From: nuny@bid.nes   
      
   On Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 4:39:49 PM UTC-8, 0something0 wrote:   
   > On Saturday, February 18, 2017 at 5:26:35 AM UTC-5, MrAnderson wrote:   
   > > So here comes the next step in designing space marines army, the personal   
   > > weapons.   
   > > What do you think, what kind would be most versatile and reliable for use   
   > > on many diferrent planets, spacecrafts with and without gravity and even in   
   > > emergency situations in 0g on vacuum? Caseless or normal rounds?   
   > > PS I am mostly thinking about kinetic weapons using chemical propellant to   
   > > fire, but if you think lasers, railguns etc would be good, write about   
   > > them:D   
   >    
   > I think what the OP had in mind was a more utilitarian weapon for survival   
   > situations, rather then actual combat.   
      
     To me "space marines" means actual combat.   
      
   > I was thinking lasers because it requires no ammo and no recoil.   
      
     A laser's ammo is its battery. (The following applies to railguns too,   
   mostly)   
      
     Tech level?   
      
     It's hard to beat the energy density of even today's propellants (gunpowder   
   descendants) in a battery with a reasonable safety margin. You drop a bullet   
   and you may have to discard it because it won't chamber. Drop a magazine and   
   it'll probably still    
   fit into the rifle and pass rounds without jamming. If it jams, just transfer   
   the rounds to another mag and discard it or dump it in a bin for later   
   recycling or repair.   
      
     Drop a battery capable of powering a weapons-grade laser for one magazine's   
   worth of shots and it's gonna be a definite problem if it ruptures (think   
   exploding cellphones only more so). Even if it doesn't rupture immediately I   
   wouldn't trust carrying    
   it.   
      
     I could see a magazine containing high-discharge-rate supercapacitors each   
   charged with maybe a dozen kilojoules. The weapon would electrically switch   
   from one to the next rather than "selecting" them mechanically. That way you   
   wouldn't have to discard    
   them after using them, just take them back aboard your deployment vehicle and   
   recharge them. They'd be a whole lot less dangerous individually than a single   
   battery if damaged.   
      
     Then there's the output wavelength issue. Too short or too long and it will   
   be too well absorbed by atmosphere or dust, and alien worlds tend to have   
   non-ideal atmospheres especially after a little "fog of war" gets raised.   
   Plus, what wavelength can be    
   guaranteed to be optimally absorbed by any given target?   
      
     That could be handled with a cylinder-like arrangement of different lasing   
   elements that would be rotated into place either manually or automatically,   
   controlled by a detector in the sight that measures how much energy is   
   reflected by a target rather    
   than absorbed- too much reflection and it tries another one.   
      
     I like the idea of dialable energy weapons- not just power level per shot,   
   but also wavelength. Get past the energy storage, wavelength and safety issues   
   and it could be a true one-size-fits-all weapon requiring little training or   
   battlefield thought    
   to use.   
      
      
     Mark L. Fergerson   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)