If humans go to space, we are going to bring weapons to space. we are going to fight in space. from what we've currently developed it doesn't look like lasers or railguns are going to really be all that great compared to good old guns. but space has different things to deal with
1. space does not have bullet drop or slowdown due to gravity or air resistance
2. bigger bullets weigh more
3. space has poor cooling, so you want to minimize the amount of propellant used to minimize heat generation in any sustained fire scenario
4. in space you are pushed by recoil so the less recoil the better
5. you don't even need the bullet to kill them if it pokes a critical hole in their suit or ship
all of those things favor extremely small, extremely fast projectiles that fragment into many pieces on impact. what i'm trying to say is, the future is very likely going to be .17 Hornady Magnum Rimfire.
pretend this was the picture i clicked for the op
Aw. C'mon, bait-chan. Does NOT have .22 mag in that line-up? But, I agree, something like .17 would do all sorts of plenty of damage. Pretty much like nothing else, especially with future space rocket materials SCIENCE. To make it a future space boolet, the design will have to evolve a bit, but it pretty close.
22lr in space would'nt kill me. 22lr sucks for personal defense.
ok well it poked a hole in your spacesuit and you're dead despite having a non-lethal flesh wound
yeah right buddy
Oh no. A hole in my nice new spacesuit. Mom's gonna be so mad.
*slaps patch on it*
Anyway...
What about something like a hollow point that’s designed to shed pettles with enough velocity to possibly blow back out in a wide pattern.. how fast can you patch 5-8 holes?
What about a light saber
I feel like in space, if we were restricted to cartridge based weapons in space then I’d guess small caliber rounds with extreme charges but loaded in recoil less rifles would be cool…. Eargersplitten loudenboomer might be more than a meme…also you forgot to consider that cooling a barrel in space might be a lot different from doing the same in atmosphere..
>just poke holes
>cooling
Sound like a job for CO2 guns
what if you made the cartridge hold co2 instead of propellant. how small can you make a co2 canister?
All your considerations suggest shotguns. If the pellets don't slow down and there's no air to disrupt the pattern, you could literally wipe out spacemen miles away with a trap load. Also this thread is dumb.
This problem was solved 60 years ago.
>fwoooosh
>GYROJET!
> Now with 50% MOAR self-guided Space Laser!
I'm on board.
ok how bout this
You can even shoot 30-30 in space
>1. space does not have bullet drop or slowdown due to gravity or air resistance
It absolutely has bullet drop due to gravity, or slowdown depending on what direction you are firing at in relation to the gravitational forces at play. Although you would call this orbital mechanics.
>2. bigger bullets weigh more
I mean... they can mass more but mass also carries energy and has implication for the structure of the projectile and how it interacts with a target that it hits.
>3. space has poor cooling, so you want to minimize the amount of propellant used to minimize heat generation in any sustained fire scenario
You always want to use just enough to get the job done.
>4. in space you are pushed by recoil so the less recoil the better
Only if more recoil was wasteful to hitting the target or destroying the target.
>5. you don't even need the bullet to kill them if it pokes a critical hole in their suit or ship
This assumes we make targets with the same design considerations we build our current space based objects; Being low mass with all or nothing failures. A military object with the design goal of being in a fight might spend a huge amounts of mass on being redundant, durable and annoyingly hard to kill. Just think how dangerous naval ships would be if sinking them wouldn't render them unable to fight. Every fight would be fought until all the magazines where hit the whole ship burned or the last sailor had ran out of things to throw.
>1. space does not have bullet drop
This would only really be applicable in interplanetary or interstellar space or relatively short ranges. Bullets still need to account for orbital mechanics.
With reduced drag you could make very impressive sniper shots spanning thousands of KM. The side that can calculate and hit those shots will win over the side that doesn't.
Most of the bullets you might fire just end up in slightly more elliptical orbits a change of 500m/s isn't going to do that much when you are moving at 10,000m/s.
>With reduced drag you could make very impressive sniper shots spanning thousands of KM. The side that can calculate and hit those shots will win over the side that doesn't.
The side trying to make those calculations is the side that doesn't have guided missiles.
>all orbital combat takes place around LEO or GSO
500m/s is a huge budget when operating around smaller moons. That is nearly escape velocity for some and 500m/s is pretty paltry compared to rifle velocities today. M193 could be fired on the surface of Diemos and escape it's gravity with proper plotting.
What's it mean for combat around Earth, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter?
500m/s for Mars is only 1/10th of the escape velocity.
And while 500m/s would be a lot of ΔV for a space ship the context is an unguided bullet heading off to a new orbit.
A bullet has use and doesn't always become a navigational hazard but as ship to ship weapons they are much less useful than missiles or whatever flavor of laser you are using.
Ferromagnetic slug launchers, air guns, plenty of ways to poke lethal holes in suits an unarmored spacecraft without really heating up a lot of your gun. Firearms would be last resort especially if not rigged up to disperse more heat into some thermal mass block or cooling system.
>4. in space you are pushed by recoil so the less recoil the better
You can make a gun zero recoil fairly easily even with a conventional setup by having a short barrel, lots of powder, and a big muzzle brake.
Just use that magnetic rifle that came out a couple years ago. The one that shoots the little steel discs.
By the time we actually hit the point where weapons are being deployed in space I feel like we’ll have had time to perfect it a little more. But it could definitely already kill a man.