Mythbusters without Adam and Jamie. But it *does* have Kari, rockets and firearms…
Nov 292016
Nov 252016
In 1965, the US Army briefly examined a need they didn’t know they had: firearms for use in space and on the Moon. The US Army Weapons Command in Rock Island, Illinois, put out a brochure detailing some ideas for lunar weapons… “The Meanderings of a Weapon Oriented Mind When Applied in a Vacuum Such as on the Moon.” While not a detailed engineering study, it nevertheless provides and interesting look at the sort of weapons that might be developed for use in a low gravity space environment.
Conventional firearms would work just fine in space… at least for a while. A vacuum would cause most lubricants to outgas and turn to waxy solids or hard rubber-like crud. The extreme differences in temperatures between sunlit and shaded would cause many metals to warp and mechanisms to seize up. And there’s always the possibility of vacuum welding, where two similar metals will simply stick together, fusing into one. And recoil that gives a shooter a good kick on Earth might knock them over on the Moon, or send them tumbling in freefall. The authors described these problems and pointed out potential solutions. Additionally, they provided a number of notional concepts for hand-held weapons, ranging from modifications to the normal sort of firearm, to guns powered by springs (with, it must be said, rather optimistic muzzle velocities) to gas-guns and handheld mini-rocket launchers. It’s odd that the Gyrojet was not included. A laser weapon is said to probably be just the thing, but development of such a thing would take 20 years. A man-portable laser weapon capable of doing useful damage in a combat situation remains sadly unavailable.
Note that the weapons have quite unconventional ergonomics. Some don’t even have proper pistol grips; those that do have triggers roughly the full length of the grip. This is so that a space-suited hand can squeeze the trigger, something very difficult for a conventional single-finger trigger.
The brochure ends with several pages of useful math, providing calculations for ballistic range in other gravity fields, penetration capabilities and muzzle velocities and gas pressures.
The report can be found here:
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Oct 302016
I’ve always liked the phasers of Star Trek more than the blasters/turbolasers of Star Wars. Ship to ship: phasers are computer controlled and seem to always hit the target (even if they don’t necessarily damage the target), while turbolasers are manually targeted and can’t seem to hit a damn thing. Same with hand-held weapons… phasers are zero time of flight weapons that non-professional soldiers can wield accurately, while blasters seem to travel slower than bullets and the biggest, most expensive and advanced military out there has troops so poorly trained that they can’t seem to hit the broad side of a barn.
But there’s one area where blasters are better than phasers: total energy usage per shot. If you get shot with a blaster, it’s like getting shot with a firearm. *Perhaps* an extra powerful firearm… a 12-gauge filled with buckshot, perhaps, but still roughly equivalent to a conventional gun. But phasers have a top setting that will *vaporize* a human. That’s not just overkill, that’s an *insane* level of overkill. It’s like using a TOW anti-tank missile to target an individual.
And this is one of the things that Star Trek got wrong. Not that it’s necessarily impossible for a weapon the size of a keychain to vaporize a human, but that the process of vaporizing the human wouldn’t utterly trash the surroundings. Face it: you’re converting, oh, 180 pounds of water to steam, and converting the calcium in the bones, the metal and plastic in his clothes, tools, weapons, etc. into plasma. And if the target is also holding a phaser, you’re converting *that* into vapor, which means that its battery (or whatever the power source is) is going to explode.
Phaser-vaporizing someone on board a spaceship is going to be a disaster, because by converting 180 pounds of water into steam, you’re increasing the *volume* by a factor of around 1,000. Imagine if the room the target was in suddenly found itself loaded with 1,000 more people. The pressure will blow the hull apart. While a blaster will simply poke a hole in the target, maybe burning their clothes.
Star Trek always made the result of someone getting vaporized pretty… well, sterile. Zap, bright light, gone. But it wouldn’t be like that. If you want to know what someone getting phasered at full power would look like, YouTube provides. Behold the phenomenon of the “Arc Flash,” where enough electrical energy can be dumped into a human to convert said human into a steam explosion. Obviously, this might be considered slightly grisly, so gather the kids around (occurs at 1:14; you can adjust settings to .25 speed to watch the guy go from “normal” to “Hey, he’s a glowing blob, just like in Star Trek” to “Where’d he go?” in three frames):
It’s kinda unclear just what the hell happened here, but it sure looks like the guy was converted into mostly a cloud and a bit of a spray. In any event, there’s no missing the fact that something really quite energetic happened to the guy. The captain of the Klingon scout vessel vaporizes one of his crew on the bridge, they’re going to be scrubbing it down for *days,* assuming that the steam and overpressure doesn’t kill everyone else on the bridge.
In the later Star Trek series, the “vaporize” setting seemed to fall out of fashion. More often than not energy weapons were used as “simple blasters” of roughly firearm-power. And that’s all you need. Firearms are as powerful as they are because that’s Good Enough. You don’t *need* a weapon that essentially turns the target into a suicide bomber.
It might be interesting to actually show accurate phasering on some future Star Trek movie or episode. In one scene, out heroes board a wrecked space station. They go in a room where someone was shot with a phaser set to Blaster Mode: the doctor rushes over, applies hand to carotid artery, looks up sadly and says “He’s dead.” Then they go to the next room, where someone was vaporized. All the furniture is smashed up against the walls; the floor, ceiling, walls, furniture are all covered in gore. Blood sprayed everywhere, teeth embedded in the ceiling, small bits of burnt, semi-burnt and unburnt eviscera scattered about, bits dripping from the ceiling. Doc stands there in the door, slack jawed; Ensign Redshirt looks in and promptly doubles over and upchucks the Tribble Surprise he had for lunch. Captain Hero looks looks in, turns a shade of green and asks “So, Doc, who was it?”
Doc looks at Captain Hero like he’s a freakin’ mo-ron and replies with something like “How the hell would I know?”
Oct 212016
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Extremely Cool cartridge conversion of the cap-and-ball LeMat revolver in WestWorld is somewhat fanciful due to the engineering requirements revolving around the central shotgun. Still, a LeMat was made into a cartridge gun for the old TV series “Johnny Ringo,” though apparently only blanks were fired. And there was a true cartridge LeMat, as shown in the vid below, but it was a fugly failure. One wonders if clever modern engineering and modern materials such as titanium alloys might allow for a truly functional LeMat cartridge pistol.
Oct 192016
You can stop looking. Here is is… “Let It Snow” on trumpet with a Glock accompaniment.
There are many more Gun Grams available on Charlie Cooks YouTube site:
Oct 172016
On the one hand, this seems like it might be kinda neat: a double barreled .380 Derringer that folds up and looks like a smart phone. Great defensive weapon for concealability. What’s not to like?
On the other hand, there have been numerous cases of people getting plugged by the police because they pulled out wallets or cell phones and the cops involved thought they were actually small pistols. Imagine if the police got wind of there being *actual* “cell phone guns.”
I have no idea how real this is… is it just computer imagery, or have they built and tested practical, functional firearms. Are they a vaporware company, or are they good to go. The “Ideal Conceal” website is not terribly informative on these points.
And on the gripping hand… if concealability, practicality and, let’s face it, the ability to actually function outside of the movie-physics-realm are not major priorities, you could always go with this:
Oct 132016
Some interesting things seem to have come out. These haven’t been officially confirmed so far as I know, but interesting nonetheless:
Details from Elon’s speech at the NRO
“We are close to figuring it out. It might have been formation of solid oxygen in the carbon over-wrap of one of the bottles in the upper stage tanks. If it was liquid it would have been squeezed out but under pressure it could have ignited with the carbon. This is the leading theory right now, but it is subject to confirmation. The other thing we discovered is that we can exactly replicate what happened on the launch pad if someone shoots the rocket. We don’t think that is likely this time around, but we are definitely going to have to take precautions against that in the future. We looked at who would want to blow up a SpaceX rocket. That turned out to be a long list. I think it is unlikely this time, but it is something we need to recognize as a real possibility in the future.”
Two things here.
- The helium pressurant bottles are carbon fiber overwrapped and sit *inside* the liquid oxygen tank. The LOX on the upper stage was sub-cooled… it wasn’t “just below boiling,” it was “just above freezing.” Keeping the LOX as cold as possible keeps it as *dense* as possible, meaning you can squeeze that much more in the tank. Which is fine… except if you blow down any helium in those tanks, due to the laws of thermodynamics the helium in the helium tank will cool off. Which means the wall of the helium tank will cool off. And any liquid oxygen in contact with the tank, or even soaked in between the carbon fibers, already close to the freezing point, may freeze solid. Solid oxygen in among carbon fibers… not a good idea.
- The failure of the Falcon 9 on the pad can be replicated by shooting it with a rifle at long range. In the comments at that Reddit posting, people who are apparently SpaceX employees say they know this because they shot a mockup. And perhaps even more interestingly, they could replicate the results by shooting *at* the rocket… not necessarily by actually hitting it. This would seem to indicate, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the shockwave shed by a presumably big and fast projectile scooting past the fragile outer skin of an upper stage is enough to send a shock into the stage. The shock hits the solid oxygen ice/carbon mixture and *blammo.*
Hmm. As Elon apparently said, they have a long list of groups that would like to see them fail. Competing American launcher companies. Competing European, Russian, Chinese launcher companies. Antagonistic foreign national governments. Religious nuts. Australian anti-STEM trolls. Generic whackjobs. SpaceX had best step up their security game. And about the only way to do that in this case is to make sure that they control all the territory out to probably two miles from the launch site.
If the upper stage can be made to fail like this due to the passage of a bullet *near* it, that may indicate that the marksman was really, really good. It’d no doubt be childs play for a well trained sniper to hit the upper stage. Compared to a human, it’s *huge.* But if you put a bullet through the stage, no doubt there would be considerable forensic evidence left over. The outer skin with a bullet hole would be pretty obvious. The interior components with bullet holes, or scrapings of copper, lead, tungsten where none should be. But if you can successfully pass a bullet within an inch or two of the surface without actually hitting anything… no evidence of the bullet will be left behind. But that’d be an impressive shot, which would *probably* tend to eliminate generic nuts and religious whackos from the list. Someone would have had to have employed a real pro, which means hiring someone really expensive or employing a pro already in your service.
It would be advisable to add a sensor network around the launch facility. Millimeter wave radar can pick up a bullet; audio sensors can nail down the location of the shot. These won’t save your rocket, but they’ll tell you what happened, and if the system is fast enough allow either counter-battery fire or perhaps the unleashing of drones, droids or security guards.
This sort of thing kinda plays into the ideas floated a few days ago re: hurricane Matthew. More launch options means you could get away from people trying to blow up your business.
Most likely it’ll turn out to be a mundane sort of failure. But the fact that after some practical testing they’ve not only *not* discounted sabotage but have actually found evidence *supporting* that explanation, is a bit distressing.
Oct 122016
“Officer Downe,” which seems to evade realism at every turn. I *do* want to get a better look at his gun, though…. I suspect it’s especially extra-wrong.
Oct 072016
I’m old enough to remember the time I thought “Yay! The threat of global thermonuclear war is over!”
Sigh.
Russia moving nuclear-capable missiles into Kaliningrad, says Estonia
And…
Russia tells citizens ‘nuclear war with the West could happen soon’
And…
Russia Adds Hundreds of Warheads Under Nuclear Treaty
And…
Army Warns that Future War with Russia or China Would Be ‘Extremely Lethal and Fast’
Gosh, I guess it’s a good thing that in the coming years the US will be helmed by strong, wise leadership…
Oct 022016
The HSV-2 Swift was a slick catamaran built in 2002 by an Australian shipbuilder to compete in a US Navy program. It did not win, and while it was leased to the US Navy for a number of years it remained a privately owned vessel, and in 2015 was leased to the UAE’s National Marine Dredging Company.
And then in late September, some jackhole in Yemen with an anti-ship missile turned it into a flaming pile of floating aluminum rubble.
Was:
Is:
Note the repeated use of the ever present Phrase That Pays (to duck when you hear it) during the early shots of the ship on fire.