Semi-OT: A General Tech Question Thread for me :)

[El_Phil]

Explosive bullets, being banned and all, probably aren't the wave of the future.

I'd also put money that the guy who said that wasn't paying for all the wasted muntitions and then got killed when he ran out of bullets. Now excessive force is good, but using a tac nuke to kill a tank is 'waste of munitions' for instance.

[Starhawk]

They are not banned actually because they are being planned for the OICW (I don't know what it's X-number is) with air bursting and explosive rounds to peirce body armor.

And it's also the opinion of a lot of authors and even some "real" military people that like it or not explosive rounds are going to have to come into play to more easily bypass such things as body armor.....and those nagging terrorist types who are so hocked up on drugs you can pump a mag into them and have em still shooting at you heh. Can't do that when you explode

Also 50-cal rifles fire "explosive" rounds.

Now White phospherous (Sp?) rounds were banned because they didn't increase kill they just burned horribly and crippled people in ways that are just not settling thinking about.


As far as "waste of munitions" well as I kind of said "waste of munitions" only counts when you have munitions if on the other hand you had a weapon with nearly unlimited fire then you wouldn't much care along those lines.
Thats like if you gave me a tank with an endless supply of ammo you can be darned sure I'm shooting every grunt, tank and mean looking rabbit I can with DU rounds hehe.

[El_Phil]

Depends what you call an explosive round. Hollow points are explosive rounds, as are mercury/glycerol cavity rounds. Both of which are out under the Geneva Convention.

Of course as that doesn't cover cops or spies, no problem.

On the other hand if by explosive round you mean 'small grenade' then your OK. The OICW is a standard 5.56 NATO ammmo gun, with an attached 20mm grenade launcher. This fires 20mm grenades. You can, I suppose, stretch that to be an explosive round, but its a grenade to anyone else.

[Starhawk]

I remember reading that it fires "air bursting bullets" out of it's primary fire not it's 20mm grenade launcher. Possible that the author meant that it was 20mm AIRBURST grenades not "bullets" but I don't know.

And no I mean minni explosive warhead in a bullet sized package that some folks in the army are already working on, right up there with the "smart bullets" though I haven't found any info on either project in a while since some of what I read was a little overly mathfilled for my tastes hehe (I really don't want to know the physics of an exploding smart bullet lol)


i thought NATO was 7.62mm as that is what the M-16 fires?

Damn they just keep making their bullets more pansy as they go lol

[El_Phil]

Sticking an explosive warhead in a bullet is very non-Geneva Convention. As in massively so. Still no reason you couldn't do it. Hell you could probably fudge around the convention with some legal kung-fu if you really wanted to. Or just issue it to cops and spies not the millitary.

NATO, and the M-16, are 5.56mm. The M-16 has always been that caliber, since the first prototype actually.

[Baron Munchausen]

Starhawk said:
I remember reading that it fires "air bursting bullets" out of it's primary fire not it's 20mm grenade launcher. Possible that the author meant that it was 20mm AIRBURST grenades not "bullets" but I don't know.

And no I mean minni explosive warhead in a bullet sized package that some folks in the army are already working on, right up there with the "smart bullets" though I haven't found any info on either project in a while since some of what I read was a little overly mathfilled for my tastes hehe (I really don't want to know the physics of an exploding smart bullet lol)


i thought NATO was 7.62mm as that is what the M-16 fires?

Damn they just keep making their bullets more pansy as they go lol

You are probably thinking of this:

http://mae.pennnet.com/Articles/Arti...0arms%20weapon

It fires 'programmable munitions' that will burst in mid-air at exactly the distance required, effectively letting soldier's shoot 'around corners' at enemies behind cover. When this becomes available 'urban warfare' will become a very dangerous activity indeed for anyone taking on US forces. It's interesting that they don't call it a 'grenade' but just a 'munition'. It's probably best described as a very small guided missile anyway.

[Starhawk]

Thanks for the info BM that's probobly why the guy's work I read just called it a "bullet" because the military its self doesn't call it a grenade.

M-16 is a pissy little 5.56? lol I got my AKs and my M's confused hehe the AK series fires 7.62 because the Russians prefer a heavier punch, interesting.

Oh and El-Phil as far as the subject of Kinetics vs Energy weapons goes I've done some reading inspired by your points and I find it interesting to note that in effect an "energy weapon" is still using Kinetic kill principles it's just different somehow.
I think a gravity based anti-bullet shield could slow down a bullet and reduce it's KE enough for the armor to stop the actual damage, however I do after reading agree with you that it could simply not stop ALL KE without using so much energy its self that the shield would require as much energy as the ship's entire systems.


Now on to the plausibility of shields using gravitic principals that doesn't actually require "physics defying" technology as it simply involves (not simply but you know what I mean) a race learning how to create an artificial gravity well around the ship. And I think you'd need to learn how to manipulate gravity to shoot a black hole at someone (and you said that's quite possible) so hehe.


As far as gravity without constant acceleration or rotation goes, no my ships don't have rotating sections but they are very often accelerating and the compensators drain off enough of the gravity effects to give the crew 1g on ship while the ship may actually be going 200 gravities.

However to not "fudge" that too much (using your favorite word lol) the compensators don't have infinite drainability and the faster the ship accelerates the more G force gets through to the crew so for an SD going 600 gravities the crew would be getting slammed with 5 G.

I know the very principal of an inertial compensator "defies physics" but at least here I'm trying to make one slightly more reasonable then the ST infini-compensator right .

And the reason I get mad at you El-Phil is because I don't like being talked down too simply because I'm younger then a lot of you folks, if you are going to say something is "utterly impossible" give me more reasons then just "because physics says so" okay, like WHY physics says so.

I mean to be honest physics is a head-in-vice sort of science because you've got newtonian, relitivistic and some third one I can't remember lol and all of them have different principals and crap so it's hard to keep track of it all right .

[El_Phil]

The explanations are never simple, or the details of it aren't, and in general people do tend to go 'Arrrrrrrrrrrgh!' and run off screaming at the concepts. The maths are worse. You can simplify things, but then you risk lose the meaning. "Things should be as simplified as far as possible, but no further." Einstien I believe.

As for the gravity when a ship stops or is at constant speed your crew should be floating around. Now this isn't really very neat, honour guards drifting around the room, coffee drifting towards the screens etc, but it's the way it goes.

Just as a side point, I do remember something about G force tolerance being massively variable. A big naval aviation study ,if I recall, had variance from 2.5 to 7.5 for blackouts in pilots/personnel. Of course you'd hope it was the pilots at 7Gs and the cleaners at 2.5 but still.

[Starhawk]

Well someday maybe someone will figure out how to create a gravity field so for the sake of keeping things nice in this story I'll just assume that I Know not very "scientific" but I don't want to have to deal with the even more complicated and pain in the butt problems that come about when you have rotating sections.

[El_Phil]

Nothing wrong with a rotating section, except when it stops rotating of course...

Now I remember a name 'Alistar Reynolds.' anyone read any off his stuff? There's a guy who takes things seriously. As in journeys take years/decades as light speed is the limits and people have to wear exo-suits when the ship accelerates at high Gs. Masochisticly hard science really.