Ladies and gentlemen,I present to you the rocket gun of the Space Age! This weapon, the gyrojet, must surely be what we will all be using in the years beyond 2000!
Man, I love the P90 as much as anyone, but there's no way you're cutting a tree in half with one. 50 rounds SOUNDS like a lot...but at 900 rounds per minute that's only a few seconds of firing.
To go logging with a gun, you need something a bit...larger.
Meh, guns are boring. When are we finally going to start developing energy weapons? Those would be so cool to have in the modern world. Like "phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range."
Re: Gun enthusiast thread
Posted: Fri Nov 30, 2018 11:06 pm
by LittleRaven
Yukaphile wrote: ↑Fri Nov 30, 2018 10:43 pm
Meh, guns are boring. When are we finally going to start developing energy weapons? Those would be so cool to have in the modern world. Like "phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range."
We're working on them constantly. But there are huge problems to overcome. Many of the problems are technical and hard, but honestly, those aren't the main ones. The really, really big problem can be summed up thusly:
"What will a phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range do that cannot be accomplished with an AR-15?"
I mean, obviously the plasma rifle is way cooler...but that doesn't buy you much outside of Hollywood.
What can energy weapons actually do? We know that if you put ENOUGH energy into the weapon, you can put holes in things...which is nice, but honestly regular guns do that too and for a fraction of the price. In Sci-Fi, energy weapons do much cooler things, like turn into precision cutting tools or stun people without doing permanent damage. Now THAT would be amazingly useful, and would more than justify the additional costs...but we haven't figured out how to actually make energy weapons do any of those things.
Yukaphile wrote: ↑Fri Nov 30, 2018 10:43 pm
Meh, guns are boring. When are we finally going to start developing energy weapons? Those would be so cool to have in the modern world. Like "phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range."
We're working on them constantly. But there are huge problems to overcome. Many of the problems are technical and hard, but honestly, those aren't the main ones. The really, really big problem can be summed up thusly:
"What will a phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range do that cannot be accomplished with an AR-15?"
I mean, obviously the plasma rifle is way cooler...but that doesn't buy you much outside of Hollywood.
What can energy weapons actually do? We know that if you put ENOUGH energy into the weapon, you can put holes in things...which is nice, but honestly regular guns do that too and for a fraction of the price. In Sci-Fi, energy weapons do much cooler things, like turn into precision cutting tools or stun people without doing permanent damage. Now THAT would be amazingly useful, and would more than justify the additional costs...but we haven't figured out how to actually make energy weapons do any of those things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Weapon_System
Laser CIWS is in the works. It's biggest benefit is the low cost per shot. Cruise missiles are expensive so a cheep way to blow them out of the sky is a great thing.
Stun weapons are way beyond current technology. The ones we do have aren't very good.
The only way I see more offensive energy weapons coming into use would be something that can effectively ignore armor. The only thing I can think of that could do the job is Gama Rays. Some sort of Gama ray emitter that can pass right through armor and kill everything in say a bunker or a tank, but Gama rays are so awful that I hope if someone does invent a Gama ray weapon that it gets banned in another Geneva convention.
Re: Gun enthusiast thread
Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2018 4:14 am
by Yukaphile
Gamma rays? That's blasting someone with radiation. Kinda like flamethrowers? Yeah, they'd get banned by the Geneva Conventions, certainly.
