I was wondering about weapons onboard the Space Shuttle-- I understand that “Space” is supposed to be weapons free (Ya right, we’ll see how long that lasts) but I’m also pragmatic enough to realize that it’s at least conceivable that there might be at some point a problem with some of the astronauts or crewmembers either from the U.S. or those other countries. Mind you, I’m not talking about .50 cal machine guns bristling from a turret, but for individual crews/ crewmembers. I suppose any type of projectile would be Bad Thing ™ in the confines of a spaceship, but surely some thought has been given to “disturbances” onboard, even if unlikely… Stun weapons, straitjackets??
Inanimate carbon rods.
Bwah?
That was a Simpson’s quote.
Well, there’s that platoon of Space Marines in the cargo hold with their laser rifles. That MUST be real; it was in “Moonraker”.
Shooting a hole through the wall of a space shuttle might be a pretty bad idea, eh?
Sucky movie, I know…
The mission commander had a pistol, which might be handy on a ‘suicide’ mission, but I never figured out what the Gatling (Phalanx) guns on the rover vehicles were supposed to be needed for!
The always great Steve Buscemi wigged out with one, and Ben Affleck shot holes through the supposedly impregnable skin of the shuttle with the other one.
Anyhow, they sure came in handy when required by the story! The plot was already so full of holes to begin with, I guess a few more wouldn’t hurt.
When you look at the cost per pound of putting something into space, you have to have a damn good reason for it to be there.
was he the weaselly looking one with bad teeth?
I remember reading a speculative article that if space flight ever becomes common, swords would make a come-back as a side-arm, since you couldn’t put a hole in the ship with a sword if you had to use it.
Swords? Bah! Lightsabers.
Lightsabers would slice through most space craft like they were made of runny cheese.
I like the sword idea, though. It’ll be interesting to watch the development of microgravity martial arts.
That’d put the Matrix stuff to shame.
Serious answer:
What problem on board a space shuttle do you imagine would require a sidearm? Shuttle crews (even foreign ones) are highly trained and due to the nature of their missions, unlikely to mutiny. A space shuttle is also unlikely to be boarded by unauthorized persons for obvious reasons.
Besides, a shuttle is not armor plated. A bullet would likely pass right through the skin and ceramic heat tiles and then everyone would be fucked.
Joke answer:
I don’t know. Probably they’d probably have pulse rifles firing 10mm caseless standard armor peircing rounds (like in Aliens) or phased plasma rifles in the 40 megawatt range (like the ones Arnold couldn’t get in Terminator).
Probably something tazer-like would be the best bet. Or by that time, funkier things like microwave beam weapons tuned only to hurt organic bits and not screw up the machinery.
The only weapon that they could conceivably need on board the Shuttle is lots and lots of hard vacuum surrounding them. Anything that you do to endanger the mission, you’re endangering yourself. If you’re suicidal enough to not care about that, why would you care about the commander holding a Smith and Wesson to your head?
I found this slightly ironic, given that James “King of the World” Cameron wants to be the next Dennis Tito. The real question is, what weapon could possibly control these outsized egos?
Those were explosive-tipped Gauss cannons, used for mining. The idea is that when you come across a larger outcropping of denser metal, instead of trying to drill through it, you blow it away.
That’s my understanding, anyway. 'Sides, it looked cool.
Well, that’s what they landed on, after going off course. A really thick metal sheet. Why didn’t they use it?
This movie is too stupid to even discuss…
Don’t forget that they keep an axe on board - in case they get locked out of the cockpit.
(joke)
Yeah, I posted a thread about that a long time ago, but we never got to the bottom of it. I heard a story that a mission specialist became suicidal due to his experiment being accidentally destroyed during launch, and was caught trying to open the main hatch. He had to be wrestled away from the hatch, and was kept heavily sedated and tied up for the rest of the mission. According to the story, NASA changed mission protocols and require a padlock on the hatch once they reach orbit, with the only keys being held by the 2 senior ranking officers. But we never determined if this was an urban legend or not. I can’t even remember where I read this, but I’m pretty good at not taking flaky news sources literally, so I must have read it at some relatively authoritative source.
Actually, at orbital velocities, an inanimate carbon rod is rather deadly.
As for internal, man-to-man combat in the shirtsleeve environment:
Obviously, guns and other kinetic weapons pose a hazard to the ship, but their recoil would also pose nearly as much a hazard to the weilder as the target.
Hand-to-hand techniques for microgravity get talked about a lot in SF, but has anyone developed them? I bet the Russians have at least looked into it. You need a pretty good anchor to club someone effectively in microgravity, and even a sword would be difficult to wield. A spear or other jabbing weapon might be the easiest to use, if you can plant your back against a bulkhead.
My weapon of choice would be a low kinetic energy missile weapon like a tranquilizer dart, or some sort of flechette gun. I want to incapacitate my opponent as quickly as possible, and do it from a distance. A taser or some sort of directed EM energy might damage a crucial shipboard component.
How about a speargun (like for underwater fishing) with a blunted tip? Sure, a substantial fraction of the kinetic energy would be imparted to the mass of the firing party, but the majority would go to the smaller projectile. And if it’s blunted, it wouldn’t pierce the hull. Or, hmmm, maybe bean-bag guns like the SWAT teams use in nonlethal situations would be better. Would it work to have a device that launches its projectile with, say, pressurized gas, and that diverts some of the gaseous force backward to counteract some of the recoil?
As far as zero-G hand-to-hand goes, it seems to me there would be two objectives. If you thought you could take your opponent, you’d want to stay close to him/her, and would want to avoid knocking yourself away. You might even have developed techniques to anchor yourself to your target. Conversely, if you thought you were outmatched, you’d WANT to hit your opponent hard and knock yourself out of reach in the opposite direction. In the latter case, those retractable spring-loaded baton thingies might be very useful.
And of course, here’s Cecil on the subject of sonic weapons.