Electro-Static Weapons
J
magazine of a highly conductive material which is used as pellets. Not much
more than the amount of a few grains of sand of this material is inserted
into the chamber. There an electronic charge juices them up and they are
fired out a magnetic system [about 300 fps would do nicely as that is the
speed I have recently found out that arrows go at]. You can have 5 lbs. of
ammo and still be able to shoot off so many shots you'd be able to fight a
one man war. It also provides the possibility of having a different material
that will explode on impact for damage to subjects besides people [such as
devices, rock, or vehicles... of course the safety part to this is that they
have to be charged and impact at the force 300 fps would impart on them].
Is it feasible? What material would be best, the limits of my chemical
studies tells me silver. And then there's the explosive stuff, which is is
way over my head already.
Later, J
--
_____________________
http://webj.cjb.net
m...@webj.cjb.net
Christopher Michael Jones
not important per se to their power.
Also, there are a few serious problems I see with this.
One, the atmosphere. As the charged particle travels through
the atmosphere, it will "arc" (so to speak) and more or less
neutralize itself. If you look at charge buildup in thunder
storms, you should notice that the charge is spread out over
a very large area (err, volume) and thus doesn't arc
immediately, however a very small highly charged object will
neutralize itself quite effectively in air very rapidly.
Also, in so doing, it is likely that something as small as
a grain of sand would experience large forces due to its
high electrostatic charge and would be "thrown off course".
Second, how to build up the charge. This is a very difficult
task (though not impossible). The trick would be to make the
device small enough and fast enough to be useful (and, of
course, be fairly effecient power usage wise).
A similar problem is how to handle the buildup of charge on the
gun itself. It will, of course, have the same charge as the
projectile (with opposite polarity). As you fire more rounds,
the charge would build up. You could fire rounds with
alternating charge (+, -, +, -, +, - ...) though that produces
many difficulties and would probably make for a very large
and complicated gun.
Now, it sounds like what you are trying to create is a small
mass projectile that can still do a great deal of damage when
it impacts. I can imagine several ways of doing that.
The most straight forward way would be hypervelocity
projectiles. There are two difficulties with this, one is
accelerating the projectile to high velocities. The other is
producing the maximum amount of damage with the projectile.
At slow enough speeds, the projectile won't have sufficient
momentum to penetrate the target (presumedly a human(oid)
body) and might just "bounce off" (quite embarrassing). At
slightly faster speeds, the projectile will penetrate, but
due to its low mass and cross-sectional area it will just
penetrate all the way through and not produce much damage.
Eventually, you reach fast enough speeds where the bullet
actually vaporizes into a plasma when it hits the target and
actually does significant damage. I'm not too sure about what
kind of damage an extremely low mass projectile (sand grain)
would do if the speed is too low for it to vaporize.
A more ambitious idea would be to use antimatter. A small
speck (*really* small) of anti-matter would provide the
"charge" for an explosive bullet. The anti-matter would be
contained until detonation at which point, the anti-matter
mote would be let loose and would cause an explosion that
would create a very hot plasma from the projectile. You
could fire the projectiles out of an ordinary pea shooter or
dart gun if you wanted, the real difficulty is in creating
the explosive anti-matter charge bullets. Creating the
anti-matter itself is difficult though not impossible, and it
is only a small amount. Creating the microscopic containment
device / detonator seems challenging, but I'm sure with
micro-electro mechanical systems, or nanotech, and a team of
blue ribbon scientists all with PhD's in handwavology you
could come up with something workable.
Another possibilty could be to use poisons. A very small
mass needle or fletchette poisoned with some sort of potent
neurotoxin would certainly allow you to pack quite a bit of
"killing" in one gun. However, you have the problem of your
attacker(s) being capable of injuring you even after you have
shot them since they will not die or be tremendously injured
immediately.
Here's a two part concept. Use a laser to vaporize or explode
a projectile right as it contacts its target. This would be
tricky, but not impossible. One of the problems with laser
weapons is that you really need the target to cooperate with
you. If they move around while you are trying to burn them
or if their surface coloring is such that they don't absorb
the laser light very effeciently, then it's hard to injure
them. Having a high peak power, pulsed laser certainly
makes the moving around problem not an issue, but you still
have the problem of effecient absorption. If you are only
delivering a fraction (possibly even less than 1/100th) of
the laser power to the "target", then you do not have a
very efficient weapon. However, you could create a very
small projectile that absorbed your specific laser light
very efficiently and would explode or vaporize after being
hit by a short burst of light from your laser. Thus, you
could fire the projectile at your target, track the
projectile in flight (and, of course, extrapolate the course
of the projectile) using high speed computers and imaging
systems, and then have the system automatically fire the
laser pulse at the correct time and in the correct
direction to explode / vaporize the projectile when it is
the "optimum" distance from the target. The main difficulty
with this system seems to be the difficulty of tracking the
projectile accurately enough (it is after all small) to
actually hit it at the right time with enough delivered
laser power. The other difficulty is creating a laser
capable of delivering that kind of power that is small
enough etc. etc. and can be pointed accurately enough to
explode the projectile in flight.
I've got some other ideas, but this post is long enough as
it is.
Mr. M.J. Lush
J <m...@webj.cjb.net> wrote:
> Back to hand-helds. I've recently thought of a weapon with a small
>magazine of a highly conductive material which is used as pellets.
You could do a lot worse than get hold of BTRC's Guns Guns Guns
rule book which would allow you to do some calculations on different
gun designs... see <http://www.btrc.net/html/catalog/catmain.html#3G3>
Basically its a set of gun design rules for any RPG (it has
conversion notes various systems in the back) its also available as a
.pdf with spreadsheets automating the calculations.
--
Michael Ban DHMO Now!! <http://www.dhmo.org/>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NPC rights activist | Nameless Abominations are people too.
J
Christopher Michael Jones <cjo...@ix.cs.uoregon.edu> wrote in message
news:8mbdcj$cfm$1...@helix.cs.uoregon.edu...
gee... I didn't think that the grains would have much problem with accuracy
simply because they are shot out so fast... maybe my idea of creating the
speed now was a bad idea. It would probably be better for the shot to go
extremely fast.
Well, really, I would like a device that inflects pain, stuns, and kills all
with the same weapon just on different "Power settings". Before I was told
that an Electro-Static weapon would not work because the charge would break
up. But that's what I want. A purely eletro-static pulse floating through
the air. Recently the idea of using grains to keep the charged "bottled"
came to me... but that is heavy with problems too. I also was under the
impression that warmer things were more willing to be charged, oh well. Then
the problem entered my mind where the need for some explosive power is also
needed.
So, basically the gun of this Sci-Fi future is a plasma weapon. It brings in
air, or has a container of it when in vacuum operations, and begins to
heat/charge it in a chamber. This change is sent out of the chamber using a
magnetic field sled. Once the charge leaves the barrel and goes on it's
course towards the target [similar problems with accuracy to a bullet, but
for different reasons, (possibly the magnetic field isn't tuned right)].
You'll always have some electrical shock with each shot and you'll have some
minor burning invovled as well, but both are adjustable from the minimums.
Problems with the above:
Accuracy, could be solved by a magnetic conduit that extends on out
through to the target [I don't like that].
Charge Build Up, materials something similar to rubber but many times
better will surround the chamber and isolate it from the casing and protect
the user... But only so much can be done using this method so alternating
charges might be helpful. And then again this will probably be one of the
limiting factors that the weapon has... meaning this is when you have to
stop firing for a while.
Power, the power cell technology is pretty advanced and I'm fairly
certain there will be plenty of energy to spare, a true energizer bunny :-)
Settings, pain mostly a little heat sting and a small shock that's no
more than a strong static shock like when you touch a person but just a
little worse. Stun knocks you out much like a Tazer does, but where the shot
hits there will be a good burn, maybe 1st or in extreme cases 2nd degree.
Kill, either shocks you to death or burns a big enough hole in you that a
vital system is compromised and you die. The last setting is a strong plasma
ball most likely providing enough energy to a target to make it seperate
with the rest of the object [a rock face for example will seperate from the
rock around it].
But with all that in mind.... I would rather want something that is possible
and not just cool sounding. Oh well, maybe I'm just asking to much on that
last thing.
jti...@my-deja.com
"J" <m...@webj.cjb.net> wrote:
> Back to hand-helds. I've recently thought of a weapon with a small
> magazine of a highly conductive material which is used as pellets.
> more than the amount of a few grains of sand of this material is
inserted
> into the chamber. There an electronic charge juices them up and they
are
> fired out a magnetic system [about 300 fps would do nicely as that is
the
> speed I have recently found out that arrows go at]. You can have 5
lbs. of
> ammo and still be able to shoot off so many shots you'd be able to
fight a
> one man war. It also provides the possibility of having a different
material
> that will explode on impact for damage to subjects besides people
[such as
> devices, rock, or vehicles... of course the safety part to this is
that they
> have to be charged and impact at the force 300 fps would impart on
them].
IIRC, Jules Verne thought of it first. The hunting scene in "20,000
Leagues Under the Sea" describes a similar weapon, using electrically
charged pellets fired from an air gun.
Thanks for Playing, and Please Try Again... beep. ;)
Regards,
Jack Tingle
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Ayende Rahien
"Christopher Michael Jones" <cjo...@ix.cs.uoregon.edu> wrote in
message news:8mbdcj$cfm$1...@helix.cs.uoregon.edu...
> Another possibilty could be to use poisons. A very small
> mass needle or fletchette poisoned with some sort of potent
> neurotoxin would certainly allow you to pack quite a bit of
> "killing" in one gun. However, you have the problem of your
> attacker(s) being capable of injuring you even after you have
> shot them since they will not die or be tremendously injured
> immediately.
That is not quite true, there are number of poisons which (while do
not kill instantly) will render the enemy incapable of harming in any
way.
Most of those poisons come from creatures which don't usually have
contact with humans.
I'm doing a search right now about the creatures that create those
poisons, but basically they all share some common traits, they are
deadly (usually) and they start affecting immediately, *very* painful,
some documented case speak about someone grinding his own teeth to
dust from the pain, and all sorts of other fun things that you don't
want to see anywhere except at Jerry Springer.
Here is the list of the animals that I've found:
Phyllobates terribiles (doesn't have to enter blood stream, touching
the skin is enough, take a few minutes to kill, not fun)
Cone shells (have to penetrate the skin, quick and *painFULL*)
Bungarus caerulus (10 - 15 seconds to die, have to penetrate the skin)
Crotalus viridis viridis (10 - 20 minutes, have to penetrate skin,
heart stop)
Naja nivea (upper body injury, death in 10 minutes)
Agkistrodon contortix ( 1 - 5 minutes for several drops of this guy's
venom)
Oh, btw, poisons can do better ( ISTR that they are define as non bio
killing agensts, while venoms are bio killing agents).
Anyone has an idea about those? What I listed are defined as venoms, I
think.
Luke Campbell
> The most straight forward way would be hypervelocity
> projectiles. There are two difficulties with this, one is
> accelerating the projectile to high velocities. The other is
> producing the maximum amount of damage with the projectile.
> At slow enough speeds, the projectile won't have sufficient
> momentum to penetrate the target (presumedly a human(oid)
> body) and might just "bounce off" (quite embarrassing). At
> slightly faster speeds, the projectile will penetrate, but
> due to its low mass and cross-sectional area it will just
> penetrate all the way through and not produce much damage.
> Eventually, you reach fast enough speeds where the bullet
> actually vaporizes into a plasma when it hits the target and
> actually does significant damage. I'm not too sure about what
> kind of damage an extremely low mass projectile (sand grain)
> would do if the speed is too low for it to vaporize.
Very little. Most people can survive a small hole right through their
body, even if it does pass through vital organs. At high enough
velocities, projectiles will cause a "temporary cavity" in flesh of much
greater cross sectional area than the projectile that immediately
colapses, but if the cavity is large enough at the time it is formed it
can tear flesh and organs. This can cause significant damage (and does,
in the case of high powered rifle bullets). Once the projectile
vaporizes from the impact, you are transfering most of its kinetic
energy to the target. At these speeds you have trouble, however, since
a small projectile is likely to burn up in the atmosphere before going
far, limiting the effective range of your weapon, although getting the
projectile to travel a couple hundred meters might be doable.
> A more ambitious idea would be to use antimatter. A small
> speck (*really* small) of anti-matter would provide the
> "charge" for an explosive bullet. The anti-matter would be
> contained until detonation at which point, the anti-matter
> mote would be let loose and would cause an explosion that
> would create a very hot plasma from the projectile. You
> could fire the projectiles out of an ordinary pea shooter or
> dart gun if you wanted, the real difficulty is in creating
> the explosive anti-matter charge bullets. Creating the
> anti-matter itself is difficult though not impossible, and it
> is only a small amount. Creating the microscopic containment
> device / detonator seems challenging, but I'm sure with
> micro-electro mechanical systems, or nanotech, and a team of
> blue ribbon scientists all with PhD's in handwavology you
> could come up with something workable.
Bad bad bad idea. You'd die of radiation poisoning after the first
shot. The target would be messed up in a big way, too, for all the
consolation that is.
> Another possibilty could be to use poisons. A very small
> mass needle or fletchette poisoned with some sort of potent
> neurotoxin would certainly allow you to pack quite a bit of
> "killing" in one gun. However, you have the problem of your
> attacker(s) being capable of injuring you even after you have
> shot them since they will not die or be tremendously injured
> immediately.
Some cone snail venoms spread faster than the nerve conduction velocity,
causing nearly instant paralysis. A dart loaded with this purified (or
synthetic) cone snail toxin would likely lead to instant incapacitation.
> Here's a two part concept. Use a laser to vaporize or explode
> a projectile right as it contacts its target. This would be
> tricky, but not impossible.
Might as well just shoot the laser beam itself at the thing you are
trying to hit.
> One of the problems with laser
> weapons is that you really need the target to cooperate with
> you. If they move around while you are trying to burn them
> or if their surface coloring is such that they don't absorb
> the laser light very effeciently, then it's hard to injure
> them.
Not necessarily. For kilowatt level or lower continuous lasers, this is
pretty much true. It is tough to get someone to just stand there while
you burn a hole through them to their vital organs. At hundreds of
kilowatts, however, you can rapidly cause second or third degree flash
burns over most of the target's exposed surface, and even through light
clothing, as well as igniting anything flamable. Even today, anyone
with second degree burns over 40% of their body is in bad condition, and
survival is iffy even with medical attention. Think of this as a long
range flamethrower. These power levels will be difficult to acheive in
anything handheld from reasonable extrapolations from today's
technology, however. Pulsed lasers will be covered below.
> Having a high peak power, pulsed laser certainly
> makes the moving around problem not an issue, but you still
> have the problem of effecient absorption.
Not really. Nearly all the light from a high power, short duration
pulse will be absorbed by the target, regardless of its initial
reflectivity. This is because the leading part of the pulse flashes the
matter it hits to plasma, and the remainder of the pulse is absorbed by
the plasma. This leads to the energy of the pulse being efficiently
converted to the energy of a shock wave in the target. The shock will
cause mechanical damage due to stretching and shear forces, additional
mechanical damage at discontinuities in density (in the lung-air
interface, or bone - muscle interface, for example), in addition to
shock heating (causing "cooking" of the target) and even shock
vaporization near the point where the shock originated. It will be
difficult, however, to get a pulse of sufficient power to kill or
incapacitate (probably in the kilojoule to tens of kilojoules per pulse
range) from anything that can be handheld.
If you have a powerful enough laser, though, one neat thing you can do
with it is to use it as a laser launch system for bullets. The
projectile can have some sort of ablative coating on the back, or a
mirror that focuses the light to a point just behind the projectile. A
laser pulse either evaporates a surface layer of the ablative coat or
ionizes the air at the focal point of the mirror, in either case you get
an explosive expansion that drives the projectile forward. This would
allow you to have, in one weapon, a laser gun, a slug thrower, and a
grenade launcher. Let the laser be tuneable, and if you tune it to the
UV to partially ionize the air in the beam path and then discharge an
electric current down the ionized trail, you could use the weapon as a
long range taser as well.
Luke
John Kensmark
[buncha stuff]
> Now, it sounds like what you are trying to create is a small
> mass projectile that can still do a great deal of damage when
> it impacts. I can imagine several ways of doing that.
>
> The most straight forward way would be hypervelocity
> projectiles. There are two difficulties with this, one is
> accelerating the projectile to high velocities.
This is generally not a problem. Accelerating a small projectile to
high speeds is pretty easy, depending mostly on what one means by
"small" and "high speeds". Certainly, within the range of an
anti-personnel weapon that operates at ranges that don't require
computer targetting and whatnot, it's essentially a trivial
engineering problem that's already been solved in a number of ways.
> The other is producing the maximum amount of damage with the
> projectile. At slow enough speeds, the projectile won't have
> sufficient momentum to penetrate the target (presumedly a
> human(oid) body) and might just "bounce off" (quite
> embarrassing).
At speeds this slow, it might not even reach the target if the
target is any considerable distance away. A weapon that emits a
small projectile which won't penetrate a human's skin or normal
clothing isn't much of a weapon. There are plenty of slingshots
that will penetrate human skin.
> At slightly faster speeds, the projectile will penetrate, but
> due to its low mass and cross-sectional area it will just
> penetrate all the way through and not produce much damage.
This is basically a myth. Putting a noticeable hole (ie, almost any
hole) all the way through a human will cause that human substantial
damage.
> Eventually, you reach fast enough speeds where the bullet
> actually vaporizes into a plasma when it hits the target and
> actually does significant damage.
This isn't necessary, nor is it necessarily helpful. A projectile
which vaporizes will be harder to aim properly and will tend to
spread out before hitting the target.
> A more ambitious idea would be to use antimatter. A small
> speck (*really* small) of anti-matter would provide the
> "charge" for an explosive bullet. The anti-matter would be
> contained until detonation at which point, the anti-matter
> mote would be let loose and would cause an explosion that
> would create a very hot plasma from the projectile.
Unnecessary. If you can shoot a small piece of antimatter into a
human target, there's plenty of normal matter in the human body for
the antimatter to react to. Forget about a plasma impact; just let
the antimatter explode on contact with the human body. Of course,
if you have this kind of technology, you probably already have a
more elegant solution and don't need this weapon.
> Creating the anti-matter itself is difficult though not
> impossible, and it is only a small amount. Creating the
> microscopic containment device / detonator seems challenging,
> but I'm sure with micro-electro mechanical systems, or
> nanotech, and a team of blue ribbon scientists all with PhD's
> in handwavology you could come up with something workable.
As long as you're handwaving it, what difference does it make?
> Another possibilty could be to use poisons. A very small
> mass needle or fletchette poisoned with some sort of potent
> neurotoxin would certainly allow you to pack quite a bit of
> "killing" in one gun. However, you have the problem of your
> attacker(s) being capable of injuring you even after you have
> shot them since they will not die or be tremendously injured
> immediately.
There are fast-acting neurotoxins which can act incapacitate more
quickly, on average, than normal gunshot wounds (sodium thiopentane,
if memory serves, will paralyze an adult human in less than 1.5
seconds, with an LD50 dose of about 2 cc's). This is more expensive
and complex than normal bullets, which are pretty effective on their
own, which is one reason why you don't see anyone bothering.
> Here's a two part concept. Use a laser to vaporize or explode
> a projectile right as it contacts its target. This would be
> tricky, but not impossible.
Per a news story a couple of years ago, the US Army is developing a
weapon that renders this concept obsolete. Two concurrent lasers of
differing wavelengths are used. The system first fires a weak test
pulse to accurately gauge the distance to target, and then it fires
two more powerful beams which converge right near the target. Where
the beams converge, they interfere, and the resulting wavelength
does not penetrate air well. The air in the region of interference
heats up explosively, resulting in an expanding (ie, exploding) ball
of plasma. As long as the laser is firing, more energy is pumped
into the plasma (which, as it gets hotter, absorbs the laser more
efficiently; it doesn't get hot enough to reflect the beam).
Ordinance-free explosion-at-a-distance. The Army was reportedly
working on both a mounted (tank) and a satellite version. My guess
is that by the time such a system is likely feasible, it, too, will
be obsolete, so I wouldn't look for a handheld version.
> One of the problems with laser weapons is that you really need
> the target to cooperate with you. If they move around while
> you are trying to burn them or if their surface coloring is
> such that they don't absorb the laser light very effeciently,
> then it's hard to injure them.
So just use high power and, say, an x-ray laser. It goes right
through clothes and flesh but superheats the skeleton. Bang. With
a laser powerful enough to be a useful anti-personnel weapon, only
highly specialized clothing will be a significant problem, and the
target won't have time to move. The plasma plume from the wound
will do more to attenuate the laser than anything they're likely to
be wearing.
> However, you could create a very small projectile that
> absorbed your specific laser light very efficiently and would
> explode or vaporize after being hit by a short burst of light
> from your laser.
This would be less efficient and more complex than simply having a
more powerful (higher velocity) projectile in the first place.
Technology exists (although it's currently much too bulky for
man-portable use) to build a gun that fires a ten gram plastic slug
at 15,000 kps. That will demolish a current main battle tank.
> Thus, you could fire the projectile at your target, track the
> projectile in flight (and, of course, extrapolate the course
> of the projectile) using high speed computers and imaging
> systems, and then have the system automatically fire the
> laser pulse at the correct time and in the correct
> direction to explode / vaporize the projectile when it is
> the "optimum" distance from the target.
The US military's OICW system, currently intended for actual field
use, *already* does this with a much simpler system. A small
rifle-launched grenade has a built-in timer that, coupled with a
low-power laser range finder, causes it to explode at an optimum
distance from the target.
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
I think there is a world market for about five computers.
-- Thomas Watson, founder of IBM
John Kensmark
> Well, really, I would like a device that inflects pain, stuns,
> and kills all with the same weapon just on different "Power
> settings".
Well, gee, how about a club? I guess you probably want a weapon
with better range, but otherwise that qualifies. Plus it's cheap,
simple, and easy to use.
> So, basically the gun of this Sci-Fi future is a plasma weapon.
> It brings in air, or has a container of it when in vacuum
> operations, and begins to heat/charge it in a chamber. This change
> is sent out of the chamber using a magnetic field sled.
This is way too complicated. Plasma weapons have already been
designed, built, and tested. They're too bulky, with current tech,
to carry around, and the power demands are enormous, and they're not
as efficient (in several senses of the word) as current
chemical-based weapons. But they're out there, and they're not that
hard to look up.
> Problems with the above:
>
> Accuracy, could be solved by a magnetic conduit that extends
> on out through to the target [I don't like that].
A nice blast of very hot plasma will move through the air very
quickly. At ranges where it won't dissipate significantly, aiming
it isn't that much of a problem.
> Charge Build Up, materials something similar to rubber but
> many times better will surround the chamber and isolate it from
> the casing and protect the user...
Only if the user is in a Farraday cage. Insulation won't help
otherwise. A much better and simpler solution is to use bipolar
plasma, which is what working designs do. As long as the plasma is
hot enough (which it will be during the very brief time it's in the
gun), the ions won't be able to recombine soon enough to cause a
problem for you.
> Power, the power cell technology is pretty advanced and I'm
> fairly certain there will be plenty of energy to spare, a true
> energizer bunny :-)
As long as you're handwaving. The power demands will be enormous.
You'll also have to deal with heat and recoil.
> Settings, pain mostly a little heat sting and a small shock
> that's no more than a strong static shock like when you touch a
> person but just a little worse. Stun knocks you out much like a
> Tazer does, but where the shot hits there will be a good burn,
> maybe 1st or in extreme cases 2nd degree.
Plasma hot enough to travel easily through the air for a large
distance (say, more than ten feet) will cause 2nd or 3rd (or even
4th, charring of skeletal tissue) burns on contact with the human
body. A plasma weapon has more in common with a flamethrower than a
taser.
> Kill, either shocks you to death or burns a big enough hole in
> you that a vital system is compromised and you die.
Electrical shock would be the least of your worries. Your tissues,
on impact, would be superheated to the point of vaporizing, probably
explosively. Plasma from viable plasma weapons eats through
concrete the way a blowtorch eats polystyrene. It melts steel.
Human tissues are no match.
Plasma doesn't penetrate air efficiently. A laser weapon with the
same power source can be much more efficient. Plasma weapons that
have been designed are usually intended to be highly inefficient
(but, frex, easy to build, perhaps nuclear-pumped) and are often
offshoots of other research. It was discovered, for instance, that
a tank with a coil gun could also fire big blasts of plasma without
much modification. This could be handy for removing some obstacles
with reduced collateral damage, and it's easier than putting both a
coil gun and a laser on the same tank.
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
I have made good judgements in the past.
I have made good judgements in the future.
-- Dan Quayle
Luke Campbell
> Here is the list of the animals that I've found:
> Phyllobates terribiles (doesn't have to enter blood stream, touching
> the skin is enough, take a few minutes to kill, not fun)
The poison dart frogs (of which Phyllobates is a member) have virulent
toxins, but they are not particularly effective unless you can get it
through the skin. As the subject of this subthread is venoms injkected
by a dart, this is not much of a limitation however. Nevertheless, you
do not die merely by handling poison dart frogs (although some of the
more virulent can cause tingling and localized numbness). If the toxins
contact the mucous membranes, however, you are in trouble. Death from
injection by a blow gun dart coated in poison dart frog poison does, as
you say, cause death in a few minutes, or even a few tens of seconds.
This is probably not fast enough to keep someone from shooting you or
sticking a knife in you, though.
> Cone shells (have to penetrate the skin, quick and *painFULL*)
Good choice. Nearly instant incapacitiation, in fish anyway. There have
been few clinical cases of cone snail envenomation in humans, and the
type of venom cone snails inject can vary widely from species to
species. At least one species produces a toxin that can instantly induce
paralysis in the fish it spears.
> Bungarus caerulus (10 - 15 seconds to die, have to penetrate the skin)
This is clearly an exageration. Death from snake envenomation in humans
rarely occurs in less than a few hours, although in severe cases deaths
in half an hour might be credible. Kraits (genus Bungarus) are no
exception.
> Crotalus viridis viridis (10 - 20 minutes, have to penetrate skin,
> heart stop)
This is, likewise, total bunk. The prairie rattlesnake (Crotalus viridis
viridis), like most other rattlesnakes, has a very low chance of killing
a human with a bite. Death, when it occurs, happens after many hours or
a few days. The protienases in the venom will cause swelling and redness
in the affected member, and severe pain, but although it may hurt so much
that you will wish you were dead, you will probably survive. Symptoms
usually take several minutes to set in, although a burning pain may be
experienced immediately. Loss of function in a bitten limb is more
likley than death, though this is also not particularly likely. With
modern medical attention, there is almost no chance of loss of life or
limb, and the pain and suffering can be markedly decreased.
The Mojave rattlesnake (Crotalus scutulatus) is the most dangerous of all
the American rattlesnakes, because its venom often contains a high
concentration of a potent neurotoxin. This can cause partial to total
paralysis and respiratory failure in an hour or so on a bad bite.
> Naja nivea (upper body injury, death in 10 minutes)
While the cape cobra (Naja nivea) and cobras in general (genus Naja), are
extremely dangerous venomous snakes, their venom still takes time to kill
humans. Death in ten minutes is extremely unlikely, most bites will kill
on a time scale of hours to days, if they are lethal at all.
> Agkistrodon contortix ( 1 - 5 minutes for several drops of this guy's
> venom)
Now this is just laughable. The American copperhead viper (Agkistrodon
contortix) is just about as harmless as venomous snakes come. The
copperhead bite produces effects much like that of the rattlesnake, that
is, local swelling, inflamation, tenderness, and pain, but the small size
of the snake and the low toxicity of the venom make copperhead bites of
little danger, although you will be hurting for several days. It takes
multiple bites from multiple copperheads to kill a human, with possible
exceptions of the very sick and weak, the very old, or the very young.
This should not be confused with the Australian copperhead, a very much
more dangerous snake.
The most potent snake venom comes from the sea snakes. Second in
toxicity are the venoms of several Australian elapids, notably the taipan
or fierce snake (genus Oxyuranus). Althout mortality from this snake can
near 100%, there is still usually time to get the patient to the
emergency ward and administer antivenom.
> Oh, btw, poisons can do better ( ISTR that they are define as non bio
> killing agensts, while venoms are bio killing agents).
Not quite. Poisons are any substance that can kill by chemical means.
Venoms are poisons that are administered by injection, the term venom is
usually only applied to biologically produced substances, but not all
biologically produced toxins are venoms (as in the case of pufferfish or
poison frogs, where the toxin must be ingested before it can take
effect).
> Anyone has an idea about those? What I listed are defined as venoms, I
> think.
Nerve toxins like sarin or VX are always good.
Luke
John Kensmark
>
> "Christopher Michael Jones" <cjo...@ix.cs.uoregon.edu> wrote in
> message news:8mbdcj$cfm$1...@helix.cs.uoregon.edu...
[poisons aren't fast enough]
> That is not quite true, there are number of poisons which
> (while do not kill instantly) will render the enemy incapable
> of harming in any way. Most of those poisons come from
> creatures which don't usually have contact with humans. I'm
> doing a search right now about the creatures that create those
> poisons, but basically they all share some common traits, they
> are deadly (usually) and they start affecting immediately,
> *very* painful, some documented case speak about someone
> grinding his own teeth to dust from the pain, and all sorts of
> other fun things that you don't want to see anywhere except at
> Jerry Springer.
Many of the animals which produce the reputedly most painful poisons
don't necessarily kill you, actually. Frex, with some of the fish
whose poisons cause the most fatalities (among fish which poison
people, not including folks who die from *eating* the fish), the
victims usually die not from the poison *per se* but because they're
in too much pain to swim, and they drown.
Look up the weeverfish (Trachnius draco) and the stonefish
(Synanceja)--or, closely related, the somewhat less painful but
still excruciating zebrafish (Pterois), both of the oft toxic
Scorpaenidae family. Weeverfish can be especially nasty because
some of them live in groups in sandy areas, and victims can be stung
multiple times. Victims of stonefish poisoning (who step on the
fish) have reportedly caused themselves serious physical damage from
the vigor of their convulsions.
Some experts regard stonefish toxin as the single most painful
poison. It acts virtually instantaneously. Victims have been known
to collapse right away and drown in very shallow water simply
because they couldn't get up.
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
Republicans understand the importance of bondage between
a mother and child.
-- Dan Quayle
Luke Campbell
> Christopher Michael Jones wrote:
>
> > At slightly faster speeds, the projectile will penetrate, but
> > due to its low mass and cross-sectional area it will just
> > penetrate all the way through and not produce much damage.
>
> This is basically a myth. Putting a noticeable hole (ie, almost any
> hole) all the way through a human will cause that human substantial
> damage.
Just about anyone can survive a stab wound from a needle. Even a really
long needle that goes all the way through them. Slightly wider wounds,
say, from a pencil or something of similar thickness, are unlikley to
kill quickly even if it pierces a vital organ.
> > Eventually, you reach fast enough speeds where the bullet
> > actually vaporizes into a plasma when it hits the target and
> > actually does significant damage.
>
> This isn't necessary, nor is it necessarily helpful. A projectile
> which vaporizes will be harder to aim properly and will tend to
> spread out before hitting the target.
I think the idea is that the projectile shock vaporizes upon striking
the target (and some of the target shock vaporizes as well).
> > Here's a two part concept. Use a laser to vaporize or explode
> > a projectile right as it contacts its target. This would be
> > tricky, but not impossible.
>
> Per a news story a couple of years ago, the US Army is developing a
> weapon that renders this concept obsolete. Two concurrent lasers of
> differing wavelengths are used. The system first fires a weak test
> pulse to accurately gauge the distance to target, and then it fires
> two more powerful beams which converge right near the target. Where
> the beams converge, they interfere, and the resulting wavelength
> does not penetrate air well. The air in the region of interference
> heats up explosively, resulting in an expanding (ie, exploding) ball
> of plasma. As long as the laser is firing, more energy is pumped
> into the plasma (which, as it gets hotter, absorbs the laser more
> efficiently; it doesn't get hot enough to reflect the beam).
>
> Ordinance-free explosion-at-a-distance. The Army was reportedly
> working on both a mounted (tank) and a satellite version. My guess
> is that by the time such a system is likely feasible, it, too, will
> be obsolete, so I wouldn't look for a handheld version.
Interesting idea. You still get an explosion if you aim the laser at a
piece of solid matter, but I suppose this allows you to create
explosions above the ground, for airbursts and whatnot. The lack of
fragmentation is likely to be problematic, though.
> > One of the problems with laser weapons is that you really need
> > the target to cooperate with you. If they move around while
> > you are trying to burn them or if their surface coloring is
> > such that they don't absorb the laser light very effeciently,
> > then it's hard to injure them.
>
> So just use high power and, say, an x-ray laser. It goes right
> through clothes and flesh but superheats the skeleton. Bang. With
> a laser powerful enough to be a useful anti-personnel weapon, only
> highly specialized clothing will be a significant problem, and the
> target won't have time to move. The plasma plume from the wound
> will do more to attenuate the laser than anything they're likely to
> be wearing.
The problem with x-ray lasers is that backscattered x-rays from the beam
will cause radiation damage to the person firing the gun. The person
hit by the x-ray laser will take a lethal dose of radiation, even if the
wound itself does not kill them. X-ray lasers have trouble getting
through the atmosphere, so it is likely to be short ranged. (X-rays are
readily absorbed by air over several meters to tens of meters. You need
to generate a very narrow beam that heats the air to near vacuum so the
rest of the beam can propagate without being absorbed. Heating and
evacuating this tunnel uses up energy from the pulse, so the range is
limited by both the energy of the pulse and diffraction of the x-rays
from this very narrow beam).
Luke
Luke Campbell
> So, basically the gun of this Sci-Fi future is a plasma weapon. It brings in
> air, or has a container of it when in vacuum operations, and begins to
> heat/charge it in a chamber. This change is sent out of the chamber using a
> magnetic field sled. Once the charge leaves the barrel and goes on it's
> course towards the target [similar problems with accuracy to a bullet, but
> for different reasons, (possibly the magnetic field isn't tuned right)].
> You'll always have some electrical shock with each shot and you'll have some
> minor burning invovled as well, but both are adjustable from the minimums.
A pulse of plasma will start to disperse as soon as it leaves the weapon. You
would get an explosion just in front of the barrel (for lack of a better term)
of the gun, and maybe a jet of hot gas that extends a little ways forward.
There may be ways to get self contained balls of plasma (ball lightning, for
example), but modern science does not know how to do so. Basically, currents
in the plasma have to set up a magnetic field that acts to contain the plasma
and keep it from spreading. The plasma will probably be of low density, and
will thus not go very far though the air (a few tens of centimeters?) until it
is slowed it near the local wind speed.
Luke
Christopher Michael Jones
> Christopher Michael Jones wrote:
> > At slightly faster speeds, the projectile will penetrate, but
> > due to its low mass and cross-sectional area it will just
> > penetrate all the way through and not produce much damage.
> This is basically a myth. Putting a noticeable hole (ie, almost any
> hole) all the way through a human will cause that human substantial
> damage.
Ummmm, wanna bet? You might be able to injure them, but in some
cases, shooting a small hole in someone might not be as effective
as simply hiting them with a big rock.
If all you do is poke a hole in someone, you run the risk of
angering them and then having them beat the ever loving
daylights out of you.
> > Eventually, you reach fast enough speeds where the bullet
> > actually vaporizes into a plasma when it hits the target and
> > actually does significant damage.
> This isn't necessary, nor is it necessarily helpful. A projectile
> which vaporizes will be harder to aim properly and will tend to
> spread out before hitting the target.
The point is to get it to vaporize or explode when it hits
the target, not in the atmosphere.
> > A more ambitious idea would be to use antimatter. A small
> > speck (*really* small) of anti-matter would provide the
> > "charge" for an explosive bullet. The anti-matter would be
> > contained until detonation at which point, the anti-matter
> > mote would be let loose and would cause an explosion that
> > would create a very hot plasma from the projectile.
> Unnecessary. If you can shoot a small piece of antimatter into a
> human target, there's plenty of normal matter in the human body for
> the antimatter to react to. Forget about a plasma impact; just let
> the antimatter explode on contact with the human body. Of course,
> if you have this kind of technology, you probably already have a
> more elegant solution and don't need this weapon.
Either way, the problem is the same. Containing a small mote of
anti-matter during storage, firing the bit of anti-matter with
any kind of reasonable accuracy and range, and ensuring the
anti-matter "charge" explodes where it is supposed to. Unless
you want to blow up yourself and half the county, you are only
going to need the smallest of motes of anti-matter (probably
micrograms or so. 1 microgram of anti-matter has an explosive
power of .04 tons of TNT when reacted with an equal amount of
matter). At those sizes, it would be difficult preventing a
naked anti-matter mote from reacting with the atmosphere during
flight and exploding very prematurely. Even with something a
bit larger, you have the problem of your mote of anti-matter
smacking into a mote of dust or a piece of hair, or a
micro-scopic skin flake, etc. and exploding nowhere near where
you want it too (most likely closer to you than to your
opponent). That is why I think a physical containment device
that protects the anti-matter mote in flight and makes sure it
is not exploded prematurely is the better way to go.
> > Creating the anti-matter itself is difficult though not
> > impossible, and it is only a small amount. Creating the
> > microscopic containment device / detonator seems challenging,
> > but I'm sure with micro-electro mechanical systems, or
> > nanotech, and a team of blue ribbon scientists all with PhD's
> > in handwavology you could come up with something workable.
> As long as you're handwaving it, what difference does it make?
I think I am entitled to at least one handwave. :D
> There are fast-acting neurotoxins which can act incapacitate more
> quickly, on average, than normal gunshot wounds (sodium thiopentane,
> if memory serves, will paralyze an adult human in less than 1.5
> seconds, with an LD50 dose of about 2 cc's). This is more expensive
> and complex than normal bullets, which are pretty effective on their
> own, which is one reason why you don't see anyone bothering.
1.5 seconds seems awfully long to me. I don't know what kind of
guns you prefer, but I like the "kills on contact! (TM)" varieties.
> > Here's a two part concept. Use a laser to vaporize or explode
> > a projectile right as it contacts its target. This would be
> > tricky, but not impossible.
> Per a news story a couple of years ago, the US Army is developing a
> weapon that renders this concept obsolete. Two concurrent lasers of
> differing wavelengths are used. The system first fires a weak test
> pulse to accurately gauge the distance to target, and then it fires
> two more powerful beams which converge right near the target. Where
> the beams converge, they interfere, and the resulting wavelength
> does not penetrate air well. The air in the region of interference
> heats up explosively, resulting in an expanding (ie, exploding) ball
> of plasma. As long as the laser is firing, more energy is pumped
> into the plasma (which, as it gets hotter, absorbs the laser more
> efficiently; it doesn't get hot enough to reflect the beam).
> Ordinance-free explosion-at-a-distance. The Army was reportedly
> working on both a mounted (tank) and a satellite version. My guess
> is that by the time such a system is likely feasible, it, too, will
> be obsolete, so I wouldn't look for a handheld version.
Hmmm, not too shaby.
> > One of the problems with laser weapons is that you really need
> > the target to cooperate with you. If they move around while
> > you are trying to burn them or if their surface coloring is
> > such that they don't absorb the laser light very effeciently,
> > then it's hard to injure them.
> So just use high power and, say, an x-ray laser. It goes right
> through clothes and flesh but superheats the skeleton. Bang. With
> a laser powerful enough to be a useful anti-personnel weapon, only
> highly specialized clothing will be a significant problem, and the
> target won't have time to move. The plasma plume from the wound
> will do more to attenuate the laser than anything they're likely to
> be wearing.
Well, quite. But I was very much trying to provide a solution
to the problem of a laser that is not quite powerful enough to
do direct damage (due to the various issues I discussed). If
you have a powerful enough laser, then, certainly, the problems
are a non-issue.
> This would be less efficient and more complex than simply having a
> more powerful (higher velocity) projectile in the first place.
> Technology exists (although it's currently much too bulky for
> man-portable use) to build a gun that fires a ten gram plastic slug
> at 15,000 kps. That will demolish a current main battle tank.
See, I was talking about very low mass projectiles. Grain of
sand type stuff, milligrams, not grams. Sorry if I didn't make
that clear.
> The US military's OICW system, currently intended for actual field
> use, *already* does this with a much simpler system. A small
> rifle-launched grenade has a built-in timer that, coupled with a
> low-power laser range finder, causes it to explode at an optimum
> distance from the target.
Again though, the thread originator was talking about very low
mass projectiles, thus giving you a a very large number of
shots in a small magazine.
Grenades are all fine and good, but considering you can only
maybe carry a few dozen of them at most, it hardly seems
germane to the issue at hand.
Toe
<lwc...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>There may be ways to get self contained balls of plasma (ball lightning, for
>example), but modern science does not know how to do so.
Isn't that the reason for the "sf" in this newsgroup? ;)
Erik Max Francis
> Are you sure you don't mean metres per second? 15,000 km/s is 44,000
> times the speed of sound in air, and 1/20 the speed of light!
Indeed. The highest muzzle speeds I've heard for those hypersonic
projectiles is a few km/s. I haven't heard of anything as high as 15
km/s, much less 15 000 km/s.
--
Erik Max Francis / m...@alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
__ San Jose, CA, US / 37 20 N 121 53 W / ICQ16063900 / &tSftDotIotE
/ \ Never be the first to believe / Never be the last to deceive
\__/ Florence, _Chess_
Erik Max Francis' bookmarks / http://www.alcyone.com/max/links/
A highly categorized list of Web links.
J
Gee, luck would have it that anything I can think of is completely
impossible.
Laser weapons of all types can cause radiation problems for the user.
Plasma weapons can't incompacitate, they just kill.
The story line involves people who are very conservitive, think of the
Federation from Star Trek, they really hate to kill. So, being able to just
make someone fall to the ground and take a few minutes of napping is
perferable. However, at the same time these folks will be fighting others
that don't have the same "work ethic" as they do, and in some cases they
will need to use deadly force... in other cases they will be firing against
vehicles such as "tanks" [no other word to describe them] and these weapons
need to be able to fire in the area of 10+ of those high powered shots.
When I originally tried to design the device [and give it some minimum
technobable] I couldn't and gave up on it until I saw a Discovery special on
storms and they showed a little bit on the Lightning Ball. The very thing I
saw next was someone pulling a trigger and a similar ball [around 1 or 2 cm
in diameter] coming out; the results were 1 guy in a good amount of pain
[but if he is tolerent to pain he might be able to fight back], 1 guy on the
ground breathing but not coming up for a while, 1 smoking guy, and 1 hole in
the wall. So, I've got the effect down pat in my head------- it needs a
cause.
I don't want to iradiate the subject, it's kinda inhumane to make a person
impossible to give a proper burial. I don't want to kill the user either,
and I don't want to kill the person I want to knock-out and take back to
base for "conversation." So a laser is out almost be default.
Ions are nice, and what else is nice about them is that the process to
ionize air, makes it easy to heat it up into plamsa [with modifications if
you need it]. So, you've got the first three settings with the ions [pain,
stun, kill] and then the plamsa is the last two [kill, destroy]. But, the
last time I brought them up, I was told that Ions are too easily aborbed by
air which limits the distance effect of the device. I only care about what's
infront of you... we're not talking about more than a few tens of meters...
wouldn't need it for more than a kilometer and really what good will it do
past 250 meters when it comes to basically untrained folks?
Uh, before I forget it, someone mentioned that grenades are big. Not
necessarily. When it comes down to it, what the yield of the grenade is
depends on what you use in it... you can get all the effect you need from a
bullet size piece of antimatter-- the containment is the problem there.
Someone else mentioned some things about lasers. There is a good reason why
I don't like the specific type of lasers that are being discussed. Without
the radiation involved, a laser beam would more or less be like a knife. If
you pull the trigger and hold it, whatever walks across the path of that
beam will get damaged... if you take a piece of wood and swipe it infront of
the beam it will have at the least a burn line on it. The same effect can be
achieved by moving the gun around. -- I perfer a weapon with the cabilities
of a Star Trek Phaser and the effect [if only the VFX] of a Babylon 5 gun.
The size, however, does not have to be uniform... the pistols don't have to
have the same ability to use the "destroy" setting, and they only need the
10+ rating on the kill [about the same amount of rounds a revolver can carry
which is 6 in most cases, but we do want to go to the metric system in all
things :-) ]. So, it's not a problem to limit the smaller device, though
when I think about it, the Star Wars pistol, which is more like a submachine
gun in size, would be best as the "smaller" gun because I don't think it'd
be reasonable that on the technology for it to be in the size of the B5 and
ST weapons. So, because the Star Wars gun is fairly large enough, the power
cell just has to be easily changed and it would be able to have all four of
the fire settings [though in this case, using such a sized gun, I think that
anything larger would be for other purposes beyond the infintry's weapon of
choice]. [Note: I'm not using those designs, just using things that are
familar to me to describe what I'm thinking of.]
Now, for to introduce me to the group's dictionary... can someone tell me
what handwaving means? :-)
Poisons are, well low-tech don't you think? Not to be rude at all... it's
just we've been using from for a few centuries and I'd like to use an energy
weapon. Now, there are obvious plot lines for piosons, when you need to
improvise, but the main weapons would be perfered to be energy based... and
the same thing about clubs, though the riot weapons will be a combination of
a club and a tazer [you have to wear something to protect your self to even
use it, but hey it sounds cool to me].
Uh, now, back to something else, I should have talked about a long time ago
in this post. I had previously posted on a similar topic about a pure energy
weapon [which is what I wanted to be truthful]. But I was told that just a
device was realistically impossible [something I still have doubts on,
though]. So, the solution was to add something to the weapon which would
make it keep the charge as it goes through the air, but wouldn't do any
additional harm to the target... that's where I got the sand bit, guess it
wasn't so clever.
As for JV, I didn't know he had thought of such a system. I didn't want to
use a bullet, but I'll thank him for the idea if it works out in some for or
another :-)
J
Toe <epast...@AMerols.com> wrote in message
news:epastoreSP-8A521...@news.erols.com...
Yes, but the main purpose of the original question was to make a the weapon
as close to possible with current scientific understanding.
Blaine Manyluk
<3989DBE9...@my-deja.com>...
> This would be less efficient and more complex than simply having a
> more powerful (higher velocity) projectile in the first place.
> Technology exists (although it's currently much too bulky for
> man-portable use) to build a gun that fires a ten gram plastic slug
> at 15,000 kps. That will demolish a current main battle tank.
Are you sure you don't mean metres per second? 15,000 km/s is 44,000
times the speed of sound in air, and 1/20 the speed of light!
======================================================================
[To reply, remove the S's from my address, and change the R's to N's.]
An infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters
will eventually come up with a good _Voyager_ script.
Ayende Rahien
"John Kensmark" <kens...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:3989E0FF...@my-deja.com...
Which was my point, killing the enemy is in lower priority, taking him
out is of higher priority, if it gets some of the venom you listed, it
won't be able to do much.
Robert O'Connor
<Aye...@softhome.net> wrote:
>Which was my point, killing the enemy is in lower priority, taking him
>out is of higher priority, if it gets some of the venom you listed, it
>won't be able to do much.
>
Let's step back for a minute here, guys.
The fastest any poison can act systemically is going to be a function
of circulation time :- a minute will be sufficient to distribute an
agent throughout the body.
The 'arm-brain' time is about fifteen seconds.
Conotoxins and stonefish venoms act by blocking sodium channels in
peripheral nerve. Pain sensation from stonefish envenomation takes
about 2-3 seconds to hit, as the nerve fibres that carry the modality
of pain are small and have slow conduction velocities (~0.1-0.2m/sec).
I agree that organophosphate nerve agents such as VX and sarin are
highly effective, due to their phenomenal affinity for
acetylcholinesterase and the irreversible nature of their binding to
the active site of said enzyme.
Other interesting compounds :-
* cyanides - bind to Fe3+ in mitochondrial cytochromes.
Unconsciousness in 15 seconds, fitting in the next 45 seconds.
* fluorides - lethal in microgram quantities. Fluorinated compounds
such as trifluoroacetate especially nasty as they block the citric
acid cycle (part of aerobic respiration).
* phosphines - commonly used in suicide attempts in India and
Pakistan. Potent liver toxins, about as quick as cyanides in onset.
* potassium salts - as used in cardioplegia solutions to stop the
heart for cardiac surgery. Would be undetectable at autopsy.
* the 'vet's cocktail' - potassium chloride, adrenaline (epinephrine)
and thiopentone (Pentothal) - actually also used in state sponsored
executions. Death following intravenous injection in 60 seconds.
* tetrodotoxin - one of the most potent sodium channel blockers known.
Lethal dose is on the order of micrograms per kilogram (due to
respiratory muscle paralysis).
Dr. Robert O'Connor
Toxicology is interesting, but messy, from my point of view.
Hound of Cullen
says...
: The story line involves people who are very conservitive, think of the
: Federation from Star Trek, they really hate to kill. So, being able to just
: make someone fall to the ground and take a few minutes of napping is
: perferable. However, at the same time these folks will be fighting others
: that don't have the same "work ethic" as they do, and in some cases they
: will need to use deadly force... in other cases they will be firing against
: vehicles such as "tanks" [no other word to describe them] and these weapons
: need to be able to fire in the area of 10+ of those high powered shots.
Your best bet would probably be some sort of concussion grenade, similar
to the "flasbangs" used by SWAT teams. These are pretty effective at
stunning and disorienting a group of people.
Couple a small concussion round with a fancy, proximity targeting system.
The more damage you want to do, the closer to the target the round
detonates.
Hound
--
Not a demographic -- Do not measure
Ayende Rahien
"Robert O'Connor" <rob...@ozemail.com.au> wrote in message
news:398ba6eb...@news.ozemail.com.au...
> * potassium salts - as used in cardioplegia solutions to stop the
> heart for cardiac surgery. Would be undetectable at autopsy.
The result is a heart attack? How fast does it affect?
Where a common person is likely to find it? (Story, I don't intend to
kill anyone in the nera future)
Ayende Rahien
target with a pistol at anything beyond 70 - 90 meters range, assult
rifle are much better, but they have an accuracy range of about 400-
600 meters.
Submachine guns are *lame* when it come to accuracy, btw.
The best you are going to get from hand held weapon isn't going to be
much over a mile, btw. Currently, I'm not aware of many weapons that
can be reliablely used with ranges of around 1 - 1.25 km, and even
fewer people that can actually use those weapons good enough for it to
count. I'm talking about sharpshooters, of course, and that take a lot
of training.
I wouldn't rule out poison if I were you.
They are the only way I can think of to have all three methods that
you want, (well, two out of three isn't that bad).
And I would go to a swim with cone snails before I would handle an
anti matter gun.
That is just a... little too risky, you understand.
Luke Campbell
> Laser weapons of all types can cause radiation problems for the user.
IR, visible, and near UV lasers do not have problems with ionizing radiation,
but dazzling from the flash tehy make or blindness from specular reflection of
the beam are problems. It is only when you get into the x-ray region that
ionizing radiation starts becoming a problem.
> I don't want to iradiate the subject, it's kinda inhumane to make a person
> impossible to give a proper burial. I don't want to kill the user either,
> and I don't want to kill the person I want to knock-out and take back to
> base for "conversation." So a laser is out almost be default.
Here are a few ideas. First, use a low powered UV laser that ionizes the air
along its beam path, but does not have enough oomph to do much more that cause
a small burn. Use this ion trail as a wave guide to discharge a capacitor or
inductor across. ZAP! Effects are similar to being hit by lightning, or
sticking your fingers in an electric socket. A sort of loing range tazer. The
effect of being hit can be scaled up or down by adjusting the voltage and
current that flow down the ionized trail. At high powers, the target
litterally explodes, at low powers, he just sort of tingles and jumps around a
bit.
Second, have a gun that shoots small guided rockets at relatively low
velocities. This will give the visual effect you seem to be looking for - a
flare of light that shoots toward the target. By fiddling with the drive
system (the rocket sucks in air, ionizes it, and shoots the high temperature
air out the back) you can get rid of the smoke trail and just have a bright
glowing light from the exhaust. The "warhead" of the rocket can be a charged
up "powercell," or whatever it is you use to store energy and turn it into
electricity. On contact, it acts like an electric stun gun. Put enough charge
into it, and the electric current causes an explosion, with less current, it
will just stun or knock out electrical systems.
Third, have the gun shoot out something very sticky, that tangles up the
target, maybe something like a small grenade that explodes into something like
a giant cobweb.
Fourth, shoot out a beam of microwaves. These heat up the target enough that
it suffers immediate heat stroke and falls unconscious, but does not die. In
relatively cool climates, it should cool off enough to regain consciousness in
a few minutes. The microwaves can also act as an EMP to knock out electronics.
Fifth, people have long speculated that certain frequencies of sound can cause
incapacitation or unconsciousness. So far, it is difficult to get weapons
operating on these principles to work, mainly because they tend to rupture the
eardrum before causing incapacity, but just assume your future society has
solved that problem. Such a weapon might shoot out a fairly wide cone, like a
shot gun, and would likely be fairly short ranged.
Sixth, shoot a normal bullet, but give it a load of nanites. The bullet causes
the normal damage - ripping through tissue, causing massive bleeding, smashing
bones, exploding organs, etc, but the nanites repair the damage in a few
minutes, before irreversable brain damage sets in. Just avoid head shots, and
your target will recover good as new.
Seventh, shoot a pulse of light from a long wavelength IR laser that isn't
focused enough to burn. It does heat up the tissues, and heats them up rapidly
enough that they cause a weak shock wave in the body. It acts something like a
long range punch, and can batter a person without killing.
Eigth, shoot acoustic solitons. These, likewise, can batter a person into
submission without killing, also like a long range punch. These thingies
actually exist, but have diffiuclties as far as using one for a weapon. Just
assume your society found tech fixes around the difficulies.
> Now, for to introduce me to the group's dictionary... can someone tell me
> what handwaving means? :-)
Giving a "sounds good" minimal explination without going to far into the
details, often to cover up the fact that such a thing cannot be done or cannot
be easily explained by today's science, but which gives enough verisimilitude
to cause at least some suspension of disbelief. Many of the descriptions above
are hand waving. It is nothing to be ashamed about, it is a long standing
tradition in science fiction.
Luke
J
Ayende Rahien <Aye...@softhome.net> wrote in message
news:8me3lm$dlt$2...@feedme.surfree.net.il...
> Just as a note, I don't think that I would be able to hit a man size
> target with a pistol at anything beyond 70 - 90 meters range, assult
> rifle are much better, but they have an accuracy range of about 400-
> 600 meters.
I'm talking about the size of the weapons, not the actual weapon... pistol
size is too small for the level of technology in the story. And the Rifle is
just plain too big for many cases.....
> Submachine guns are *lame* when it come to accuracy, btw.
But submachine guns are medium size, they are half way between pistols and
rifles which is just what would work. I'm not going to use the Submachine
gun, or a similar case, I'm just thinking that a weapon of that size is what
I'm after.
John Kensmark
>
> J wrote:
>
>> Laser weapons of all types can cause radiation problems for the
>> user.
>
> ionizing radiation, but dazzling from the flash tehy make or
> blindness from specular reflection of the beam are problems. It
> is only when you get into the x-ray region that ionizing
> radiation starts becoming a problem.
Is fractured reflection really a significant problem with an
invisible wavelength laser? I haven't heard of it being a problem.
> Here are a few ideas. First, use a low powered UV laser that
> ionizes the air along its beam path, [...] Use this ion trail as
> a wave guide to discharge a capacitor or inductor across. ZAP!
I've been hearing about these sorts of laser weapons since the late
seventies, but I've never seen one demonstrated. This makes me
suspect that the damn thing is mighty hard to get to work.
Non-lethal laser weapons *currently in commercial production*
include 'dazzler' systems that are going into limited use with SWAT
teams in parts of the US. These fire optically brilliant but
non-damaging beams in a circular patch; when shone on a target's
face, the bright, zig-zagging light produces a strong enough sensory
stimulation so that the target is theoretically briefly
incapacitated. This apparently worked well enough in open trials to
make the LAPD representatives drool on themselves.
> Second, have a gun that shoots small guided rockets at relatively
> low velocities.
This sort of thing certainly sounds neat, but it's either awfully
complicated (ala "Runaway") or else not terribly workable (ala the
various gyrojet-style handguns). SWAT teams are also now
experimenting with a rapid fire paintball-sort of weapon that
delivers a rather stinging blow out to about 100m, except that the
balls are filled with both fluorescent marking dye and capsein (tear
gas, basically). The gun is the size of an assault rifle.
> Third, have the gun shoot out something very sticky, that
> tangles up the target, maybe something like a small grenade
> that explodes into something like a giant cobweb.
"Taffy guns" that look like a cross between a flame thrower and a
fire extinguisher have been tested for possible use both by SWAT
teams and the US Marine Corp (which is expecting to do more police
work in the future). These fire a thick, continuous stream of gunk
up to about 30 feet away; the gunk is very sticky and thickens on
contact with air. It doesn't quite harden but becomes stiff and
elastic and quite restraining and is difficult to remove. It
doesn't work as perfectly as one might hope, and the supply of
"taffy" is an issue (you run out pretty quickly).
> Fourth, shoot out a beam of microwaves. These heat up the
> target enough that it suffers immediate heat stroke and falls
> unconscious, but does not die.
This should essentially be possible--alternate home heating systems
that use microwaves to heat people up have actually been tested--but
I don't know how quickly a person could drop from microwave-induced
heatstroke. Also, there'd be variation from person to person of how
much 'cooking' it'd take, and what would be required to cook one guy
might very well kill the next.
> Fifth, people have long speculated that certain frequencies of
> sound can cause incapacitation or unconsciousness. So far, it
> is difficult to get weapons operating on these principles to
> work, mainly because they tend to rupture the eardrum before
> causing incapacity, but just assume your future society has
> solved that problem. Such a weapon might shoot out a fairly
> wide cone, like a shot gun, and would likely be fairly short
> ranged.
This is way beyond speculation already. There is at least one
design that's already going into production. It's considerably
larger than a shotgun but is man-portable and it uses a small
modified rocket engine to produce powerful waves of directed
infrasound. The waves do spread out into a cone. I don't know what
the effective range is. The effects on targets include dizziness,
severe nausea, and uncontrollable defecation and urination.
Unpleasant, but perhaps not moreso than tear gas. Note that
friendly units might be able to become 'immune' to the infrasound
through advanced active cancellation, which you can look up on the
web if you like.
> Sixth, shoot a normal bullet, but give it a load of nanites.
If you have nanotechnology (or, if you like, handwaving) this
advanced, you don't need anything this complicated.
> Seventh, shoot a pulse of light from a long wavelength IR laser
> that isn't focused enough to burn. It does heat up the tissues,
> and heats them up rapidly enough that they cause a weak shock
> wave in the body. It acts something like a long range punch,
> and can batter a person without killing.
A shockwave like this would be caused by the expansion of the heated
tissues. In order for the tissues to expand suddenly and severely
enough to batter a person, they'd have to explode.
> Eigth, shoot acoustic solitons. These, likewise, can batter
> a person into submission without killing, also like a long
> range punch. These thingies actually exist, but have
> diffiuclties as far as using one for a weapon. Just assume
> your society found tech fixes around the difficulies.
There *is* such a thing as an acoustic soliton; it has to do with
the physics of wave behavior, as in water or plasma. I don't know
much about it, and I haven't heard of weapons applications, so I
can't really comment.
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant.
John Kensmark
>
> John Kensmark wrote:
>
>> Christopher Michael Jones wrote:
>>
>>> due to its low mass and cross-sectional area it will just
>>> penetrate all the way through and not produce much damage.
>>
>> This is basically a myth. Putting a noticeable hole (ie, almost
>> any hole) all the way through a human will cause that human
>> substantial damage.
>
> really long needle that goes all the way through them.
It will still do, at the least, "substantial damage", as I said.
Internal bleeding will likely be non-trivial. Note that the FBI's
current research indicates that the vast majority of deaths from
gunshot wounds are from bleeding. Bleeding doesn't get enough
credit. Losing blood is bad.
Moreover, any hole through any large part of the body has an
excellent chance of either hitting an artery (arterial bleeding is
especially bad) or an important organ (a hole through an organ is
also bad). It's easy to say that most people can survive having a
needle stuck all the way through their bodies, but it's not really
something that's been tested all that much.
> Slightly wider wounds, say, from a pencil or something of similar
> thickness, are unlikley to kill quickly even if it pierces a vital
> organ.
You're fooling yourself. A pencil-diameter hole through the heart
will kill you nice and quick. Through a lung, and you'll need
emergency medical attention soon; if the pneumothorax (collapsed
lung) doesn't kill you, the edema (fluid build-up) and bleeding
probably will. Then there's hemothorax, in which the chest cavity
fills with blood and fluid and you become unable to breathe, or
cardiac tamponade, in which the pericardium fills with fluid and the
heart stops working very well.
Puncture the liver, and you get blood toxicity problems, plus the
internal bleeding. Puncture the intestine, and you get gruesome
internal sceptic issues. It's all bad. Nature doesn't want
anything going through you except via the digestive tract, and even
then it's very picky.
[interference plasma laser]
> Interesting idea. You still get an explosion if you aim the
> laser at a piece of solid matter, but I suppose this allows you
> to create explosions above the ground, for airbursts and whatnot.
> The lack of fragmentation is likely to be problematic, though.
Well, you get secondary fragmentation in many cases. I doubt it'll
ever be a handy, efficient weapon, but it's an interesting
direction.
> The problem with x-ray lasers is that backscattered x-rays from
> the beam will cause radiation damage to the person firing the gun.
> [...] (X-rays are readily absorbed by air over several meters to
> tens of meters.
I don't know that much about spectrum absorption and whatnot,
myself. The Army was developing what they were calling a "deep-UV"
laser that was "near x-ray" and which air and water were nearly
transparent to, per reports. The laser went fairly easily through
air, water, glass, and with more effort through softer construction
materials and flesh, but was absorbed reliably by bone tissue.
So presumably there's some wavelength that works out nicely if these
are the effects you want. The report I saw said the beam worked
great through rain and fog but didn't penetrate underwater well and
that it could punch through gypsum wallboard and current-standard
military uniforms. Current projectors were apparently unwieldy and
short-lived, and power supply, as ever, was another problem.
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
It's true that every time you hear a bell, an angel gets his
wings. But what they don't tell you is, every time you hear
a mousetrap snap, an angel gets set on fire.
John Kensmark
>
> John Kensmark (kens...@my-deja.com) wrote:
>>
>> Christopher Michael Jones wrote:
>
>>> At slightly faster speeds, the projectile will penetrate, but
>>> due to its low mass and cross-sectional area it will just
>>> penetrate all the way through and not produce much damage.
>
>> This is basically a myth. Putting a noticeable hole (ie, almost
>> any hole) all the way through a human will cause that human
>> substantial damage.
>
> Ummmm, wanna bet?
Okay. You line up the volunteers, but make sure they know what
they're in for.
> You might be able to injure them, but in some cases, shooting a
> small hole in someone might not be as effective as simply hiting
> them with a big rock.
I said nothing about comparative effectiveness. A small hole all
the way through a major body part *will* produce substantial damage,
which is exactly what I said. Few people will be lucky enough to
shrug off, say, a 3mm diameter hole through their head or torso.
Odds are that, without prompt medical attention, they'll die from
such a wound. In some cases, it could take weeks to die, but that's
not my point.
> If all you do is poke a hole in someone, you run the risk of
> angering them and then having them beat the ever loving
> daylights out of you.
If I could reliably and easily put a 3mm hole through their trunk or
head, I think I could run that risk without being too worried about
it.
>>> Eventually, you reach fast enough speeds where the bullet
>>> actually vaporizes into a plasma when it hits the target and
>>> actually does significant damage.
>
>> This isn't necessary, nor is it necessarily helpful. A
>> projectile which vaporizes will be harder to aim properly and
>> will tend to spread out before hitting the target.
>
> The point is to get it to vaporize or explode when it hits
> the target, not in the atmosphere.
You're right; I was apparently inferring an emphasis on the word
"plasma" that led me to misunderstand what was being said.
[antimatter is dangerous stuff]
> That is why I think a physical containment device that
> protects the anti-matter mote in flight and makes sure it
> is not exploded prematurely is the better way to go.
I'm still 100% not convinced that using antimatter this way is
sufficiently productive to justify the difficulties involved. Just
smack the target with a super-high-velocity mundane projectile. The
tech level needed is substantially lower.
>> As long as you're handwaving it, what difference does it make?
>
> I think I am entitled to at least one handwave. :D
Yeah, that seems fair.
> But I was very much trying to provide a solution to the problem
> of a laser that is not quite powerful enough to do direct damage
> (due to the various issues I discussed). If you have a powerful
> enough laser, then, certainly, the problems are a non-issue.
A weaker laser--one suitable only for surface burns--that can fire a
longer duration beam can be very effective. Add a range-finding
function and a very simple targetting computer, and run the beam
through a pair of wired quartz optics at the end of the 'barrel'.
The optics vibrate (you can use vibrating mirrors, too, if you
like), scattering the beam across a circular area defined by the
computer. Make that a 2m diameter circle, and you'll burn the
entire visible surface area of the target.
Very nasty. A relatively low-powered laser could do this very
quickly--too quickly for the target to move, frex, in a seeming
'flash'. Second-degree burns over 30% or more of your body, and
you're out of the fight.
>> This would be less efficient and more complex than simply
>> having a more powerful (higher velocity) projectile in the first
>> place. Technology exists (although it's currently much too
>> bulky for man-portable use) to build a gun that fires a ten gram
>> plastic slug at 15,000 kps. That will demolish a current main
>> battle tank.
>
> See, I was talking about very low mass projectiles. Grain of
> sand type stuff, milligrams, not grams. Sorry if I didn't make
> that clear.
I honestly don't know how reliably a milligram projectile
accelerated to those speeds will travel. It'd still hit mighty
hard, for a human target.
>> The US military's OICW system, currently intended for actual
>> field use, *already* does this with a much simpler system. A
>> small rifle-launched grenade has a built-in timer that, coupled
>> with a low-power laser range finder, causes it to explode at an
>> optimum distance from the target.
>
> Again though, the thread originator was talking about very low
> mass projectiles, thus giving you a a very large number of
> shots in a small magazine.
>
> Grenades are all fine and good, but considering you can only
> maybe carry a few dozen of them at most, it hardly seems
> germane to the issue at hand.
If you want to handwave nanotech, see the first few chapters of Neal
Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_, in which characters have implanted
microguns that fire tiny explosive bullets, and injected nanobombs
can shred someone internally. With minimal handwaving.
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt.
Then it's a sport.
John Kensmark
>
> John Kensmark <kens...@my-deja.com> wrote in article
> <3989DBE9...@my-deja.com>...
>
>> This would be less efficient and more complex than simply having
>> a more powerful (higher velocity) projectile in the first place.
>> Technology exists (although it's currently much too bulky for
>> man-portable use) to build a gun that fires a ten gram plastic
>> slug at 15,000 kps. That will demolish a current main battle
>> tank.
>
> 44,000 times the speed of sound in air, and 1/20 the speed of
> light!
Ahhh, crap. Yeah, you're right. I do that kind of thing all the
time.
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting
them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no
good reason.
John Kensmark
>
> Blaine Manyluk wrote:
>
>> Are you sure you don't mean metres per second? 15,000 km/s is
>> 44,000 times the speed of sound in air, and 1/20 the speed of
>> light!
>
I'm working from memory, but I'm pretty sure that the late-80's /
early-90's work on coil guns intended for tanks had a 10-gram
projectile at 15 kps (earlier extra zeroes were my mistake, typing
the number for meters and then saying kilometers). The only
specific source I can remember for this specific project is . . . I
think the magazine was called "Air Combat and International
Defense", or some such.
A quick google search turned up a 1994 Sandia Labs coil gun project
that launched a small titanium projectile (no mass given, worse
luck, but some dimensional numbers are listed) at over 10 kps.
Here's the URL:
http://www.sover.net/~geoffk/abstract.txt
This has abstracts for all kinds of interesting-looking articles
that I very sadly don't have time to chase down.
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
I propose getting rid of conventional armaments and replacing
them with reasonably priced hydrogen bombs that would be
distributed equally thoughtout the world.
-- Idi Amin
Christopher Michael Jones
> It will still do, at the least, "substantial damage", as I said.
> Internal bleeding will likely be non-trivial. Note that the FBI's
> current research indicates that the vast majority of deaths from
> gunshot wounds are from bleeding. Bleeding doesn't get enough
> credit. Losing blood is bad.
Just like to make a small point on this particular statistic here.
Bleeding to death from a gunshot wound is the predominant form
of death from GSW injuries statistically, but that still doesn't
really give you any useful information. In fact, it would seem
to me that whether or not people died from bleeding out after
the fact or being killed nearly immediately from a gunshot is
more sensitive to the types of guns used by people who inflict
gunshot wounds, and is really not based on any important
difference between the types of wounds inflicted by different
types of firearms. For example, if people started using
poisoned darts a lot, I would expect that the majority of people
who have been attacked by someone with a deadly weapon would die
from poisoning, and not (say), from getting their head blown off
by grenades.
It is my understanding that most of your "street punks" carry
fairly small caliber and low power hand guns (.25 automatic,
.22 pistol, 9 millimeter pistols, .38 pistols). Unless someone
deliberately uses special ammunition in these guns, wounds
inflicted by these weapons will generally be the "poke holes"
type where creating a large hole for blood to leak out of is
the dominant form of damage.
Also, one bit of info I would like to see is the percentage of
people who received a gunshot wound but nevertheless were able
to recover (most likely due to emergency care). My preliminary
impression would be that this number would in fact be quite
high, as there are many people who survive gun shot wounds.
Overall, I'd have to rate your statistic at a useless level of
92.3% (+/- 1.7%) (*), sorry.
(*) Note: Studies indicate that 87.5% +/- 0.2% of made up
statistics are believable if they include a decimal
point and a margin of error.
Robert O'Connor
Cardiac arrest secondary to ventricular fibrillation within 60 seconds
(or 'at the end of the needle' [= less than 10 seconds] if given
directly into the heart e.g. via a catheter into the pulmonary artery
or right atrium).
Potassium salts are very easy to obtain. Look at sodium chloride
substitutes at your supermarket...
Dr. Robert O'Connor
J
John Kensmark <kens...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:398BE6D0...@my-deja.com...
> Non-lethal laser weapons *currently in commercial production*
> include 'dazzler' systems that are going into limited use with SWAT
> teams in parts of the US. These fire optically brilliant but
> non-damaging beams in a circular patch; when shone on a target's
> face, the bright, zig-zagging light produces a strong enough sensory
> stimulation so that the target is theoretically briefly
> incapacitated. This apparently worked well enough in open trials to
> make the LAPD representatives drool on themselves.
That's not the goal. You're team has to stop, prevent any more resistance on
that subject and then move on. I'm wanting a weapon that will be the
equivilent to putting someone under for an operation while using an energy
weapon to do it.
> > Sixth, shoot a normal bullet, but give it a load of nanites.
>
> If you have nanotechnology (or, if you like, handwaving) this
> advanced, you don't need anything this complicated.
Uh... nah... nanotechnology isn't something that would be norm in this. I
personally never thought it was cool outside of the lab scenarios :-)
J
John Kensmark <kens...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:398BEC9E...@my-deja.com...
> I don't know that much about spectrum absorption and whatnot,
> myself. The Army was developing what they were calling a "deep-UV"
> laser that was "near x-ray" and which air and water were nearly
> transparent to, per reports. The laser went fairly easily through
> air, water, glass, and with more effort through softer construction
> materials and flesh, but was absorbed reliably by bone tissue.
Oh yeah... there's an interesting idea. Something that doesn't effect
anything but bone material. Once it hits your bones you get electrocuted
from pain, to stun, all the way up to death, of course... I don't think that
the above weapon would work exactly but the addition of a way to fire an
electric current though the ionized air conduit would do. I guess there is
nothing wrong with having an "over-under" with the human weapon on top and
then the "lethal-to-most-anything-including-those-made-of-metal" weapon on
the bottom [or reversed... anyone know the combination of a gun and grenade
launcher?].
Of course, what this leads to is how to blow up the vehicles. Which in sync
the laser weapon creating an ion trail or vacuum for a plasma ball to
"easily" travel through. I'm not afraid of a plasma ball not hurting
something, I know that enough shots from one could do significant damage
[I'm fairly certain that it will be melting/vaporization unless of course
you hit a really good spot], which is the point because these aren't
supposed to be the main counter weapon for vehicles [these guys are
revolutionaries so they aren't going to be well equiped and in some
situations they fall short--- but as revolutionaries go, they try anyway].
Of course, how to get a person to fire a laser then angle the weapon up to
where it is in line with the ion trail and the electronic zapper thingy
[real scientific naming eh?] is slightly beyond me. I think the best way to
solve it would be a system similar to the double-action guns which fire a
bullet, load a new bullet into the chamber, and finally cock the hammer...
in this case the weapon could rotate from the laser to the electronic weapon
during the trigger pull [pull trigger fires the laser and as you release the
electronic part of the weapon fires... of course this is only to time
measure things, but it is possible to "rapid-fire" but over heating may come
into play there and so would cost-effective shots]. [BTW, distance is not a
problem, an infared laser would easily be able to measure the distance and
adjust power settings accordingly-- technology which is possible today.]
Christopher Michael Jones
> That's not the goal. You're team has to stop, prevent any more resistance on
> that subject and then move on. I'm wanting a weapon that will be the
> equivilent to putting someone under for an operation while using an energy
> weapon to do it.
Incapacitation weapons are actually very difficult.
It is not too difficult to create non-lethal weapons that allow
you to gain the upper hand over people and prevent them from
attacking or allow you to more easily take control of them. Tear
gas, pepper spray, beanbag guns, tazers, flash bang devices, etc.
all fall into this category, and they work moderately well and
can allow you to gain the upper hand in a situation, but they
have limited functionality.
However, knockout gas, sleep rays, "stun" weapons, etc. are
much much much more difficult. Clinical anesthesia has proved
to be a wonderful thing, but even in the best of situations
things can (and do) go wrong and death or serious injury results.
This is due to the fact that the doses of anesthesic agents
necessary to anesthetise a person are close to lethal doses.
Modern anesthetics give you more of a margin of error, but still
it is only about a factor of 4 or so between anesthetic dose and
lethal dose. This is why it is necessary to use just the right
amount of anesthetics for the weight of the subject. If you gave
the same amount of anesthetics to a small child or diminutive
person as you do to a large burly male (say 100 kg) then you
could very easily injure or even kill the smaller person. If you
choose a "flat dose" intermediate between the dose for the large
person and the small person, you still run a risk of injury for
the smaller person (though much less so) but you also run the
risk of not actually anesthetising the large individual.
This is why sleep gas is currently not possible. You cannot
control accurately enough the dose of sleep gas that someone will
be exposed to (if the gas is thicker, or they breath more deeply,
they could get several times a higher dose). Thus, you would
maybe end up with a few people in just the right areas who
breathed as expected and were in the right mass range who get
knocked out, while there is a large group of people farther away
who are still lucid and capable of doing whatever it is you don't
want them to do, and then there's the group of dead or nearly so
people where the gas concentrations were the highest, or who
breathed heavily and/or were physically smaller individuals.
Overall, a non optimal situation.
Sleep rays and stun guns that actually put the target to sleep
are very much beyond modern technology and understanding. It
might even be the case that such things are not possible.
Overall, the best option is probably tranquilizer darts. But this
leaves a lot to be desired, including the lack of any "whizz bang
neato" aspects.
J
Christopher Michael Jones <cjo...@ix.cs.uoregon.edu> wrote in message
news:8mi52c$eu9$1...@helix.cs.uoregon.edu...
That's only a problem for those that can't scan and know... but in this
specific case I really don't think they'll have something that can
automatically scan body mass and motabolism [I spelled that wrong didn't I?]
which would make a weapon with drugs in it almost fail-proof, just need to
fix the aim :-)
> This is why sleep gas is currently not possible. You cannot
> control accurately enough the dose of sleep gas that someone will
> be exposed to (if the gas is thicker, or they breath more deeply,
> they could get several times a higher dose). Thus, you would
> maybe end up with a few people in just the right areas who
> breathed as expected and were in the right mass range who get
> knocked out, while there is a large group of people farther away
> who are still lucid and capable of doing whatever it is you don't
> want them to do, and then there's the group of dead or nearly so
> people where the gas concentrations were the highest, or who
> breathed heavily and/or were physically smaller individuals.
>
> Overall, a non optimal situation.
>
>
> Sleep rays and stun guns that actually put the target to sleep
> are very much beyond modern technology and understanding. It
> might even be the case that such things are not possible.
I wouldn't say beyond understanding. Simply jolting the system so that the
nervuous system is temporarily screwed up, would do the trick. How to do
this isn't exactly known to me... but an episode of 7Days gave me an idea...
the bright and repeated flashes caused trouble for Parker's brain and almost
collasped. Doing the same by applying an artificial stimulus to the skin's
nerves and a more powerful would lead to similar effects and hopefully more
powerful ones [you could inflect pain, cause severe orientation problems,
knock them out completely, and crank it up more you could cause a heart
attack or some kind of brain stopping body killing effect... the nervous
system is important :-) ].
J
joost kroes <j.j....@student.utwente.nl> wrote in message
news:8mi6dg$hlg$1...@dinkel.civ.utwente.nl...
> about that UV laser that ionizes the air to act as a conduit for the
pulse,
> it _has_ a working prototype,
> the only problem was that it's about 3 meters long
> so not quite the handgun :)
So why is it that in 200 hundred years it wouldn't be the size of only 30
centimeters?
joost kroes
Ayende Rahien
"Christopher Michael Jones" <cjo...@ix.cs.uoregon.edu> wrote in
message news:8mi52c$eu9$1...@helix.cs.uoregon.edu...
[a lot of snippage of interesting stuff]
> Overall, the best option is probably tranquilizer darts. But this
> leaves a lot to be desired, including the lack of any "whizz bang
> neato" aspects.
If anesthetics are so dangerous, how come tranquilizer darts would
work?
Christopher Michael Jones
> If anesthetics are so dangerous, how come tranquilizer darts would
> work?
They're still dangerous, but tranquilizer darts make it a bit
safer. If you pick a "standard dose" that is just a bit higher
than necessary to tranquilize the largest individuals then you
can usually use it on just about anyone and it will work and
be fairly safe. Even if you use it on smaller sized individuals,
you may not have too high of a chance of permanently injuring
the individual.
However, even so, at zoos and wild animal parks they prefer to
tailor the dossage in the darts to each animal based on a
guesstimate of their weight, to make the risk of death or
serious permanent injury as low as possible. Only the most
irresponsible of park or zoo animal wranglers would use the
same dosage for a small young animal as they would for a
full sized adult.
The main advantage of tranquilizer darts is that they deliver
a very exacting dosage to their targets.
If you had a tranquilizer dart gun for human(oid)s, you could
probably incapacitate anyone you wanted to, however if you
(for example) were in the habbit of darting children, you
might end up with a percentage of the children you hit being
permanently injured (perhaps with brain damage) or dead.
This might be deemed acceptable in a "frontier exploration,
protecting yourself from the savage natives" type situation,
but would probably not be in a "colony world protecting
yourself from angry mobs or aprehending criminals" type
situation.
John Kensmark
>
> John Kensmark (kens...@my-deja.com) wrote:
>
>> It will still do, at the least, "substantial damage", as I
>> said. Internal bleeding will likely be non-trivial. Note
>> that the FBI's current research indicates that the vast
>> majority of deaths from gunshot wounds are from bleeding.
>> Bleeding doesn't get enough credit. Losing blood is bad.
>
> Just like to make a small point on this particular statistic
> here.
A lot of your analysis escapes me, but maybe it's just me.
> Bleeding to death from a gunshot wound is the predominant form
> of death from GSW injuries statistically, but that still
> doesn't really give you any useful information. In fact, it
> would seem to me that whether or not people died from bleeding
> out after the fact or being killed nearly immediately from a
> gunshot is more sensitive to the types of guns used by people
> who inflict gunshot wounds, and is really not based on any
> important difference between the types of wounds inflicted by
> different types of firearms.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. The FBI report in question covered the majority
of fatal gunshot wounds reported in the US *and* combined data from
military small arms (ie, assault rifles and down) research. Most of
the non-military data, naturally, involved relatively small caliber
handguns and non-exotic ammunition. The military data, if I
remember correctly, centered on the Colt .45 sidearm and the newer
Beretta 9mm sidearm and the 5.56mm variant of the M16.
That's a considerable range of weapons. I grant that they weren't
taking into effect things like a .50 sniper rifle or machine gun,
but the study did include hunting rifles and shotguns. The strong
majority of fatalities were directly caused by blood loss, per the
research, followed by shock, and then either cardiac failure
(usually from a direct hit to the heart) or neurological damage
(from a penetrating shot to the head)--I think; infection may have
been ahead of rapid death from a critical hit.
Yes, there are guns and gun-like weapons, real and possible, which
can reliably cause death through a mechanism other than blood loss.
If you hit someone in the chest with a .50 machine gun, what they
die from is something of a moot point--it's massive trauma and organ
failure all over the place.
Note that the study is not saying that when you shoot someone, you
have to wait for them to leak lots of blood before they're
affected. It just says that blood loss is what *kills* them, in
most cases. They may be immediately incapacitated due to shock, low
blood pressure, or pain.
And, obviously, this is a summary of typical gunshot wounds, which
doesn't mean careful, well-aimed, expert shots. An expert with a
sniper rifle can hit someone in the head more frequently, in which
case neurological damage is probably going to be a factor more often
than blood loss.
> For example, if people started using poisoned darts a lot, I
> would expect that the majority of people who have been attacked
> by someone with a deadly weapon would die from poisoning, and
> not (say), from getting their head blown off by grenades.
??? I have no idea what your point is here. Actually, there are
people who believe that *now* more people in the US who are murdered
die from poisoning than gunshots (but many, if not most, of these
murders go undetected). That doesn't affect how gunshots kill
people.
> It is my understanding that most of your "street punks" carry
> fairly small caliber and low power hand guns (.25 automatic,
> .22 pistol, 9 millimeter pistols, .38 pistols).
I wouldn't personally lump a typical .25 auto with a 9mm auto under
the same "low power" rubric, but maybe that's just me.
> Unless someone deliberately uses special ammunition in these
> guns, wounds inflicted by these weapons will generally be the
> "poke holes" type where creating a large hole for blood to leak
> out of is the dominant form of damage.
Damage, per se, is not the issue. Cause of death is what I'm
addressing. In most cases, an M16 kills the same way as a .25
autoloader--by making a hole that blood leaks out of. The M16
causes a lot more collateral damage and lets the blood out faster.
Both weapons can incapacitate immediately, but the one that
generally causes more damage in a shorter amount of time will have
the greater chance of knocking the victim down right away and of
killing quickly. The one which does more damage, on average, will
also be more likely to kill. But, statistically, they both tend to
kill in the same way.
> Also, one bit of info I would like to see is the percentage of
> people who received a gunshot wound but nevertheless were able
> to recover (most likely due to emergency care). My preliminary
> impression would be that this number would in fact be quite
> high, as there are many people who survive gun shot wounds.
If you take blood loss as the primary cause of death in most cases,
it's not hard to see why prompt medical attention can save many
gunshot victims. Of course, they often take a long time to recover,
if they ever recover fully. Even from small, low-power bullets, the
collateral damage is often rather significant.
> Overall, I'd have to rate your statistic at a useless level of
> 92.3% (+/- 1.7%) (*), sorry.
>
> (*) Note: Studies indicate that 87.5% +/- 0.2% of made up
> statistics are believable if they include a decimal
> point and a margin of error.
The range of your margin of error should be bigger. A nice,
plausible margin of error is between 2 and 5%. Less than 2% (for
surveys and whatnot, anyway) is generally suspicious, and more than
5% suggests they didn't use a big enough sample. And you should
probably round to the nearest percent, because otherwise your number
looks suspiciously precise for something with that sort of margin of
error. Or so it seems to me.
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
If you could change the order of the alphabet,
what order would you put the letters in?
Malcolm McMahon
>below...
>
>Christopher Michael Jones <cjo...@ix.cs.uoregon.edu> wrote in message
>news:8mbdcj$cfm$1...@helix.cs.uoregon.edu...
>
>
>So, basically the gun of this Sci-Fi future is a plasma weapon. It brings in
>air, or has a container of it when in vacuum operations, and begins to
>heat/charge it in a chamber. This change is sent out of the chamber using a
>magnetic field sled. Once the charge leaves the barrel and goes on it's
>course towards the target [similar problems with accuracy to a bullet, but
>for different reasons, (possibly the magnetic field isn't tuned right)].
>You'll always have some electrical shock with each shot and you'll have some
>minor burning invovled as well, but both are adjustable from the minimums.
>
How about a gun that shoot plasmoids (small ball-lightning)? Although
nobody knows quite how these things work they do seem to be structures
composed of plasma and stable in air (at least for some tens of
seconds).
Another idea that occured to me years ago was some kind of radiation,
perhaps millimeter em, that ionises the air in a narrow beam creating a
conductive chanel down which an electrical discharge can be sent, a
genuine lightning gun.
Malcolm McMahon
>
>The story line involves people who are very conservitive, think of the
>Federation from Star Trek, they really hate to kill. So, being able to just
>make someone fall to the ground and take a few minutes of napping is
>perferable. However, at the same time these folks will be fighting others
>that don't have the same "work ethic" as they do, and in some cases they
>will need to use deadly force... in other cases they will be firing against
>vehicles such as "tanks" [no other word to describe them] and these weapons
>need to be able to fire in the area of 10+ of those high powered shots.
>
Your basic problem is the diversity of human beings. A shock (electrical
or impact) that will just make one man even more angry will kill another
stone dead. This is a problem with all "less than lethal" weapons.
A better approach if you want to have a high chance of incapacitating
with a minimal chance of killing (though there will _always_ be some
chance) is something which incapacitates physically like a glue gun.
J
Malcolm McMahon <mal...@pigsty.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:oe3tosor416n64nim...@4ax.com...
> Another idea that occured to me years ago was some kind of radiation,
> perhaps millimeter em, that ionises the air in a narrow beam creating a
> conductive chanel down which an electrical discharge can be sent, a
> genuine lightning gun.
This is what I think I'm putting together now. A UV lazer will ionize a
conduit of air to the target and then a specific energy pulse... most likely
electric will be sent down it. The voltage [wattage, ampage... someone will
have to fill me in on which one is correct at this point I have yet to
memorize them straight] can be adjusted and the strength of the laser can be
adjusted too.
However, instead of just shocking a person... the idea is to use the
electrical part to tell the nervous system to do something. In the two
possible cases I most need [in order of highest need] is the ability to tell
the nervous system to dialate the blood vessels so that blood pressure drops
and it causes the person to faint... the next possibility is the pain
setting but that has already been taken care of with the normal electric
discharge but of course if you can send a nerve pulse to make someone faint
why can't you make their entire body go into a muscle cramp?
Now, how to get the above to work is way over my head, I practically hate
bio-med science. But when it comes down to it there ought to be some way for
it to work in my mind because the nervous system uses electrical impulses
and inputting an artifical one or causing a certain kind of impulse to go
off would be very helpful.
Erik Max Francis
> A better approach if you want to have a high chance of incapacitating
> with a minimal chance of killing (though there will _always_ be some
> chance) is something which incapacitates physically like a glue gun.
Which is a good case in point, actually. The current glue guns which
spray an extremely sticky foam at the combatant are quite effective, but
the people testing them are wearing full body suits for a reason -- if
you hit them in the face they'll suffocate.
--
Erik Max Francis / m...@alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
__ San Jose, CA, US / 37 20 N 121 53 W / ICQ16063900 / &tSftDotIotE
/ \ So little time, so little to do.
\__/ Oscar Levant
Fat Boy and Little Man / http://www.fatboyandlittleman.com/
Watch Fat Boy and Little Man go about their antics.
Malcolm McMahon
wrote:
>Malcolm McMahon wrote:
>
>> A better approach if you want to have a high chance of incapacitating
>> with a minimal chance of killing (though there will _always_ be some
>> chance) is something which incapacitates physically like a glue gun.
>
>Which is a good case in point, actually. The current glue guns which
>spray an extremely sticky foam at the combatant are quite effective, but
>the people testing them are wearing full body suits for a reason -- if
>you hit them in the face they'll suffocate.
Quite, and if you render someone unconsious, however you do it, they may
fall badly, their airway may become obstructed, they may fall face-down
in a puddle or something. Even in the operating theater rendering
someone unconscious carries certail irreducible risks.
On the whole I'm inclined to think this may be a Good Thing. A really
safe incapacitating weapon would be used too readily, I suspect.
Malcolm McMahon
>However, instead of just shocking a person... the idea is to use the
>electrical part to tell the nervous system to do something. In the two
>possible cases I most need [in order of highest need] is the ability to tell
>the nervous system to dialate the blood vessels so that blood pressure drops
>and it causes the person to faint... the next possibility is the pain
>setting but that has already been taken care of with the normal electric
>discharge but of course if you can send a nerve pulse to make someone faint
>why can't you make their entire body go into a muscle cramp?
>
The trouble is that the significance of nervous impulses is everything
to do with which nerve they happen in and next to nothing to do with
intensity, frequence, pattern or whatever. You can't expect to stimulate
a particular nerve with a gun from a distance. It's not like the target
nerve would even necessarilly be in the same place in different
individuals.
Further any disabling effect you aimed for would occasionally be fatal.
If you're prepared to gloss over the problems of selective stimulation
the effect to aim for might be a petite mal epileptic siezure. Victims
of the so called "absence siezure" don't usually fall down, they just
kind of freeze up.
You could do all kinds of things with nanotech, of course, up to and
including throwing someone into total biostasis, but I gather you're
avoiding too much nanotech for the usual reasons (the probable nanotech
futures being essentially unimaginable).
John Schilling
>How about a gun that shoot plasmoids (small ball-lightning)? Although
>nobody knows quite how these things work they do seem to be structures
>composed of plasma and stable in air (at least for some tens of
>seconds).
Well, maybe. There are enough unknowns surrounding "ball lightning" that
you can handwave it into just about any sort of weapon you like. But damn
little rational basis for actually expecting such a thing, or even defending
its plausibility in anything remotely resembling hard science fiction.
>Another idea that occured to me years ago was some kind of radiation,
>perhaps millimeter EM, that ionises the air in a narrow beam creating a
>conductive chanel down which an electrical discharge can be sent, a
>genuine lightning gun.
*A* conductive channel leaves you with a bit of a problem, namely the lack
of a current return path. Storm clouds can wander around with coulombs
and megavolts worth of static charge to send on one-way trips, but folks
who want to operate near metal objects, the ground, and so forth, are
likely to have problems with that approach.
Multiple conducting channels might work, but seem cumbersome and prone to
premature shorting.
There seems to be an effect at work here in which we define the special
effects first, then try to come up with the technobabble for the weapon.
Insisting that future or SFnal weapons must involve bright streaks of
light being fired at a target and causing explosions on impact is a
failure of imagination.
--
*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" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
Malcolm McMahon
wrote:
>Malcolm McMahon <mal...@pigsty.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
>
>>How about a gun that shoot plasmoids (small ball-lightning)? Although
>>nobody knows quite how these things work they do seem to be structures
>>composed of plasma and stable in air (at least for some tens of
>>seconds).
>
>Well, maybe. There are enough unknowns surrounding "ball lightning" that
>you can handwave it into just about any sort of weapon you like. But damn
>little rational basis for actually expecting such a thing, or even defending
>its plausibility in anything remotely resembling hard science fiction.
>
Well there are enough observations of plasmoids to know that are fairly
stable, until they go pop. It's _how_ they achieve this stability which
is so mysterious.
>
>>Another idea that occured to me years ago was some kind of radiation,
>>perhaps millimeter EM, that ionises the air in a narrow beam creating a
>>conductive chanel down which an electrical discharge can be sent, a
>>genuine lightning gun.
>
>*A* conductive channel leaves you with a bit of a problem, namely the lack
>of a current return path. Storm clouds can wander around with coulombs
>and megavolts worth of static charge to send on one-way trips, but folks
>who want to operate near metal objects, the ground, and so forth, are
>likely to have problems with that approach.
>
Yes, that occured to me to. Maybe you could have a grounding wire on
your gun, but you'd be tripping over it.
>
>
>There seems to be an effect at work here in which we define the special
>effects first, then try to come up with the technobabble for the weapon.
>Insisting that future or SFnal weapons must involve bright streaks of
>light being fired at a target and causing explosions on impact is a
>failure of imagination.
Ah, but what author isn't thinking of the film rights?
David Mitchell
<m...@webj.cjb.net> writes
>Below...
>
>Malcolm McMahon <mal...@pigsty.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
>news:oe3tosor416n64nim...@4ax.com...
>> conductive chanel down which an electrical discharge can be sent, a
>> genuine lightning gun.
>
>conduit of air to the target and then a specific energy pulse... most likely
>electric will be sent down it. The voltage [wattage, ampage... someone will
>have to fill me in on which one is correct at this point I have yet to
>memorize them straight] can be adjusted and the strength of the laser can be
>adjusted too.
>
ObSF: "The Battle of Forever" by A E Van Vogt
--
==========================================================================
David Mitchell ===== Visit: www.thehungersite.com
================================
da...@edenroad.demon.co.uk ===== Feed someone for nothing.
==========================================================================
Luke Campbell
> Luke Campbell wrote:
> > IR, visible, and near UV lasers do not have problems with
> > ionizing radiation, but dazzling from the flash tehy make or
> > blindness from specular reflection of the beam are problems. It
> > is only when you get into the x-ray region that ionizing
> > radiation starts becoming a problem.
>
> Is fractured reflection really a significant problem with an
> invisible wavelength laser? I haven't heard of it being a problem.
It will not dazzle you (temporary blindness, caused by bleaching the
rhodopsin in the eye's light receptors), but invisible laser light is
still dangerous in that it can easily lead to retinal scarring (from
third degree burns to the retina), which causes permanent blindness.
Visible light can, of course, also cause retinal scarring, but will
dazzle as well. The problem is that the lens focuses the laser light of
all frequencies to a very small spot on the retina, so the intensity is
greatly increased and burns can occur from even low powered beams. In
many cases, this just leads to a small blind spot in your field of
vision, in others, total blindness can result.
> > Here are a few ideas. First, use a low powered UV laser that
> > ionizes the air along its beam path, [...] Use this ion trail as
> > a wave guide to discharge a capacitor or inductor across. ZAP!
>
> I've been hearing about these sorts of laser weapons since the late
> seventies, but I've never seen one demonstrated. This makes me
> suspect that the damn thing is mighty hard to get to work.
They work just fine (in the lab), but the UV lasers are far to large to
be easily portable. In a future fiction scenario, the size issue does
not have to be a problem.
> > Second, have a gun that shoots small guided rockets at relatively
> > low velocities.
>
> This sort of thing certainly sounds neat, but it's either awfully
> complicated (ala "Runaway") or else not terribly workable (ala the
> various gyrojet-style handguns).
Complicated need not be a serious problem in far future scenarios.
> > Third, have the gun shoot out something very sticky, that
> > tangles up the target, maybe something like a small grenade
> > that explodes into something like a giant cobweb.
>
> "Taffy guns" that look like a cross between a flame thrower and a
> fire extinguisher have been tested for possible use both by SWAT
> teams and the US Marine Corp (which is expecting to do more police
> work in the future). These fire a thick, continuous stream of gunk
> up to about 30 feet away; the gunk is very sticky and thickens on
> contact with air. It doesn't quite harden but becomes stiff and
> elastic and quite restraining and is difficult to remove. It
> doesn't work as perfectly as one might hope, and the supply of
> "taffy" is an issue (you run out pretty quickly).
They also have the problem that if the sticky gunk covers the nose and
mouth, the target suffocates. Hence my idea for fine cob-web like
sticky strands, which should allow entangled targets to breathe.
> > Fourth, shoot out a beam of microwaves. These heat up the
> > target enough that it suffers immediate heat stroke and falls
> > unconscious, but does not die.
>
> This should essentially be possible--alternate home heating systems
> that use microwaves to heat people up have actually been tested--but
> I don't know how quickly a person could drop from microwave-induced
> heatstroke. Also, there'd be variation from person to person of how
> much 'cooking' it'd take, and what would be required to cook one guy
> might very well kill the next.
The temperature at which the brain starts to shut down is fairly
constant (among humans) regardless of body size or other factors. The
problems of targeting the brain, measuring its mass and heat capacity,
and sending out a micorwave pulse of just the right energy and spread to
evenly heat the brain without cooking parts I leave as an engineering
problem for future gunsmiths.
> > Fifth, people have long speculated that certain frequencies of
> > sound can cause incapacitation or unconsciousness. So far, it
> > is difficult to get weapons operating on these principles to
> > work, mainly because they tend to rupture the eardrum before
> > causing incapacity, but just assume your future society has
> > solved that problem. Such a weapon might shoot out a fairly
> > wide cone, like a shot gun, and would likely be fairly short
> > ranged.
>
> This is way beyond speculation already. There is at least one
> design that's already going into production. It's considerably
> larger than a shotgun but is man-portable and it uses a small
> modified rocket engine to produce powerful waves of directed
> infrasound. The waves do spread out into a cone. I don't know what
> the effective range is. The effects on targets include dizziness,
> severe nausea, and uncontrollable defecation and urination.
> Unpleasant, but perhaps not moreso than tear gas. Note that
> friendly units might be able to become 'immune' to the infrasound
> through advanced active cancellation, which you can look up on the
> web if you like.
Infrasound has special problems. Corridors can act as waveguides, rooms
can act as resonators, and corners at right angles will direct the sound
right back at you. Shoot your infrasound gun indoors or in city streets
and you may zap yourself as well (or instead of) your target. It also
diffracts a lot, you would be hard pressed to get anything other than a
very wide spread, say, 45 degrees or so, without an aperture larger than
a person could carry.
With ultrasound, a lot of these problems go away, but ultrasound
attenuates quite rapidly in air when it is at any reasonable intensity
(the waves have non-linear behavior and tend to bunch up into shock
waves, which loose a lot of energy by heating the air), so ultrasound
stunners would be quite short ranged. They would also have some
problems with diffraction, though spreads of about a degree with
reasonable sized apertures seem about right.
> > Seventh, shoot a pulse of light from a long wavelength IR laser
> > that isn't focused enough to burn. It does heat up the tissues,
> > and heats them up rapidly enough that they cause a weak shock
> > wave in the body. It acts something like a long range punch,
> > and can batter a person without killing.
>
> A shockwave like this would be caused by the expansion of the heated
> tissues. In order for the tissues to expand suddenly and severely
> enough to batter a person, they'd have to explode.
Possibly. Expanding suddenly without explosion is doable, just heat the
tissue rapidly with a short pulse, but with insufficient energy to burn
the tissue. Whether this packs enough oomph to batter a person is
highly questionable.
> > Eigth, shoot acoustic solitons. These, likewise, can batter
> > a person into submission without killing, also like a long
> > range punch. These thingies actually exist, but have
> > diffiuclties as far as using one for a weapon. Just assume
> > your society found tech fixes around the difficulies.
>
> There *is* such a thing as an acoustic soliton; it has to do with
> the physics of wave behavior, as in water or plasma. I don't know
> much about it, and I haven't heard of weapons applications, so I
> can't really comment.
They have been made into weapons - search the net using the keywords
"acoustic bullet". They are not very practical, though.
Luke Campbell
> <big snip>
>
> Overall, the best option is probably tranquilizer darts. But this
> leaves a lot to be desired, including the lack of any "whizz bang
> neato" aspects.
One problem not mentioned above with tranquilizers, but which is a big problem
with using them on wild animals in the field, is that tranquilizers interfere
with the body's ability to thermoregulate. This can lead to death by heatstroke
when used on an excited animal that has been exerting itself trying to escape or
if the animal collapses in the sunshine, even when the tranquilizer dose is well
below that needed to kill in a climate controlled operating room.
Luke
Luke Campbell
> On Thu, 3 Aug 2000 06:48:35 -0400, "J" <m...@webj.cjb.net> wrote:
>
> >below...
> >
> >Christopher Michael Jones <cjo...@ix.cs.uoregon.edu> wrote in message
> >news:8mbdcj$cfm$1...@helix.cs.uoregon.edu...
> >
> >
> >So, basically the gun of this Sci-Fi future is a plasma weapon. It brings in
> >air, or has a container of it when in vacuum operations, and begins to
> >heat/charge it in a chamber. This change is sent out of the chamber using a
> >magnetic field sled. Once the charge leaves the barrel and goes on it's
> >course towards the target [similar problems with accuracy to a bullet, but
> >for different reasons, (possibly the magnetic field isn't tuned right)].
> >You'll always have some electrical shock with each shot and you'll have some
> >minor burning invovled as well, but both are adjustable from the minimums.
> >
>
> How about a gun that shoot plasmoids (small ball-lightning)? Although
> nobody knows quite how these things work they do seem to be structures
> composed of plasma and stable in air (at least for some tens of
> seconds).
On a slightly related note, this weekend I got my home microwave to produce jets
and balls of plasma - very spectacular. A red seedless grape, cut nearly in
half with only a thin piece of skin connecting the two pieces, aparently acts as
a microwave resonant cavity that forces high currents across the skin when the
microwave is turned on. In some places in the microwave, you only get a bit of
sparking as the skin burns through, in others you get pulses of brilliant plasma
and a loud buzzing sound, presumably because the initial plasma absorbs the
incoming microwave radiation, delivering power to the plasma at a faster rate
than it can be dissipated. Jets of plasma shoot off the grape skin and form
traveling balls that move up at an angle until they contact the top of the
microwave oven and dissipate. My microwave still works, by the way.
So, if you want guns with spectacular special effects, maybe you could use some
idea like this. Generate a pulse of plasma and energize it by sending an
intense beam of microwaves into it. Use additional microwave emitters to form
an interference channel in a direction pointing directly away from the gun in
the direction you are pointing it. This is all handwaving, of course.
Luke
John Kensmark
>
> John Kensmark wrote:
>
>> Luke Campbell wrote:
>>> IR, visible, and near UV lasers do not have problems with
>>> ionizing radiation, but dazzling from the flash tehy make or
>>> blindness from specular reflection of the beam are problems.
>>> It is only when you get into the x-ray region that ionizing
>>> radiation starts becoming a problem.
>>
>> Is fractured reflection really a significant problem with an
>> invisible wavelength laser? I haven't heard of it being a
>> problem.
>
> (from third degree burns to the retina), which causes permanent
Yes, but what I was asking was if this is a problem in cases of
imperfect reflection of invisible-wavelength lasers.
>>> Here are a few ideas. First, use a low powered UV laser that
>>> ionizes the air along its beam path, [...] Use this ion trail
>>> as a wave guide to discharge a capacitor or inductor across.
>>> ZAP!
>>
>> I've been hearing about these sorts of laser weapons since the
>> late seventies, but I've never seen one demonstrated. This makes
>> me suspect that the damn thing is mighty hard to get to work.
>
> They work just fine (in the lab), but the UV lasers are far to
> large to be easily portable. In a future fiction scenario, the
> size issue does not have to be a problem.
I agree about the future. I'm not disputing your claim, but do you
have a cite for a currently-working model? I've never seen a
demonstration.
>>> Second, have a gun that shoots small guided rockets at
>>> relatively low velocities.
>>
>> This sort of thing certainly sounds neat, but it's either
>> awfully complicated (ala "Runaway") or else not terribly
>> workable (ala the various gyrojet-style handguns).
>
> Complicated need not be a serious problem in far future
> scenarios.
True; I just think there are simpler designs that are plenty
reliable, such that when a weapon reaches a certain level of
complication, it becomes less useful.
>> "Taffy guns" [...]
>
> They also have the problem that if the sticky gunk covers
> the nose and mouth, the target suffocates. Hence my idea for
> fine cob-web like sticky strands, which should allow entangled
> targets to breathe.
The device tested by the USMC looked like it was shooting a stream
just a little thicker than a pencil. I think it would be possible
to (accidentally) smother a target, but I think you could almost
always avoid doing so, with reasonable care. I imagine they use a
certain size stream based on factors like range and the properties
of the sticky stuff currently used. So, yeah, future designs might
be able to use thinner strands and still be effective.
[infrasound]
> Infrasound has special problems. Corridors can act as
> waveguides, rooms can act as resonators, and corners at right
> angles will direct the sound right back at you.
Of course, if you can carry a personal active cancellation device,
then this might not be a problem. The current design I mentioned
was intended for outdoor use. I agree it's not a perfect weapon,
but, then, what is?
>>> Eigth, shoot acoustic solitons. These, likewise, can batter
>>> a person into submission without killing, also like a long
>>> range punch. These thingies actually exist, but have
>>> diffiuclties as far as using one for a weapon. Just assume
>>> your society found tech fixes around the difficulies.
>>
>> There *is* such a thing as an acoustic soliton; it has to do
>> with the physics of wave behavior, as in water or plasma. I
>> don't know much about it, and I haven't heard of weapons
>> applications, so I can't really comment.
>
> They have been made into weapons - search the net using the
> keywords "acoustic bullet". They are not very practical,
> though.
I tried a few dozen sites. Everything that had sources and seemed
to have been written by someone even vaguely technical was not
weapons-related. Most of the stuff that was weapons-related seemed
to have copied the exact same text from an uncredited source, and
none of them had any specific information about where such a device
had been developed or tested.
There was more specific information about other acoustic weapons.
Do you have a cite for "acoustic bullet" weapons? Just curious. I
hadn't seen anything that I remember on this particular subject.
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
I had intended to enclose my check with this letter, but I
mistakenly sealed the envelope before doing so, and so my
payment will have to wait until my next communication.
Luke Campbell
> Luke Campbell wrote:
> >
> > John Kensmark wrote:
> >
> >> Christopher Michael Jones wrote:
> >>
> >>> At slightly faster speeds, the projectile will penetrate, but
> >>> due to its low mass and cross-sectional area it will just
> >>> penetrate all the way through and not produce much damage.
> >>
> >> This is basically a myth. Putting a noticeable hole (ie, almost
> >> any hole) all the way through a human will cause that human
> >> substantial damage.
> >
> > Just about anyone can survive a stab wound from a needle. Even a
> > really long needle that goes all the way through them.
>
> It will still do, at the least, "substantial damage", as I said.
> Internal bleeding will likely be non-trivial. Note that the FBI's
> current research indicates that the vast majority of deaths from
> gunshot wounds are from bleeding. Bleeding doesn't get enough
> credit. Losing blood is bad.
Bleeding from a needle hole is trivial unless you are a hemophiliac.
> Moreover, any hole through any large part of the body has an
> excellent chance of either hitting an artery (arterial bleeding is
> especially bad) or an important organ (a hole through an organ is
> also bad). It's easy to say that most people can survive having a
> needle stuck all the way through their bodies, but it's not really
> something that's been tested all that much.
I've had arteries pierced by needles before. There was no bleeding
except for a slight drop of blood where the needle entered the skin.
Arteries, and other tissues, are elastic enough to press a needle wound
closed and prevent bleeding.
> > Slightly wider wounds, say, from a pencil or something of similar
> > thickness, are unlikley to kill quickly even if it pierces a vital
> > organ.
>
> You're fooling yourself. A pencil-diameter hole through the heart
> will kill you nice and quick.
It can kill you nice and quick, but does not always do so. Admittedly,
cardiac bleeding is not a good thing, but people can and do survive
bullets to the heart, knife thrusts through the heart, and puncture
wounds from various miscelaneous implements through the heart. A heart
shot is not an automatic death sentance, although it is very dangerous.
As to the original point, narrow wounds are unlikley to kill _quickly_,
death is generally from blood loss, asphyxiation, or infection. This
gives the other guy plenty of time to run up to you and crush your
skull, or stick you several times with something sharp, or shoot you
multiple times. In many cases, people who have recieved traumatic
wounds (such as a hole all the way through the body) are immediately
incapacitated from pain or mental shock. In other cases, people can
ignore the pain or do not even feel the pain and keep going until they
fall over from blood loss.
> Through a lung, and you'll need
> emergency medical attention soon; if the pneumothorax (collapsed
> lung) doesn't kill you, the edema (fluid build-up) and bleeding
> probably will.
Again, dangerous, but not a guarenteed kill. People can and do survive
these kinds of injuries even without medical attention. They are even
more likely to survive for long enough to inflict wounds which
eventually will kill you, too, and then succumb to their injuries later.
> Then there's hemothorax, in which the chest cavity
> fills with blood and fluid and you become unable to breathe, or
> cardiac tamponade, in which the pericardium fills with fluid and the
> heart stops working very well.
ditto.
> Puncture the liver, and you get blood toxicity problems, plus the
> internal bleeding. Puncture the intestine, and you get gruesome
> internal sceptic issues. It's all bad.
And more ditto. Living things can take a lot of abuse, and death is
very hard to guarentee. See, for example,
http://www.classicalfencing.com/articles/bloody.shtml
http://www.classicalfencing.com/articles/kill2.shtml
> > The problem with x-ray lasers is that backscattered x-rays from
> > the beam will cause radiation damage to the person firing the gun.
> > [...] (X-rays are readily absorbed by air over several meters to
> > tens of meters.
>
> I don't know that much about spectrum absorption and whatnot,
> myself. The Army was developing what they were calling a "deep-UV"
> laser that was "near x-ray" and which air and water were nearly
> transparent to, per reports. The laser went fairly easily through
> air, water, glass, and with more effort through softer construction
> materials and flesh, but was absorbed reliably by bone tissue.
This sounds highly suspect. In the deep UV and soft x-ray region of the
spectrum, air is nearly opaque. Light in these frequencies doesn't get
much farther than a meter or so, if that. You need to get really hard
x-rays or gamma rays to get radiation that goes more than a few meters
through sea level air. Also, the deep UV and soft x-rays are very
easily absorbed by matter of any type. Do not expect them to get
through more than a few millimeters of any matter of typical solid or
liquid densities.
Eric Tolle
Stun-only or incapacitating weapons also lose the "threat" factor
that lethal weapons have. I recall one short story I read where I
person was threatening another with a web-gun (thus inadvertently
giving the bad-guy a chance to escape)...and I found myself thinking
"That's silly- web him first, and _then_ you can ask him all the
questions you want.".
--
Eric Tolle sch...@silcom.com
People tend to underestimate the impact of scientific progress.
Why just fifty years ago, only a few people had even heard of DNA,
and now everybody who is somebody uses it!
Luke Campbell
> Luke Campbell wrote:
> >
> > John Kensmark wrote:
> >
> >> Luke Campbell wrote:
> >>> IR, visible, and near UV lasers do not have problems with
> >>> ionizing radiation, but dazzling from the flash tehy make or
> >>> blindness from specular reflection of the beam are problems.
> >>> It is only when you get into the x-ray region that ionizing
> >>> radiation starts becoming a problem.
> >>
> >> Is fractured reflection really a significant problem with an
> >> invisible wavelength laser? I haven't heard of it being a
> >> problem.
> >
> > It will not dazzle you [...], but invisible laser light is
> > still dangerous in that it can easily lead to retinal scarring
> > (from third degree burns to the retina), which causes permanent
> > blindness. [...]
>
> Yes, but what I was asking was if this is a problem in cases of
> imperfect reflection of invisible-wavelength lasers.
It depends on what you mean by "imperfect reflection." If only a
fraction of the beam is reflected, but it is reflected specularly,
blindness is a real danger. This is why people working with high
powered lasers, even invisible ones, have to wear safety goggles.
Diffuse scattering of invisible light, on the other hand, is not likely
to cause much of a problem.
> >>> Here are a few ideas. First, use a low powered UV laser that
> >>> ionizes the air along its beam path, [...] Use this ion trail
> >>> as a wave guide to discharge a capacitor or inductor across.
> >>> ZAP!
> >>
> >> I've been hearing about these sorts of laser weapons since the
> >> late seventies, but I've never seen one demonstrated. This makes
> >> me suspect that the damn thing is mighty hard to get to work.
> >
> > They work just fine (in the lab), but the UV lasers are far to
> > large to be easily portable. In a future fiction scenario, the
> > size issue does not have to be a problem.
>
> I agree about the future. I'm not disputing your claim, but do you
> have a cite for a currently-working model? I've never seen a
> demonstration.
Here is a starting point, you may be able to find more on-line.
http://news6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_342000/342188.stm
> [infrasound]
>
> > Infrasound has special problems. Corridors can act as
> > waveguides, rooms can act as resonators, and corners at right
> > angles will direct the sound right back at you.
>
> Of course, if you can carry a personal active cancellation device,
> then this might not be a problem. The current design I mentioned
> was intended for outdoor use. I agree it's not a perfect weapon,
> but, then, what is?
For active cancelation, you would need to know the phase of the incoming
infrasound. With reflections off of objects of unknown distance, this
could not be predicted in advance. You would need to sense the waves
before they hit you to have your own personal speakers generate a
counter signal. Then there is the problem that when the counterwave is
being generated right next to the gun, you will tend to cancel out the
gun's beam while protecting yourself.
> >>> Eigth, shoot acoustic solitons. These, likewise, can batter
> >>> a person into submission without killing, also like a long
> >>> range punch. These thingies actually exist, but have
> >>> diffiuclties as far as using one for a weapon. Just assume
> >>> your society found tech fixes around the difficulies.
> >>
> >> There *is* such a thing as an acoustic soliton; it has to do
> >> with the physics of wave behavior, as in water or plasma. I
> >> don't know much about it, and I haven't heard of weapons
> >> applications, so I can't really comment.
> >
> > They have been made into weapons - search the net using the
> > keywords "acoustic bullet". They are not very practical,
> > though.
>
> I tried a few dozen sites. Everything that had sources and seemed
> to have been written by someone even vaguely technical was not
> weapons-related. Most of the stuff that was weapons-related seemed
> to have copied the exact same text from an uncredited source, and
> none of them had any specific information about where such a device
> had been developed or tested.
>
> There was more specific information about other acoustic weapons.
> Do you have a cite for "acoustic bullet" weapons? Just curious. I
> hadn't seen anything that I remember on this particular subject.
I don't have any net sources bookmarked or memorized on acoustic
bullets, what I can find will not be any better than what you could find
using the same search engines.
Luke
J
Malcolm McMahon <mal...@pigsty.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:60vtosc208n3trav7...@4ax.com...
> Ah, but what author isn't thinking of the film rights?
Film rights? who said anything about film rights :-)
At the moment I'm just trying to get it on digital paper... and that isn't
going as well as expected.
Tommy the Terrorist
lwc...@u.washington.edu writes:
[a greatly enjoyable post, but there's one idea I didn't see
represented...]
How about the legendary blue-ringed octopus? Not merely does it have
sufficient venom to kill a ludicrous number of people ... it comes in a
most convenient package! Thrust a blue ringed octopus into someone's
face and you'll definitely have an intimidation factor :)
John Kensmark
>
> John Kensmark wrote:
>
>>> Just about anyone can survive a stab wound from a needle.
>>> Even a really long needle that goes all the way through them.
>>
>> It will still do, at the least, "substantial damage", as I said.
>> Internal bleeding will likely be non-trivial. Note that the
>> FBI's current research indicates that the vast majority of
>> deaths from gunshot wounds are from bleeding. Bleeding doesn't
>> get enough credit. Losing blood is bad.
>
> Bleeding from a needle hole is trivial unless you are a
> hemophiliac.
See below.
>> Moreover, any hole through any large part of the body has an
>> excellent chance of either hitting an artery (arterial bleeding
>> is especially bad) or an important organ (a hole through an
>> organ is also bad). It's easy to say that most people can
>> survive having a needle stuck all the way through their bodies,
>> but it's not really something that's been tested all that much.
>
> I've had arteries pierced by needles before. There was no
> bleeding except for a slight drop of blood where the needle
> entered the skin. Arteries, and other tissues, are elastic
> enough to press a needle wound closed and prevent bleeding.
It's occurred to me, after reading this, that we're thinking
different needle sizes, which does make some difference. From what
you say here, you seem to be thinking of syringe needles, whereas I
was thinking of a much more substantial sewing needle.
Moreover, a needle-sized projectile that passes entirely through the
body is not really the same as a syringe inserted into one's arm by
a medical professional (which, I hope, is what you mean). And
there's a limit to the self-sealing capabilities of arteries and
other tissues. Last time I gave blood, I bled badly; my arteries
tend to cling to a hypodermic needle and not want to let go. The
nurse was quite upset when she had trouble getting the needle back
out of my arm.
I wouldn't want to generalize from my own case. Point is, I don't
have statistical evidence on hand for how serious the wound from a,
say, 1 mm hole all the way through someone's torso is. My guess is
that, without medical attention, at least half of people injured in
this manner would develop severe side effects.
>>> Slightly wider wounds, say, from a pencil or something of
>>> similar thickness, are unlikley to kill quickly even if it
>>> pierces a vital organ.
>>
>> You're fooling yourself. A pencil-diameter hole through the
>> heart will kill you nice and quick.
>
> It can kill you nice and quick, but does not always do so.
Fair enough. I was generalizing. It's not something I'd want to
risk, certainly.
> Admittedly, cardiac bleeding is not a good thing, but people can
> and do survive bullets to the heart, knife thrusts through the
> heart, and puncture wounds from various miscelaneous implements
> through the heart.
Especially with prompt medical attention. Note that a round hole in
the heart is, generally, a more serious injury than a straight-line
cut through the heart muscle because it's harder to seal.
> A heart shot is not an automatic death sentance, although it is
> very dangerous.
It's not automatic, but if you're going to place a bet, it's
certainly the smart money.
> As to the original point, narrow wounds are unlikley to kill
> _quickly_, death is generally from blood loss, asphyxiation,
> or infection.
My original point had nothing to do with dying *quickly*. My
original point in this subthread was
Putting a noticeable hole (ie, almost any hole) all the way
through a human will cause that human substantial damage.
which I certainly stand by. I'd say that from a penetrating hole
pencil-sized or larger, death is almost certain in most cases
without medical attention.
> This gives the other guy plenty of time to run up to you and
> crush your skull, or stick you several times with something sharp,
> or shoot you multiple times.
Yep. Sometimes.
> In many cases, people who have recieved traumatic wounds (such
> as a hole all the way through the body) are immediately
> incapacitated from pain or mental shock. In other cases, people
> can ignore the pain or do not even feel the pain and keep going
> until they fall over from blood loss.
Sure, although "many cases" doesn't necessarily translate to, say,
"more than a small percentage of cases". But it can happen. When I
was a kid, we followed, in school, the story of a man who was
driving a van that crashed into another vehicle. A six-foot crowbar
that was in the back of the van penetrated the man's head. He
survived. More recent cases include a motorcycling tourist who was
impaled on a sapling more than five inches in circumference and who
remained conscious until they gave him anaesthetic so they could
remove it. Or the an elderly man whose chainsaw kicked back,
cutting almost all the way through his throat (his trachea was
completely severed, and both juglar veins cut open); he drove
himself to the hospital.
These are few and far between. It's probably much more common that
people die of seemingly minor wounds than that they survive
seemingly massive ones.
>> Through a lung, and you'll need emergency medical attention
>> soon; if the pneumothorax (collapsed lung) doesn't kill you,
>> the edema (fluid build-up) and bleeding probably will.
>
> Again, dangerous, but not a guarenteed kill.
Well, no, which is why I said "probably". It's certainly the safe
bet.
> Living things can take a lot of abuse, and death is very hard
> to guarentee. See, for example,
> http://www.classicalfencing.com/articles/bloody.shtml
> http://www.classicalfencing.com/articles/kill2.shtml
I think you're overstating the case. These articles don't present
likelihoods, but rather possibilities. They're talking about when
you absolutely, positively have to kill the other guy real soon.
Death isn't hard to guarantee; it's hard to cause immediately.
These articles say
Exsanguination is the principal mechanism of death caused by
stabbing and incising wounds and death by this means is
seldom instantaneous.
Which is fine; it agrees with what I've said. One of them also says
While a stab wound to the heart is a grave matter, numerous
instances of penetrating wounds to this organ have been
documented in which victims have demonstrated a surprising
ability to remain physically active.
It says "numerous" but doesn't say (with good reason) that this is
anything like *typical* behavior. The victims' "ability to remain
physically active" is "surprising" more because it's unusual, I'd
say, than because old Zorro and Fairbanks films show folks dropping
like flies.
[Army "deep UV" laser]
> This sounds highly suspect. [analysis]
I'll take your word for it. It sounds like you know a lot more
about it than I do; I only saw a couple of secondhand news reports
about it. It's entirely possible, too, that the Army was
misrepresenting the project or that the description released to the
press was not particularly intentionally non-representative.
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me,
I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him
to a quiet place and kill him.
-- Mark Twain
Malcolm McMahon
wrote:
>Malcolm McMahon wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 07 Aug 2000 02:38:54 -0700, Erik Max Francis <m...@alcyone.com>
>> wrote:
>
>> On the whole I'm inclined to think this may be a Good Thing. A really
>> safe incapacitating weapon would be used too readily, I suspect.
>
>Stun-only or incapacitating weapons also lose the "threat" factor
>that lethal weapons have. I recall one short story I read where I
>person was threatening another with a web-gun (thus inadvertently
>giving the bad-guy a chance to escape)...and I found myself thinking
>"That's silly- web him first, and _then_ you can ask him all the
>questions you want.".
Exactly, you give the cops something of that sort and it's web everybody
first, then sort out perps from victims later.
Malcolm McMahon
wrote:
>Luke Campbell wrote:
>>
>>> You're fooling yourself. A pencil-diameter hole through the
>>> heart will kill you nice and quick.
>>
>> It can kill you nice and quick, but does not always do so.
>
>Fair enough. I was generalizing. It's not something I'd want to
>risk, certainly.
>
The problem, from the weapon user's point of view, is that a too-high
velocity bullet that goes straight through the target may kill in the
end but it isn't so likely to kill _quickly_ which means the guy you
shot gets the chance to shoot back.
There were complaints about this from the British forces in the
Falklands war.
Ayende Rahien
> On Tue, 08 Aug 2000 06:14:14 GMT, John Kensmark <kens...@my-deja.com>
> wrote:
>
> >Luke Campbell wrote:
> >>
> >>> heart will kill you nice and quick.
> >>
> >> It can kill you nice and quick, but does not always do so.
> >
> >Fair enough. I was generalizing. It's not something I'd want to
> >risk, certainly.
> >
>
> velocity bullet that goes straight through the target may kill in the
> end but it isn't so likely to kill _quickly_ which means the guy you
> shot gets the chance to shoot back.
>
> There were complaints about this from the British forces in the
> Falklands war.
Well, you can always use soft bullets or maybe hollow ones, the one that
expand when they hit something solid.
Anyone else remember Elister McClin (sp?) description for the Peacemaker?
Malcolm McMahon
wrote:
>
>"Malcolm McMahon" <mal...@pigsty.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
>news:p6fvoso68firafp9u...@4ax.com...
>>
>> The problem, from the weapon user's point of view, is that a too-high
>> velocity bullet that goes straight through the target may kill in the
>> end but it isn't so likely to kill _quickly_ which means the guy you
>> shot gets the chance to shoot back.
>>
>> There were complaints about this from the British forces in the
>> Falklands war.
>
>Well, you can always use soft bullets or maybe hollow ones, the one that
>expand when they hit something solid.
Like the target's flack jacket, for example.
Eric Tolle
>
> >Stun-only or incapacitating weapons also lose the "threat" factor
> >that lethal weapons have. I recall one short story I read where I
> >"That's silly- web him first, and _then_ you can ask him all the
> >questions you want.".
>
> Exactly, you give the cops something of that sort and it's web everybody
> first, then sort out perps from victims later.
Of course I'm not sure how that would be different from current
police procedure in some of our cities. "The suspect was shot
because he was reaching for something that later turned out to be
the doorknob to his apartment..." (The Onion)
Eric Tolle
>
> > "Taffy guns" that look like a cross between a flame thrower and a
> They also have the problem that if the sticky gunk covers the nose and
> mouth, the target suffocates. Hence my idea for fine cob-web like
> sticky strands, which should allow entangled targets to breathe.
"Tangle Guns" are also a classic weapon in SF, going back decades.
Of course they still have the problem that they aren't all that
useful to threaten people with, and it's possible for an entangled
person to be indirectly put in a lethal situation (The first story
I read with tangle guns featured an entangled person having to be
fished out of a pool before he drowned...).
Luke Campbell
Oh, no! Not the lethal squid gun!
"Aargh ... I would shoot you, but my ammunition has slithered off
somewhere else, just a moment ..."
Luke
John Kensmark
In any case, rounds like these are banned by the Hague Convention.
Full metal jacket only are allowed, although there are ways of
getting around these restrictions. (Let's not hear all about
fragmenting M16 ammo; I mean like military shotgun flechette rounds
and the new OICW grenade munitions.)
Soldiers have been complaining about weak-ass bullets that go right
through people without dropping them since WWI, at least. The
higher-ups often attribute this not to weak-ass bullets but to
missing.
There's probably some truth on both sides, but note that the
Pentagon's small arms design contests are rarely about producing
more powerful rounds and very, very frequently about increasing
first-round hit probability.
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
Assmosis - The process by which some people seem to absorb
success and advancement by kissing up to the boss.
Gharlane of Eddore
news:8me3lm$dlt$2...@feedme.surfree.net.il...
>
> Just as a note, I don't think that I would be able to hit a man size
> target with a pistol at anything beyond 70 - 90 meters range, assult
> rifle are much better, but they have an accuracy range of about 400-
> 600 meters.
>
Using a light rifle or an "assault rifle" ( note that most things
called "assault rifles" by politicians are *NOT* "assault rifles,"
but simply light sporting rifles available to civilians )
at ranges much past 100 meters isn't really all that effective
anyway.
"Assault rifle" designs date primarily from the post-WWII era, when
light weapons were designed for use by undertrained conscript troops,
for combat distances typically less than 300 yards.
It took forty years to find loads, bullet weights, and barrel
twist rates that would supply enough accuracy at 600 yards to
use the silly things in a serious rifle match.
The best use for what are called "assault rifles" is low-cost
plinking and small game hunting; they're very good for small
crop-destroying varmints and keeping coyotes out of the chicken
coop; they're not terribly effective for shooting human beings,
and you need to pick your ammunition carefully if you're using
them for hunting anything much larger than medium goats.
( Do *NOT* use "Assault Rifles" to hunt things like bear or
feral pigs; they will stomp you and your Mattel-Toy
plinking rifle to shreds and then eat you. )
In <k3Mi5.9215$1V.9...@nntp1.onemain.com>
"J" <m...@webj.cjb.net> writes:
>
> I'm talking about the size of the weapons, not the actual weapon...
> pistol size is too small for the level of technology in the story.
> And the Rifle is just plain too big for many cases.....
>
This stance may not be entirely defensible. A number of modern
pistols provide greater impact energy and accuracy and range
than fairly standard light rifles. a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle,
or a .50 AE Desert Eagle, for example, are much more energetic
than an "Assault Rifle." ( and some wags say, more accurate!
*grin* )
Ayende Rahien <Aye...@softhome.net> wrote in message
news:8me3lm$dlt$2...@feedme.surfree.net.il...
>
> Submachine guns are *lame* when it come to accuracy, btw.
>
Absolutely. Very few were designed with accuracy in mind;
automatic weapons are for enfilade, for area interdiction,
for area control; they are not the most effective, or accurate,
*weapons*. ( Nota bene; I have seen accurized Thompson SMG's
that can reliably put .45 ACP pistol ammo into a 1-2" group
at 100 yards. Even better, that nice big fat 230-grain bullet
only loses about 15% of its impact energy at 100 yards, unlike
itty-bitty silly "Assault Rifle" bullets, which can lose over
forty percent. Of course, the "Assault Rifle" will still have
about three times the impact energy of a .45 automatic at
100 yards, so it may be a better deal.... )
In <k3Mi5.9215$1V.9...@nntp1.onemain.com>
"J" <m...@webj.cjb.net> writes:
>
> But submachine guns are medium size, they are half way between pistols
> and rifles which is just what would work. I'm not going to use the
> Submachine gun, or a similar case, I'm just thinking that a weapon of
> that size is what I'm after.
>
This may be conceptually indefensible.
A "Sub-Machine Gun" /"SMG" is simply a light rifle that shoots
PISTOL ammunition in automatic mode or burst-fire mode.
In recent decades, the name has been extended to refer to large-
capacity pistols which can fire in full-auto or burst-fire modes.
Note that full-auto pistols are largely useless, anyway, since
only Superman could hold them on target. Some burst-mode
pistols are controllable; there have actually been a few
Beretta 93R's which, in three-shot burst mode, were
handleable; but the putrid ergonomics of the Beretta 92/93
series design mitigates against any real value for the design.
The Glock 18, the full-auto/selectable-fire version of the
Glock 17, has better ergonomics, but it s still largely
useless for anything but a movie prop.
An "Assault Rifle" is a selectable-fire weapon which uses
ammunition in a power range intermediate between pistol and
'high-power' rifles.
Currently, the most common "Assault Rifle" ammunition is the
SovBloc 7.62x39 "Russian Short," and the U.S. .223 Remington
( also referred to as "5.56x45mm NATO." )
These ammunitions typically have an impact energy at the
muzzle of 1200-1400 foot-pounds, depending on load.
( The "Russian Short" is typically a hundred foot-pounds
heavier, and is consequently legal for deer hunting in
most states. The .223 Remington is too light for deer
in most states, unless you upgrade to a heavier bullet. )
Malcolm McMahon
wrote:
>Malcolm McMahon wrote:
>In any case, rounds like these are banned by the Hague Convention.
>Full metal jacket only are allowed, although there are ways of
>getting around these restrictions. (Let's not hear all about
>fragmenting M16 ammo; I mean like military shotgun flechette rounds
>and the new OICW grenade munitions.)
>
>Soldiers have been complaining about weak-ass bullets that go right
>through people without dropping them since WWI, at least. The
>higher-ups often attribute this not to weak-ass bullets but to
>missing.
>
I heard a classic piece out of a letter from some general back in the
Zulu wars trying to justify the use of the dum-dum.
Your well trained british soldier, he said, knows when he's shot and
has the decency to lie down. These heathens, on the other hand, are apt
to come on with one or two bullets in them and cut your head off before
they die.
J
Gharlane of Eddore <ghar...@ccshp1.ccs.csus.edu> wrote in message
news:8mr12o$8...@news.csus.edu...
> In <k3Mi5.9215$1V.9...@nntp1.onemain.com>
> "J" <m...@webj.cjb.net> writes:
> >
> > I'm talking about the size of the weapons, not the actual weapon...
> > pistol size is too small for the level of technology in the story.
> > And the Rifle is just plain too big for many cases.....
> >
>
> This stance may not be entirely defensible. A number of modern
> pistols provide greater impact energy and accuracy and range
> than fairly standard light rifles. a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle,
> or a .50 AE Desert Eagle, for example, are much more energetic
> than an "Assault Rifle." ( and some wags say, more accurate!
> *grin* )
>
Further...
Though in both cases you are exactly right when it comes to the weapon you
are speaking of, But the weapon I was speaking of is idealy an
Electro-Static Weapon, not a firearm. When I said that a pistol would be too
small I said that because the technology level is probably not going to get
to the point where the devices inside would be small enough to fit in what
one would consider a pistol size. And again, when I said that a rifle was
too large I meant that the general size of a rifle would be too bulky.
However, the SMG is perfect in the size category. It would be able to fit
all the devices inside of it but at the same time wouldn't be so bulky as a
rifle.
I'm not talking about the pistol, rifle, and SMG of today... I'm talking
about the size of those weapons with a technology totally different. To give
you a better idea, I'm generally thinking that pistols are between 5 and 6
inches long, machine guns about twice that, and rifles three times. So what
I'm saying in the above posts that you replied to is this:
A weapon about the size of a pistol would require too much "handwaving" to
incorporate the devices [at this moment, power, aim/targeting systems
(including power settings), UV laser, and some type of electronic device
which would shoot out the charge].
A weapon about the size of a rifle would be too large to give the idea of
advanced, considering the limitations that physics puts on the technology.
A weapon about the size of a SMG would be able to reasonably contain all the
devices needed to work and is of a fair size.
So, it isn't about those specific weapons now adays it's about similar sized
weapons with futuristic technology. Another way I can describe it is the
Star Wars rifle but outside of the movies it looks smaller than I remember
http://www.starwars.com/weapons/blaster_rifle/rifle3_bg.html .
Ayende Rahien
"John Kensmark" <kens...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:3990983B...@my-deja.com...
> Malcolm McMahon wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 8 Aug 2000 12:09:40 +0200, "Ayende Rahien"
> > <Aye...@softhome.net> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> "Malcolm McMahon" <mal...@pigsty.demon.co.uk> wrote in
> >> message news:p6fvoso68firafp9u...@4ax.com...
> >>>
> >>> The problem, from the weapon user's point of view, is that a
> >>> too-high velocity bullet that goes straight through the target
> >>> may kill in the end but it isn't so likely to kill _quickly_
> >>> which means the guy you shot gets the chance to shoot back.
> >>>
> >>> There were complaints about this from the British forces in
> >>> the Falklands war.
> >>
> >> Well, you can always use soft bullets or maybe hollow ones, the
> >> one that expand when they hit something solid.
> >
> > Like the target's flack jacket, for example.
>
I really don't understand this convention. In one case they forbid using
lasers to blind enemy soliders because it's *cruel*.
A half a dozen bullets in the stomach is not cruel, mind you.
John Kensmark
I don't remember exactly what the rationale of this particular bit
of the Hague Convention was, and I'm too lazy and short on leisure
time to look it up. It may have been something about lead
poisoning, in fact. My guess is that they were hoping to increase
lethality and decrease nasty injury, or at least decrease how much
time field surgeons had to spend hunting around for bullet
fragments.
I think it's worth noting, too, that 'it's cruel' is the *reason*
most commonly given for banning blinding lasers, and not necessarily
the actual reason. The introduction of such weapons into combat
would produce all kinds of complications, many of them very
expensive, and the major militaries which make these kinds of
agreements have a hell of a lot of money invested in more standard
technology. They want to cash in on those investments when
possible.
Moreover, the longer these weapons stay unused, the more time folks
have to develop them and their countermeasures before needing them.
That's handy.
> A half a dozen bullets in the stomach is not cruel, mind you.
Well, it can be--especially if the wound is merely intensely
debilitating. Shooting people with small-arms bullets is much more
a surefire way to *hurt* people than to kill them. Severely hurting
someone is often (but not always) enough to make them stop fighting,
and small arms (and their ammunition) are cheaper and simpler (to
manufacture, to teach the use of, to actually use) than more
reliable weapons.
But, as I've said, the US Army's OICW project basically aims at
replacing the small arm (the assault rifle, in this case, and,
later, the light-to-medium machine gun) with a
small-arm-and-explosive-munition weapon that, in some ways, is quite
different from what's in use now. In some ways, it will be a much
more effective weapon, but I still think most troops should have
their assault rifles replaced by a PDW, such as the FN P70.
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
I take me pet lion to church with me on Sundays. He has to eat.