>> and the radiation and all . . .)
>
> Just the heavy powered armor that also let them survive things like
> having a skyscraper fall on them.
>
> BtW, as others have pointed out the armor was powered by the
> antimatter, not specifically the gun which just used the armor's power
> also.
Actually, the antimatter in the ammo was intended to allow the gun to
be fired w/o draining the armor's power storage cells -- the armor
(aside from a small number of hideously expensive special-made units)
were not powered by on-board antimatter. The bullets did not carry any
antimatter with the to the target.
In the latter books this becomes a major plot point, since using
"low-grade" ammo (identical, but w/o its own antimatter) drains the
suits' power supplies rapidly, leading to a rather severe drop in combat
effectiveness vs the Posleen.
The low-grade ammo also had a lower muzzle velocity, IIRC.
> I haven't read the entire series but: the presumed reason for the
> really high velocity is that (a) the humans are using a LOT of ammo,
> enough that weight matters even with the powered armor, (b) while the
> targets are unarmored they are also tough, (c) some of the aliens do
> have armor or ride vehicles, and (d) some of the gear is IIRC
> deliberately suboptimal.
Plus the ACS units were intended to be dealing with *very* large wave
attacks while outnumbered by several orders of magnitude.
Overpenetration was generally considered a *good* thing -- one round
going through several Posleen could only help.
Though I do have to wonder if escape-vel+ muzzle velocities were really
necessary...
> People without the powered armor use conventional guns, grenades,
> mines, and artillery (lots of artillery) to some effect.
Lots and lots and lots of arty. Plus lots of automated
"kill-anything-that-moves-in-this-zone" machine guns.
Chris Thompson
GSV Three Minds in a Can <G...@quik.clara.co.uk> wrote:
[...]
>I can see a brontosaurus falling on your Bradley, or stomping you into
>some bottomless mudpit, where your fossilised remains will intrigue
>future palaeontologists. 8>.
"Gee, we really don't want to let Ed Conrad find out about this.'
--
Chris Thompson
Email: cet1 [at] cam.ac.uk
Justin Fang
David McMillan <spam...@skyefire.org> wrote:
> Actually, the antimatter in the ammo was intended to allow the gun to
>be fired w/o draining the armor's power storage cells -- the armor
>(aside from a small number of hideously expensive special-made units)
>were not powered by on-board antimatter. The bullets did not carry any
>antimatter with the to the target.
> Plus the ACS units were intended to be dealing with *very* large wave
>attacks while outnumbered by several orders of magnitude.
>Overpenetration was generally considered a *good* thing -- one round
>going through several Posleen could only help.
Why not just shoot the antimatter at the target, then?
--
Justin Fang (jus...@panix.com)
Paul F Austin
"Justin Fang" <jus...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:efrafr$10j$1...@panix1.panix.com...
Ooootsie command authority with a Thing about nuclear weapons.
madk...@yahoo.com
The battle rifle transitioned from large heavy rounds to small light
high velocity rounds through the 20th century - not in an orderly
fashion. Not offering comment on this being a good or bad thing, but a
'needle gun' is just an extension of what has already taken place.
High velocity light rounds have several distinguishing characteristics.
When your culture no longer hunts 'since you where knee high to a
grasshopper', you can carry more ammo to waste and hope a random round
hits a target. Air resistance increases nonlinearly with velocity, so
fast, light rounds loose energy fast in air, their range is limited.
They bounce off stuff like bone, so they shred flesh as they tumble,
but are likely to be deflected by foliage.
(The rounds are designed to tumble - if they penetrate too efficiently,
they do little damage.)
You, too, can play with this, if you like. Short of buying an M-16
variant or building your own railgun, you can buy or make sabot rounds
for your more conventional gun.
Easy to defend against? You can put plastic through plate armor if you
throw it hard enough
(fast enough), it's been done.
MadKaugh
David McMillan
Well, they ended up not *having* any, for one thing (with Earth
blockaded from the Galactic tech base, AM was in very short supply).
There were also political problems with using antimatter weapons -- the
politicos tended to hear "bigger badder nuke" and started freaking
out. For a third, loading the bullets with antimatter probably would
have made the ammunition more complex, cumbersome, and hard to
manufacture -- remember that the AM ammo was essentially using the AM
the way a normal firearm uses gunpowder: it all got 'burned' in the
breech. None of left the barrel with the projectile.
Kevrob
> Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net>:
> > On 27 Sep 2006 01:58:30 -0400, nebusj-@-rpi-.edu (Joseph Nebus) wrote:
> >
> > >> I guess it's better than the Fleisher Superman cartoons, where
> > >>he'd change in a supply closet, backlit against its transluscent
> > >>window. What _did_ the rest of the Planet think he was doing when
> > >>they could see him ripping his clothes off?
>
> Maybe we were shown a split microsecond image of what was too fast for
> the actual people present to spot? Boring, I know.
>
> > Somebody wrote a speculation that the world is playing along with
> > Superman, as long as he's having fun doing good, we are safe from him.
>
Ever see this?
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/99/99okent.phtml
> Now I'm imagining the agency responsible for producing new and crazier
> super-crooks for the big S to apprehend. And the serious, humorless men
> in dark suits that come and talk to you if you say something nasty about
> him in a public forum.
>
>
Sounds like Project Cadmus and the DEO..
Kevin
d...@tao.merseine.nu
>
> That does remind me of the idea I once had, the rather than have a
> laserblaster that seems to miss 9 out of 10 shots it would make more
> sense to have a rotating reflector similar to what is on a check out
> lane so the the laser impact could be shaped. Then rather than a bolt
> of laser energy you would get a thousand needles in a controllable
> pattern.
Let's suppose you can deliver 10 KJ to one square millimeter in 1/100
second. That's a 1 megawatt laser. Distributing that over a thousand
targets gives 10 J apiece over 1000 square millimeters.
That's roughly comparable to sunlight on a cloudless day. You might be
inflicting sunburn.
-dsr-
--
.-.. -... .... . --.. .-. ..-. ..-. -. - .-. ...- ..-. -... ---
..-. .--. .-. .- .-. ...- .- ..-. -... --.. .-. -.-. -. . --.
-... ... --. ..- .-. .--- -... . -.-- --.- ..-. ..- ...- --.
..-. -... ...- ..-. --. ..- ...- ..-. -... .- .-.
m-cb...@columbus.rr.com
d...@tao.merseine.nu wrote:
> On 2006-09-27, ghostwriter <ghostw...@postmaster.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > That does remind me of the idea I once had, the rather than have a
> > laserblaster that seems to miss 9 out of 10 shots it would make more
> > sense to have a rotating reflector similar to what is on a check out
> > lane so the the laser impact could be shaped. Then rather than a bolt
> > of laser energy you would get a thousand needles in a controllable
> > pattern.
>
> Let's suppose you can deliver 10 KJ to one square millimeter in 1/100
> second. That's a 1 megawatt laser. Distributing that over a thousand
> targets gives 10 J apiece over 1000 square millimeters.
>
> That's roughly comparable to sunlight on a cloudless day. You might be
> inflicting sunburn.
The number of targets possible would depend on the output of the
weapon. 1mm^2 and 200mm deep human torso, thats 200mm^3 target volume,
2cm^3. 10kj is massive overkill for that volume, and will flash
vaporize a hole 1mm in diameter though everything in is path. Find the
energy transfer to volume ratio that maximizes damage and divide the
beam into that many different bolts. 10J may not be useful but I
imagine a hundred bolts at 100J might make an excellent crowd control
setting.
Design the system to be adjustable to allow for different fire control
settings. Single bolt when dealing with armored opponents, adjustable
number of bolts and asjustable angle out of the weapon for dealing with
other situations. Basically slugs, buckshot, birdshot, or rock salt
available on command. Make the reflector pattern controlable and you
could use it to lay down a perfect line over the top of a wall to
suppress fire, inpact at 10% of lethal hitting you in the face would
still guarentee the inablility to aim and fire effectivly. The US
military is working on dazzle type weapons that basically use a hundred
thousand small needles and saturate the area to potentially permanently
blind opponents.
Ghostwriter
Steve
James Nicoll wrote:
"Except, and I only mention this because I still find it baffling, bows
and arrows in the New World. Bows show up up north three thousand years
before they show up on the East
Coast of North America. Three thousand years!"
-- preindustrial cultures tend to be intensely conservative about their
basic activities, for obvious reasons. If something works, they're
extremely reluctant to abandon it for something else that requires
learning new skills and possibly rearrangements in social and cultural
matters.
It took nearly a millenium for the stirrup to become generalized in
Eurasia, for example. The Irish -still- weren't using stirrups in the
1500's, and that despite having been in contact with people who did use
them for about 800 years! And that's a very simple little invention,
easy to make and use, with a big payoff.
Also, there's a skill gradient involved. If you're really good with a
spear-thrower, you'll be somewhat less effective as a hunter and/or
warrior than you would be with equal skills with a good bow, generally
speaking.
But you will be _more_ effective than you would be if you're not a good
archer and/or don't have a good bow; and both making and (even more)
using bows require a -lot- of practice.
"The best is the enemy of Good Enough," as the saying goes.
The Mesoamerican cultures were using both the bow and the spear-thrower
when Cortez arrived.
Walter Bushell
"Steve" <joats...@aol.com> wrote:
> It took nearly a millenium for the stirrup to become generalized in
> Eurasia, for example. The Irish -still- weren't using stirrups in the
> 1500's, and that despite having been in contact with people who did use
> them for about 800 years! And that's a very simple little invention,
> easy to make and use, with a big payoff.
Great payoff in warfare.
--
Divided we stand!
Nancy Lebovitz
>
>"Except, and I only mention this because I still find it baffling, bows
>and arrows in the New World. Bows show up up north three thousand years
>before they show up on the East
>Coast of North America. Three thousand years!"
>
>-- preindustrial cultures tend to be intensely conservative about their
>basic activities, for obvious reasons. If something works, they're
>extremely reluctant to abandon it for something else that requires
>learning new skills and possibly rearrangements in social and cultural
>matters.
Still, they do innovate occasionally, and I've never seen a discussion
of how innovation really happens in preindustrial cultures.
--
Nancy Lebovitz http://www.nancybuttons.com
http://nancylebov.livejournal.com
My two favorite colors are "Oooooh" and "SHINY!".
Nancy Lebovitz
>wonderful person Paul F Austin <pfau...@bellsouth.net> said
>{huge snip}
>>If I were to shoot a carnosaur, I think I'd want an explosive round.
>>Actually, I'd like to do the shooting from behind armor, thank you very
>>much. A Bradley seems about right. A burst 25x137 rounds would settle the
>>hash of anything on feet.
>
>I think you're being unreasonably gung-ho .. I'd do it from the air .. a
>helicopter gunship, or even an A10.
>
>some bottomless mudpit, where your fossilised remains will intrigue
>future palaeontologists. 8>.
There was a story ("Poor Little Warrior"? Brian Aldiss?) about a hunter
who kills a dinosaur and......
is killed by one of the large parasites leaving the corpse.
Nancy Lebovitz
Joe Bednorz <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>On 23 Sep 2006 21:22:20 -0700, walt...@mindspring.com wrote:
>
> (That "contemporary ignorance" includes my own. Recently I've been
>seeing just how much military technology I thought were recent
>inventions were actually extensively used in WWII. Not jets (or even
>napalm). Things like frequency hopping radar, "Bouncing Betty"
>landmines, shaped charge warheads, proximity fuses, cluster bombs, IFF,
>solid shot armor piercing ammunition, homing torpedoes, etc.)
>
What are the important post-WWII innovations? I've heard that supply
has been much improved by the use of computer programs, but that's
kind of subtle.
>
> You don't even have to take my word for it. A lot of Drake's work is
>made available for free on the WWW by Baen. Start here:
>
>SF at Project Gutenberg: <http://thethunderchild.com/Books/OutofCopyright.html>
>Baen Free Online SciFi: <http://www.baen.com/library/>
>Baen Free SciFi CDs <http://files.plebian.net/baencd/>
>SciFi.com classic/original: <http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/archive.html>
>Free Samples: <http://www.webscription.net/catalog.asp>
http://www.freesfonline.de/ is another free sf site (no pirating). I see
that Beagle's "Two Hearts" is still available. I recommend it.
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/new.html. More free books--all sorts.
http://67.118.51.201/bol/default.cfm is BookonLine--they try to list all
the books available (not counting self-publication, I think--they don't
have Atlanta Nights) online, and most of them are free.
OBSF: _The Man Who Was Thursday_ is online.
Nancy Lebovitz
How much of the anti-matter would "burn" up on the way to the target?
William F. Adams
> What are the important post-WWII innovations? I've heard that supply
> has been much improved by the use of computer programs, but that's
> kind of subtle.
Don't underestimate the effect which supply can have --- during the Six
Day War Israel was able to fire shells from their tanks in the
afternoon which were still cool from having been in a US warehouse
earlier that morning, and the unlimited supply of munitions made for a
marked change in tank tactics (huge artillery barrages to take out a
single vehicle).
William
Nancy Lebovitz
I don't underestimate it--I understand that it's crucial. But it doesn't
seem to fascinate people nearly as reliably as big machines and explosives
and direct killing do.
IsaacKuo
Nancy Lebovitz wrote:
> In article <5kkch2p4o5unnr934...@4ax.com>,
> Joe Bednorz <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> > (That "contemporary ignorance" includes my own. Recently I've been
> >seeing just how much military technology I thought were recent
> >inventions were actually extensively used in WWII. Not jets (or even
> >napalm). Things like frequency hopping radar, "Bouncing Betty"
> >landmines, shaped charge warheads, proximity fuses, cluster bombs, IFF,
> >solid shot armor piercing ammunition, homing torpedoes, etc.)
> What are the important post-WWII innovations? I've heard that supply
> has been much improved by the use of computer programs, but that's
> kind of subtle.
Off the top of my head, and not in any particular order, here are some:
Kevlar body armor (first practical personal armor against bullets)
GPS
Armor piercing fin stabalized discarding sabot anti-tank ammo.
Chobham composite tank armor
Nuclear ballistic missile
Nuclear submarine
laser guided missiles/bombs (allows ground or UAV target designation)
fire-and-forget guided missiles/bombs
Phased array electronic beam steering (allows tracking/attacking
multiple targets)
passive night vision goggles
Isaac Kuo
Matthias Warkus
Some more:
Supersonic aircraft
Variable-geometry aircraft
VTOL aircraft
In-air refueling
Helicopter gunships
ASW helicopters
Stealth design
Red-dot sights
Non-nuclear air-independent submarine propulsion
Autoloaders
Multiple round, single impact artillery
Top-attack missiles
Laser range finding
Satellite surveillance
Head-up displays
mawa
Walter Bushell
nan...@panix.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
> I don't underestimate it--I understand that it's crucial. But it doesn't
> seem to fascinate people nearly as reliably as big machines and explosives
> and direct killing do.
Which is the reason it's easier to win by building a better
Quartermaster corps, than that other stuff; the enemy is likely to cheat
on the boring stuff.
In the American War Amongst the States, the Union won, because of better
supplies. And the Union supplies were often of less than mediocre
quality due to war profiteering.
--
Divided we stand!
jackli...@earthlink.net
> "Stephen Rush" <sjr...@comcast.net> wrote in message
> news:pan.2006.09.24....@comcast.net...
> >
> > I don't know about Piper, but Heinlein was a naval officer before he
> > contracted typhoid fever and had to resign. This was in the thirties,
> > before antibiotics.
>
> Tuberculosis, actually. This doesn't invalidate the point.
>
> Joseph T Major
Piper was a very private person who claimed to have been self-taught.
He created a weapon with a ten-grain bullet traveling at 10,000
foot-seconds. Not quite needle but close enough.
Heilein's TB created another sci-fi story where Senator Proxmire time
travels to cure him so the space program won't exist.
William F. Adams
(re: post World War II weaponry developments)
> Autoloaders
> Multiple round, single impact artillery
In what context?
The Navy had such --- read _The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors_ for
a funny / sad / poignant instance of of the latter being used against
an individual and of the strain imposed on sailors when the former were
damaged.
William
serg271
IsaacKuo wrote:
> Armor piercing fin stabalized discarding sabot anti-tank ammo.
Armor piercing discarding sabot (APDS) were developed during WWII. Fin
stabilization/smoothbore cannon combo is an obvious improvment, caused
by need for longer penetartor, due to better armor of modern tanks.
Another major weapon advance - Fuel-Air (thermobaric) explosives.
IsaacKuo
serg271 wrote:
> IsaacKuo wrote:
> > Armor piercing fin stabalized discarding sabot anti-tank ammo.
> Armor piercing discarding sabot (APDS) were developed during WWII. Fin
> stabilization/smoothbore cannon combo is an obvious improvment, caused
> by need for longer penetartor, due to better armor of modern tanks.
There was already a need for improved armor penetration
in WWII. If the British style of APFSDS ammo were available
to the Allies in WWII, then Sherman anti-tank rounds wouldn't
have bounced off of Tiger armor. (The British innovation of
slipping rings allowed use of APFSDS rounds in rifled guns.)
Such early APFSDS ammo might have been relatively
expensive and perhaps not as accurate as normal ammo,
but surely it would have been less expensive than all
the Shermans lost due to ineffective firepower.
Isaac Kuo