Non-lethal, cheaper, higher capacity, lighter, more personalized.
One of the main disadvantages of regular guns that I don’t think anyone has mentioned, is the need to keep reloading the thing and carrying extra clips.
That’s why I think some sort of energy weapon would be desirable if/when we can pack sufficient power into a small space, and we know the ceiling for power per kg is rather high (of course I am talking far future here, like the OP).
People often don’t have much confidence in new technology. It’s just a matter of demonstrating effectiveness.
I can see smart guns first being used by various police forces around the world, then rippling out to responsible gun owners.
So you’ve have a weapon which would kill the target days or weeks after being shot? It sounds like a device more suited to an absurd Bond movie (“The radiation will kill him in 96 hours, but until that time it give him x-ray vision and superstrength.”)
To pack the kind of energy and peak power output in to a battery or fuel cell that would be comparable to the chemical energy stored in the powdered propellant in a cartridge would require revolutionary developments, e.g. stable nuclear isomers. This isn’t just “sometime in the future” technology; this is science fiction technology that nobody knows how to develop as it will require fundamental breakthroughs in the basic physics. It is more likely that a man-portable laser or other energy weapon would use some form of exothermic chemical energy akin to a cartridge, which of course, would require the same carrying of cells and reloading that existing weapons do. The technomagic “phaser” weapons of Star Trek which just keep firing without ever running out of juice are a convenience to screenwriters and directors but will never exist in the real world.
Yes, and this is the problem; the technology is not effective, and there is no expectation that it will be suitable effective for defensive use in the foreseeable future. Until you have some kind of weapon which autheticates without external aids and does so assuredly so you aren’t left holding a paperweight after you’ve drawn down, such weapons are unlikely to find use by professional law enforcement.
Stranger
I think the biometric authentication firearms like in Skyfall and Judge Dredd will appear. They seem very useful if they can be made to work. And while perfecting our fingerprint recognition systems, it’s easy to do this:
- When turning safety off, authenticate the fingerprint. If accepted, vibrate.
- Firearm can continue to fire without authentication, until it is released from grip (measured by capacitive touch sensors on the handle)
That way, you know beforehand if the authentication didn’t work. No getting caught unawares. If you drop the gun or it’s wrestled away from you, it re-locks. Hmm, maybe I should patent this…
Anyway, they already have biometric gun safes, and people aren’t complaining about not being able to access them in time.
And according to this, the next weapon up is the fusion bomb: A Brief History of Weapons. The evolution of killing | by Zach Weinersmith | The Nib | Medium
Brilliant!
Yeah but the OP said “hundreds or thousands of years” in the future. That’s a long time given how quickly weapons in particular have developed. Any speculation needs to necessarily consider us making vast leaps in scientific and engineering know-how.
Not jettison existing science know-how of course, but I didn’t do that.
I don’t share this pessimism. If nothing else, the “wear a watch” devices have excellent success rates and so already are quite practical for use in law enforcement. And again, foreseeable future is quite different from the periods the OP was suggesting.
Thanks for the replies so far.
As perhaps an extension of the OP, apologies if I’m repeating myself…
Purely conceptually speaking…(over the next few hundred or thousand years…)
- Anti-matter guns. If we found a way to manufacture and store anti-matter easily, might this work?
- Radiation guns. Like, shooting gamma-rays, microwaves, or whatever. Again, if we found a way to store enough energy in a cell to make this viable, could this happen? What sort of radiation would be best/most efficient?
- Nuclear guns. Are mini-nuclear reactors possible (or might they be in the future)? Could you direct a mini-nuclear explosion out of a gun barrel?
- Plasma guns. I don’t know where to start with this one…
- [insert science] guns. Anything else I’ve missed out?
(Perhaps once we’ve got so good at science that we can manufacture commercial quantities of anti-matter we’ll no longer be at the stage of civilisation where it is sometimes necessary or desirable to shoot people at close range, although somehow I doubt it…)
One issue with Nuclear, Radiation or A-M guns is going to be sheer size/weight. The radiation created by these devices is difficult to control, you basically need shielding whose effectiveness is directly related to mass. You can’t create a super thin super dense shielding that weighs less than an equivalently effective lead shield.
It is one thing to portray such a device in a film or cartoon; it is another to make it a workable system suitable for defense use, where assuring positive function and reliability of the weapon is as equally important as the safing function. In a true defensive situation faced by a police officer, he or she will not have time to place their finger on a sensor in the required position then wait for it to scan and vibrate before the pistol is ready to fire. Virtually all issued duty weapons today do not even have a manual safety; the safety is either built into the trigger assembly or grip (e.g. Glock, Springfield XD) or is provided via double action/double action only trigger with a decocting mechanism (Sig Sauer, S&W four digit, et cetera). Unless this hypothetical fingerprint scanning safety is transparent to the user and results in no effective delay, it will not be acceptable for law enforcement or combat use.
And what I’m saying is that attaining such energy density in a portable device will require more than just a better chemical battery; it would require fundamental breakthroughs in the basic mechanics of energy storage, e.g. stable nuclear isomers, man-portable nuclear reactors, or some other technomagical innovation that we cannot even draw a path to with current knowledge. Energy weapons are favored by the science fantasy crowd because of how frequently and convincingly they are portrayed in film, t.v., animation, et cetera, but the reality is that it will take enormous breakthroughs that we can’t even credibly speculate about. Arguing that “once a miracle happens, anything is possible” is arguing for miracles.
Please point to a single law enforcement agency which is using these types of devices.
None of those would be necessary (or probably even workable) as anti-personnel or man-portable weapons. The plasma gun, for instance, while a staple of science fantasy, would not function the way it is portrayed in video games or comic books, as an charged plasma will expand explosively (e.g. literally faster than the speed of sound) as soon as it leaves confinement, which would pose as much hazard to the wielder as to the target. Directed energy weapons such as lasers and proton beams are in theory workable, but would have such enormous power throughput requirements that even a small inefficiency would result in a massive amount of waste heat such that the cooling system you would require to keep the weapon functional would be much larger than the weapon itself. Conventional firearms, which primarily use natural convection or in the case of water-cooled machine guns, forced convection to a cooling jacket, also suffer from these effects when fired repeatedly as anyone who has handled a weapon after a long range session can attest, and they are thermodynamically quite efficient (~25-30%) in comparison to even the best high energy lasers (1-2%). The creation of anti-matter is fundamentally inefficient (at best about 0.01% efficient) by any known or speculative measure which would make it fundamentally non-viable for a portable weapon system (not to mention the high energy hazard it would pose to the user) in comparison to even lasers or other directed energy weapons. And of course, all energy weapons may be dramatically affected by the media through which they operate; an opaque cloud of water vapor (e.g. fog) may be enough to substantially attenuate even a high energy laser.
In fact, the singular values of directed energy weapons over conventional or electromagnetic projectile weapons is ballistics and speed; a laser or particle beam will be essentially unaffected in trajectory over any reasonable distance and will move at a speed close to or at the speed of light in the medium, whereas bullets follow a quasi-parabolic trajectory and will progressively slow as affected by aerodynamic drag. By pretty much any other measure, projectile weapons are and will remain superior for the foreseeable future, even the far future. The form of the projectiles and the means of propelling them may change, but “blasters” and “phasers” are fantastical and fundamentally unworkable without some kind of revolution in the physics and thermodynamics of energy storage and projection.
Stranger
Thanks, Stranger
Really? Because I thought LEO’s first response is to talk to the suspect, assess danger, give warnings THEN shoot? How often do they need to draw and fire as soon as possible, unless they’re jumped? Even going into a dangerous situation (armed suspect), they can draw as they’re walking in. In fact, after you draw, you still need to aim, which is enough time to authenticate.
Drawing a weapon unnecessarily escalates a situation. Do you want to be facing the muzzle-end of a firearm while being pulled over for a speeding violation?
More often than you think. There are plenty of traffic stops where the officer is shot at well before s/he gets a chance to draw his/her weapon. The four dead cops in the Seattle-area coffee shop, the Houston-area policewoman who got shot in the face (and eventually chased and arrested her shooter), the Newhall CHP officers: you can doubtless google plenty more.
As to aiming before shooting, you also might want to look at the concept of “point shooting.” The gist of this is that, sometimes, split seconds count. And when you need your gun, you need it right now. This is also why the practice of carrying in Condition 3 (loaded magazine, magazine in pistol, empty chamber) is disfavored now a days. Often there isn’t the time to draw, chamber, and fire.
When an authentication program exists and the police are using it, then and only then, would I feel comfortable putting it on my personal firearms. They have much more motive to develop it than ordinary, non-LEO consumers do, as they have a much higher risk of being killed with their own weapon. I’m not grappling with an assailant if I have a choice; LEOs often are required to do so, and when doing so, the risk of getting their gun taken from them comes up.
EDIT: As to **Airman Doors’**s point, I certainly don’t want to face one, but damned if cops don’t seem to draw their pistols a lot more often than when my father was working a LEO beat 30 years ago.
If I can also use scare quotes, the ‘measure’ now is place is boycotting retailers who sell a product, accompanied with death threats (although someone said I was wrong to mention that last).
Maybe because, although prototypes have been made in the past, the first halfway plausible model only went on sale (and then went off sale due to the US gun culture) this year. I would think that police standardize on time-proven weapons, and thus would not be early adopters. Also, it would be a budget-buster at current pricing.
Luddites usually lose. And the apparently leading company is German, and so might be able to succeed while leaving the US market for later. So I am keeping with my prediction that future hand-held guns will be most different from those of today in their safety features.
It’s only a .22.
Watch this video.
Note how long it takes to enter the PIN so the gun can be fired.
Don’t let the gun get more than 15 inches from your hand, otherwise it locks up and you need to re-enter the PIN.
Any reason the gun makers couldn’t use the same technology automakers have been using for years … in chipped car keys? If the gun would only fire in very close proximity to a hidden chip, you could control who uses the gun. It could be limited to one person, a couple of partners, or a whole family. In an emergency, you could hand the chip over to a bystander.
Oh ok, I guess quick drawing is important. But there are degrees of similarity to fingerprints. Maybe the system can be tuned to err on the side of allowance? It wouldn’t block any legitimate users, but it might let some others through. All systems need to make decisions like this. When do you deploy an airbag, and risk injuring someone?
There will always be a place for the model 1911!
That is already one of the options being tested. With the chip being embedded in a ring, bracelet, or watch on the primary shooting hand.
I don’t see biometric safeties being viable until someone develops something to read an electrical biometric signature through a palm sensor that will authenticate in the time it takes to get the weapon from holster to on target. Maybe with and RFID style backup. Just don’t forget to keep the batteries charged.
But before that happens, I expect we’ll see a weapon with a built in camera interfaced to something like Google Glasses where the user will see a cross-hair where the gun is pointed. If some component of that fails, you can immediately fall back to the centuries standard iron sites.
How much do you think the Metal Storm technology (multiple barrels, stacked cartridges) will become a mainstream design for small arms?
http://hackedgadgets.com/wp-content/_metal_storm_hand_gun.jpg