If humanity ever truly expanded into space and private space travel would become common, such as with firefly or many other science fiction stories, do you think that firearms as we know them would still be used? Are there any technologies that have the potential to replace them en masse? The possibility of this technology becoming affordable to the average person is also important. I was thinking along the lines of some kind of rechargeable gun (not simply a stungun) or plasma gun.
The technologies featured in sci-fi usually have aspects that are impossible or unpractical in the real world and they tend to be in conflict with real physics.
I do not really see a good reason for people to replace projectile firearms anyway. Why would they? It works. And with 3d printers they’ll be able to just print new bullets, so ammunition shoudn’t really be a problem. Projectile firearms should remain popular, right?
Inside a space ship? Yeah. They could be used. But you could probably trigger explosive decompression anytime you missed the meat bag you are aiming at and hit a capsule window.
Between space ships? It could probably work until any kind of armor is used. The biggest problem would be tracking and hitting a very rapidly moving target, I think.
Utter nonsense. It would only leave a 9mm hole–a pinprick with the air escaping very slowly. A spaceship is only pressurized to one atmosphere and a Firefly-class freighter is quite big. They’d have days to stick some bubblegum over the hole. Joss Whedon, unlike his space opera predecessors, got that one right.
It’d probably just create a dent instead of a hole, if anything. Assuming that spaceship hulls are made from strong alloys. I think most of the personal combat would take place outside of spaceships though.
I dunno. All it would need to do is support the fuselage in some multiple (but not too multiple) G maneuvers, just like a 747, and I would assume the skin and windows of a 747 could be penetrated by a 9mm slug. But maybe not a hollowpoint.
Of all the things in the universe that I only guess at (most of them) this is one I am sure somebody has calculated. Browncoats are like that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Castle should be coming on soon and Nathan Fillion may make another Firefly shout out. What? They are showing some country music Christmas show?
Note, I said “Window”. Causing cracks in most of our currently available transparent materials will cause the pressure in 1 atmosphere to continue the cracking until failure.
Granted, if you have something betterer for future space fire fights, it could be mitigated.
Meet a strange guy who tried to talk to your Apple IIe, eh?
In reality, transparent aluminum hasn’t found it’s way onto any current space craft. And, from what I have passively read, it’s very expensive to make, so it may not make the journey.
I’d say the biggest problem is what happens should you *fail *to hit it. Because now you’ve got a big chunk of metal chock full of kinetic goodness, and it’s going to give someone, somewhere a Very Bad Day, eventually. No friction in space means that unlike on Earth, it’s not stopping on its own.
Naturally, odds are it’ll impact a dead rock in two thousand years and another galaxy, or get eaten by a sun. But miss a lot, and the odds of one of those chunks doing a lot of damage to something important increase. If we’re talking massive scale space warfare waged with mass drivers, there’s going to be quite a few terminally surprised land dwellers over the next few millenia.
Depending on the part of the ship, why would the metal be particularly thick or strong? (Really, it’s thickness, not no much the specific alloy; an M-16 will shoot through a 1/8" plate of Moly-6 stainless as surely as it will a plate of aluminum.) Again, the ship only has to hold in one atmosphere of pressure.
Surely no worse than any other micrometeor type thingie that’s sure to already be out there, I’d guess? And if you’re talking about fighting in orbit, would such a projectile be able to achieve escape velocity and travel to distant stars, or just end up in its own orbit and eventually fall back to the planet in a couple of thousand years’ time?
Given the problems with recoil in a zero or low-g environment and the increasing “smartening” of weapons, I think that the personal firearm of space will be a handheld missile launcher; an update to the Gyrojet concept. Something that fires small missiles that do most of their acceleration after being fired, and have at least some self-guidance capability.
They are likely to be pretty thin and therefore weak due to the driving need to keep the mass of the ship as low as possible. Also, the odds are good that given the need to deal with the hostile environment of space that you’ll end up fighting either a person in a powered space suit that qualifies as low-grade powered armor, or someone using a teleoperated robot; you’ll need a weapon with enough power to take out something like that. Which in turns increases the likelihood of a hull breach.
I recall reading a short SF story about a tour of the colonized moon. It seemed that very early in the colonization there was some sort of disagreement between the good guys (US an or UK) and the bad guys (probably USSR) that was negotiated with gunfire. Lots of gunfire. Years later, after that issue was resolved, people in suit on the surface had to take cover as swarms of bullets from that disagreement went passing by. It seems their velocity was enough to make a very low altitude lunar orbit.
Depending on the ship, maybe not even that. The Apollo Lunar Module had a wall thickness of 0.012" in some places. It only held in 5 psi, but that’s all it needed.
Obligatory Futurama quote:
Farnsworth: Good Lord! That’s over 5000 atmospheres of pressure!
Fry: How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?
Farnsworth: Well, it was built for space travel, so anywhere between zero and one.
Depends on the size of the driver, doesn’t it ?
And since any large spaceship is going to be built off-world (if only to save on the power and pollution of escaping the homeworld’s gravity well), no reason not to build BIG fuckoff guns. Humanity’s epeen (or is it starpeen ?) is at stake !
Let me put it another way : the point of having a navy is not to be able to destroy another navy. That’s well and good, but in and of itself sort of a waste of effort. The point of a navy is to project power over land.
On Earth, that means being able to blow anything up within n miles of the coast, to then be able to use those n miles to put proverbial boots on the ground. Get the coast, get the country in time.
In space, that means being able to melt through the defences of an entire planet. I mean, those ships are going to be travelling for decades just to reach the next dustball over and tell whoever’s on it to give us their stuff or else, at the very least they should pack something to threaten them with besides reality TV reruns. We can’t expect nuclear missiles to work (what if they hammered out the kinks in *their *Star Wars program ?) but I’d like to see anyone do something about a chunk of metal a kilometer across coming their way at high speed. Bruce Willis, eat your heart out.
And if we’ve already got guns big enough to threaten a planetary installation with, well, why not use them on their ships too, show 'em there’s no kill like overkill ?
No, I was talking about ship-to-ship combat out in the black.
Maybe a hand held laser is possible in the fairly near term. Presumably if we have the ability to go to space in a big enough way to have wars there we could solve the dense, light battery problem. I think a plasma gun would be a bit more difficult, but if we can have batteries/capacitors with the ability to be carried and fire a laser, another possibility might be some sort of portable/ship mounted rail gun (what the hell, just one more materials science issue to solve :p)…that would also avoid the recoil issue plus if you could fire a small piece of wire at several kilometers per second I’d guess that would be fairly effective in space combat (ship to ship).
Things like laser guns, rail guns and the like are not in conflict with real physics…we simply can’t make them small enough and powerful enough, today, to be carried by a soldier. We can even make exoskeleton suits today and robotic donkeys to carry stuff, but it’s the power issue that’s the real drawback. However, if we get into space in a way that brings space combat into reality then we will have had to solve several fundamental issues, so a lot of this stuff is within the realms of possibility at that point.
Sure. You’d need to do some serious work on them if you were fighting in vacuum, but if you were fighting on the ship then a good old gun would work fine. IIRC the main problem of firing in vacuum and the harsh environment of space is lubricant, not the bullets themselves, which are sealed and have their own oxidizers in the ‘fuel’. Again, however, if we can actually get into space then that probably opens up several other technologies that are marginal today…such as armored exoskeletons, which might be immune to bullets. Even space suits that are designed for space combat might be bullet resistant (almost certainly would, since in space you have to worry about more than bullets killing you). Once concept that might work is the bullet storm system, with bullets stacked in barrels and set off in series using electrical systems instead of primer. It won’t be recoil-less, of course, but you could throw a lot of lead down range with such a system, so increasing the probability of a hit. And if you made it man portable you could use it as personal thrust system.
All joking aside, using a gun for propulsion is actually a really old idea. I recall it being used in the novel King David’s Spaceship as well; they couldn’t build a rocket good enough to get into orbit, but could build a gun good enough…
