KE weapons in trek low tech super weapon or lark?

[SapphireFox]

Well that is somewhat subjective to the user. Around .3c (1/3 c) the relativistic KE is not significantly higher than the standard Newtonian KE. At around .5c is when I start using the relativistic KE calcs. One just has to judge when they want to trade simplicity for accuracy.

It is worthwhile to note that if you are extremely concerned about absolute accuracy then the relativistic KE becomes noticeable around 6,000,000 m/s. (meters per second)

Although it might not scale down to particles scale Mike has a calculator for this kind of KE calculation here. http://stardestroyer.net/Resources/Calc ... ivity.html

[Eternal_Freedom]

Above post: Anything above about 10% is where relativistic effects start becoming noticeable

To borrow an idea from Stargate, you mentioned station-mounted jump drives that can go further and allow multiple ships to cross, and possible be based on Borg transwarp conduits?

Why not make it so the gates can go further, but only from one gate to another? Adds a strategic twist that they have what the feddies would consider tactical FTL on their ships and have to island hop, until they built their jump gate and boom, much longer range FTL

Or maybe make it like lost in space, where their FTL can go further, but is much safer/easier/more accurate if going between gates, hence the island hopping from system to system

[lordofchange13]

ok this is my last question that kinda fits in to this thread : in a sci fi i've been writing, some of my soldiers have a semi-long rang gauss rifle, it fires a 7-9 gram round at 1300 m/s, which has 67.6TJ. now to my question, is thise weapon over powered for anti-infantry weapon?

[SapphireFox]

Depends on what kind of infantry you are hunting. If you mean for normal unarmored humans then yes it is likely to much. If you are hunting something a bit tougher like toughened alien with a carapace or an armored or power armored human infantryman, then you may need the armor penetrating potential.

To put it into perspective a tank firing a Kinetic Kill weapon like a sabot round typically fires around ~1,800 m/s you have your rifle firing at 1,300 m/s and normal .50 BMG and 30-06 rounds have a velocity of around ~900 m/s.

Also I think you might need to recalculate your KE calc for that weapon. Most likely you used the number of grams straight right? Not quite the best as the formula is set more for kg than g so you would need to put 0.006 than 6.

To demonstrate.

(remember inner brackets first) V*V= 1300 X 1300 = 1,690,000

next bracket level M*(V*V)= M X (V X V)= M X 1,690,000 = 0.006 X 1,690,000 = 10,140

KE = 1/2 (M*(V*V)) so just 1/2 the results from the brackets to get 5070 J.

Not so mind numbingly insane of a weapon now is it?
Again putting it into perspective a 30-06 rifle round has around ~ 3,800-4000 J and a .50 BMG has over ~13,800-14,000 J

Why the difference? Well quite frankly your bullet is a light weight compared to the full rifle rounds its closer to the 62 grain (4g) bullet of the 5.56X45 NATO round used by the M-16 than the 150-220grain (9.7-14g) range of the 30-06. To say nothing of the heavy 650-800 grain (42.4-52g) for the .50 BMG.

So while it might be more gun than you need it would not be unreasonable for an infantry weapon. The most likely use I can think of for this is as a sniper weapon where the velocity would likely help maintain a flat trajectory better.

[lordofchange13]

your right sorry, its so post to be .07 Kg so that would be 70 grams right, that is the mass i meant it to be. and yes this is for a sniper rifle. but my gauss rifle idea has it so the speed is a bit ajustible but this is mostly for large game.

[SapphireFox]

Above post: Anything above about 10% is where relativistic effects start becoming noticeable

To borrow an idea from Stargate, you mentioned station-mounted jump drives that can go further and allow multiple ships to cross, and possible be based on Borg transwarp conduits?

Why not make it so the gates can go further, but only from one gate to another? Adds a strategic twist that they have what the feddies would consider tactical FTL on their ships and have to island hop, until they built their jump gate and boom, much longer range FTL

Or maybe make it like lost in space, where their FTL can go further, but is much safer/easier/more accurate if going between gates, hence the island hopping from system to system

I was already thinking of using wormhole drive jump gates in a more B5 manner that would have the same results as what you suggest.

The jump gates are more accurate and longer range than the ship mounted ones. In addition to that you can link two gates together like the stargate gates do, this would allow double the already enormous range of the gate and eliminate any error in accuracy.
A tactical consideration is that using a gate doesn't take energy form the ship so can launch an attack with the ships fully charged and powered as the drive consumes a lot of power. So much power that ships below a certain size/power threshold can't have/use a ship mounted drive. So smaller ships and craft NEED to use the gates to get from one system to another.

[SapphireFox]

your right sorry, its so post to be .07 Kg so that would be 70 grams right, that is the mass i meant it to be. and yes this is for a sniper rifle. but my gauss rifle idea has it so the speed is a bit ajustible but this is mostly for large game.

um yikes. 70g is heaver than the 14.5X114mm soviet heavy machine gun round and it is getting dangerously close to the weight of a 20mm cannon round! That would end up with a KE of ~59150 J that is a bit much for a rifle used by an infantryman.

The recoil for a weapon like that might take your poor soldier's shoulder apart!

[lordofchange13]

this soldiers about 9 feet tall with power armour. and is fighting heavly armoured cyborgs. also i was looking up some other weapon rounds sized to git persepctive and the bolt pistol from 40k are 0.09Kg with 6-10 shots per clip. but i git you point ill down size the rifle thanks for you comments! lastly i see a lot of people spouting out the mass and caliber of all sorts of weapons, is there a web site that specialises in that, or what?

[SapphireFox]

this soldiers about 9 feet tall with power armour. and is fighting heavly armoured cyborgs. also i was looking up some other weapon rounds sized to git persepctive and the bolt pistol from 40k are 0.09Kg with 6-10 shots per clip. but i git you point ill down size the rifle thanks for you comments! lastly i see a lot of people spouting out the mass and caliber of all sorts of weapons, is there a web site that specialises in that, or what?

Probably but for me I just look up the common rounds used on Wikipedia. For me it has all the necessary information I need like various bullet weights and muzzle velocity for the main versions produced for that caliber. Remember if you look up various rounds for comparison then it is best to search for the name of the caliber like 30-06, 5.56X45, .308, and .50 BMG.

[Temujin]

this soldiers about 9 feet tall with power armour. and is fighting heavly armoured cyborgs. also i was looking up some other weapon rounds sized to git persepctive and the bolt pistol from 40k are 0.09Kg with 6-10 shots per clip. but i git you point ill down size the rifle thanks for you comments! lastly i see a lot of people spouting out the mass and caliber of all sorts of weapons, is there a web site that specialises in that, or what?

You may want to give these sites a try as well:
Cannon, Machine Guns and Ammunition
Modern Firearms & Ammunition

[Eternal_Freedom]

You may need to use a different engine other than ion drives. They are fairly useless for maneuvring but are great for long continuous burns. I would sugest something like the feddie impulse engine for general usefulness. Or if you want a real-world-possible engine, I would suggest Orion nuclear engines, or nuclear thermal rockets

Of course, you could be using a different kind of ion drive to what we have now (like SW does). If so, carry on and ignore my post

[SapphireFox]

You may need to use a different engine other than ion drives. They are fairly useless for maneuvring but are great for long continuous burns. I would sugest something like the feddie impulse engine for general usefulness. Or if you want a real-world-possible engine, I would suggest Orion nuclear engines, or nuclear thermal rockets

Of course, you could be using a different kind of ion drive to what we have now (like SW does). If so, carry on and ignore my post

I hate to use another B5 reference but I must. The ion engines are similar to those used by the EA ie slow but powerful. A craft with impulse engines would be able to run circles around an ion equipped ship. Mind you I haven't seen a feddie impulse engine move somthing with the mass of a Senwa crusier or worse the super star destroyer plus mass of the grand battleship Uchuu Kaiju. IIRC even the enterprise-D need some of the magic mass lightening fields to have the ship be moved properly by the impulse engines.

Mind you that for smaller craft the Senwa have fusion turbines for propulsion. They are as good as impulse engines but don't/can't scale up to ship size. So while the fighters and bombers might be as fast as the feddies the cap ships will always be lagging behind.

[Swindle1984]

your right sorry, its so post to be .07 Kg so that would be 70 grams right, that is the mass i meant it to be. and yes this is for a sniper rifle. but my gauss rifle idea has it so the speed is a bit ajustible but this is mostly for large game.

um yikes. 70g is heaver than the 14.5X114mm soviet heavy machine gun round and it is getting dangerously close to the weight of a 20mm cannon round! That would end up with a KE of ~59150 J that is a bit much for a rifle used by an infantryman.

The recoil for a weapon like that might take your poor soldier's shoulder apart!

Meh. In a proper prone firing position, the recoil of a 20mm gun would just shove you backwards five or six inches if you didn't have it on a tripod or pintle mount.

Lahti and Solothurn anti-tank rifles from WWII used the powerful 20x138mm round and are available on the civilian market both in the US and parts of Europe (much easier to get ammo overseas than in America.). The Anzio Ironworks rifle uses the Vulcan 20x102mm round and you can either fire it prone from a bipod, set it up on a tripod for the M2 machine gun, or put it on a pintle mount if your truck has a hitch for a gooseneck trailer.

You can't fire it from the shoulder because it's too friggin' heavy to hold in that position.



.50BMG rifle on the right, 20mm Vulcan rifle on the left.

For comparison, between the muzzle brake and weight of the rifle, a .50BMG rifle has about the same felt recoil as a low-velocity 12-gauge slug; quite managable. Again, the biggest difficulty in firing one from the shoulder is the weight of the gun itself, not the kick.

[SapphireFox]

Damn!....I thought the biggest round available to civilians was the .50 BMG! I wasn't aware that someone was crazy enough to try making a rifle with an even bigger round.

As for the recoil note that the weapon of lordofchange13 is firing a round that is approaching sabot tank shell speeds, as it has been mentioned earlier the recoil from such a shot would be rather large. The faster the round needs to go the larger the recoil and since it is not a conventional gunpowder propelled weapon, a muzzle brake like the M82 and your monster 20mm has would be useless as there is no exhaust gases. Mind you I am not saying that the weapon must damage the shoulder but that it would be a bit too much to ask of a normal soldier to fire from the shoulder into the enemy. Now I may be wrong but even if you could fire that monster 20mm upright from the shoulder I don't think anyone would as the recoil would likely knock them on their ass.

However with that said I definately have found what I want for christmas heh heh heh. Now I get to fling HE and HE-I rounds at those damned pesky coyotes on uncle rick's farm.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Fair enough Sapphire_Fox. As I havent seen B5 I don't know the charachteristics of those ion drives, but they sound pretty neat. One thought though.

If they are slow but powerful, will they be sufficient to counter the recoil of your big ships spinal mounted weapons?

If the ion drives aren't good at sudden, high-impulse (proper term rather than ST term) manuvres you may have some big problems with firing the main weaponry.

[SapphireFox]

Fair enough Sapphire_Fox. As I havent seen B5 I don't know the charachteristics of those ion drives, but they sound pretty neat. One thought though.

If they are slow but powerful, will they be sufficient to counter the recoil of your big ships spinal mounted weapons?

If the ion drives aren't good at sudden, high-impulse (proper term rather than ST term) manuvres you may have some big problems with firing the main weaponry.

Yes for the most part they will since the recoil will have to deal with not only the thrust of the engines themselves but the shear mass of the ship itself and the momentum it carries. For the more overguned warships for their size like the 8in/203mm mounted Destroyers, sometimes firing the main spinal gun multiple times at full power may force a noticeable slowdown in speed until the engines can get them up to full combat speeds again. However for most ships they are designed to have an engine burst equal to the recoil. Some older models of warships might have special secondary engines designed to fire in concert with the main gun, however most modern Senwa ships now have engines with enough burst thrust to compensate for the main gun. Mind you that a full alpha strike forwards WILL slow the ship down as no current Senwa ship short of the Uchuu Kaiju has enough engine thrust to compensate for all that recoil.

[Eternal_Freedom]

You've clearly got this all thought out. Kudos to you sir!

I look forward to reading the fanfic

[Sea Skimmer]

Damn!....I thought the biggest round available to civilians was the .50 BMG! I wasn't aware that someone was crazy enough to try making a rifle with an even bigger round.

.50cal is the largest you can have without needing a Class III license and a huge amount of paperwork to register a new destructive device. Introducing new machine guns is illegal, but you can get new destructive device tax stamp under Federal Law. However some states have additional laws which block all further transfers of civilian destructive devices within the state boundaries. So if you don’t have it already, you’ll never be able to get one without moving. Before 1968 you could not only easily buy 20mm anti tank rifles, you could also buy proper anti tank guns and working mortars… for about 100 dollars apiece. Amazingly the US was not awash in drive by anti tank shootings. The trick is though, if you want high explosive ammunition then each individual round would be its own destructive device, and as a minimal requires a 200 dollar tax stamp and its own paperwork trail. That gets expensive and time consuming real quick assuming you could even find the ammo to buy. So in reality the 20mm guns are stuck with ball ammo for civilians and this doesn't leave them that much more effective then .50cal. So new ones are very rare.

A number of other 20mm anti tank rifle designs exist, and the largest anti tank rifle ever was a Swiss 24mm monstrosity that actually had wheels for transport. You could never fire something like these weapons from a shoulder because the guns are just too damn heavy, and active recoil absorption solutions like a moving barrel would make them heavier still. For a guy in powered armor it might work.


Swiss Tb.41 24mm. Clearly the most practical rifle ever invented at 131kg and with 91,000 joule muzzle energy.

[SapphireFox]

.50cal is the largest you can have without needing a Class III license and a huge amount of paperwork to register a new destructive device. Introducing new machine guns is illegal, but you can get new destructive device tax stamp under Federal Law. However some states have additional laws which block all further transfers of civilian destructive devices within the state boundaries. So if you don’t have it already, you’ll never be able to get one without moving. Before 1968 you could not only easily buy 20mm anti tank rifles, you could also buy proper anti tank guns and working mortars… for about 100 dollars apiece. Amazingly the US was not awash in drive by anti tank shootings. The trick is though, if you want high explosive ammunition then each individual round would be its own destructive device, and as a minimal requires a 200 dollar tax stamp and its own paperwork trail. That gets expensive and time consuming real quick assuming you could even find the ammo to buy. So in reality the 20mm guns are stuck with ball ammo for civilians and this doesn't leave them that much more effective then .50cal. So new ones are very rare.

I don't think I would mind having the class III license just to own the 20mm rifle, but spending $200+ per round to make a coyote go boom is too much to justify for me. Spending $10-$20 per ball round (damn expensive as it is!) is much more reasonable to me. Pity that I probably can't get one at home in the "great white north" of Canada. Thankfully I don't really need it for any other place than uncle rick's in the states.

A number of other 20mm anti tank rifle designs exist, and the largest anti tank rifle ever was a Swiss 24mm monstrosity that actually had wheels for transport. You could never fire something like these weapons from a shoulder because the guns are just too damn heavy, and active recoil absorption solutions like a moving barrel would make them heavier still. For a guy in powered armor it might work.

From what I can tell it kind of passes the line from rifle to man portable cannon. If you can't wield it braced against your shoulder (not necessarily standing up) then I believe the line has been crossed. (yes I am aware that larger weapons have been referred to as rifles up to the 16inch naval rifles)

However IIRC the current power armor weapon ideas had a 20mm-30mm rifle design for it.

[lordofchange13]

does anyone know how to calculate recoil for a magneticly propeled weapon? also got a weird physics question:if i were to fire said weapon from orbit (it being mounted on a spaceship) at the earth would its 0.05 titanium round burn up on entry or woul it hit the ground with out looseing to much mass? (the rounds going around 3260 meters/s when its fired)

[Marcus Aurelius]

A number of other 20mm anti tank rifle designs exist, and the largest anti tank rifle ever was a Swiss 24mm monstrosity that actually had wheels for transport. You could never fire something like these weapons from a shoulder because the guns are just too damn heavy, and active recoil absorption solutions like a moving barrel would make them heavier still. For a guy in powered armor it might work.

There was in fact one anti-tank rifle which you could fire from a shoulder, namely this:



The Carl Gustav Pvg fm/42. It still qualifies as an anti-tank rifle, because it fires a high velocity 20 mm AP projectile, but of course it employs the recoilless rifle principle. It was later developed into the more well-known Carl Gustav 84 mm recoilless rifle, which naturally uses HEAT ammunition for armor penetration.

[SapphireFox]

Nice piece. I wonder how effective it really was in the field. Especially considering how quickly armor had become resistant to 20mm projectiles, I can't really be surprised that they up gunned to a larger caliber.

[lordofchange13]

Whens you're next chapter coming out

[Marcus Aurelius]

Nice piece. I wonder how effective it really was in the field. Especially considering how quickly armor had become resistant to 20mm projectiles, I can't really be surprised that they up gunned to a larger caliber.

Considering the Swedes did not participate in WW2, not that effective at all

In earnest, it was outdated immediately at introduction in 1942. It might have worked against the side armor of German mediums which had only 30 mm of armor there, though, after all the Soviet 14.5 mm AT rifles managed to kill them occasionally at close ranges, and of course there were also armored cars, half-tracks and other light AFVs.

[SapphireFox]

Whens you're next chapter coming out

Well Real LifeTM has delayed me from getting back to it and sapping my creative juices. It's been delayed even longer because I am trying to write an action scene and keep the chapter longer then before. (kind of hard to do when I want to keep a change of chapter with each change of group perspective)

However thanks to you reminding me I actually do have a small fanbase that I do need to appease, I think I can get back to it within a reasonable time. Expect it out within a week from today. (of this posting of course )