Combat in microgravity

[SMJB]

The research I've done indicates that in melee there'd be a lot of judo throws and not a whole lot of punches, which makes sense. Because, you know, microgravity. I also assume that you're going to want to brace yourself somehow if you're using any species of slugthrower. A basically-modern but space-adapted sidearm will be the primary weapon of choice of most people, because logic, but I also want to know about other weapon types. Even swords, because the 'verse this is for is kinda crazy and has a bunch of freaks running around, and it's better to have an idea about this and not need it than vice versa. I imagine man-portable lasers are inefficient in this 'verse, but it might be worth it to have a weapon that can be calibrated to, say, eat through human flesh without leaving a hole in the wall behind your opponent. I'd also like to know the differences between doing all this in vacuum (where you'd need a space suit of some description, obviously) and, say, in a pressurized military depot hidden inside a hollowed-out asteroid.

Semi-relatedly, I imagine they also have microgravity sports in this 'verse. I'm thinking something like football in a tin can.

[Korto]

And, since I don't see a location mentioned for you, when you say "football", what do you mean? Soccer, Rugby League, Rugby Union, Aussie Rules, Celtic, or that American rubbish?
(No doubt I missed some.)

[SMJB]

I don't know. So far it's really just intended to be a background event for people to bet on, anyway.

[StandingInFire]

What weapons can be used I would think depend more heavily on the armour/distance of the enemy than micro gravity.

If people are pretty much unarmored you could use an acid/chemical supersoaker, it probably wouldn't be hard to find some that hurt humans pretty badly but leave the ship intact and maybe breakdown relatively quickly as well not pose a hazard after wards. Or just lower velocity guns.

If people are relatively heavily armored you just kindoff have to hope they make the outsides of the ships of thick enough stuff not to puncture them and still penetrate the armour. Sonic weapons might be feasible in this case to hurt humans badly/disable them and not damage a ship much (assuming air).

[madd0ct0r]

if you're operating in micro-gravity, chances are you have a micro-jetpack. In turn, that could be linked to the weapon and used for recoil compensation.

[Korto]

Weapons, scheapons, we're talking sport here!
I think soccer would be your best bet. It's already got an indoor version, I could picture the ball bouncing around in the micro-gee, kicked and headed in a lightning-fast sport. I don't think the pick-up and carry games would work as well. Aussie rules definitely wouldn't work, but I'd love to watch them try.

[Simon_Jester]

Recoilless beam weapons would be desirable, but it might be hard to make them powerful enough with near-future technology.

A conventional machine gun might have problems, but it wouldn't necessarily be that bad. The only time recoil is a serious problem is if you risk being flung into space- in which case you really should be securing yourself better, say with magnetic boots or lines. Also, jetpacks.

Melee combat would be- basically, anything you have to swing is contra-indicated. Stabbing weapons are a good idea, both because they puncture space suits and because they can be used to forcibly "fend off" anything you don't want drifting into you.

Boarding troops should be vacuum-protected if at all possible, because if nothing else, the enemy might always think to vent their own ship to space as a way of getting rid of your boarders. Fighting in vacuum won't be that different than fighting in air, except for the part where anything that tears or punctures your clothes is Very Bad News. Also where if you didn't remember to bring a pressure suit, you die of exploding lungs.

[phred]

Maybe acid, or white-phosphorous pellets fired from a paintball gun? They don't have much recoil, and you're relying on the chemicals to cause the damage instead of straight penetration. Which is good because it still kills people/damages spacesuits, but you don't have to worry as much about accidentally venting the compartment you're fighting in.

For melee I would second expecting knives and small piercing weapons, combined with fighting techniques that rely a lot on grappling and holding your opponent in place.
Out in space the moves would all be simplified since you would be fighting in bulky suits, and the winner is the guy who's spacesuit maintains enough air to breathe the longest.

[madd0ct0r]

hard to beat a shotgun.

For the sport, maybe we'd be seeing something like squash or fives?

[PeZook]

Space suit punctures are usually portrayed in an overblown way in media, though. You can have a hole in your suit and still have hours to actually fix it (depending on how large it is, of course): leaks are happening from time to time on the ISS and nobody was ever in serious danger.

Also space suits are actually pretty well armored kinda by default, and can be made self-sealing. That's for common suits designed to stay outside for hours ; Specialized boarding equipment might very well be designed much differently (for example, thermal regulation is much simplified inside a spacecraft, even with no atmosphere at all, because the sun isn't shining directly at you).

[Lord of the Abyss]

For guns some variation on Gyrojets seems a useful idea; since the projectiles are rockets and accelerate themselves, recoil will be minimized.

Weapons, scheapons, we're talking sport here!
I think soccer would be your best bet. It's already got an indoor version, I could picture the ball bouncing around in the micro-gee, kicked and headed in a lightning-fast sport. I don't think the pick-up and carry games would work as well.

If the teams have jetpacks or wings (human powered or motorized) then pick-up-and-carry could be fun; ball games with dogfighting.

[Simon_Jester]

For guns some variation on Gyrojets seems a useful idea; since the projectiles are rockets and accelerate themselves, recoil will be minimized.

The problem with a gyrojet is that it becomes increasingly useless at close quarters, to the point where at point blank you can stop the 'bullets' by putting your hand over the barrel. Though I'd want gloves to wear for that trick.

Since combat aboard a spacecraft or space installation is likely to be fairly short-ranged, the gyrojet rounds will have such minimal stopping power that even very modest protection will make them totally ineffective..

[Sea Skimmer]

If you have little or no gravity then massive use of small guided missiles becomes stupefying appealing since they don't need to use thrust to maintain flight speed and direction. As Quick Kill showed it is now possible to make some very small guided weapons.

If you have a vacuum, then grenade + launcher would be incredibly effective, since those eight thousand foot per second or so fragments now have no air resistance to stop them and even a fairly low velocity weapon will go pretty far pretty fast because it never slowed down either. The only limit on effective range is literally the odds of one hitting someone diminish, which would become another good reason to launch them from missiles too since you don't want your shooter anywhere close. The general trend would be to massively increase combat ranges, because the lack of air also makes optical and radar sensors work much better.

Taking over something like a asteroid base is likely to be so destructive that it would make the most sense to simply send in wave after wave of robotic bombs until the enemy surrenders, crack the whole thing apart with heavy naval guns, or drill holes from the surface and send bombs down those to blow in the roofs of specific compartments. Sci fi loves 'boarding' stuff but in all reality, it'd be like trying to take over one of the fortified factories in Stalingrad, if it was also built inside a U-boat pen. The losses against a prepared enemy would far outweigh any possible gain and the entire facility will be wrecked, making capture pointless.

Against an unprepared enemy your number one goal would be speed, to prevent them from becoming prepared, or else you'd just expect them to surrender out of hand.

[Korto]

Weapons, scheapons, we're talking sport here!
I think soccer would be your best bet. It's already got an indoor version, I could picture the ball bouncing around in the micro-gee, kicked and headed in a lightning-fast sport. I don't think the pick-up and carry games would work as well.

If the teams have jetpacks or wings (human powered or motorized) then pick-up-and-carry could be fun; ball games with dogfighting.

Wouldn't like the thought of aggressively tackling anyone wearing a jet pack, sounds like an explosion waiting to happen to me, or at least a serious injury.
The human-powered wings idea sounds good, though. Made out of some light rubbery material, flexible, springy, but tough; the ball would be made easy to grab and hold in one hand. The guy's there, got the ball clenched in one hand, flapping his heart out, about to get (literally) swooped on, he spins, throws to a team-mate...
Yeah, that would work (in micro-g). Think I'll steal it.

[madd0ct0r]

jetbacks don't have to be combustion - bottles of compressed air make more sense in this scenario anyway.

[Nitrophage]

Recoil will probably be less of a problem than you think because A) small fast objects like bullets have a lot of kinetic energy but not much momentum (4g 5.56 NATO at 930 m/s gives 3.72 Newton-seconds, probably more like 5 when you factor in the propellant gases-which will move a person at a measly few centimetres per second. And of course B) if you aren't in a position to brace yourself on some cover you're pretty much already dead. I admit that I don't really know anything about martial arts, so I can't help you there.

As for what the weapon of choice will be I'm assuming based on the OP that we are talking CQB here. As such shotguns would indeed be fearsome weapons, though they won't do much against armour and would lead to rather fast air loss if you blasted a wall with one. (And yes, the shot would penetrate-spacecraft walls are very flimsy) I think it would be better to use a carbine of some sort as the rounds would better penetrate armour and also because narrow high velocity rifle rounds would put smaller holes in walls but could yaw and/or fragment in the body to still cause great damage. This on top of the differences in RoF and ammo capacity.

On the subject of sidearms I think you'd look for much of the same things- practical RoF, manageable up close and with a tendency to blow decent size holes it thick juicy humans (or whatever) but leave much smaller ones in thin walls. As such glaser slugs, etc would have some use though they have problems with reaching vital organs. Maybe something like an FN-57.

As for how well typical weapons could hold up to the lubricantless vacuum of space my understanding is that you could engineer most classes of firearms to hold up decently well. That said overheating would be a problem with sustained fire weapons due to impossibility of air cooling. We might see a return to WW1 style water cooled machine guns. Lasers would have less mechanical problems due to lack of moving parts, but the fact that there is no projectile or casing to carry away heat would make the overheating problem worse.

[Terralthra]

Taking over something like a asteroid base is likely to be so destructive that it would make the most sense to simply send in wave after wave of robotic bombs until the enemy surrenders, crack the whole thing apart with heavy naval guns, or drill holes from the surface and send bombs down those to blow in the roofs of specific compartments. Sci fi loves 'boarding' stuff but in all reality, it'd be like trying to take over one of the fortified factories in Stalingrad, if it was also built inside a U-boat pen. The losses against a prepared enemy would far outweigh any possible gain and the entire facility will be wrecked, making capture pointless.

Sure, if it's prepared. But the thing is, those fortified factories weren't always like that; they were fortified in anticipation of the German advance, and they certainly couldn't have been used as actual factories in the fortified state. Boarding an enemy ship or factory which has been prepared for frontal assault is going to have ruinous losses, sure, but any boarding action is likely to be carried out in a blitz against hopefully unprepared or underprepared defenders, or using a very sneaky attack plan.

[SMJB]

Speaking of being sneaky, how does one do stealth with a torchship?

[Formless]

Speaking of being sneaky, how does one do stealth with a torchship?

You don't. Torchships throw off too much light and heat not to be noticed. Stealth in space is a contentious subject (I think it can be done, but its circumstantial), but its better to be deceptive than hidden in these cases. For example, you might be best served not attacking with a marked warship, but sneaking troops in with a disguised shipping transport or other civilian vessel, then pulling out rifles at the last second. Might be a good tactic right before the start of a war, while ships trajectories aren't being tracked to the last detail in case they're bombs or hijacked or secretly warships or something.

[Terralthra]

Speaking of being sneaky, how does one do stealth with a torchship?

Attack out of the sun.

[SMJB]

Speaking of being sneaky, how does one do stealth with a torchship?

Attack out of the sun.

First thing I thought of, after shutting the engines off and coasting. Problem is, what if you're worried about being watched from multiple angles? That, and still having the sun behind you when you're close enough to be visible, but I suppose that's a matter of angling.

[Formless]

By the way, about stealth; there is a thread in the Library subforum called "How would you make "Sensors" for a starship?" that got put there because it was considered a quality discussion on the topic, starting from the first (usually overlooked) question of how sensors work and their limitations. Its fairly technical, but still easy enough to follow.