Its a standard A2 in rifle length like the ones sold by Luth AR.
The stock is specifically the PAMAX AR15/M4 Milspec Stock FDE - Integrated QD painted white
The extra tab on the stock is just made from a bit of ridged plastic so the gun could be shouldered in the suit.
The scope is not the Brownells clone but that would be a better choice if you dont want to make it screen accurate. Otherwise the ecact one used is made by Barska: 4x20mm Electro Sight Carry Handle Base Mil-Dot Rifle Scope w/ BDC Turret
They use a comb of white and silver high temp paint for the props.
As far as the upper and lower I do not know for sure, the lower is a milspec M4 style AR-15 and the upper could be a C7 from Luth or some other maker with a mix-a-match upper. straight slip ring, A2 flash hider, Triangle handguard cup with a hybrid A2 hand guard. Barrel is probably a standard government profile or it could be a match bull barrel. I think Rock River used to make a upper like this with a match threaded barrel.
As for the real deal, yeah NASA and the DoD played around with the idea of this back in the 50s and 60s. bone stock rifles would almost die right away. moon dust is super abrasive and would foul up actions super fast. most of the stuff we sent up there (motors, suits pwr tools etc.) started to break down in the time it was deployed let alone any long term use. The paint is not just for looks either. Real space guns would have ceramic or titanium furniture to keep them light and to resist thermal issues. barrel over heating was a nightmare due to the obvious lack of air cooling, there where ideas for radiator fins for cooling but the barrel life would suck for these things and they would heat up fast under use. 556 would be awesome for space fighting, velocity would be king and you would want as little recoil as you could get. They would not go with a flash hider, you would see a giant comp on the end to counter act every ounce of recoil you could.
Yes you can fire guns in space. You might need special ammo that carries a bit of oxygen though. And yes, space infantry fighting is like one hit kills in a video game since any hit is always lethal because it damages your space suit.
>special ammo that carries a bit of oxygen though.
Just use a monopropellant or one with oxidizer included. I think nitrocellulose uses oxygen from the air but things like black powder and nitroglycerin do not.
>Just use a monopropellant or one with oxidizer included. I think nitrocellulose uses oxygen from the air but things like black powder and nitroglycerin do not.
Black powder.
On the moon. >"Neil! Buzz! Give these commies a volley!"
Dumb story. I've not finished it yet but already I can poke a massive hole in it. The aliens can't not be aware of gravity and Newton's principles even if they're otherwise backwards. There's literally nothing stopping them using their ships to grab a rock and fling it at the earth at high speed.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
why would they destroy Earth if they want to conquer and colonize it?
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Maybe the first fleet did. The second fleet probably needs to end humanity because it's existential threat to everyone else in the galaxy.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
It's been a few years since I read the story, but there IIRC only one fleet appears in it, and given the lack of communications, it doesn't seem unreasonable that humanity can reverse engineer the FTL drives and prepare for the things you describe.
Either way, you're complaining about things that aren't relevant to the story.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
finish it. The effect it uses only works with objects matching roughly the mass and dimensions of a sail ship. They literally have no drive capable of moving an asteroid off-course, because they never invented rockets.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Just read it. Nothing about the limits of the FTL or contragravity in the story is described or explained. The actual thing limiting the aliens from throwing rocks is the lack of developing the math or technology needed to aim them through orbital mechanics.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Jumping straight into warcrimes is the lazy science fiction enthusiast's crutch. Just because you can annihilate a society from orbit doesn't mean you should and there are plenty of reasons to avoid it.
>You might need special ammo that carries a bit of oxygen though.
Every fricking propellant since blackpowder already does that.
[...] >I think nitrocellulose uses oxygen from the air
Go think a bit about the logistics of getting a thousand times the propellant's volume of atmospheric oxygen into the casing during the microsecond it takes to fire and realize what a complete moron you are.
>bit of oxygen though
nobody tell this guy about nitration chemistry. it's funnier this way.
>what is an oxidizer
There's no reason it wouldn't work as long as you use dry lube (oil or grease will freeze) and don't need to shoot enough rounds to overheat the gun since it takes a very long time for anything to cool off in the absence of air.
[...]
Dunning-Kruger moment.
>need to add some sealant to the neck of each round so the air doesn't leak out after a few hours
>You might need special ammo that carries a bit of oxygen though.
Every fricking propellant since blackpowder already does that.
>special ammo that carries a bit of oxygen though.
Just use a monopropellant or one with oxidizer included. I think nitrocellulose uses oxygen from the air but things like black powder and nitroglycerin do not.
>I think nitrocellulose uses oxygen from the air
Go think a bit about the logistics of getting a thousand times the propellant's volume of atmospheric oxygen into the casing during the microsecond it takes to fire and realize what a complete moron you are.
Then they can shut the frick up about them until they've gone and looked shit up, or as is the case here simply tried thinking a teeny tiny little bit about it.
1: Just don't fire rapidly and let it radiate away over time
2: A heat sink built into the barrel
3: Some kind of active cooling system that moves heat away from the barrel using coolant.
4:Radiator panels
QC barrels and very open receiver designs that mostly keep the heat isolated in the barrel-chamber complex.
Maybe have spare bolts that can similarly be dropped free and installed quickly.
Unironically, brass cartridges are little heat sinks that'll help mitigate the issue. Using something like a caseless cartridge is shit since the heat will build up rapidly with basically no means of removing it.
There's no reason it wouldn't work as long as you use dry lube (oil or grease will freeze) and don't need to shoot enough rounds to overheat the gun since it takes a very long time for anything to cool off in the absence of air.
>special ammo that carries a bit of oxygen though.
Just use a monopropellant or one with oxidizer included. I think nitrocellulose uses oxygen from the air but things like black powder and nitroglycerin do not.
Part of the problem with shooting in vacuum is that the bolt will weld to the receiver pretty quickly, so the lubricant and the materials in the firearm need to be very specific, but you're largely right here. The other guys talking about recoil and oxidizing powders (because they already exist and we all use them already) are silly. You solve the lubrication problem and your M-16A2 is Gucci.
I think ammo is the easy part, handling how recoil affects the shooter whilst obtaining the neccessary velocity for the projectile to penetrate whatever armour is being used by the target is the harder part I reckon
Most likely the best round would be very fast and very light. Like 30gr .223 or however light it can be. Maybe it would be easier than I'm anticipating to implement some kind of self-sealing spacesuit, but in the lack thereof, it seems like the wound of the round itself might be secondary to simply damaging the space suit.
>You might need special ammo that carries a bit of oxygen though.
Anon, you already know guns can fire under water where there is no free oxygen. Go ahead and apply that reasoning now.
>under water where there is no free oxygen
Not entirely true, there's quite a lot of free oxygen in water, that's how fish breathe.
Some lung-using animals can harvest oxygen from water too, collecting it in hairs and dimples and things.
>filled with birdshot
Flechettes, possibly with some kind of disposable rifling to induce spin since fin stabilisation won't be significant in the timeframe.
A few layers of kevler/ceramic armour would stop bird shot dead if it was fired in the same orbital frame of reference. You need some penetration.
At that point a small fighter craft would be all you'd need. Boarding in space in unpractical as the distances between ships could be tens to hundreds of kilometers. Being just regular infantry drifting around 100km from your ship with no way to get back doesn't sound so fun.
Modern ammo contains its own oxidizer so yes, they'd fire fine in space.
Actual engineering problems might be weird effects like "cold welding" between moving metal components that can sometimes occur in space. Or heat rejection/overheating.
>cold welding
That's a real problem; apparently astronaut tools are coated in plastic to prevent them from welding to whatever bolt or screw they're manipulating while space walking. +1 for lasers over bullets in space (few moving parts).
>Modern ammo contains its own oxidizer so yes, they'd fire fine in space.
Has there been any firearms propellant ever that didn't? Because while I guess the implication that old ammo doesn't is technically true due to arrows, sling-stones and such...
Yeah but a gun on earth is designed to dissipate heat through conduction, not purely through electromagnetic radiation.
You can't take an earth gun and just use it in space the same way.
So my question was how would you handle this problem? You gonna slap on some radiation panels? Maybe liquid cooling?
>is designed to dissipate heat through conduction
Convection. Conduction through air is slow enough that air has been humanity's favourite thermal insulator ever since the first caveman wrapped himself in an old animal skin.
>Convection just moves the heatsink medium
Exactly, and in this case it's the air around the gun that moves and takes the heat away with it. We consider it a case of conductive cooling if the medium is stationary and the heat is conducted straight through it instead. Mixed cases can exist, but with somewhat freely moving air the conductive contribution is going to be frick all. The jump from gun to air that you're trying to UHM ACKSHUALLY about? No one gives a frick at this level, that bit doesn't even show up in the basic equations.
>Convection just moves the heatsink medium
Exactly, and in this case it's the air around the gun that moves and takes the heat away with it. We consider it a case of conductive cooling if the medium is stationary and the heat is conducted straight through it instead. Mixed cases can exist, but with somewhat freely moving air the conductive contribution is going to be frick all. The jump from gun to air that you're trying to UHM ACKSHUALLY about? No one gives a frick at this level, that bit doesn't even show up in the basic equations.
Also, speaking of heat transfer...
[...]
Paint the barrel, front stock and receiver black.
no. convection is when heat is moved from object to fluid (air is a fluid)
conduction is when heat is moved from object to object.
an air cooled barrel is using CONVECTION to cool (transfer of heat from object to fluid)
conduction would be if your hot barrel was connected to a heat sink, but in atmosphere that heat sink sitll cools of through convection. kind of like a CPU with a fan blowing over it. conduction is the heat flowing from the CPU into the heat sink, convection is the fan blowing air across the heat sink.
to make it extra simple/clear:modern firearms are air cooled and rely entirely on convection (heat transfer through fluid) to cool off. some firearms have some form of heat sink (through thicker barrel, or shroud, or other methods) but those heat sinks still rely on convection to dissipate heat.
in space, there's no convection using the atmosphere. this is a massive problem for current firearm designs. you'd be relying on radiation for heat disipation which is going to be too slow to work.
even if you used a liquid cooled system, you'd be dissipating barrel heat into a liquid (convection) but now you're left with a hot liquid. without the atmosphere to dissipate heat into you're still stuck with electromagnetic transfer of heat from your now hot liquid to the vaccum of space.
the only thing I've seen/heard that makes any sense would be a disposable heat sink.
sure, you could use a cooling array (heat sink made to maximize surface area to increase the rate of heat exchange) but it would still be slow with the added pain in the ass of it's mass.
disposable heat sinks, like mass effect's thermal clips would probably work pretty well. you're not going to have 100% of heat being drawn off by the heat sinks though, so you'll still run into overheating eventually, but I'm sure a thermal clip design would be great for any weapon that doesnt rely on sustained fire (like an lmg).
Convection vs conduction isn't just about solids vs fluids.
Conduction is molecular scale heat transfer in media with no bulk movement, solid or fluid.
Convection is a combination of multiple phenomena in fluids specifically. Heat is conducted into the fluid, then the heat is transported away by both molecular-scale diffusion and bulk-scale movement of the fluid (advection).
i appreciate a good bit of pedantry but for practicality's sake I simplified things.
> Heat is conducted into the fluid, then the heat is transported away by both molecular-scale diffusion and bulk-scale movement of the fluid
is exactly what happens in the examples I gave, I just didn't give AS in depth a breakdown as I probably could have. thanks though.
still say that a pneumatic weapon system makes more sense.
cooling arrays/heat sinks would become targets on ships/stations and would make hand-held weapons unweildy. best way to combat heat is to generate as little as possible to start with. much easier to compress gas and use it to accelerate a mass with minimal friction than to deal with the heat of explosives/gunpowder.
you'd only need 1,000fps with small piece of metal and you're good to go. don't have to worry about drop off or reduced power at longer ranges. space is pretty dope for ballistics.
what do you think?
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
If, or when, people start getting into the grit of small arms exchanges in space there's a good chance that space suit designs would follow the trend and we'd see a lot more armor floating around. I can see the designs become fairly complex without the restrictions of weight and knowing you can take fire from any direction. In that instance I could imagine larger and more energetic projectiles being common.
AR's have coatings and treatments on most of the parts already. Might need to change some of them. I have no idea if phosphate coatings can cold weld but there's a bunch to choose from, I'm sure one of the popular choices works.
Cold welding isn't real. It doesn't exist for actual surfaces and is a physics lie.
Temperature tolerance for the gun becoming brittle from being too cold or overheating are actual problems. However the rifle stored at 0C won't freeze instantly in the vacuum of space and firing the rifle with no effective cooling won't overheat the rifle until several magazines have been fired. The rifle itself won't cool more than the nearby objects, and will warm if in sunlight at Earth's orbit.
guns in space would need either replaceable barrels, or ejecting heatsinks.
they would have no way of cooling down, and only be able to fire off a single 20 stack mag before becoming useless.
also the gas blocks would need to be reworked to work better in vacuum.
Yeah but a gun on earth is designed to dissipate heat through conduction, not purely through electromagnetic radiation.
You can't take an earth gun and just use it in space the same way.
So my question was how would you handle this problem? You gonna slap on some radiation panels? Maybe liquid cooling?
There are two solutions, venting or storing. You can vent the energy into space through time, like a long ass time, or you make a gun that is insulated from the projectile with a thermally reflective coating on the inside of the barrel.
That or you can store the heat, either in a disposable rod format, or maybe in like a big heat back-pack that could then be used as a battery of some kind.
For right now, a high powered laser that could burn a hole through a space-suit is probably all we need
>Heat still travels in space
Blackbody radiation is the least efficient form of cooling after slapping a pissed-off person in the face and telling them to cool it.
Yeah but a gun on earth is designed to dissipate heat through conduction, not purely through electromagnetic radiation.
You can't take an earth gun and just use it in space the same way.
So my question was how would you handle this problem? You gonna slap on some radiation panels? Maybe liquid cooling?
>dissipate heat through conduction
You mean convection.
There are two solutions, venting or storing. You can vent the energy into space through time, like a long ass time, or you make a gun that is insulated from the projectile with a thermally reflective coating on the inside of the barrel.
That or you can store the heat, either in a disposable rod format, or maybe in like a big heat back-pack that could then be used as a battery of some kind.
For right now, a high powered laser that could burn a hole through a space-suit is probably all we need
>There are two solutions, venting or storing. You can vent the energy into space through time, like a long ass time
I think you could do it quicker with Mass Effect's heat sinks but make them a bit more sophisticated.
>ejecting heatsinks
Get the frick out of here Bioware, disposable thermal clips were dumb then and they're dumb now.
>disposable thermal clips were dumb
I liked the idea.
If I tried to do it IRL, they'd probably have more in common with a stinger's BCUs. Either absorbing the excess heat from the weapon like an instant-cold-pack and being discarded when at thermal capacity or supplying a chilled gas that expands and absorbs heat before dissipating, being discarded when it's out of gas.
The latter might have a problem with people getting covered in nitrogen or argon ice and optics being fogged up and stuff so I don't know that it's 100% practical but it would be my first thought on cooling with consumable heat sinks.
supposedly, Mass Effect 2 was going to have a much more lore-congruent system where weapons had functionally infinite shots with chamber heat build-up like in ME1 but you could eject thermal clips from a finite supply in order to rapidly dissipate your weapon's heat if it was needed
playtesters didn't like it though so we got the generic ammo system
People have figured out how to mod that in, I think it might not've been fully cut from the code to begin with.
Helldivers does something similar with how its laser weapons work, heat sinks you can let cool down or purge and replace.
Here's my idea:
Gyrojets, but no need for spin because it's space, plus they would only need a bit of fuel. And here's the kicker: they're electronically primed and fired from disposable, plastic barrels a la Metal Storm.
Revive the G11 concept but take the huge front mounting stick mags and now make them a barrel and as much of the bolt as we possibly can, the hyper burst gimmick and clockwork ass can go since there are bigger issues to solve, and newer ideas in gunsmithing to use for a 2.0 rotating chamber design.
Pretty sure the idea behind making it white is to reflect sunlight not radiate heat.
Unfiltered sunlight on the surface of the moon leads to average surface temperatures of about 250F during lunar days, no need for the gun to get so toasty when not even in use.
depending on the time of lunar day thats right. i dont know guns - how much heat is created in the structure of the rifle from each shot? perhaps they designed the thing with a certain limit of how many shots can be fired until it needs a break to cool down?
Modern guns work perfectly fine underwater so you really just need to add some sealant to the neck of each round so the air doesn't leak out after a few hours.
The real issue is that Space is kinda weird so the gun might not cycle properly. You'll run into a number of thermal issues with the sun being much hotter and shadows being much colder and a complete lack of air to cool air cooled guns. Normal liquid lube would boil in space so you need a dry lubricant. Also, graphite apparently doesn't work, something to do with water molecules getting caught between graphene layers.
On a side note, remember that in a low or no gravity environment you have less weight and thus less traction. It'll take a lot less recoil to unbalance you.
>in space it's an AR-15 but with WHITE FURNITURE OMG
you wouldn't even be able to get an acceptable cheekweld let alone actually aim down the sights
probably the only appropriate use-case for those gay moronic 7" riser unity mounts
>so the air doesn't leak out after a few hours
gunpowder has its own oxidizer you stupid moron >Normal liquid lube would boil in space so you need a dry lubricant.
we already have low vapor pressure high temp lubricants, also you can just use PTFE
[...] >but no need for spin because it's space
you do realize that gyroscopic stabilization is MORE necessary in space, not less, right?
[...] >You can't take an earth gun and just use it in space the same way.
yes you can, it's called radiative cooling and it's been the primary method of cooling firearms since water jackets went away
there's no meaningful air mass being moved when a firearm is cooled, most of the cooling of modern guns is passive radiative and convective cooling
you could unironically just do away with the top half of an AR's forearm and solder a copper heat sink to the barrel and be more than covered
First off, rude.
Second off, the oxidizer isn't the issue. The problem is that the reaction isn't going to propagate through the powder without air. Without that existing pressure the heat isn't going to transfer from grain to grain properly and you'll be lucky to get a squib.
>in space it's an AR-15 but with WHITE FURNITURE OMG
you wouldn't even be able to get an acceptable cheekweld let alone actually aim down the sights
probably the only appropriate use-case for those gay moronic 7" riser unity mounts
>so the air doesn't leak out after a few hours
gunpowder has its own oxidizer you stupid moron >Normal liquid lube would boil in space so you need a dry lubricant.
we already have low vapor pressure high temp lubricants, also you can just use PTFE
Here's my idea:
Gyrojets, but no need for spin because it's space, plus they would only need a bit of fuel. And here's the kicker: they're electronically primed and fired from disposable, plastic barrels a la Metal Storm.
>but no need for spin because it's space
you do realize that gyroscopic stabilization is MORE necessary in space, not less, right?
Yeah but a gun on earth is designed to dissipate heat through conduction, not purely through electromagnetic radiation.
You can't take an earth gun and just use it in space the same way.
So my question was how would you handle this problem? You gonna slap on some radiation panels? Maybe liquid cooling?
>You can't take an earth gun and just use it in space the same way.
yes you can, it's called radiative cooling and it's been the primary method of cooling firearms since water jackets went away
there's no meaningful air mass being moved when a firearm is cooled, most of the cooling of modern guns is passive radiative and convective cooling
you could unironically just do away with the top half of an AR's forearm and solder a copper heat sink to the barrel and be more than covered
>most of the cooling of modern guns is passive radiative and convective cooling
Where does this radiation go to, and is it present in the vacuum of space?
>Where does this radiation go to, and is it present in the vacuum of space?
yes, it's far infrared (heat) radiation and it doesn't require a medium for transfer
there are three types of heat transfer: convection, conduction, and radiation
conduction is based on direct transfer of heat from one molecule or atom to another. On earth this cools a barrel as the hot barrel transfers its heat directly to an air molecule
convection is based on the movement of fluids like air or water. on earth this cools a barrel because hot air moves upwards and cool air replaces it, which is then heated via conduction
radiation is just the emission of heat as electromagnetic radiation. this happens on earth and space because it doesn't require a medium to transfer it. all of the cooling and thermal regulation in space is radiative
water cooled firearms were basically leveraging a high thermal mass (water) to cool
if you have a fanless passively cooled PC, congratulations you're watching radiative cooling with a little bit of convection work, usually up to 65W TDP. there's not a lot of air mass moving in a computer with no fans.
>and it doesn't require a medium for transfer
It does require transfer medium if you want to efficiently cool a firearm. Relying on electromagnetic radiation propagation on a conventical design will get you nowhere.
>Relying on electromagnetic radiation propagation on a conventical design
engrish alert >posts a pic of an abused firearm, on earth, experiencing thermal failure
space is at a constant 2.7 degrees K
your thermal reserve for firing weapons is much higher than on earth
you start out at ~290 degrees K on earth
that means you have 287 degrees C/K of thermal capacity over the same weapon being fired on earth, starting from a "cold" weapon.
air is a thermal insulator unless it's moving, and when you reach high barrel temperatures, unless you're cooling convectively, you're not cooling efficiently through any method other than radiative cooling anyway
the space station gets up to 250 degrees Fahrenheit in the sun while maintaining an interior temperature of 70 degrees, with not a tremendous amount of radiator panels, and those radiators are also in direct sun.
the problem of heat dissipation in space is not a huge deal, especially when like I mentioned before, you could arctic silver and bolt on $35 worth of copper finned heatsink and be completely okay, thermally
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
2.7K only if you are in the shadow, if you were sunlit even in space, there will be excess heat.
>Where does this radiation go to
In every direction away from the hot object.
>and is it present in the vacuum of space?
How do you think the light and heat from the sun gets to us? (Yes, they're both the same fundamental phenomena.)
>you wouldn't even be able to get an acceptable cheekweld let alone actually aim down the sights
If you pay attention during that scene you can see that the moon marine shooting targets has a crosshair drawn in marker on the inside of his helmet, my guess is that they figured out a way of aiming by using that drawn crosshair and the sights of the rifle.
>No air resistance
Not technically true because space isn't a true vacuum but the density is probably not significant but it's not about air resistance, it's about accuracy and ensuring that minor perturbations are corrected over distances and not exaggerated.
>Not technically true
well if you want to be "technical" air refers to the atmosphere of earth, or more specifically, the gaseous substance surrounding eath.
this is why I can't stand "well technically" homosexual because they always follow it up with wrong information.
also your looking at, TOPS 40ppm per cm3 in space, with les between star systems and even less between galactic clusters. nowhere near enough to ever qualify as "air" in any context, regardless of "technicality".
also, "gyroscopic stabilization" is just using a fricking gyroscope to figure out where you're pointing and adjusting accordingly. what you're actually talking about is spin stabilization.
spin stabiliazation is used in things like sattelites to help keep them pointed towards earth. it reduces fuel costs over a long period.
you don't need to spin stabilize a projectile in space to keep it heading towards your target. because their is no air resistence, your bullt could be an uneven polyhedron flipping end over end and it wont effect the direction it's traveling one bit. it will still hit exactly where it was aimed.
spin stabilization is important in atmo because once your projectilce starts to yaw or flip it bleeds off energy and is re-directed by the atmosphere, missing your target. not an issue in space.
the only reason you might want to spin stabilze a bullet in space is if you absolutely need it to hit pointy-end first.... but since space has no atmosphere, aerodynamics don't matter so you don't need to make things pointy. spheres would be a great option.
all in all, spin stabilization does not become "more necessary in space", and in fact, is LESS necessary depending on the projectile you're using.
now, make yourself a projectile that has a shape charge, say, and exploding artillary shell that sends out shrapnel or a penetrating dart.... sure... spin stabilizing would make sense
>No, why? No air resistance, shouldn't matter.
there are two types of stabilization, gyroscopic and aerodynamic
FMJBT projectiles use both, APFSDS use only aerodynamic, and wadcutters use only gyroscopic. if you don't have any air to stabilize the projectile, the only thing keeping it from tumbling is gyroscopic stabilization or something like a center of thrust/center of mass balance.
[...]
First off, rude.
Second off, the oxidizer isn't the issue. The problem is that the reaction isn't going to propagate through the powder without air. Without that existing pressure the heat isn't going to transfer from grain to grain properly and you'll be lucky to get a squib.
the primer is more than enough to set off the grains inside the cartridge, even in the event that they don't ignite each other (which they do because even some grains catching creates a huge oxidized heat and pressure wave within the cartridge). touching off a cartridge doesn't rely on air in the way that you think it does.
You'll need some huge radiators in space to cool things, or put on a replaceable water cooling loop or something, exchange it when hot.
picrel space station with white radiators next to solar panels.
Why use a gun when you can use a handheld space claymore. Because it's in a vacuum their isn't a blast shockwave, the flash deflector deflects the blast. The ball bearings have a flat trajectory and infinite range and you only need one to puncture a space suit. Basically a space blunderbuss. Carry like 5 or 6 of these each and blast away. Not a new idea, the military figured this out in the 60s
>Basically a space blunderbuss
For something so moronic, that's honestly a pretty good idea.
Though I do wonder why you wouldn't just use a pump-action shotgun with a shell of small flechette darts at that point. They could integrate some coolant in the shell to reduce barrel temperature after firing, just tweak the chemistry/packaging so that the propellent gas is chased down the barrel by a puff of compressed argon or something.
The old military reports came to the conclusion that conventional firearms would be clunky and awkward to handle and aim while wearing a space suit.
Moving parts were also a problem since they could freeze and or cold weld themselves together in the vacuum of space.
That same vacuum would also cause any liquid lubricant to instantly boil off the guns, and since there's no wind or water erosion on the moon, moon dust is incredibly sharp and jagged, so it'll eat through most materials quite rapidly and jam the absolute frick out of guns with moving parts.
No. that optic has terrible eye relief and eyebox. And the controls are completely unsuited to the gloves of a space suit. You would want to redesign the ergonomics to work with the suit and a magnified optic just isn't compatible with a big helmet like this. I would push for a suit or backpack mounted rifle and remove the need for the astronaut to use his hands at all. That would make movement easier, walking on the moon is awkward as frick and they fell over had to catch themselves all the time. Replace the magnified optic with a red dot. First generation Aimpoints came around just as the Apollo program was ending so if we stayed around and armed the astronauts they would have been available. I'm the sure the geniuses at NASA would have managed something a bit better than the OG aimpoint anyways. Keep 5.56 its actually fine for use on the moon. No reason to change that.
>Keep 5.56 its actually fine for use on the moon. No reason to change that.
I agree, all you need for the heat problem is an HBAR. extended engagements are unlikely when even a grazing wound is lethal, so for just a mag or two the simplest solution is to soak it up with the gun's own mass. weight? only matters as far as fitting it into the payload allowance, the guy in the 180lb spacesuit isn't gonna mind a slightly heavier rifle in 1/6th gravity
As for guns. Yes, but kinda primitive. The goal here is kinetic transfer. You can do this with a centrifugal launcher, electrically. Far less heat. You down one ovmy birds, i down two of yours to prove a point.... how many cycles of that before you have an unmanageable debris cloud?
But, this same tecnnology could instead cheaply move a couple of tonnes of resources point to point.
>be enemy of the US >ready to go into battle against US troops on the moon >hear distant *AEIOU* *AEIOU* *AEIOU* *JOHN MADDEN* *JOHN MADDEN* in steven hawking's speech synthesizer as you are being pummeled to death by freedom.freedom x freedom mm rounds.
Moon isn't a vacuum, it has an atmosphere. The oxygen/water that turned the iron and titanium on the lunar surface into their respective oxides stretches all the way from earth.
You can't breathe the atmosphere on Mars but it's thick enough for a helicopter to fly.
You can't breathe any extra-terrestrial atmosphere for that matter but they exist for other purposes.
im just saying that the comment saying the moon has an atmosphere is stupid. ok, there might a few atoms per cubic cm more than perfect vacuum, but what difference does it make to anything at all?
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
>the comment saying the moon has an atmosphere is stupid
How can it be stupid to say the moon has an atmosphere if the moon does have an atmosphere?
It's no more stupid than saying an atom has a gravitational pull.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
he point is that those few atoms per cubic cm make no difference for anything. what difference does it make? what do you even mean by 'atmosphere' if all you mean is a few atoms like that?
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
>what do you even mean by 'atmosphere'
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Now go on a roadtrip with your gas tank on E, there are certainly gas molecules in the tank.
For the bullet, Moon's atmosphere is meaningless.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Nothing with mass or chemical rection in space is meaningless, it all has an effect, maybe not to you, but to say it's meaningless is silly.
Or maybe you're right and the moon doesn't have an atmosphere, and all the scientific bodies who say it does are wrong.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Do you go around and tell people that table salt should be called sodium chloride?
For hitting someone 50ft in front of you, Moon's atmosphere is meaningless.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
me spitting in your face from 1000 miles away has SOME effect on you.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
As an engineer I can tell you with great confidence that yes, the moon's atmosphere is meaningless for most applications and problems. The Lunar exosphere is a stronger vacuum than any vacuum that has ever been created on Earth. The drag is so minuscule that the air resistance really CAN be neglected.
In fact, the moon's vacuum is so thin and so useful for many industrial and scientific processes that preservation of that vacuum will likely be a major issue when the first long-term outpost goes up there. Even off-gassing from melting regolith can significantly affect it so there will be a push to conduct experiments and industry in sealed chambers.
>There is a skitzo woman that protests outside of the air force base in my town against space lasers.
Tell her that technology has solved the laser problem and it's going to be space bullets now.
>space warfare >84 posts >no mention of the Almaz space station cannon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz >The Almaz program was a highly secret Soviet military space station program, begun in the early 1960s. >To cover the military nature of the program, the three launched Almaz stations were designated as civilian Salyut space stations. >In addition to reconnaissance equipment, Almaz was equipped with a unique 23mm Rikhter (factory index 261P or 225P) rapid-fire cannon mounted on the forward belly of the station. This revolver cannon was modified from the tail-gun of the Tu-22 bomber and was capable of a theoretical rate of fire of 1800-2000 (up to 2600) rounds per minute. Each 168 gram (ammo 23-OFZ-D-R ) or 173 gram (ammo 23-OFZ-G-R) projectile flew at a speed of 850 m/s relative to the station. The cannon was tested at the end of the mission by firing 20 rounds, when the station was operating in uncrewed mode. To aim the cannon, which was on a fixed mounting, the entire station would be turned to face the target. The Almaz series are the only known armed, crewed military spacecraft ever flown.
>no mention of the Almaz space station cannon
The thread opened with a picture of a lunafied AR so I feel like space station cannons might not be as man portable as we're looking for here.
>The Almaz series are the only known armed, crewed military spacecraft ever flown >only KNOWN
Yeah and if you believe that I've got some real nice bottomland to sell you.
It was fun at first when it was still mostly about the alt timeline of the space race before it turned into full blown family/love triangle/homosexual rights drama.
Stock AR-15 with a water jacket wrapped around the barrel and graphite or graphite-silica lubricant should cycle and fire fine in LEO or on the Moon. I'll test it when I get my vacuum chamber back online.
would you need a long barrel in space? nasa would want to save weight wherever they could so I imagine they'd opt for a short barreled rifle, and there's no wind resistance in space.
>would you need a long barrel in space?
Muzzle velocity doesn't become less important, it just gets slightly more effective. Kinetic energy is still the main actor on the target so fast bullets > slow bullets regardless of how much is due to rifled rounds spinning into the target and how much is displaced material.
Longer barrels provide more muzzle velocity because propellent gases push on the bullet for longer.
>is it feasible?
not really. the weapon would function (gunpowder has it's own oxidizer) but there would be a lot of problems. >recoil
this is just a guess, but I imagine with the lack of gravity recoil management would be a bigger issue >sights
we'd need a total redesign of either helmets, sights, or both to be able to use the weapon effectively >space suits
generally very poor mobility. would require new techonology for effective infantry >heat
on earth, guns cool off through convection (heat transfers from the weapon to a fluid (yes, air is a fluid, but not a liquid)). the lack of an atmosphere means you'd have to rely on radiation alone. veryyyy slow, shitty way of cooling things down. even if you had some sort of liquid cooling system, you've got to remember that those rely on convection too. the only way to quickly cool the weapon would be to have big heat sinks/cooling arrays that would spread out the heat for maximum surface area. any way you look at it the heat build up is going to be a big problem.
what you really need is a new space suit that's more maneuverable, a new helmet that works with weapon sights, and new weaponry that doesn't generate a bunch of heat.
It's funny. My uncle had the Colt 4x scope new in box and gave it to me. Looked it up and it was pretty expensive. Like $500+. So I ended up getting the Colt to go with it and complete the look. First 20" AR and damn I wish I bought/built one sooner. I only had 16" ones before it.
A shotgun loaded with something like 20 gauge birdshot makes infinitely more sense. Point it in the general direction of the enemy and unload to get as much dispersion as you can. All you need to do is have a single pellet connect to punch a hole in the target's atmo-suit, and they're depressurized and done for.
Without air resistance or gravity, there's no point in something high-velocity or rifled, Each individual pellet out of a smoothbore will go just as far a rifle bullet, and won't lose any energy over distance, and you only need enough power to punch through their suit. A smoothbore can be made much a much heavier barrel so it can absorb more heat.
>Point it in the general direction of the enemy and unload
Recoil still exists and is a much bigger problem. You don't want to be knocked down or even airborne by a badly braced shot, so you want low recoil which means throwing small mass projectiles at high speed with extreme accuracy, not high mass of projectiles at low speed with no accuracy.
Or, make your weapon recoilless somehow, including just delaying recoil through some sort of M777-like rail and cradle system.
>Each individual pellet out of a smoothbore will go just as far a rifle bullet, and won't lose any energy over distance
In a combat on the moon, there's likely to be a lot of dust in the air which takes a while to settle. Dust resistance might end up being worse than air resistance, you'd have to model it in your ballistics anyway.
>and you only need enough power to punch through their suit
If you're bringing a rifle, then you also brought plates or some sort of armour and so did your enemy because they're a space power in a war.
Even if it's just kevlar reinforcing, simple shot won't be reliable unless it cracks a seal or finds a thin part of the suit. It can't be ignored by the victim but it can't be relied on by the shooter either.
Since we are on the topic about space warfare. Is HAARP a weapon. I don't believe it changes the weather ( I believe that's a fake conspiracy created to deflect it's actual use) but could it heat up the ionosphere enough to fry a satellite.
>Is it feasible /k/?
Guns in space? Preposterous. Everyone knows that you need air to burn things. It's not like the ammunition is filled with nitrated organics that have ample oxygen available through decomposition. How would such a thing even be created without burning up?
The problem nobody thinks of is what to do with all the heat generated. You're only going to be able to get off a few shots before the gun starts to melt itself.
My favorite bit from the moon war arc was that NASA sent the Marines up with specialized rifles for use on the moon, but the Soviets just gave their cosmonauts basic side folder AKMs
Nebulae have less gas particle densities than air, so you should see each other well inside one. They look colorful and intricate due to how far away and huge they are.
I see. Damn. So is any kind of space combat just simply not at all feasible in fiction? I think about it a lot and I just don't see how it could be made workable
Well if we were talking about spaceship battles it would be either kinetic impactors like on Earth or just shine a big laser until the other side die of overheating, you can't outrun a laser beam (until we find warp drives) and you have nowhere to dump the heat faster.
It should work fine. As for an advantage I don't see one. Some kind of guided rockets would be great though since the low gravity and no air resistance would mean much longer range.
Is this bait?
Spin helps keep a bullet from boat-tailing or otherwise doing dumb shit because a bullet is never perfectly formed and balanced, and even less so after being fired. Slight imperfections will cause the bullet to start tumbling without spin and will affect accuracy and penetration. It's not about air resistance.
>It's not about air resistance.
Why do you think tumbling affects accuracy, anon? When a bullet starts spinning off its central axis, the drag force is unbalanced and affects its trajectory. In space that doesn't happen.
>Would the backblast be dangerous for a longer distance with no air resistance slowing the solid particles among the gases?
I think the zone would be a lot larger, there could be wider dispersion too though, I think the gases being accelerated out of the rear would meet the slowing, cooling gases already out and cause vortices off to the sides at a greater rate than would occur in atmosphere.
This effectively creates a localised and temporarily thicker atmosphere so relocating after shots is probably wise.
This is a stupid side track but kinda related to space warfare- I can’t help but imagine that If we ever start parking asteroids in orbit for mining that some company CEO is going to have the mother of all weapons of mass destruction. They could do some real bond villain shit. Surrender to me or the blue one gets it.
>If we ever start parking asteroids in orbit for mining that some company CEO is going to have the mother of all weapons of mass destruction
Already true for commercially run nuke plants and all sorts of heavy industry.
Look at the Baltimore bridge and at Evergreen in the Suez, the ability of corporations to cause disasters with huge impacts goes well beyond weaponized mining operations.
It'll be mostly fine for a few reasons, the CEOs need somewhere to spend their money, if they try to become emperor of earth then they either win or die and they're not going to win because it takes more than a gun to someone's head to make you king. If you put a gun to Biden's head right now, you don't become POTUS, you just get arrested.
Same for any CEO getting uppity. The fun doesn't start until two things are true:
* they can live in permanent off-world settlements such as lagrange stations that would be reasonably easy to isolate and defend
* they are largely self-sufficient in those settlements
Otherwise, we just cut off your internet, fuel and food deliveries and say no. Eventually you want to rejoin the human race because your e-girls are getting too old and you find there's an arrest team waiting for you.
If Musk had a self-sustaining colony on Mars that he ruled over, his negotiations about income and taxes on his Earth-orbit operations could get a whole lot more rambunctious. Not even getting to the level of threatening genocide, just threatening to turn the lights off because he owns the orbital solar array that powers North America and feels like pulling a Shkreli.
In theory, nationalising assets that are used this way is the answer but the US is allergic to it. It's still the right answer though, any commercial practice that can be weaponised requires regulation and oversight and can be nationalised if abused. Just like having a firearm confiscated because it was brandished in public.
Wouldn't the bullet just spin out into deep space forever? What the muzzle velocity be like? Would it be much faster? Your firearm my need a cooling system of some sort.
Wouldn't the bullet just spin out into deep space forever? >Sort of it would depend on the launch angle.
What the muzzle velocity be like? Would it be much faster? >much faster, you could see 4500FPS from M855 from a 20" with no air to slow it down or hinder acceleration.
Your firearm my need a cooling system of some sort. >Yes with out air to cool you would need some sort of radiator fins, heat sink or even a liquid cooled jacket with rads. Also you would need to protect it from rapid heat and cooling due to being in the sun or shadow.
At this point I think we should just deploy the Space Force with cross bows.
All this shit with heat issues on the barrel and needing to add radiator fins plus the fact that just poking holes in any dudes suit will kill them just means firearms would work but so would throwing a spear, and the spear would not have heat issues. Just give every astronaut a crossbow.
With LRF ballistic computers integrated into weapon optics and programable air burst ammo from the XM29 OICW and XM25 program a GyroJet would be a very competent and rugged system for Space Wars
>Wouldn't the bullet just spin out into deep space forever?
Escape velocity for the sun out at 1AU is ~138,000FPS, although if you are lined up perfectly with the earth system's vector you 'only' need a muzzle velocity of about 53,000FPS to get all the way up to speed. Anything slower than that will be on a long, slow trip to the sun.
Recoil and overheating would be moronic. With lowered to no gravity recoil would not only make the gun fly over the place it would move you much more. Without particle to interact with the very hot barrel to interact with it takes longer to cool. moronic idea to fix these problems: delayed rocket cartridges that Brun most of their propellant outside the barrel of the gun.
hybrid rifle that uses a magnetic system to get the projectiles (either a gryojet style or something like a duplex bullet) out of the barrel, then they ignite on their own.
>guns in reduced gravity >there will never be a war in space fought with swords clubs and spears
dude imagine getting killed by a brick with razorblades glued to it when it slices a hole in your suit, floating along like a frisbee
You would probably need a Hydrogen system
in the picture you can see how the bullet would be pushed out by a series of detonation, steadily increasing speed
That turned out to be a terrible design. The Germans tried this in WW2, even going so far as to build a bunker complex for a battery of guns aimed at London, but it never fired a shot before the bongs made it suck a tallboy. The small scale version had symmetric side chambers, had difficulty in getting the detonation timing right, and had problems with overpressure that eventually destroyed it.
Electronic controls have improved significantly since 1940s.
Fixed gun emplacements just aren't very useful for military purposes.
Here and there, there is talk of making a cannon like that for delivering stuff to LEO, but nothing came of it so fat.
>No guidance >No ability to detect or track targets hundreds or thousands of miles away >No ability for a typical user to intuitively predict the relative motion of the target or the hyperbolic path of the fired bullets in the presence of more than 2 bodies >Need to counterbalance every shot fired thus wasting a significant amount of the power in each shot and increasing your own thermal and optical signatures
Truly S tier space weapons
Where can I get white AR furniture? I like the look.
Buy black furniture and paint it white
FYI
Its a standard A2 in rifle length like the ones sold by Luth AR.
The stock is specifically the PAMAX AR15/M4 Milspec Stock FDE - Integrated QD painted white
The extra tab on the stock is just made from a bit of ridged plastic so the gun could be shouldered in the suit.
The scope is not the Brownells clone but that would be a better choice if you dont want to make it screen accurate. Otherwise the ecact one used is made by Barska: 4x20mm Electro Sight Carry Handle Base Mil-Dot Rifle Scope w/ BDC Turret
They use a comb of white and silver high temp paint for the props.
As far as the upper and lower I do not know for sure, the lower is a milspec M4 style AR-15 and the upper could be a C7 from Luth or some other maker with a mix-a-match upper. straight slip ring, A2 flash hider, Triangle handguard cup with a hybrid A2 hand guard. Barrel is probably a standard government profile or it could be a match bull barrel. I think Rock River used to make a upper like this with a match threaded barrel.
As for the real deal, yeah NASA and the DoD played around with the idea of this back in the 50s and 60s. bone stock rifles would almost die right away. moon dust is super abrasive and would foul up actions super fast. most of the stuff we sent up there (motors, suits pwr tools etc.) started to break down in the time it was deployed let alone any long term use. The paint is not just for looks either. Real space guns would have ceramic or titanium furniture to keep them light and to resist thermal issues. barrel over heating was a nightmare due to the obvious lack of air cooling, there where ideas for radiator fins for cooling but the barrel life would suck for these things and they would heat up fast under use. 556 would be awesome for space fighting, velocity would be king and you would want as little recoil as you could get. They would not go with a flash hider, you would see a giant comp on the end to counter act every ounce of recoil you could.
Yes you can fire guns in space. You might need special ammo that carries a bit of oxygen though. And yes, space infantry fighting is like one hit kills in a video game since any hit is always lethal because it damages your space suit.
>special ammo that carries a bit of oxygen though.
Just use a monopropellant or one with oxidizer included. I think nitrocellulose uses oxygen from the air but things like black powder and nitroglycerin do not.
>Just use a monopropellant or one with oxidizer included. I think nitrocellulose uses oxygen from the air but things like black powder and nitroglycerin do not.
Black powder.
On the moon.
>"Neil! Buzz! Give these commies a volley!"
reminds me of that short story about Earth being invaded by aliens who never had FTL travel but had Napoleonic tech otherwise.
What? Now I kinda want to read it.. Does anyone remember title/author/origin?
https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
Dumb story. I've not finished it yet but already I can poke a massive hole in it. The aliens can't not be aware of gravity and Newton's principles even if they're otherwise backwards. There's literally nothing stopping them using their ships to grab a rock and fling it at the earth at high speed.
why would they destroy Earth if they want to conquer and colonize it?
Maybe the first fleet did. The second fleet probably needs to end humanity because it's existential threat to everyone else in the galaxy.
It's been a few years since I read the story, but there IIRC only one fleet appears in it, and given the lack of communications, it doesn't seem unreasonable that humanity can reverse engineer the FTL drives and prepare for the things you describe.
Either way, you're complaining about things that aren't relevant to the story.
finish it. The effect it uses only works with objects matching roughly the mass and dimensions of a sail ship. They literally have no drive capable of moving an asteroid off-course, because they never invented rockets.
Just read it. Nothing about the limits of the FTL or contragravity in the story is described or explained. The actual thing limiting the aliens from throwing rocks is the lack of developing the math or technology needed to aim them through orbital mechanics.
Jumping straight into warcrimes is the lazy science fiction enthusiast's crutch. Just because you can annihilate a society from orbit doesn't mean you should and there are plenty of reasons to avoid it.
>aliens who never had FTL travel
who had* FTL travel
>nitro
>cellulose
give it a big think, I'm sure you'll be able to figure it out
>falling for the ammo needs air to function bait
>I was merely acting moronic!
>You might need special ammo that carries a bit of oxygen though.
Every fricking propellant since blackpowder already does that.
>I think nitrocellulose uses oxygen from the air
Go think a bit about the logistics of getting a thousand times the propellant's volume of atmospheric oxygen into the casing during the microsecond it takes to fire and realize what a complete moron you are.
people aren't born knowing things and its kinda gay to snap at people for not knowing things yet
>t. reddit.com
Then they can shut the frick up about them until they've gone and looked shit up, or as is the case here simply tried thinking a teeny tiny little bit about it.
And how you dissipate the heat generated.
Thermal clips
>There is already a liquid cooling system in the space suit, just route some of it to a block on the barrel under the handguard.
>man dies of heatstroke defending his home on the moon from moon-hoppers
1: Just don't fire rapidly and let it radiate away over time
2: A heat sink built into the barrel
3: Some kind of active cooling system that moves heat away from the barrel using coolant.
4:Radiator panels
QC barrels and very open receiver designs that mostly keep the heat isolated in the barrel-chamber complex.
Maybe have spare bolts that can similarly be dropped free and installed quickly.
Unironically, brass cartridges are little heat sinks that'll help mitigate the issue. Using something like a caseless cartridge is shit since the heat will build up rapidly with basically no means of removing it.
>bit of oxygen though
nobody tell this guy about nitration chemistry. it's funnier this way.
There's no reason it wouldn't work as long as you use dry lube (oil or grease will freeze) and don't need to shoot enough rounds to overheat the gun since it takes a very long time for anything to cool off in the absence of air.
Dunning-Kruger moment.
Part of the problem with shooting in vacuum is that the bolt will weld to the receiver pretty quickly, so the lubricant and the materials in the firearm need to be very specific, but you're largely right here. The other guys talking about recoil and oxidizing powders (because they already exist and we all use them already) are silly. You solve the lubrication problem and your M-16A2 is Gucci.
>what is an oxidizer
I think ammo is the easy part, handling how recoil affects the shooter whilst obtaining the neccessary velocity for the projectile to penetrate whatever armour is being used by the target is the harder part I reckon
Most likely the best round would be very fast and very light. Like 30gr .223 or however light it can be. Maybe it would be easier than I'm anticipating to implement some kind of self-sealing spacesuit, but in the lack thereof, it seems like the wound of the round itself might be secondary to simply damaging the space suit.
The problem with shooting in space is that firing even single shot will cause you to spin out of control and float off into space.
>You might need special ammo that carries a bit of oxygen though.
Anon, you already know guns can fire under water where there is no free oxygen. Go ahead and apply that reasoning now.
>under water where there is no free oxygen
Not entirely true, there's quite a lot of free oxygen in water, that's how fish breathe.
Some lung-using animals can harvest oxygen from water too, collecting it in hairs and dimples and things.
Space warfare will be recoiless rifles like the Carl Gustav but filled with birdshot.
Possibly a disposable system.
AR ricers need not apply.
>filled with birdshot
Flechettes, possibly with some kind of disposable rifling to induce spin since fin stabilisation won't be significant in the timeframe.
A few layers of kevler/ceramic armour would stop bird shot dead if it was fired in the same orbital frame of reference. You need some penetration.
At that point a small fighter craft would be all you'd need. Boarding in space in unpractical as the distances between ships could be tens to hundreds of kilometers. Being just regular infantry drifting around 100km from your ship with no way to get back doesn't sound so fun.
How would the oxygen even get there into the casing when firing, if it really did need oxygen to fire?
Of course the dumb female b***h is the one to pull an necessary shot and nearly start WW3
Modern ammo contains its own oxidizer so yes, they'd fire fine in space.
Actual engineering problems might be weird effects like "cold welding" between moving metal components that can sometimes occur in space. Or heat rejection/overheating.
>cold welding
That's a real problem; apparently astronaut tools are coated in plastic to prevent them from welding to whatever bolt or screw they're manipulating while space walking. +1 for lasers over bullets in space (few moving parts).
>Modern ammo contains its own oxidizer so yes, they'd fire fine in space.
Has there been any firearms propellant ever that didn't? Because while I guess the implication that old ammo doesn't is technically true due to arrows, sling-stones and such...
>is designed to dissipate heat through conduction
Convection. Conduction through air is slow enough that air has been humanity's favourite thermal insulator ever since the first caveman wrapped himself in an old animal skin.
It's still conduction. Convection just moves the heatsink medium, replacing hot fluid with cool fluid to faster cool the object via conduction
>Convection just moves the heatsink medium
Exactly, and in this case it's the air around the gun that moves and takes the heat away with it. We consider it a case of conductive cooling if the medium is stationary and the heat is conducted straight through it instead. Mixed cases can exist, but with somewhat freely moving air the conductive contribution is going to be frick all. The jump from gun to air that you're trying to UHM ACKSHUALLY about? No one gives a frick at this level, that bit doesn't even show up in the basic equations.
Also, speaking of heat transfer...
Paint the barrel, front stock and receiver black.
no. convection is when heat is moved from object to fluid (air is a fluid)
conduction is when heat is moved from object to object.
an air cooled barrel is using CONVECTION to cool (transfer of heat from object to fluid)
conduction would be if your hot barrel was connected to a heat sink, but in atmosphere that heat sink sitll cools of through convection. kind of like a CPU with a fan blowing over it. conduction is the heat flowing from the CPU into the heat sink, convection is the fan blowing air across the heat sink.
to make it extra simple/clear:modern firearms are air cooled and rely entirely on convection (heat transfer through fluid) to cool off. some firearms have some form of heat sink (through thicker barrel, or shroud, or other methods) but those heat sinks still rely on convection to dissipate heat.
in space, there's no convection using the atmosphere. this is a massive problem for current firearm designs. you'd be relying on radiation for heat disipation which is going to be too slow to work.
even if you used a liquid cooled system, you'd be dissipating barrel heat into a liquid (convection) but now you're left with a hot liquid. without the atmosphere to dissipate heat into you're still stuck with electromagnetic transfer of heat from your now hot liquid to the vaccum of space.
the only thing I've seen/heard that makes any sense would be a disposable heat sink.
sure, you could use a cooling array (heat sink made to maximize surface area to increase the rate of heat exchange) but it would still be slow with the added pain in the ass of it's mass.
disposable heat sinks, like mass effect's thermal clips would probably work pretty well. you're not going to have 100% of heat being drawn off by the heat sinks though, so you'll still run into overheating eventually, but I'm sure a thermal clip design would be great for any weapon that doesnt rely on sustained fire (like an lmg).
imo pneumatic weapons make the most sense.
Convection vs conduction isn't just about solids vs fluids.
Conduction is molecular scale heat transfer in media with no bulk movement, solid or fluid.
Convection is a combination of multiple phenomena in fluids specifically. Heat is conducted into the fluid, then the heat is transported away by both molecular-scale diffusion and bulk-scale movement of the fluid (advection).
t. pedant.
i appreciate a good bit of pedantry but for practicality's sake I simplified things.
> Heat is conducted into the fluid, then the heat is transported away by both molecular-scale diffusion and bulk-scale movement of the fluid
is exactly what happens in the examples I gave, I just didn't give AS in depth a breakdown as I probably could have. thanks though.
still say that a pneumatic weapon system makes more sense.
cooling arrays/heat sinks would become targets on ships/stations and would make hand-held weapons unweildy. best way to combat heat is to generate as little as possible to start with. much easier to compress gas and use it to accelerate a mass with minimal friction than to deal with the heat of explosives/gunpowder.
you'd only need 1,000fps with small piece of metal and you're good to go. don't have to worry about drop off or reduced power at longer ranges. space is pretty dope for ballistics.
what do you think?
If, or when, people start getting into the grit of small arms exchanges in space there's a good chance that space suit designs would follow the trend and we'd see a lot more armor floating around. I can see the designs become fairly complex without the restrictions of weight and knowing you can take fire from any direction. In that instance I could imagine larger and more energetic projectiles being common.
Cold welds usually aren't very strong so it's more an annoyance than a real problem. Some MoS2 should fix that, assuming you have some moly on hand.
AR's have coatings and treatments on most of the parts already. Might need to change some of them. I have no idea if phosphate coatings can cold weld but there's a bunch to choose from, I'm sure one of the popular choices works.
Cold welding isn't real. It doesn't exist for actual surfaces and is a physics lie.
Temperature tolerance for the gun becoming brittle from being too cold or overheating are actual problems. However the rifle stored at 0C won't freeze instantly in the vacuum of space and firing the rifle with no effective cooling won't overheat the rifle until several magazines have been fired. The rifle itself won't cool more than the nearby objects, and will warm if in sunlight at Earth's orbit.
guns in space would need either replaceable barrels, or ejecting heatsinks.
they would have no way of cooling down, and only be able to fire off a single 20 stack mag before becoming useless.
also the gas blocks would need to be reworked to work better in vacuum.
>what is radiation
Heat still travels in space
Yeah but a gun on earth is designed to dissipate heat through conduction, not purely through electromagnetic radiation.
You can't take an earth gun and just use it in space the same way.
So my question was how would you handle this problem? You gonna slap on some radiation panels? Maybe liquid cooling?
There are two solutions, venting or storing. You can vent the energy into space through time, like a long ass time, or you make a gun that is insulated from the projectile with a thermally reflective coating on the inside of the barrel.
That or you can store the heat, either in a disposable rod format, or maybe in like a big heat back-pack that could then be used as a battery of some kind.
For right now, a high powered laser that could burn a hole through a space-suit is probably all we need
Or a pneumatic dart gun
Hold on, let me dig up a Girandoni.
>Heat still travels in space
Blackbody radiation is the least efficient form of cooling after slapping a pissed-off person in the face and telling them to cool it.
>dissipate heat through conduction
You mean convection.
>There are two solutions, venting or storing. You can vent the energy into space through time, like a long ass time
I think you could do it quicker with Mass Effect's heat sinks but make them a bit more sophisticated.
>disposable thermal clips were dumb
I liked the idea.
If I tried to do it IRL, they'd probably have more in common with a stinger's BCUs. Either absorbing the excess heat from the weapon like an instant-cold-pack and being discarded when at thermal capacity or supplying a chilled gas that expands and absorbs heat before dissipating, being discarded when it's out of gas.
The latter might have a problem with people getting covered in nitrogen or argon ice and optics being fogged up and stuff so I don't know that it's 100% practical but it would be my first thought on cooling with consumable heat sinks.
>ejecting heatsinks
Get the frick out of here Bioware, disposable thermal clips were dumb then and they're dumb now.
A barrel swap is essentially an ejectable heatsink when you think about it
supposedly, Mass Effect 2 was going to have a much more lore-congruent system where weapons had functionally infinite shots with chamber heat build-up like in ME1 but you could eject thermal clips from a finite supply in order to rapidly dissipate your weapon's heat if it was needed
playtesters didn't like it though so we got the generic ammo system
People have figured out how to mod that in, I think it might not've been fully cut from the code to begin with.
Helldivers does something similar with how its laser weapons work, heat sinks you can let cool down or purge and replace.
Here's my idea:
Gyrojets, but no need for spin because it's space, plus they would only need a bit of fuel. And here's the kicker: they're electronically primed and fired from disposable, plastic barrels a la Metal Storm.
>no need for spin because space
Wut?
Is everyone dumb here or what?
Is this bait?
the point is to bring existing firearms to space.
Guns in space do not heat faster than gins in Earth's atmosphere. You would need to rapid fire more than 100 rounds to even worry about heat.
every part of the gun will get too hot to touch before the barrel turns red
They don't hear faster but they cool alot slower
Revive the G11 concept but take the huge front mounting stick mags and now make them a barrel and as much of the bolt as we possibly can, the hyper burst gimmick and clockwork ass can go since there are bigger issues to solve, and newer ideas in gunsmithing to use for a 2.0 rotating chamber design.
Sure you can paint an AR white and use it on the moon, the downside is it would radiate heat faster if it was black.
Pretty sure the idea behind making it white is to reflect sunlight not radiate heat.
Unfiltered sunlight on the surface of the moon leads to average surface temperatures of about 250F during lunar days, no need for the gun to get so toasty when not even in use.
depending on the time of lunar day thats right. i dont know guns - how much heat is created in the structure of the rifle from each shot? perhaps they designed the thing with a certain limit of how many shots can be fired until it needs a break to cool down?
Modern guns work perfectly fine underwater so you really just need to add some sealant to the neck of each round so the air doesn't leak out after a few hours.
The real issue is that Space is kinda weird so the gun might not cycle properly. You'll run into a number of thermal issues with the sun being much hotter and shadows being much colder and a complete lack of air to cool air cooled guns. Normal liquid lube would boil in space so you need a dry lubricant. Also, graphite apparently doesn't work, something to do with water molecules getting caught between graphene layers.
On a side note, remember that in a low or no gravity environment you have less weight and thus less traction. It'll take a lot less recoil to unbalance you.
>need to add some sealant to the neck of each round so the air doesn't leak out after a few hours
Just stop talking you fricking moron.
First off, rude.
Second off, the oxidizer isn't the issue. The problem is that the reaction isn't going to propagate through the powder without air. Without that existing pressure the heat isn't going to transfer from grain to grain properly and you'll be lucky to get a squib.
>in space it's an AR-15 but with WHITE FURNITURE OMG
you wouldn't even be able to get an acceptable cheekweld let alone actually aim down the sights
probably the only appropriate use-case for those gay moronic 7" riser unity mounts
>so the air doesn't leak out after a few hours
gunpowder has its own oxidizer you stupid moron
>Normal liquid lube would boil in space so you need a dry lubricant.
we already have low vapor pressure high temp lubricants, also you can just use PTFE
>but no need for spin because it's space
you do realize that gyroscopic stabilization is MORE necessary in space, not less, right?
>You can't take an earth gun and just use it in space the same way.
yes you can, it's called radiative cooling and it's been the primary method of cooling firearms since water jackets went away
there's no meaningful air mass being moved when a firearm is cooled, most of the cooling of modern guns is passive radiative and convective cooling
you could unironically just do away with the top half of an AR's forearm and solder a copper heat sink to the barrel and be more than covered
>most of the cooling of modern guns is passive radiative and convective cooling
Where does this radiation go to, and is it present in the vacuum of space?
>Where does this radiation go to, and is it present in the vacuum of space?
yes, it's far infrared (heat) radiation and it doesn't require a medium for transfer
there are three types of heat transfer: convection, conduction, and radiation
conduction is based on direct transfer of heat from one molecule or atom to another. On earth this cools a barrel as the hot barrel transfers its heat directly to an air molecule
convection is based on the movement of fluids like air or water. on earth this cools a barrel because hot air moves upwards and cool air replaces it, which is then heated via conduction
radiation is just the emission of heat as electromagnetic radiation. this happens on earth and space because it doesn't require a medium to transfer it. all of the cooling and thermal regulation in space is radiative
water cooled firearms were basically leveraging a high thermal mass (water) to cool
if you have a fanless passively cooled PC, congratulations you're watching radiative cooling with a little bit of convection work, usually up to 65W TDP. there's not a lot of air mass moving in a computer with no fans.
>and it doesn't require a medium for transfer
It does require transfer medium if you want to efficiently cool a firearm. Relying on electromagnetic radiation propagation on a conventical design will get you nowhere.
>Relying on electromagnetic radiation propagation on a conventical design
engrish alert
>posts a pic of an abused firearm, on earth, experiencing thermal failure
space is at a constant 2.7 degrees K
your thermal reserve for firing weapons is much higher than on earth
you start out at ~290 degrees K on earth
that means you have 287 degrees C/K of thermal capacity over the same weapon being fired on earth, starting from a "cold" weapon.
air is a thermal insulator unless it's moving, and when you reach high barrel temperatures, unless you're cooling convectively, you're not cooling efficiently through any method other than radiative cooling anyway
the space station gets up to 250 degrees Fahrenheit in the sun while maintaining an interior temperature of 70 degrees, with not a tremendous amount of radiator panels, and those radiators are also in direct sun.
the problem of heat dissipation in space is not a huge deal, especially when like I mentioned before, you could arctic silver and bolt on $35 worth of copper finned heatsink and be completely okay, thermally
2.7K only if you are in the shadow, if you were sunlit even in space, there will be excess heat.
>Where does this radiation go to
In every direction away from the hot object.
>and is it present in the vacuum of space?
How do you think the light and heat from the sun gets to us? (Yes, they're both the same fundamental phenomena.)
>you wouldn't even be able to get an acceptable cheekweld let alone actually aim down the sights
If you pay attention during that scene you can see that the moon marine shooting targets has a crosshair drawn in marker on the inside of his helmet, my guess is that they figured out a way of aiming by using that drawn crosshair and the sights of the rifle.
>you do realize that gyroscopic stabilization is MORE necessary in space, not less, right?
No, why? No air resistance, shouldn't matter.
That's gay, no thanks.
>No air resistance
Not technically true because space isn't a true vacuum but the density is probably not significant but it's not about air resistance, it's about accuracy and ensuring that minor perturbations are corrected over distances and not exaggerated.
>Not technically true
well if you want to be "technical" air refers to the atmosphere of earth, or more specifically, the gaseous substance surrounding eath.
this is why I can't stand "well technically" homosexual because they always follow it up with wrong information.
also your looking at, TOPS 40ppm per cm3 in space, with les between star systems and even less between galactic clusters. nowhere near enough to ever qualify as "air" in any context, regardless of "technicality".
also, "gyroscopic stabilization" is just using a fricking gyroscope to figure out where you're pointing and adjusting accordingly. what you're actually talking about is spin stabilization.
spin stabiliazation is used in things like sattelites to help keep them pointed towards earth. it reduces fuel costs over a long period.
you don't need to spin stabilize a projectile in space to keep it heading towards your target. because their is no air resistence, your bullt could be an uneven polyhedron flipping end over end and it wont effect the direction it's traveling one bit. it will still hit exactly where it was aimed.
spin stabilization is important in atmo because once your projectilce starts to yaw or flip it bleeds off energy and is re-directed by the atmosphere, missing your target. not an issue in space.
the only reason you might want to spin stabilze a bullet in space is if you absolutely need it to hit pointy-end first.... but since space has no atmosphere, aerodynamics don't matter so you don't need to make things pointy. spheres would be a great option.
all in all, spin stabilization does not become "more necessary in space", and in fact, is LESS necessary depending on the projectile you're using.
now, make yourself a projectile that has a shape charge, say, and exploding artillary shell that sends out shrapnel or a penetrating dart.... sure... spin stabilizing would make sense
I feel vindicated.
Up yours, moron.
>No, why? No air resistance, shouldn't matter.
there are two types of stabilization, gyroscopic and aerodynamic
FMJBT projectiles use both, APFSDS use only aerodynamic, and wadcutters use only gyroscopic. if you don't have any air to stabilize the projectile, the only thing keeping it from tumbling is gyroscopic stabilization or something like a center of thrust/center of mass balance.
the primer is more than enough to set off the grains inside the cartridge, even in the event that they don't ignite each other (which they do because even some grains catching creates a huge oxidized heat and pressure wave within the cartridge). touching off a cartridge doesn't rely on air in the way that you think it does.
?si=tEMz6yeMyz-M6rPd&t=22
Your biggest problem with a rifle in space is managing recoil in zero g.
Ever notice how any topic related to space brings out the most simultaneously confident and moronic people on the planet?
You'll need some huge radiators in space to cool things, or put on a replaceable water cooling loop or something, exchange it when hot.
picrel space station with white radiators next to solar panels.
.50 bmg goes a very long way on the Moon
Why use a gun when you can use a handheld space claymore. Because it's in a vacuum their isn't a blast shockwave, the flash deflector deflects the blast. The ball bearings have a flat trajectory and infinite range and you only need one to puncture a space suit. Basically a space blunderbuss. Carry like 5 or 6 of these each and blast away. Not a new idea, the military figured this out in the 60s
that's cool a frick
>Basically a space blunderbuss
For something so moronic, that's honestly a pretty good idea.
Though I do wonder why you wouldn't just use a pump-action shotgun with a shell of small flechette darts at that point. They could integrate some coolant in the shell to reduce barrel temperature after firing, just tweak the chemistry/packaging so that the propellent gas is chased down the barrel by a puff of compressed argon or something.
The old military reports came to the conclusion that conventional firearms would be clunky and awkward to handle and aim while wearing a space suit.
Moving parts were also a problem since they could freeze and or cold weld themselves together in the vacuum of space.
That same vacuum would also cause any liquid lubricant to instantly boil off the guns, and since there's no wind or water erosion on the moon, moon dust is incredibly sharp and jagged, so it'll eat through most materials quite rapidly and jam the absolute frick out of guns with moving parts.
Hence the disposable boom sticks.
No. that optic has terrible eye relief and eyebox. And the controls are completely unsuited to the gloves of a space suit. You would want to redesign the ergonomics to work with the suit and a magnified optic just isn't compatible with a big helmet like this. I would push for a suit or backpack mounted rifle and remove the need for the astronaut to use his hands at all. That would make movement easier, walking on the moon is awkward as frick and they fell over had to catch themselves all the time. Replace the magnified optic with a red dot. First generation Aimpoints came around just as the Apollo program was ending so if we stayed around and armed the astronauts they would have been available. I'm the sure the geniuses at NASA would have managed something a bit better than the OG aimpoint anyways. Keep 5.56 its actually fine for use on the moon. No reason to change that.
>Keep 5.56 its actually fine for use on the moon. No reason to change that.
I agree, all you need for the heat problem is an HBAR. extended engagements are unlikely when even a grazing wound is lethal, so for just a mag or two the simplest solution is to soak it up with the gun's own mass. weight? only matters as far as fitting it into the payload allowance, the guy in the 180lb spacesuit isn't gonna mind a slightly heavier rifle in 1/6th gravity
space warfare will make water cooled guns relevant again
Space warfare will be a race to cripple the opponents radiators.
Space is harsh. Too harsh to consider squabbling over what is in abundant supply. Won't even leave the solar system with this mentality.
As for guns. Yes, but kinda primitive. The goal here is kinetic transfer. You can do this with a centrifugal launcher, electrically. Far less heat. You down one ovmy birds, i down two of yours to prove a point.... how many cycles of that before you have an unmanageable debris cloud?
But, this same tecnnology could instead cheaply move a couple of tonnes of resources point to point.
That's until we meet our first Xenos species, and frick it.
>spins off into outerspace never to be seen again whilst spraying bullets in every direction
>Was going to post this
Fill it with warm water to prevent the gun from freezing before you shoot
>space warfare.
revolvers
a gyrojet-type round deployed by an initial low pressure gas/air system
A colt 36 would work fine on the moon with BP which is its own oxididiser
Until the recoil gives you escape velocity..
>which is its own oxididiser
As is the case with every other type of gunpowder as well.
enjoy your cartwheels into lunar orbit anon
>be enemy of the US
>ready to go into battle against US troops on the moon
>hear distant *AEIOU* *AEIOU* *AEIOU* *JOHN MADDEN* *JOHN MADDEN* in steven hawking's speech synthesizer as you are being pummeled to death by freedom.freedom x freedom mm rounds.
>>hear distant
sound does not travel in a vacuum you moron
Fine
>hear intercepted radio communication of *
Moon isn't a vacuum, it has an atmosphere. The oxygen/water that turned the iron and titanium on the lunar surface into their respective oxides stretches all the way from earth.
post hs diploma
You can say even space isn't vacuum if want to insist but for all intend and purpose, moon's atmosphere is vacuum.
go breathe it and and let me know.
You can't breathe the atmosphere on Mars but it's thick enough for a helicopter to fly.
You can't breathe any extra-terrestrial atmosphere for that matter but they exist for other purposes.
im just saying that the comment saying the moon has an atmosphere is stupid. ok, there might a few atoms per cubic cm more than perfect vacuum, but what difference does it make to anything at all?
>the comment saying the moon has an atmosphere is stupid
How can it be stupid to say the moon has an atmosphere if the moon does have an atmosphere?
It's no more stupid than saying an atom has a gravitational pull.
he point is that those few atoms per cubic cm make no difference for anything. what difference does it make? what do you even mean by 'atmosphere' if all you mean is a few atoms like that?
>what do you even mean by 'atmosphere'
Now go on a roadtrip with your gas tank on E, there are certainly gas molecules in the tank.
For the bullet, Moon's atmosphere is meaningless.
Nothing with mass or chemical rection in space is meaningless, it all has an effect, maybe not to you, but to say it's meaningless is silly.
Or maybe you're right and the moon doesn't have an atmosphere, and all the scientific bodies who say it does are wrong.
Do you go around and tell people that table salt should be called sodium chloride?
For hitting someone 50ft in front of you, Moon's atmosphere is meaningless.
me spitting in your face from 1000 miles away has SOME effect on you.
As an engineer I can tell you with great confidence that yes, the moon's atmosphere is meaningless for most applications and problems. The Lunar exosphere is a stronger vacuum than any vacuum that has ever been created on Earth. The drag is so minuscule that the air resistance really CAN be neglected.
In fact, the moon's vacuum is so thin and so useful for many industrial and scientific processes that preservation of that vacuum will likely be a major issue when the first long-term outpost goes up there. Even off-gassing from melting regolith can significantly affect it so there will be a push to conduct experiments and industry in sealed chambers.
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
QuestionmarkExclamationpointQuestionmarkExclamationpointQuestionmarkExclamationpoint John Madden
AEIOU
>That's one small step for John Madden
HERE COMES A CHINESE EARTHQUAKE BRBRBRRBRBRBRBRBRBRBR
Holy shit I remember.
A shotgun with needle-like projectiles
There is a skitzo woman that protests outside of the air force base in my town against space lasers.
She has signs and everything.
>There is a skitzo woman that protests outside of the air force base in my town against space lasers.
Tell her that technology has solved the laser problem and it's going to be space bullets now.
>space warfare
>84 posts
>no mention of the Almaz space station cannon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz
>The Almaz program was a highly secret Soviet military space station program, begun in the early 1960s.
>To cover the military nature of the program, the three launched Almaz stations were designated as civilian Salyut space stations.
>In addition to reconnaissance equipment, Almaz was equipped with a unique 23mm Rikhter (factory index 261P or 225P) rapid-fire cannon mounted on the forward belly of the station. This revolver cannon was modified from the tail-gun of the Tu-22 bomber and was capable of a theoretical rate of fire of 1800-2000 (up to 2600) rounds per minute. Each 168 gram (ammo 23-OFZ-D-R ) or 173 gram (ammo 23-OFZ-G-R) projectile flew at a speed of 850 m/s relative to the station. The cannon was tested at the end of the mission by firing 20 rounds, when the station was operating in uncrewed mode. To aim the cannon, which was on a fixed mounting, the entire station would be turned to face the target. The Almaz series are the only known armed, crewed military spacecraft ever flown.
>no mention of the Almaz space station cannon
The thread opened with a picture of a lunafied AR so I feel like space station cannons might not be as man portable as we're looking for here.
>The Almaz series are the only known armed, crewed military spacecraft ever flown
>only KNOWN
Yeah and if you believe that I've got some real nice bottomland to sell you.
For All Mankind by the way. perfectly acceptable watching experience
It was fun at first when it was still mostly about the alt timeline of the space race before it turned into full blown family/love triangle/homosexual rights drama.
this. season 4 was pretty much worthless. just a long boring union story. surprised they even got funding for season 5
Stock AR-15 with a water jacket wrapped around the barrel and graphite or graphite-silica lubricant should cycle and fire fine in LEO or on the Moon. I'll test it when I get my vacuum chamber back online.
Third aspect is plugging the water jacket into the operator's space suit heat exchanger. This assumes IMU/A7LB/Krechet type suits.
would you need a long barrel in space? nasa would want to save weight wherever they could so I imagine they'd opt for a short barreled rifle, and there's no wind resistance in space.
>would you need a long barrel in space?
Muzzle velocity doesn't become less important, it just gets slightly more effective. Kinetic energy is still the main actor on the target so fast bullets > slow bullets regardless of how much is due to rifled rounds spinning into the target and how much is displaced material.
Longer barrels provide more muzzle velocity because propellent gases push on the bullet for longer.
how much difference in velocity?
>is it feasible?
not really. the weapon would function (gunpowder has it's own oxidizer) but there would be a lot of problems.
>recoil
this is just a guess, but I imagine with the lack of gravity recoil management would be a bigger issue
>sights
we'd need a total redesign of either helmets, sights, or both to be able to use the weapon effectively
>space suits
generally very poor mobility. would require new techonology for effective infantry
>heat
on earth, guns cool off through convection (heat transfers from the weapon to a fluid (yes, air is a fluid, but not a liquid)). the lack of an atmosphere means you'd have to rely on radiation alone. veryyyy slow, shitty way of cooling things down. even if you had some sort of liquid cooling system, you've got to remember that those rely on convection too. the only way to quickly cool the weapon would be to have big heat sinks/cooling arrays that would spread out the heat for maximum surface area. any way you look at it the heat build up is going to be a big problem.
what you really need is a new space suit that's more maneuverable, a new helmet that works with weapon sights, and new weaponry that doesn't generate a bunch of heat.
>Also space warfare
There’s something enthralling about space warfare happening above one of the oldest and most historically important cities on Earth.
I got that scope, maybe.
I like your style.
It's funny. My uncle had the Colt 4x scope new in box and gave it to me. Looked it up and it was pretty expensive. Like $500+. So I ended up getting the Colt to go with it and complete the look. First 20" AR and damn I wish I bought/built one sooner. I only had 16" ones before it.
Why use a rifle at all in space?
A shotgun loaded with something like 20 gauge birdshot makes infinitely more sense. Point it in the general direction of the enemy and unload to get as much dispersion as you can. All you need to do is have a single pellet connect to punch a hole in the target's atmo-suit, and they're depressurized and done for.
Without air resistance or gravity, there's no point in something high-velocity or rifled, Each individual pellet out of a smoothbore will go just as far a rifle bullet, and won't lose any energy over distance, and you only need enough power to punch through their suit. A smoothbore can be made much a much heavier barrel so it can absorb more heat.
>Point it in the general direction of the enemy and unload
Recoil still exists and is a much bigger problem. You don't want to be knocked down or even airborne by a badly braced shot, so you want low recoil which means throwing small mass projectiles at high speed with extreme accuracy, not high mass of projectiles at low speed with no accuracy.
Or, make your weapon recoilless somehow, including just delaying recoil through some sort of M777-like rail and cradle system.
>Each individual pellet out of a smoothbore will go just as far a rifle bullet, and won't lose any energy over distance
In a combat on the moon, there's likely to be a lot of dust in the air which takes a while to settle. Dust resistance might end up being worse than air resistance, you'd have to model it in your ballistics anyway.
>and you only need enough power to punch through their suit
If you're bringing a rifle, then you also brought plates or some sort of armour and so did your enemy because they're a space power in a war.
Even if it's just kevlar reinforcing, simple shot won't be reliable unless it cracks a seal or finds a thin part of the suit. It can't be ignored by the victim but it can't be relied on by the shooter either.
Since we are on the topic about space warfare. Is HAARP a weapon. I don't believe it changes the weather ( I believe that's a fake conspiracy created to deflect it's actual use) but could it heat up the ionosphere enough to fry a satellite.
>Is it feasible /k/?
Guns in space? Preposterous. Everyone knows that you need air to burn things. It's not like the ammunition is filled with nitrated organics that have ample oxygen available through decomposition. How would such a thing even be created without burning up?
The problem nobody thinks of is what to do with all the heat generated. You're only going to be able to get off a few shots before the gun starts to melt itself.
My favorite bit from the moon war arc was that NASA sent the Marines up with specialized rifles for use on the moon, but the Soviets just gave their cosmonauts basic side folder AKMs
What justification would you have for infantry fighting in space?
It just sounds so unnecessarily dangerous.
>It just sounds so unnecessarily dangerous.
A fella could get hurt in this sort of thing.
Mining disputes on the lunar surface
Realistically none
Fighting would be done on habitable worlds
If everyone can see where everyone is at all times I space, how does anyone even start a fight? Does everyone have to fight in gas nebulas.
Nebulae have less gas particle densities than air, so you should see each other well inside one. They look colorful and intricate due to how far away and huge they are.
I see. Damn. So is any kind of space combat just simply not at all feasible in fiction? I think about it a lot and I just don't see how it could be made workable
Well if we were talking about spaceship battles it would be either kinetic impactors like on Earth or just shine a big laser until the other side die of overheating, you can't outrun a laser beam (until we find warp drives) and you have nowhere to dump the heat faster.
Would a recoilless rifle design function on the moon? And would it have any advantage?
It should work fine. As for an advantage I don't see one. Some kind of guided rockets would be great though since the low gravity and no air resistance would mean much longer range.
Spin helps keep a bullet from boat-tailing or otherwise doing dumb shit because a bullet is never perfectly formed and balanced, and even less so after being fired. Slight imperfections will cause the bullet to start tumbling without spin and will affect accuracy and penetration. It's not about air resistance.
>It's not about air resistance.
Why do you think tumbling affects accuracy, anon? When a bullet starts spinning off its central axis, the drag force is unbalanced and affects its trajectory. In space that doesn't happen.
Would the backblast be dangerous for a longer distance with no air resistance slowing the solid particles among the gases?
>Would the backblast be dangerous for a longer distance with no air resistance slowing the solid particles among the gases?
I think the zone would be a lot larger, there could be wider dispersion too though, I think the gases being accelerated out of the rear would meet the slowing, cooling gases already out and cause vortices off to the sides at a greater rate than would occur in atmosphere.
This effectively creates a localised and temporarily thicker atmosphere so relocating after shots is probably wise.
This is a stupid side track but kinda related to space warfare- I can’t help but imagine that If we ever start parking asteroids in orbit for mining that some company CEO is going to have the mother of all weapons of mass destruction. They could do some real bond villain shit. Surrender to me or the blue one gets it.
>If we ever start parking asteroids in orbit for mining that some company CEO is going to have the mother of all weapons of mass destruction
Already true for commercially run nuke plants and all sorts of heavy industry.
Look at the Baltimore bridge and at Evergreen in the Suez, the ability of corporations to cause disasters with huge impacts goes well beyond weaponized mining operations.
It'll be mostly fine for a few reasons, the CEOs need somewhere to spend their money, if they try to become emperor of earth then they either win or die and they're not going to win because it takes more than a gun to someone's head to make you king. If you put a gun to Biden's head right now, you don't become POTUS, you just get arrested.
Same for any CEO getting uppity. The fun doesn't start until two things are true:
* they can live in permanent off-world settlements such as lagrange stations that would be reasonably easy to isolate and defend
* they are largely self-sufficient in those settlements
Otherwise, we just cut off your internet, fuel and food deliveries and say no. Eventually you want to rejoin the human race because your e-girls are getting too old and you find there's an arrest team waiting for you.
If Musk had a self-sustaining colony on Mars that he ruled over, his negotiations about income and taxes on his Earth-orbit operations could get a whole lot more rambunctious. Not even getting to the level of threatening genocide, just threatening to turn the lights off because he owns the orbital solar array that powers North America and feels like pulling a Shkreli.
In theory, nationalising assets that are used this way is the answer but the US is allergic to it. It's still the right answer though, any commercial practice that can be weaponised requires regulation and oversight and can be nationalised if abused. Just like having a firearm confiscated because it was brandished in public.
Wouldn't the bullet just spin out into deep space forever? What the muzzle velocity be like? Would it be much faster? Your firearm my need a cooling system of some sort.
Wouldn't the bullet just spin out into deep space forever?
>Sort of it would depend on the launch angle.
What the muzzle velocity be like? Would it be much faster?
>much faster, you could see 4500FPS from M855 from a 20" with no air to slow it down or hinder acceleration.
Your firearm my need a cooling system of some sort.
>Yes with out air to cool you would need some sort of radiator fins, heat sink or even a liquid cooled jacket with rads. Also you would need to protect it from rapid heat and cooling due to being in the sun or shadow.
At this point I think we should just deploy the Space Force with cross bows.
All this shit with heat issues on the barrel and needing to add radiator fins plus the fact that just poking holes in any dudes suit will kill them just means firearms would work but so would throwing a spear, and the spear would not have heat issues. Just give every astronaut a crossbow.
With LRF ballistic computers integrated into weapon optics and programable air burst ammo from the XM29 OICW and XM25 program a GyroJet would be a very competent and rugged system for Space Wars
A computer controlled GyroJet is some Fallout tier stuff.
I agree it has the Fallout vibe, but it would be the natural progression of space small arms.
>Wouldn't the bullet just spin out into deep space forever?
Escape velocity for the sun out at 1AU is ~138,000FPS, although if you are lined up perfectly with the earth system's vector you 'only' need a muzzle velocity of about 53,000FPS to get all the way up to speed. Anything slower than that will be on a long, slow trip to the sun.
Recoil and overheating would be moronic. With lowered to no gravity recoil would not only make the gun fly over the place it would move you much more. Without particle to interact with the very hot barrel to interact with it takes longer to cool. moronic idea to fix these problems: delayed rocket cartridges that Brun most of their propellant outside the barrel of the gun.
everyone gets mag fed shotguns and fires flechettes
explosive propellant has to be overkill for space. there's no air resistance and nobody is wearing armor. just used compressed air or some shit.
Guns don't work in space
no oxygen
>not reading the first few posts in the thread
NGMI
Also
>please wait before making a post
what caused this gay shit?
Counterpoint, guns work underwater.
Thought it was a wojak til click thumb nail
hybrid rifle that uses a magnetic system to get the projectiles (either a gryojet style or something like a duplex bullet) out of the barrel, then they ignite on their own.
>guns in reduced gravity
>there will never be a war in space fought with swords clubs and spears
dude imagine getting killed by a brick with razorblades glued to it when it slices a hole in your suit, floating along like a frisbee
You would probably need a Hydrogen system
in the picture you can see how the bullet would be pushed out by a series of detonation, steadily increasing speed
That turned out to be a terrible design. The Germans tried this in WW2, even going so far as to build a bunker complex for a battery of guns aimed at London, but it never fired a shot before the bongs made it suck a tallboy. The small scale version had symmetric side chambers, had difficulty in getting the detonation timing right, and had problems with overpressure that eventually destroyed it.
Electronic controls have improved significantly since 1940s.
Fixed gun emplacements just aren't very useful for military purposes.
Here and there, there is talk of making a cannon like that for delivering stuff to LEO, but nothing came of it so fat.
>no air resistence
>no gravity
kinetic weapons are S tier space weapons
>No guidance
>No ability to detect or track targets hundreds or thousands of miles away
>No ability for a typical user to intuitively predict the relative motion of the target or the hyperbolic path of the fired bullets in the presence of more than 2 bodies
>Need to counterbalance every shot fired thus wasting a significant amount of the power in each shot and increasing your own thermal and optical signatures
Truly S tier space weapons
Pneumatic air shotgun filled with birdshot or snakeshot would be the perfect space infantry weapon.
Step aside children, im here to make holes in airtight suits and spacecraft