Interesting Plasma Weapon Concept
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- Sea Skimmer
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Zixinus wrote: Well, my mind has a strange idea. I don't know if it has any real basis, I don't know how material and heat interact.
The idea is simple: to pierce armour.
Lasers can be diffracted and mirrored, heat generated by lasers can also be conducted away. If you create a plasma shock on the armour however, the shock can go right trough the armour and cause internal damage.
That's my idea anyway.
You don’t seem to know what your own idea is actually. Do you want to put a hole in the armor and cause damage inside with the projectile itself passing through, or transmit shock through the armor to knock of a scab of material off on the inside?
We have two different real life shells that can do those jobs using chemical (vs. kinetic impact) energy.
The first is High Explosive Anti Tank (HEAT ), which are plain old hollow charges with liners. They pierce armor by explosively concentrating a jet of copper from the liner at onto a very small point, the spray of solid copper then bounces around to cause internal damage to the target.
High Explosive Squash Head accomplishes the job of shock transmission to knock off an internal scab of the target armor. It works by having a thin metal nose, behind which is a large charge of plastic explosive. Unlike HEAT it does require some velocity to be effective, but not any vast amount, certainly far less then a kentic hit would need to defeat the same armor. Basically on impact the plastic explosive squashes against the armor, and is then exploded by a delay action base fuse. Thin armor will simply be ripped open by this blast, but thick armor will withstand it, only to have a chunk of armor blown off the back at very high velocity.
Kinetic projectiles which are stopped by armor may also cause similar internal damage, this broken off internal armor material is called spall. Some modern AFVs actually have a second layer of armor, physically separate from the main armor, to protect against spall. These liners aren’t normally thick enough to stop the huge scab of armor HESH creates, though certainly special armor materials can reduce the amount of shock HESH can transmit.
So basically you need to decide which kind of approach you want to use, before you can come up with a suitable weapon to give that result.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
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— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
No problem - as a big fan of the first two XCOM games, as well as avidly watching what you and your cohorts have been up to for the past year or so, I don't mind helping in the least. It's a pure labor of love on your parts - considering how much I loved the first two games, I felt I could not do less.Winter wrote:That's about it in a nutshell. Thanks for your list, it will certainly prove helpful -- grasers for the aliens is an idea that I'm certainly interested in -- but I can't help feeling that there must be some kind of weapon that would fire bright bolts of energy/matter/whatever. It just seems right for there to be one.
Actually, this is why I included the railgun, coilgun, and the hybrid - the speed and rate of fire of each, coupled with different sorts of ammo, would achieve what you're looking for quite nicely. After all, having an armor-piercing round traveling at about Mach 12 has a decent punch. With this sort of round, I could easily see a player shooting through a few enemies, if they happen to be unlucky enough to be in a straight line.Winter wrote:I'm still leaning towards the idea of an incendiary round that heats up on impact, or even a bullet composed of two compounds that start off a chain reaction as soon as they're brought into contact, which on impact begins reacting with the atoms of the target. This would make a pretty good armour-piercing or at least armour-destroying round.
Alternatively, you could have your explosive/incendiary shell for the same type of gun - less penetration, but much more impressive impact. A good analogy would be ultimately a fusion round of some sort. Think of the rail/coil/flail-guns as very high-speed rocket launchers.
No problem - however, plasma and sonic weaponry, despite how powerful they were in the first and second XCOM games respectively, just don't stand up to real-life physics, as others have pointed out.Winter wrote:Sorry if it seems like I'm clutching at straws here, but if I'm to change the plasma weapon writeups I want to avoid needing a change of particles if at all possible -- people would not be very happy with me in that event. And in my opinion even a distant plausibility is preferable to a non-plausibility.
For further ideas, I'd also suggest Nyrath's Atomic Rockets site, as he includes a host of useful information about a variety of topics, including sci-fi weaponry, and it's feasibility with current understanding of physics.
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If you're happy with a projectile variant, I suggest that this 'plasma generation' process be an explosion. It's not far-fetched to imagine some kind of super-hot explosive that has a much higher proportion of plasma in its fireball than an ordinary flame (IIRC it's <1%). In that case, plasma isn't the damage mechanism, it's just a side-effect of this special super-energetic explosive. Then you can go right ahead and call it a plasma weapon (plasma shells, plasma grenades, etc).Winter wrote:I guess that a projectile generating plasma at the target is probably the best option at this. Can anyone give some info as to what would be the best way to go about this, with composition of the projectile and required tech, etc.?
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Winter
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A coilgun just needs to get the projectiles into the accelerator start position. A machine gun has to form a gas-tight seal around each round as it fires. For a coilgun, a plastic belt of projectiles (resembling tacks or needles I imagine) on a sprocket plus a simple linear solenoid to punch them out of the belt (and into the firing chamber) should suffice. There isn't much that can go wrong with that, because there are no moving seals and the mechanism isn't subject to corrosion or fouling.Sea Skimmer wrote:How do you propose that coilgun fires at several hundred to several thousand RPM without lots of moving parts to load the ammunition? That’s what the majority of the moving parts in a machine gun do.
True, you need a highly reliable (and for infantry use, compact) power source for both of these, which currently we don't have.Even faulty ammo wont stop them for firing, lets see a laser keep firing after you put bad fuel in the generator.
This depends on the frequency of the laser. Smoke won't stop IR lasers and it takes a considerable thickness to have any real effect on a weapons-grade visible laser. X-ray lasers ignore smoke and light cover as well.in the case of a laser a mere rain storm or cloud of smoke is enough to render the weapon useless.
Certainly machine guns are vastly cheaper and simpler. These exotic weapons only make sense for militaries where the cost of the weapon is not the limiting factor (either because of very cheap manufacturing, or very expensive personnel).It costs only a few thousand dollars and can be built in any decent machine shop.
Why is this? The stresses on a coilgun barrel are strong, but not incomparable to the stresses on a tank gun tube, and unlike the later there isn't any physical barallel wear. I'm unaware of any reason why a coilgun accelerator should wear out (unless the supports are made of aluminium and thus have a fatigue limit).Plus a realistic coilgun is going to require a very expensive barrel change after only a handful of shots,
Coilgun projectiles are just simple steel penetrators or at their most complex a penetrator wrapped in a conductive (ideally superconductive) sabot (for inductive drive). If anything I'd think they'd be less sensitive to variations in ammo quality; the controller should be able to compensate for a fairly big variance in weight and drag (with the same logic it needs to cope with different firing positions and vibration of the gun platform).and will be extremely sensitive to ammunition quality.
Yes, there's no known way around the horrible railgun barrel wear problems.Railguns would be even worse.
I can't see any particular reason why this would be the case. With coilguns you've got a barrel, a possibly seperate capacitor array, the (simple) feed mechanism, the control electronics box, the sight and the case. With lasers you've probably got the emitter, some power electronics, a targetting mechanism, maybe a capacitor block and the case.What’s more, such weapons certainly will need maintained, and because they are so complex it won’t be possible to do it at less then depot level. With a machine gun you can change just about anything in the field, and even assemble a working gun out of the parts of several broken ones.
Well, it certainly seems unlikely that machine guns would be fully phased out, though refinements such as liquid binary or even electrothermal propellants might make it down to that scale eventually.Nope sorry, you’re not going to beat the machine gun for efficiently killing people.
Thanks, but I'm well familiar with the MetalStorm concept. We're already using a MetalStorm-type railgun in the game already.Zixinus wrote:Oh, and here is something cool.
http://www.metalstorm.com/
Multi-barrel guns using electricity as a trigger. Sorry if I already posted the link.
Winston Blake, explosion-generated plasma would be fine with me, but how would it explain the blue ball of energy in mid-flight?
Regards,
Winter
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And the cartridge case does that job without any additional moving parts. A coilgun is not going to be designed without a moving breach block, because then you’d risk those massive magnetic fields sucking shit into it.A coilgun just needs to get the projectiles into the accelerator start position. A machine gun has to form a gas-tight seal around each round as it fires.
That’s about how a chaingun works, in fact you can manually fire a chain gun with a wrench, but it still take a damn long time to perfect a mechanism that can do that a thousand times per minute in all weather conditions.
For a coilgun, a plastic belt of projectiles (resembling tacks or needles I imagine) on a sprocket plus a simple linear solenoid to punch them out of the belt (and into the firing chamber) should suffice.
That assumes your solider can carry around his belt of plastic ammunition without getting it dirty and that the weapon is also dirt proof. Good luck with that one.There isn't much that can go wrong with that, because there are no moving seals and the mechanism isn't subject to corrosion or fouling.
I notice you ignored the rain issue completely, no doubt because you know it will screw over any kind of laser. Smoke certainly will stop IR lasers in any case; do you not recall all the trouble the USAF had in both Gulf Wars using laser guided bombs through oil field smoke? Those laser designators are IR.
This depends on the frequency of the laser. Smoke won't stop IR lasers and it takes a considerable thickness to have any real effect on a weapons-grade visible laser. X-ray lasers ignore smoke and light cover as well.
So you are conceding the argument right here, but I’ll go on with this anyway.
Certainly machine guns are vastly cheaper and simpler. These exotic weapons only make sense for militaries where the cost of the weapon is not the limiting factor (either because of very cheap manufacturing, or very expensive personnel).
Actually barrel wear will be considerable, because the projectile must fit tightly if it’s going to avoid bouncing down the barrel like a smooth bore cannon ball, which will cause even more damage.
Why is this? The stresses on a coilgun barrel are strong, but not incomparable to the stresses on a tank gun tube, and unlike the later there isn't any physical barallel wear. I'm unaware of any reason why a coilgun accelerator should wear out (unless the supports are made of aluminium and thus have a fatigue limit).
Real life ammunition has a soft driving band which expands to hold the round in the barrel properly, allowing it to compensate for variations in the size of the projectile and the barrel. If your coilgun projectile is merely a piece of steel then it would have to be an absolute precise fit to work and the whole gun would probably jam under anything but ideal temperature conditions.
Coilgun projectiles are just simple steel penetrators or at their most complex a penetrator wrapped in a conductive (ideally superconductive) sabot (for inductive drive). If anything I'd think they'd be less sensitive to variations in ammo quality; the controller should be able to compensate for a fairly big variance in weight and drag (with the same logic it needs to cope with different firing positions and vibration of the gun platform).
That’s like saying with a firearm all I have is a barrel, receiver, bolt and a simple feed mechanism, obviously reality is much different. Whets more the firearm at least all the parts are just simple pieces of steel, rather then masses of wiring and circuit boards. Don’t forgot your coilgun must either be built out of superconductive materials, or it must have an active cooling system, and in fact it’s possible it would need active cooling even with superconductors.I can't see any particular reason why this would be the case. With coilguns you've got a barrel, a possibly seperate capacitor array, the (simple) feed mechanism, the control electronics box, the sight and the case. With lasers you've probably got the emitter, some power electronics, a targetting mechanism, maybe a capacitor block and the case.
It will never make sense to use liquid or elecotricthermal propellants with a mere machine gun. That would totally defeat the point of the self contained cartridge case, which is one of the single greatest innovations in military technology ever. 100 years from now I have no doubt that the machine guns of today, in some cases literally the machine guns of today, will still be in use.Well, it certainly seems unlikely that machine guns would be fully phased out, though refinements such as liquid binary or even electrothermal propellants might make it down to that scale eventually.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
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Tracers. An associated technology of this super-energetic explosives research might be a new tracer material that happens to glow bright blue, and is compact and cheap enough to fit in every round. This asks the question of why it's not used in other ammunition, but we can assume that large stocks of old ammunition already exist and will take a few years to burn through.Winter wrote:Winston Blake, explosion-generated plasma would be fine with me, but how would it explain the blue ball of energy in mid-flight?
Regards,
Winter
Gatling gun tracers
Rifle tracers
Pistol calibre tracers
Let's show the overall picture.Sea Skimmer wrote:[...]
Today's guns fire projectiles at typical velocities such as 0.4 km/s for a 9mm pistol, 0.7 km/s for typical ammo in an AK-47, and 0.9 km/s for a 0.50-caliber M2 machinegun. The highest velocity is obtained by tank cannons. For example, the 120mm main gun on a M1A1 tank firing M829A2 rounds obtains a muzzle velocity of 1.68 km/s.
With the highest velocity guns such as the 120mm M256 on modern U.S. MBTs, barrel wear is quite a concern, which is why the M256 is actually smoothbore rather than rifled. Even so, the barrel life of modern MBT main guns can be only a few hundred rounds fired before needing replacement. There's also other limits on the velocity of conventional gunpowder weapons. Every 0.1 km/s of additional velocity has been important since armor penetration increases semi-exponentially with higher velocity (within the relevant velocity range), but guns like the M256 are approaching the limit for their technology.
One limit is the energy of the propellant. The limit of conventional "gunpowder" propellant is illustrated in one case by the JA-2 propellant used in the M829A2 round previously mentioned: It is just 1.2 kJ per gram. For perspective, rocket propellant is a few times more specific energy even for solid fuel launch vehicles and even for kerosene / nitric acid, while high performance fuel & oxidizer combinations range up to 13 kJ/g for LH2/LOX propellant (which is why nobody ever seriously considered using gunpowder-based rockets for space launch).
Better yet, when combusted with oxygen in ambient air, where the oxidizer mass can be ignored, the specific energy of gasoline is about 45 kJ/g. Indeed, even after inefficiencies, it can take a relatively tiny mass of hydrocarbon fuel burned in a generator to power the EM launch of projectiles. That compares to the logistics of supplying the mass of ammo consumed by conventional guns. For example, that's why this illustration depicting one relatively near-term U.S. Navy concept advertises "simplified logistics" and "large capacity magazines" ... though other aspects like obtaining hundreds of miles range through higher velocity are equally important:
That's an illustration for one 2.5 km/s railgun proposal, obtaining 200+ mile range due to its velocity, which is high by today's standards when muzzle velocities like 0.6 km/s are common for conventional gunpowder artillery. If one considers the distant future, such as another century, frequent use of weapons with still higher velocity is at least possible, leading to even greater range, e.g. even up to intercontinental artillery.
Returning to the earlier figure of <= ~ 1.2 kJ/g for the energy release of gunpowder propellant, it should come as no surprise that conventional guns can not obtain 4 km/s projectile velocity, instead peaking at under 2 km/s. To obtain 4 km/s, a projectile would need 8 kJ/g of kinetic energy (KE = 0.5MV^2) ... but the expansion velocity of gases released by the detonation of gunpowder isn't nearly so high.* That's due to limited specific energy, plus the high average molecular weight of the gases produced.
* (To be technically accurate here, there are some techniques where lots of gunpowder has inefficiently, indirectly been used to fire tiny projectiles at far more than 2 km/s, for lab purposes, such as driving another stage filled with hydrogen, but those aren't practical for weapons use).
There have been experiments at an U.S. Army research lab of combustion light gas guns using methane. Obtaining closer to rocket fuel specific energy performance, the higher specific energy in combination with lower molecular weight products allowed projectile velocity of 3 to 4+ km/s in the 30mm / 40mm cannons tested, but I can't find a link online or in my records at the moment. Railguns are the most frequent concept for future weapons of 2+ km/s projectile velocity, avoiding propellant storage concerns.
Here's one illustration:
articleArticle earlier this year wrote:Normally, new weaponry tends to make defense more expensive. But the Navy likes to say its new railgun delivers the punch of a missile at bullet prices.
[...]
A demonstration of the futuristic and comparatively inexpensive weapon yesterday at the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren had Navy brass smiling.
The weapon, which was successfully tested in October at the King George County base, fires nonexplosive projectiles at incredible speeds, using electricity rather than gun powder.
The technology could increase the striking range of U.S. Navy ships more than tenfold by the year 2020.
"It's pretty amazing capability, and it went off without a hitch," said Capt. Joseph McGettigan, commander of NSWC Dahlgren Division.
"The biggest thing is it's real--not just something on the drawing board," he said.
The railgun works by sending electric current along parallel rails, creating an electromagnetic force so powerful it can fire a projectile at tremendous speed.
Because the gun uses electricity and not gunpowder to fire projectiles, it's safer, eliminating the possibility of explosions on ships and vehicles equipped with it.
Instead, a powerful pulse generator is used.
The prototype fired at Dahlgren is only an 8-megajoule electromagnetic device, but the one to be used on Navy ships will generate a massive 64 megajoules. Current Navy guns generate about 9 megajoules of muzzle energy.
The railgun's 200 to 250 nautical-mile range will allow Navy ships to strike deep in enemy territory while staying out of reach of hostile forces.
[...]
The range for 5-inch guns now on Navy ships is less than 15 nautical miles, Garnett said.
He said the railgun will extend that range to more than 200 nautical miles and strike a target that far away in six minutes. A Tomahawk missile covers that same distance in eight minutes.
The Navy isn't estimating a price tag at this point, with actual use still about 13 years away. But it does know it will be a comparatively cheap weapon to use.
"A Tomahawk is about a million dollars a shot," McGettigan said. "One of these things is pretty inexpensive compared to that."
He said estimates today are that railgun projectiles will cost less than $1,000 each, "but it's going to depend on the electronics."
Projectiles will probably eventually have fins for GPS control and navigation.
[...]
At the peak of its ballistic trajectory, the projectile will reach an altitude of 500,000 feet, or about 95 miles, actually exiting the Earth's atmosphere.
The railgun will save precious minutes in providing support for U.S. Army and Marine Corps forces on the ground under fire from the enemy.
[...]
General Atomics, a San Diego defense contractor, was awarded a $10 million contract for the project last spring.
It is a very reasonable prediction to expect railguns to become more common in the future, substituting for conventional gunpowder weapons in some applications.
When it comes to terrestrial combat, use of coilguns is more uncertain, tending to be farther into the future than the relatively near-term railgun concepts.
The railgun does have one significant disadvantage, though, compared to what is possible with coilguns. A railgun has physical contact between the projectile and rails at high velocity. (One general overview of railguns is here). Rail erosion becomes worse with higher velocity and more rounds fired.
(As an extreme case, depictions in some sci-fi of relativistic railguns are nonsense: Among other issues, no real-world material plausibly withstands friction and physical contact with rails at that velocity, just like a ground vehicle couldn't travel at relativistic speed without destroying itself).
The main advantage of a coilgun or mass driver can be avoiding the rail ablation problem, avoiding "barrel wear" from physical contact at high velocity. Instead of a projectile contacting rails, the magnetic field of pulsed electromagnets is strongest in the center of the launch tube, forcing the projectile there rather than having it contact the walls when being accelerated to high velocity. Indeed, a mass driver is a little analogous to magnetically levitated trains, although operating on much different scale.
Here's a description of one mass driver:
SSIThe first practical device was constructed by Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill and Dr. Harry Kolm in 1977. O’Neill and Kolm, working with a team of graduate students at MIT, constructed Mass Driver I from about $3,000 worth of scrounged electronic parts. In its initial tests, this push-only machine achieved over 33 gravities.
Mass Driver II demonstrated magnetic levitation of the moving portion of the mass driver (the bucket), and optical triggering of the drive coils. This machine was operated at nearly 500 gravities and demonstrated the feasibility of the circuitry necessary to store and direct the electrical power required for mass driver operation.
Mass Driver III demonstrated O’Neill’s pull-only design, which provided automatic centering for the buckets as they traveled down the length of the accelerator. [...] Mass Driver III has demonstrated over 1,800 gravities acceleration.
(Although the above figures showed progress, there's nothing special about them, as one might guess from the rapid progress and drastic change from 33g to 1800g ... at least tens to hundreds of thousands of gravities are generally considered obtainable, perhaps more).
Relatively moderate acceleration is sufficient for the civilian applications usually considered for mass drivers. However, to instead make them into weapons, coilguns, would naturally require far greater acceleration, more miniaturization, and greater performance relative to size.
A multi-thousand-ton mass driver accelerating projectiles to 11 km/s over kilometers of length would be fine for civilian space launch, but a weapon for terrestrial military use would typically have to be orders of magnitude more compact in order to be competitive with the alternatives in the lower velocity realm.
What "coilguns" exist today are just lab curiosities, like the various examples on this page. Being just built by hobbyists, those are frequently weak enough to have physical contact as the projectile accelerates. However, if one day improved enough to be real weapons, competitive weapons, the main point of having coilguns instead of railguns would be to avoid rail/barrel erosion through strong enough magnetic fields for levitation of the accelerating projectile, avoiding physical contact while it accelerates to high velocity, like the previous quoted example.
It is not the case that a sophisticated coilgun weapon would have barrel wear from high-velocity friction. The main point of using a coilgun would be to avoid that, which is how coilguns and mass drivers are able to have no universal velocity limit comparable to that of railguns. Even a 50 km/s coilgun is as possible as a 1 km/s coilgun, albeit tending to be longer and more expensive ... though velocities higher than ~ 4 to 10 km/s at most would tend to be suited only to space weapons rather than terrestrial weapons, considering projectile passage through air.
Of course, coilguns becoming potentially competitive military hardware would depend on the distant future eventually having technological advancement like a lesser version of the difference between a simple Civil War cannon of 1865 and a complex million-part B2 bomber aircraft of 130 years later. That may be a controversial prediction.
However, what is apparent is that current conventional gunpowder weapons are not nearly the ultimate theoretically possible in regard to range, firepower, accuracy, armor penetration, or ammunition capacity. For example, there likely will be some railgun deployment during the next several decades. And, like the 21st century battlefield differs from the 19th century battlefield, there will tend to be much change eventually.
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Isn't that basically goign to be like some sort of "mini-nuke" or "antimatter" "explosive" round?Winston Blake wrote: If you're happy with a projectile variant, I suggest that this 'plasma generation' process be an explosion. It's not far-fetched to imagine some kind of super-hot explosive that has a much higher proportion of plasma in its fireball than an ordinary flame (IIRC it's <1%). In that case, plasma isn't the damage mechanism, it's just a side-effect of this special super-energetic explosive. Then you can go right ahead and call it a plasma weapon (plasma shells, plasma grenades, etc).
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forgot about this
The Shiva Star plasma weapon
This would mesh with starglider's earlier concept of a "low velocity/high mass" partilce beam weapon.
There's also gyrojet weaponry (rocket propelled bullets/explosive shells.)
The Shiva Star plasma weapon
This would mesh with starglider's earlier concept of a "low velocity/high mass" partilce beam weapon.
There's also gyrojet weaponry (rocket propelled bullets/explosive shells.)
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Antimatter would do the job for sure, but I was imagining a new chemical explosive with high energy density, maybe something like this. I don't know if this particular example releases enough heat to make its fireball contain notably more plasma, but I figure the basic idea is a lot more realistic than magic glowing bolt weapons (or antimatter-tipped bullets).Connor MacLeod wrote:Isn't that basically goign to be like some sort of "mini-nuke" or "antimatter" "explosive" round?Winston Blake wrote:[snip]
Although given the softness of the setting in question, antimatter shell launchers could fairly be called plasma weapons. In this case, 'plasma' weapons would probably only be available to the advanced alien side, and then only when the expense was worth it; perhaps carried occasionally as an anti-armour weapon?
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The second. To send shock waves trough the body that damages bones and internal organs. You mentioned that this can be done with conventional chemical weapons. Can this be done with lasers with the correct pulsing/wavelength?You don’t seem to know what your own idea is actually. Do you want to put a hole in the armor and cause damage inside with the projectile itself passing through, or transmit shock through the armor to knock of a scab of material off on the inside?
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Just so you know, the aliens in this setting have easy access to antimatter, and use it to power most of their advanced technology. Sublight drives, energy generation, etc.Winston Blake wrote:Antimatter would do the job for sure, but I was imagining a new chemical explosive with high energy density, maybe something like this. I don't know if this particular example releases enough heat to make its fireball contain notably more plasma, but I figure the basic idea is a lot more realistic than magic glowing bolt weapons (or antimatter-tipped bullets).
Although given the softness of the setting in question, antimatter shell launchers could fairly be called plasma weapons. In this case, 'plasma' weapons would probably only be available to the advanced alien side, and then only when the expense was worth it; perhaps carried occasionally as an anti-armour weapon?
We haven't decided where exactly the power to generate the antimatter comes from, but that's probably up to a bunch of advanced fusion power plants in the mothership.
Regards,
Winter
I don't mean they have vast reserves of it. They're low on everything at the beginning of the war, they don't have enough resources to just throw around. When they start mining the solar system, the war heats up considerably.Xeriar wrote:...then why haven't they won?
All I meant was that antimatter-containing ammo is a possibility, one that we've considered for some time. We've already got antimatter-fuelled guided missiles. It's not a big leap.
Regards,
Winter