Comments on: p. 147 (Chapter 5)

By: Insectoid

Insectoid — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:12:34 +0000

@Tara: (am keeping mouth shut)

By: brenatevi

brenatevi — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 23:18:19 +0000

Not to toot another webcomic, but Schlock Mercenary has covered most of the future weapons discussed here, from gravity guns to cee-sabots. I wouldn’t have posted, but since the discussion was on weaponry, and I started thinking “Hey, I’ve seen this stuff before…” I thought I would share.

If you have never read Schlock, be careful clicking these links; 10 years of archives.
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20010715.html
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20001105.html

By: Andrew Crisp

Andrew Crisp — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 19:32:58 +0000

Only the first volume. Strange Adventures didn’t have the others (though I’m seriously considering begging them to stock the current version…). So past that, I have no clue whatsoever

By: Tara

Tara — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:40:17 +0000

@Andrew: If you have the old graphic novel (which for comparison purposes I call “The Black Book), you know exactly what is going to happen next!

By: Andrew Crisp

Andrew Crisp — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 01:06:03 +0000

With reference to robots and combat…

I doubt we’ll see robots become an essential part of combat – at least I *hope* we don’t. Even with teleoperated stuff like what’s been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are already huge dilemmas being confronted by robotics ethicists. Imagine the problems once the robots start being able to decide for themselves when and when not to fight…

Back to the page, and an interesting side-note: I came across a copy of the original Galaxion graphic novel in the GN section of the local comic shop (Strange Adventures, for the curious). Snapped it up, and I can certainly see a lot of differences (and similarities) in the storylines up to this point.

One thing I noticed – in the old GN, there’s a scene where we see a bunch of butterflies appearing, shall we say ‘ominously’? (How can a butterfly be ominous, I wonder?) And in the final panel there looks to be a swarm of bugs gathering above Our Heroes…

So, Tara, should I break out “Flight of the Bumblebee” for the next page? ^_^

By: Torjin

Torjin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 10:24:44 +0000

nice discussion about the weapons – but i guess the technology part is drifting away somehow… anyway, as Andrew Crisp pointed out: weapons are going to get more and more smart – why dont make the logical conclusion and go up to combat robots – their faster and can be armoured & equipped with whatever you like; and I guess if it is possible to create real AI, it must be possible to keep it at bay, or just give the robot the intelligence (and loyalty) of a dog, so no big deal.

Another point, which has not been considered so far: in many cases (like here) a gun is used to threaten (and by this try to avoid further escalation) so it has to be recognised as a weapon or it would be useless…

But back to the start – the current gun desing is ok from my point of view, I also like the kind of “zoom out” effect when the general realises that she lost this round… maybe we now can find out why these people are that pissed off?

By: Nate

Nate — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 08:48:47 +0000

@Andrew Yes, the power requirements for a warp drive are pretty freakin’ insane if current physics holds, and yes one of the side effects of any effective spaceship warp drive is pretty much that every vessel becomes an effective planet-killer if the crew so desire (just ram at relativistic speed and foom goes large chunks of the scenery). This would have all sorts of implications for space traffic policy – much like if suddenly every car could take down a city. Again, not many SF scenarios explore this, though I suppose it would resolve into something like Cold War politics. C J Cherryh in her Merchanter series did memorably have sequences where station folk are very very nervous of any ship entering a system because you never know if it’s going to decelerate or not.

Handheld planetkillers would be an even nastier problem. It’s interesting to think about the implications of energy densities. At the moment we’re all worried about what if oil runs out, but if we got something like working cold fusion tomorrow, we might have even bigger problems if a glass of water could make an H-bomb. Uranium fission is sorta politically controllable, though MAD gave us all nightmares (ah, the ’80s) – but deuterium or hydrogen fusion, not so much. And dark energy if we ever got to that – um, eep?

By: IllvilJa

IllvilJa — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:33:23 +0000

More possibilities: bullets that are guided by your gun to hit where you are looking with your aiming eye. Of course, the gun need to ‘filter out’ too abrupt eye moves and disregard them so it does not have to divert the bullets on their way in a too steep curve (as too wild maneuvering would lower their speed and thus their impact on the target), but the ability for a gunner to just ‘look at the enemy’ and then quickly shoot a burst that actually hits there without spending time aiming is useful.

How to determine what the gunner look at? The gun may look externally at the eye movements (potentially inaccurate) or even better (but far creepier) the gun is via some cybernetics fed with the vision of the gunners eyes. The visual nerve signals together with input from a camera on the gun itself ought to give it a good enough idea of where the bullets are in relation to where the gunner focus his/her eyes in order to guide the bullets accordingly. Poor target.

J. Wilde: Shooting rounds in the pelvis if two rounds in the chest does not bring down the enemy? Yuck, quite a reminder how awful war is.

By: Andrew Crisp

Andrew Crisp — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:00:00 +0000

@ Nate – I agree that a whole new physics can be a game-changer. However, I’m a big believer in the “correspondence principle”: new physics must line up with old physics where the old physics has been proven true. IJS that if you’re going to be manipulating gravity, you’ll be dealing with energy levels equal to the mass required to produce a given gravity field. E still equals MC squared, after all

That’s not a showstopper for futuristic energy/exotic weapons, per se – one can, for example, tap into the “dark energy” that makes up roughly 70% of the total mass-energy of the universe (I’m not making this up!) but I see a problem if anything should go wrong with that tap. If it should malfunction so that the weapon “overloads”, even a handgun or personal repeller field potentially becomes a planet-destroyer. MULTIPLE safety systems would have to be perfected before such devices get sent out to field use – REGARDLESS of the people who will be using them.

One other possibility lies with ranged nonlethal weapons like tranks and tasers would be the “smart gun” – not something that would aim for you, but something that can dial its trank dosage / taser voltage depending on what it’s pointed at. Given object-recognition software in use today and Moore’s Law to continually shrink computers, I could see a 22nd / 23rd century taser equipped with a miniature camera and “person recognizer/body mass calculator” program, allowing it to decide whether it’s pointed at a big burly guy or a little child and adjust its output accordingly (or even not fire at all). Network the guns to something that can seperate hostile from innocent bystander (probably requiring a human or advanced intel to make such judgements) and you can potentially eliminate those bits of mealymouthed Pentagonese like “collateral damage” and “friendly fire”.

Of course, when going up against an unknown species with an equally unknown chemistry, even smart tasers and tranks can become either lethal weapons or as useful as harsh language…

By: Prestwick

Prestwick — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 13:42:04 +0000

@J.Wilde and IllvilJa: Furthermore, the kind of weapon the may carry could dictate their behaviour. For example, in Northern Ireland during a riot in Belfast, a section of British soldiers were advancing up a side street towards a t-junction when a terrorist armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun spun round the corner up ahead at said t-junction, fired off a two to three second burst wildly before vanishing again. The theory being that due to the high rate of fire and perceived inaccuracy of such a gun combined with the technical and physical superiority of the British, the man chose “spray and pray” and a tactical retreat rather than stick around and try his luck! In the event, one of the dum dum bullets hit one of the soldier’s flak jackets but didn’t penetrate.

Thankfully a debate about 5.56 vs 7.62 ammunition hasn’t broken out yet although there is still time!!!