Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city-buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-b*tch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law? Serviceman Burnside: Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir! Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot! Serviceman Burnside: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir! Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip! Serviceman Chung: Sir, yes sir!
LOVE that scene.... and it's 100% true! In Stellaris there is an event where one of your ships is almost hit by a Mass Driver round from deep space, damn thing came from another galaxy and was fired millions of years ago!
Neat trivia - Gunny is within an order of magnitude, if not closer on the amount of energy carried by a 20 kilo slug doing 0.013C. Impact energy will depend on how much of that energy is dumped into the target, how quickly. (anything from a hole the diameter of the slug straight through from one end to the other, on up to a 6 mile diameter crater that doesn't quite penetrate the 7 mile thick armor)
As a Army infantryman I was both a machine gunner and a Bradley Gunner at times. I can assure you that flinging lead at your enemy is full of middle finger energy. Hard-on inducing energy.
@@Nemoticon Eh. Big part of that "Fuck you!" energy is feeling the recoil, that makes you aware of the fact you're about to ruin someone's day in a very visceral manner, and that's missing with energy weapons. Fun fact: That's why Fatshark added recoil to lasguns in Darktide, apparently, using them just didn't feel right without it, even on a screen. Of course, we just have to take their word for it.
One of my absolute favorite tropes in science-fiction is people still using the M2 Browning hundreds if not thousands of years in the future. Shoutout to Brigador, which specifically brings attention to this in its weapon description.
>2066 >Stationed on Mars to quell a rebellion >Become side door gunner for atmospheric dropship. >No miniguns or gatling cannons, just some metal brick with a pipe on one end. >Get sent in to extract some wounded. >Reach the evac zone and come under attack. >Hoard of rebels charging in with their new plasma guns and compact rocket launchers. >Let loose a stream of bullets. >The sounds of the rebel's screams are nearly drowned out by the heavy "Kachunk chunk chunk chunk" of the machinegun. >The wounded are loaded up and returned to base. >Inspect MG afterwards. >Thing was made in 1942. >Tunisia, Italy, and Germany are scratched onto the gun. >Scratch "Mars" on with a knife.
A practical reason for not using high energy weapons in space scifi is heat management (which is frequently neglected). Getting rid of heat in a vaccume is difficult and flying around mid combat with huge radiators deployed sound like a good way to break them. Lower energy requirements -> less heat generated -> better combat stamina before cooking your crew alive.
well, to some extent that also applys also for kinetic weapons. the need for cooling the barrels is ignored almost 100% but there are some sci-fi books which at least adress the issue of radiating heat of the ships. just recently read one where ships had to drop out of a battle and deploy radiators. if they dont, the crew gets cooked...
@@certhass One big thing about modern firearms is that most of the heat generated by a powder explosion is ejected with a shell, hence why the G11 wasn't really considered a good gun since that heat had nowhere to go, so it had a lot of heating problems.
I always thought a cool idea for space heat dissipation would be to have a backup stock of a liquid compound that has a ridiculously high boiling point and temperature transfer. You fire until the liquid hits a pre-specified heat and then vacuum it into space and turn it into a heat ghost in space. Or store it so deep in a vacuum container the middle of the ship until the end of combat that a scanner couldn't just read the heat. (Of course this may not be great in an extended battle)
The Expanse solves the recoil proble really well. If you look closely at the martian PDCs you can see a small rocket engine firing out of the back of them. They have a built in recoil compensation rocket engine. And with the railguns they are usually mounted on warships massive enough to not be affected by the recoil or they are built in a way so that the ship's main engine automatically fires every time the railgun is used.
I was thinking about SPG-9 style recoilless guns but belt fed, i mean ignition problem (see RPG-7 firing pin placement and method of actuation), we could use electric spark instead. This way we have guns that have no positive or negative recoil and thus did not disturb space ship movement pattern. Actually in space we could make recoilless guns of practically any size if there be no atmosphere (cause that would be dangerous).
It is likely not a rocket per se, but redirected gasses from the fired cartridges. It would reduce the overall velocity of the fired munitions slightly, but it would reduce a percentage of the total force of recoil.
There's also the factors of recoilless rifles which we still use in modern day, like onerxowns2202 talked a bit on. So long as you design it recoilless, a weapon can technically be as powerful as you wish it to. Just be sure of the backblast, of course.
If you watch closely, once the roci has her railgun, she burns the drive for a very short duration upon firing, to counteract recoil... There is at least 1 scene I remeber going- damn, they don't miss anything do they.
I think with kinetic weapons it's also often a matter of aesthetics and how "realistic" they want things to come across. Reboot Galactica and The Expanse were definitely going for a much more grounded grim and gritty mood than something like Star Wars or Star Trek, and part of that was using more "realistic" weapons than bright colorful lasers beams. I also really liked how Halo used the UNSC relying or kinetic weapons while the Covenant used energy weapons, to highlight how the Covenant had more advanced technology.
Kinetic weapons are absolutely terrifying if allowed to benefit from the same technological advancement that makes DEWs viable in a setting. Not only do kinetic weapons do significantly more damage for a given amount of energy than lasers, they also have this interesting property where their wattage on target increases the quicker defenses try to stop it. UNSC technology was inferior to the covenant's, but that has nothing to do with kinetic weapons. If UNSC small arms used MAC technology, ground battles would have been a slaughter. A tungsten toothpick doing even mach 20 is going to do terrible things to whoever it hits.
@@jacobnebel7282 unsc had the advantage on ground battles, every time the covenant went for ground battles they had to use massive numbers to win otherwise they would lose big,
@@jacobnebel7282 And to look at what parity in power would do for MACs... A planetary defense super MAC shot will punch clean through two Covenant ships, shields and all, and still blow up a third one behind them.
@@JoaoSoares-rs6ec urban warfare is tough for anyone, but I'm not going to lie seeing plasma guns in the streets would terrify me, near misses would boil skins, needler's needles exploding shortly after impact in the same room would kill unarmoured targets within the day
One cool thing about kinetics or missiles is that you only have a limited amount of them and need places to store it. Logistics can add a good amount of realism to a setting and make ships less do everything types to specialized warships.
Battletech does this well, energy weapons don't require ammunition unlike ballistic and missile weapons but the price is that you have to deal with the heat generation, forcing you to choose between taking on ammo or extra heat sinks.
Gunpowder does have oxidizer, so does nitrocellulose (smokeless powder) and so does cordite, all common gun propellants have included oxidizers, because in the chamber and barrel of a gun the access to atmospheric oxygen is practically none, especially with the very short combustion times available.
"Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of gun in space" The most effective weapon in space is a fast moving rock. Just ask Earth how it liked stealthy asteroids being hurled at it, or what the dinosaurs thought about it.
Well, when you need to fight the replicators sometimes propelling small pieces of metal via a tiny exposition in a toob is a better option than fancy plasma weapons.
The Expanse's guns don't push their ships back because the gun turrets themselves have thrusters behind them to compensate for the recoil (the thrusters ignite whenever the guns shoots). Battlestar Galactica guns may have a system to compensate recoil too.
It is relatively easy to shield something against heat. Laser weapons are nothing but heat. Shielding something against kinetic energy is actually quite harder.
Yeah, clouds already attenuate lasers to the point that most wavelengths longer than X-ray are nearly useless at any range longer than a CWIS shot. Imagine what would happen in space if a military ship started dumping literal tons of shredded aluminum foil into the battlespace.
@@argokarrus2731 We already accelerate mass to near c in particle accelerators. Increasing the mass or the acceleration is not a major leap by any stretch.
@@argokarrus2731Depends on the effective range of other weapons and the velocity of the projectiles. Beams diffuse, missiles run out of propellant, but the fast rock keeps going fast until it hits something. They’re harder to justify as a main weapon in a sci-fi context, but even then I wouldn't say it's impossible.
@@justinthompson6364 Beams diffuse after thousands of kilometers at worst and can be a whole light second or three before they're diffused, missiles can conserve remass like a ship can, that rock? Move one millimeter up, or down, or too slowly, and you've dodged it. Jitter your barrel a radian and you've missed.
It would be nice if Scifi shows lean more into the limited ammo aspect of using kinetic weapons because usually the most well known ships seem to have endless supply unless plot demands the heroes be nerfed to give the villains a minor victory.
@@HappyBeezerStudios I know that is the rational but it would be nice if they some throw away line or display to show it. They could even just have the ship be supplied or go into a station for resupply. You can open up new story angle for the characters if you do. I don't mind it for one or two battles, but the overall plot you need to show limits. BattleStar reboot did a goodish job with it.
Look at ww2 naval battles you see the battleships and cruisers shelling the islands the aircraft carriers launching strikes but you hardly see the thousands of supply ships crewed by tens of thousands people
The meta angle on including kinetic weapons in military sci-fi (of varying hardness) is a fascinating one. A standard slug or an HE shell is understandable for the general audience, one thing punches a hole in thing, and the other explodes in its face with sharpel. But then you can really scratch the proverbial technobabble itch with various colorful and cool descriptions. A guided HEAT shell, a gigantic uranium spike, the holy canister of flak. It kind of manages to satisfy both the casual part of the audience and the hardcore military science enjoyers. To various degrees depending on execution but still. And yes, guns are simply cool as hell.
which is why the Imperial Guard uses lasguns. No need to have logistics for ammo if each guardsman could theoretically carry on through a campaign with three power packs. Plus any additional packs harvested from the ones who didn't exceed their 15h life expectancy.
Energy weapons should have heat or power draw limitations, but most settings with that sort of stuff assume some kind of limitless energy and then handwave the heat.
I think a big point you missed for Kinetic weapons is that they are generally cheap and easy to create, so most civilisations will have access to them at some point.
I mean when you think about what could be achieved in Star Wars when you use the energy of all the Turbo Lasers on a Star Destroyer to simply accelerate lets say 10tons of hyper dense space magic material. Rods from God mixed with Space Magic. Lets say "Why use the Death Star at all" ^^.
@@thunberbolttwo3953 With enough Kinetic energy almost ANYTHING can destroy a planet. As long as the projectile holds together, then it can transfer the energy and wipe out a planet.
If the setting is anywhere close to realistic, projectiles are always going to be one of the cheapest and efficient ways to transfer destructive energy into the target. They work for the same reason wheels and levers will still be around: physics and math.
I like the way the Eve Online universe handled it: 2 races developed magnetic accelerator guns, one developed lasers, and the 4th...guns. Just plain guns. Why? Well that race were slaves fighting against an enslaving empire, so bullets go brrrrr is simpler and easier to produce by the resistance. Fits the universe and still gives the rule of cool as your 1400mm artillery cannons go off and one shot someone dumb enough to sit still.
Guns are simple, both to understand, and to engineer. They can also be much more robust, have a _theoretically_ unlimited range (the round will travel until it hits something, which energy weapons will lose energy or cohesion with distance), and depending on size can be loaded with a variety of rounds. It's also imaginable to have different types of projectiles on the same vessel, big coil/rail-guns for anti-ship work, and chemical-projectiles for point-defence work.
exactly, i was playing a space based table top game, and i used a bunch of slugs to hit their ships by using orbital mechanics to hit them when they couldn't even see me.
Fire arms aren't as easy to engineer as you think. One thing l think with weapons firing a ballistic slug is that the rounds themselves may have an auto destruct built in. Something similiar to an RPG-7 that has a maximum range of 900 meters after which it goes boom.
@@mpetersen6 in space it would be better for the slug to stay together all in one piece, otherwise you will just make a wall a shrapnel in space moving at the same speed the slug was
Kinetic energy weapons are simple, and easily understood. Even a monkey can figure out to pick up a rock and huck it at the Jaguar stalking him. And kinetic energy does not degrade over distance. Throw a can of paint or a thousand kilo rock and it will become a hazard to shipping until a gravity well pulls it in.
Or some small, enterprising miner grabs it, pulls it into a stable orbit, and exploits the hell out of it for resources before dumping the useless bits into the designated "trash" orbit. Which we will have at some point, because throwing it just everywhere is a recipe for Kessler syndrome, and throwing heavy elements into stars accelerates their lifecycle.
A note on the railgun versus coilguns: railguns are certainly physically simpler than coilguns and easier to engineer, but they're not necessarily easier to maintain. The rails need a gap between them to fit the projectile, and the narrower the gap the easier it is to fire. It needs to do that because the projectile is a point in the circuit and the electricity needs to arc between it and the rails. This arc though can create problems with ablating the surface of the rails every time it fires. After a few shots it begins to degrade. So something using a railgun is going to need to replace the rails between battles, and probably will need a machine-shop to smooth the rails again after they've been used. It might also involve secondary systems on the railgun itself. For example, railguns in The Expanse mitigate the wear by pre-cooling the rails with chilled hydrogen gas vented over them. This gas also becomes the medium the electrical arc goes through, so they can have a wider barrel gap. This also produces the visual effect of the gas glowing purple from the arc and getting blown away when it fires because it too had become charged. (which also just looks really cool on camera.)
So fun fact if you are a fan of the expanse, the point you made about recoil for mass accelerators in that show is addressed in the cgi, Eg: when roci shoots pdc's their is a burst or discharge behind the pdc same goes for the railgun
A railgun making contact with armor won't just punch a hole. It's gonna cause substantial frag and spalling on the other side which will bonk a lot of soft tissue and cause plenty of respiratory issues as well as damaging unarmored systems.
Also massive expansion as the shock way of the slug passed through your body. A lot of the time ruptuing organs. Ever see a .50 cal on a human body in slow mo? The body expands to double it's size because of the force following the round
Railgun round actually function a lot like HEATs round when they hit armor. They hit the armor so hard that they shatter at the molecular level turning into a plasma cloud. Which is why whipple shields are very effective against them and why the ISS is covered in whipple shields
@@groomschild1617 TLDR: I agree with the broad strokes I just think APFSDS is a better comparison than HEAT a whipple shield or spaced armor which would be the nearest ground vehicle equivalent work for very different reasons. But I definitely get what you're saying. Spaced armor works against heat because the plasma jet from a heat warhead can only remain cohesive for a certain distance, and you're just keeping that distance further away from important stuff. Whereas a whipple shield relies on that projectile fracturing you mentioned. By shattering the projectile and scattering it in a bunch of different directions making it so each piece doesn't actually have enough energy or mass to penetrate. But APFSDS doesn't just instantly break up on impact, It is essentially erodes itself and the armor simultaneously. The rate at which either one is eroded is based on the relative density of the materials. But this only applies for relatively homogeneous armor. If there's a big enough gap in spaced armor It can actually work like a whipple shield causing the projectile to deflect witch changes the impact angle. Which could do anything from shatter the projectile to just increase the apparent angle of the armor by forcing the projectile to hit it at an angle. My understanding of rail guns is they're going to behave like something between modern sabot and very heavy space debris. Which is handy cuz they both do damage in a similar way. Which is essentially the projectile and or the armor shattering inside of the vehicle. Shooting spall everywhere.
Simple...because they work. Rail guns, slug throwers, flechette guns, shard shotguns, flak guns, they all have real world analogues that we all can understand. Also, projectile weapons require less power than energy weapons, and are more ruggedly designed and less likely to malfunction than those delicate high energy components that compose energy weapons. And there's something just so satisfying making something go "bang" and then seeing holes appear in whatever you're shooting at.
A note on flexibility with kinetics; in universe they are also flexible due to being able to be loaded with different kinds of ammunition (HE, incendiary, various sub-munitions, hollow point rail gun slugs like the Autumn in Halo, etc.). There's also the brutality implied in kinetics (something lent into by the original 40k designers), a laser or other energy weapon will burn a little hole or disintegrate a target and is very clean, a kinetic will punch a giant hole doing insane damage to the target if it didn't paint the room with their insides.
Actually, pulsed lasers can basically deliver an explosive right to the skin of a target. They're experimenting with that for non-lethal use and secondary effects on target, because explosions on a hard surface have a nasty habit of propagating through the material and creating shrapnel on the inside, a la the HESH round in common British use. Additionally, you could use an AESA as a weapon by focusing the effects on a particular area, flash-boiling the water _inside_ a target. From the outside, it would look like nothing, and then the guy just explodes into steaming chunky salsa. No crack-bang, no nothing other than maybe a mild sunburn, just BOOM, cooked Jerry nuggets.
@@mage3690 laser can flash boil metals too (in space mostly). In space you can use FELs, those are actually very simple because the lasing medium is electron gas in vacuum. FELs are so powerful that they can reach the max power density allowed in vacuum. And also capable of making x-ray laser, which is super difficult to protect against.
One word - Destruction. While you have fancy energy shields battle going like "Oh no, we are in danger, our percent gone lower!" Meanwhile with kinetics: "Last enemy fire volley ripped out two guns, create a hole for extence ventillation and nearly hit command room as you can see that our room now have new exit. So, things going kinda smooth for now - we even able to move and return fire."
Would Ion shields work against projectiles? Cause I can understand it working well against plasma, any type of waves and maybe to a small degree railguns but what stops a bullet?
@@tarektechmarine8209 With enough power, literally everything works great against everything. The question is more like “what would work *best* for (X type of weapon)?” For example, mass and electromagnetic shields would work wonders against kinetic projectiles (strong enough EM fields can literally lift living beings in the air - you only need to put more power into them and voila, you stopped a MAC round mid-space) but then again, you need lots of energy as opposed to just slapping on some good ol' heavy armor.
I've yet to see a sci-fi universe handle laser in the way I would. They either throw them out completely or make them the main weapon choice, replacing guns with them. Lasers, in reality, would be death by heat to the enemy. Even better, it can be completely invisible to the enemy, who wouldn't know till their ship started getting unusually warm, in which case, they'll then panic and frantically look for your ship, hoping to take you down with them.
that only works if laser weapons are very rare, otherwise every warship would have special sensors for detecting lasers and dielectric mirror cover to reflect 99.9% of the energy. And other countermeasures, like ejecting lots of small thin plastic dielectric mirrors (glitter). Covering the warship with a mirror layer would work better than throwing out glitter. Below the mirrors could be a thin ablative layer to delay the overheating somewhat by boiling away (and the gases also catch some of the laser too). These mirrors weight almost nothing, but would wear out under harsh conditions, so that layer would need regular maintenance. If mass allows it, the ships could have an emergency phase change cooler, the simplest is just water, but there may be better choices. Also if the range allows it moving randomly can help to avoid being focused on. That only works with long range like 300 000 km, but it would be interesting to calculate what is the closest range where the random movement avoids most of the laser energy, but the acceleration does not kill the occupants.
The Expanse did so much right with it's space combat. One of my favorite things it did, without pointing attention to it (until that specific episode you mentioned) was that their ships would do a brief burst of their main engines whenever they fired their dorsal railguns, so that their ships wouldn't start drifting backwards during battle.
Capital Naval Autocannons in Battletech use a plasma explosion to fire the projectile several kilometers at the target. At least in game there is a reason to have them since they can to critical damage through armor, just like ACs on tanks and Battlemechs, since lasers are mostly used to melt away armor. And the larger the cannon, the greater the damage but the shorter the range, just like regular ACs. For example, the Naval AC 10 (10 Capital Damage, 100 Standard) has a maximum range of 44 hex, which are 792 Km (one hex on a space map is 18 Km if I remember correctly), the NAC40 (40 capital damage, 400m standard) only got 24 hexes, but can almost one shot any smaller ship. Or to just to bomb a city from orbit if you don't want to deal with it and save the nukes for later. The ballistic weapon with the most range is the Light Naval Gauss Rifle, with a max range of 56 hexes, or 1008 Km. That is the same range at which railguns in The Expanse are used in CQB.
I would just like to note that while your ranges for the hex grid are indeed correct, the in universe weapons ranges would not be the same. Much like the Battlemech weapons having laughably low weapons ranges, the Aerotech ranges are designed to work on a game mat and do not represent a realistic range for the weapons. In reality the space range of ALL kinetic weapons is *until it hits something.*
It isn't more about how far a round can go but it's operational range. If you're too far or the round is too slow, it can be detected and intercepted by point defense or evaded. So you do need to be mindful of your range. Solutions are making sure you are within your optimal firing range or increase your round's velocity.
For me, Kinetic weapons go further since the projectile is solid. Lasers are like flashlights, further out more spread. Plasma is a excited ball of energy giving off its energy throughout flight. All 3 can exist because they do different roles for damage. But good old mechanical firearm functions regardless, plus dakka
Range will also be a factor. Plasma and lasers lose energy over distance, so that may also be another use for them, even just more penetrating power, get through stuff instead of needing to melt the entire armor section. Cost can also be a factor on larger systems where you need to use a ships power source in order to use an energy weapon.
In principle the maximum range of a kinetic projectile itself is infinite. But usually at some point it either hits something or gets moved off course by gravitational pull.
Former army ranger and avid sci-fi enthusiast who was designed space guns for games and four giggles you are spot on especially about the part of we are monkeys who like throwing metal rocks at other things it makes us smile please more of this
I've always liked gauss/rail weaponry since I find it a happy middle ground between classic gunpowder and laser weapons since it's still kinetic you still get punch and impact but the mechanics still give that advanced tech feeling.
I think you are pretty much right on the money, especially with guns already being familiar to most people. Putting them in in some form creates a point of connection that helps to ground that fantastical setting ever so slightly into reality.
Something interesting for coil or rail guns, which also apply to normal guns but a bit more fiddly is the payload of the projectiles, or more specifically the speed is variable which is great if you want to launch a small probe to peak around that planet
@@HappyBeezerStudiosthe scary thing is rail and coil guns can yeet out any payload as long as it's properly containerized. So you can have a rail gun yeeting out nuclear fusion explosive rounds if they were built to withstand the G force GREATLY enhancing the efficacy and destructive power of the weapon system. In the homegrown sci Fi stories I make up, larger higher end warships are absolutely terrifying because they can rapidly ripple shoot multiple of those rounds at planets completely undetected because unless you specifically saw the ship fire you'd never know the rounds were coming. Excellent deterrents
Love this stuff, good work guys! The effect of solid state firepower is significant in creating energy and tension in a setting. The tension of when the thunder sticks start running low and stopping is especially but clenching. when the
The main thing I love about kinetic weapons is the potential for variety. When you get into the details, there are a TON of different kinds of munitions you can be throwing around. That's something most energy weapons don't have, unless you get so specific that only a particle physicist will understand the differences. In general, laser acts like a laser, whether its 40 megawatts or 400 terawatts. But with bullets and shells, you have SO MANY OPTIONS. Is it a kinetic penetrator? Does it fragment? Is it incendiary? Does it explode? What kind of warhead does it carry? Is it guided? How is it fired? Is it a chemical explosive? Is it magnetic? Is it rocket propelled? Is it accelerated by an artificial gravity well? Does it create an artificial gravity well when it impacts the target? I always like it when a universe makes ballistic weapons really common, coming in all shapes and sizes. And there are a few exotic energy weapons that are extra special. The game Brigador does this really well. Many of the guns in it are actually the future evolution of WWII weapons, like the Browning M2, and MG-42. But then you have some more exotic stuff, like a gamma ray emitter, sonic cannons, and a static discharge gun. And of course, some giant lasers and railguns to really make a mess of things.
Actually no, there are lasers that deliver differing effects on target that have nothing really to do with wavelength. Pulse the laser rapidly, and the laser doesn't heat as much, and you get a nice explosive effect as the laser burns off the surface material of whatever you're shooting at, then turns that little cloud into plasma. Continuous, focused use has a penetrative effect. Unfocused, it's a dazzler or heating weapon. Use a weaponized AESA to create a relatively short-ranged but much more powerful lance that you can point anywhere at will, solid-state. If you can use wavelengths that penetrate a target, that AESA could also focus its effects _inside_ the target, blowing it up from the inside out. As a bonus, an AESA also has built-in redundancy, but makes for a much larger target. If you have truly colossal amounts of power and enough precision, focusing enough lasers on one spot will create a tiny, temporary black hole, allowing you to bend a shot around a chaff screen, or redirect an enemy shot to somewhere it wasn't aimed, up to and included right back where it came from. NASA has already created a tractor beam using lasers, use that to push the chaff out of the way, or catch incoming projectiles. And I'm sure that I haven't even begin to imagine all the possibilities, just like I'm sure no one imagined all the things that projectiles would become back when the cannon was a thing only carted around by horses.
You are absolutely right! But one of the best space battles i have seen was in 'Space Battleship Yamato 2199' where the Yamato filleted a whole gamillan fleet withe its shock cannons and killed a small planet with the wave motion gun.
Don't forget how the Yamato's shock cannons are dual purposed, they can fire either an energy beam or projectile. This became a huge factor when Dessler ambushed them in hyperspace and beam weapons couldn't be used for some technical reason.
The way I see ballistics vs. energy technology is this: Ballistics are more deadly, but energy weapons have better logistics. At least, that's how it would be in my world building. Your point defense weapons would likely be lasers, but your mid ranger weapons would be ballistics, and your long range weapons would be missiles.
In EVE Online, every faction favors a different type of armament. The Amarr Empire runs lasers. They don't need ammo, but they also lock you into the thermal damage type. And they run off your capacitor bank. The capacitor bank that runs your targetting computers, your microwarp drive, your repair modules, your entire goddamn ship. So you better manage that carefully. The rest of the galaxy chose to haul their ammo.
I love the unit of measure you use. 'Mach Jesus' is a real unit of speed. 'Holy wall of Flak (blessed be His name)' is a unit of area...mostly where you don't want to be when it arrives.
It would be hard to have a tactical battle with lasers and shields. Perfect tracking, effectively instant travel inside conversation distance - how do you write a dogfight or naval battle with that?
Realistic ranges for space combat make energy weapon combat much more practical. Ships that can and do travel between stars won't be restricted to ranges that would make a tank commander flinch. They won't even be restricted to ranges that would make sea-navies think "Hmm, not much has changed." When ranges are measured in light-seconds (at least) instead of meters or kilometers, aiming with lasers seems much harder - and aiming with kinetic energy weapons seems downright impossible.
@richardkenan2891 tbf there is realistic range for energy weapons and then realistic range for kinetic weapons. For the most part it comes down to the power of the energy weapon and the targeting capability of the kinetic one. Energy weapons have a limited range by nature where as kinetic ones trade their range advantage for speed disadvantage. Laser weapons would be faster than plasma but also potentially substantially weaker as they required prolonged contact with the target for maximum damage. I find Halo does some of this the best as most weapons systems on UNSC ships, most definitely the MAC weapon is controlled by a miniature super computer which is able to do the calculations necessary to get an accurate enough shot.
Mankind loves it's dakka-dakka. We love it so much we have gun attachments so if you want to attach a shotgun to your rifle, you can do that. The KS 12 has a pump action shotgun underbarrel attachment so when your magazine runs out of shotgun shells, you can continue to fire shotgun shells.
Commenting before, guns are super easy, super effective and just super versatile to not use. Esp in space. Fuck a Vulcan defense turret could make entire waves of explosive or hard punching rounds in space and the best part is they would be fully capable of keeping and maintaining there highest velocity possible
a reasonable question though I suspect the answer lies in convenience and cost to manufacture or as the lasy general says if it aint broken dont fix it
In my personal 'verse, infantry firearms are jacketed in an alloy that allows projectiles to go through low-level personal shields. The problem is that the jacket ablates and you're left with the core of the projectile, so you're hitting your shielded target with unjacketed bullets. An enemy faction fires pellet hyperbursts: super-hardened pellet followed by an unjacketed pellet, with a superheated or supercooled pellet as the third projectile.
There is something primal and inherently practical about lobbing an object at the enemy at high velocity. We've done that for millennia and it's unlikely we will ever stop at least thinking about this kind of engagement ever in our existence. The feeling given by firing a battery of ludicrously oversized guns, lobbing projectiles close in mass to a car, is simply hard to beat.
In Black Fleet the destroyer in the first book had two huge cannon turrets firing 1600mm shells, but it was an old ship and newer ships just had lasers and missile launchers. The alien ship disabled the engines and came close to grapple it, until they fired a broadside into it at less than a mile away. The shells were tipped with HE that went off after going half way through. Didn't destroy it but the damage was extreme, allowing them to repair the engines and finish it off with missiles later.
If memory serves in The Expanse, their point defense gatling guns got this kinda mini rocket thing at the roughly back middle of the barrels, firing in tandem with the barrels to compensate for recoil. Dead Space's seeker rifle is also a funny one. If you crank its damage with nodes to high heaven, you can drop if not all then at least most necros even with a single bodyshot.
Why use guns in sci-fi? Simple... monkey throw rock. Make monkey happy to throw rock harder and faster with loud bang. Edit: yes, you covered this perfectly well as the zinger. Good lad.
In an episode of SG-1 the team is giving weapon and supplies to the free Jaffa to fight the Goa'uld. The Jaffa want true/warrior weapons. Jack explains to them that their staff weapons are weapons of terror and oppression. Jack then explains to them our weapons are for killing your enemy. Those of you who have fought us already know.
what i like most is versatility of amunition enemy laser point defence,shell em with smoke, ap dont penetrate, try a heat shell, they trying to ask for help, emp shell and aim at the bridge
I will note that you have swapped around the roles of the Railgun and Coilgun, Railguns are extremely poor magnetic weapons, mainly because their rails disintegrate significantly faster when fired at reasonable velocities.
The thing about the Rocinante shooting its railgun to propel itself reminded me of that episode of stargate where the prototype x-301's systems got hijacked, so they tried to set the missiles to burn in an attempt to slingshot the vehicle back to earth
My first Windows computer came with a Mech game called G-Nome. I was so taken by it I wrote a sci fi novel based on the game. I even acted out the battle scenes on the game. I went into detail on the advantages and disadvantages between energy weapons and missile / projectile weapons. a) Logistics: Missiles and projectile weapons require a supply chain where energy weapons only require a power supply, albeit a large power supply but if one has power for propulsion, one has power for weapons. b) Effectiveness: Missiles & projectiles are less effective against energy shields while energy weapons are less effective against armor. So the tactic would be to wear down the energy shields using energy weapons and then pound the armor using missiles and projectiles.
By the way, modern propellants contain their oxidizer so you wouldn't need to change that, current guns literally work in space. Easiest way to understand this is the fact that the compellent is never exposed to air in typical operation. Because if you have big enough gaps that the propellant gets exposed to atmosphere then instead of deflagrating the charge detonates, which basically means that instead of pushing the bullet it cracks the chamber or the bolt and you know, explodes in your face. Kentucky ballistics style, Though what happened there was due to undercompressed powder which is probably kind of the same thing on a technicality but not really.
This reminds me of one of my favorite npc conversations in mass effect when one of the alliance officers is drill his gunners that if you fire a piece of metal at a quarter of the speed of light you had better hit your target because every time you fire that gun you ruin somebody day either your target or some poor smuck on the other side of the galaxy i always loved that because of newton's laws.
One factor that I think makes ballistics still common is the energy density is high compared to mass. While can be heavy, the trade off is you take a stable explosive powder and slug that is able to transfer a lot of energy into a target. One thing we're seeing with things such as lasers is that they are not the scalpel that some settings show them as. They are hot, but they need to stay on target for long periods of time to heat up the surface. This requires a lot of control and a lot of energy needed to power the laser. For a bullet, just ignite the powder and make sure it is going in the right direction.
"They're both slowly drifting into an atmosphere with no power left" _Ground Control to Major Tom_ Btw this reminds me the absolute wallbanger of a conclusion to BSG should have been rolling the credits to _Who Made Who_ - bad and cheezy but at least badass epic. There: fixed their terrible ending with a song.
i recall one chain many years ago parsing the same question and answering it like this "remember a rock thrown at your head still hurts". also he used Hinelin's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" as a way of displaying this when a moon colony uses hyper accelerated asteroids targeted at earth as a way to declare independence
"What stopped the Tri-Tach plot (Guns!) What was it that ol' Ludd forgot? (Guns!) Wha've we got that they have not? (Big, big, guns!)" - Drinking song of the Hegemony navy
No matter how advanced technology gets. An object with sufficient mass. Traveling at high enough speeds will always remain dangerous to anything in its path.
I would add, that it is simply what we know best at them moment and it is hard to imagine something different from what is so omnipresent. Great angles though, thanks!
I really prefer energy weapons because they're just plain cooler. So, when designing my own sci-fi setting I went out of my way to include a reason why nobody uses regular guns or bombs. My solution was simply to make the space magic shields everyone uses completely immune to all kinetic impacts and for that matter any conventional damage that isn't the special energy weapons that only work because they also run on space magic. This had some interesting ramifications, for example crashing your ship into a planet at ludicrous speed is 100% survivable provided the shields are up, ships can just ram straight through asteroids or dive into suns, dropping nukes on shielded infantry does absolutely nothing, etc. And sure, this seems kinda overpowered, but I feel that's a small price to pay to ensure no gun nut boomstick fanboy can go: "Actually, they should just use guns because bullets better than lasers!" Because I guess I'm just that petty. Regarding the idea that "the heart of creativity is limitations"... Eh. I understand the reasoning but I also feel that it can end up an excuse for lazy writing. It reminds me of that brief period in the 90s where writers would just sorta pretend cellphones didn't exist because they'd never learned how to tell stories where the characters could simply contact each other at any time. To writers of that particular generation, cellphones were just too convenient and kept ruining the suspense of their plots. Obviously, we've managed to adapt since then. So, I'm generally skeptical towards the idea of creating by limiting possibilities, because that sorta goes against the whole point of being creative. Especially when writing speculative fiction, it's more important to establish what is and isn't possible, resolve to keep that consistent, and find ways of telling good stories within the context of those possibilities. If this renders traditional tropes and storytelling devices unusable, well, that's when you need to get creative and come up with new ones.
There's one sci-fi series that has a very good reason for using guns: Confederation series by Tanya Huff. The in universe explanation is that both sides possess tech that can disable "smart" weapons at a distance. But there's no disabling a chemical explosion that hurls a metal rock at the enemy at high speeds.
Star Wars's greatest failing is not embracing the holy wall of flak (blessed be its name). Halos greatest failing is not showing UNSC ships unleashing it on screen, like, ever
20 km frangable and\or canister coil gun PDC and smart a spread in the magnetic drive. Also, for a fun book and early sci-fi one would do well reading "the moon is a harsh mistress" by Heinlein where he gets Into a mag driver sitting atop the gravity well and bloody huge rocks
If you're into reading and enjoy scifi guns, check out the Honor Harrington series. Future space navy stuff, warring space nations, massive space naval battles. In the very 1st book, they are trying out an advanced new laser weapon, but the thing requires so much power, and needs to be at such a close distance to be effective, that it's basically worthless compared to tactical nuke missiles that can travel at fractions of the speed of light and cover hundreds of thousands of kilometers. The author was either former Navy, or did consulting with retired Navy, and he applies that knowledge incredibly well to the scifi setting.
Watching this after watching the shield video that was posted recently. There is another reason why kinetic is still used compared to others and it is down to how effective they can be realistically. You can disrupt energy or take out a missile with defenses, stopping heavy mass projectiles that are really tiny compared to other things. It's really hard to stop comparatively, you just need thicker armor and even that buckles.
Always wondered why you would have 40mm CIWS guns and they are NOT firing PROXIMITY shells mixed in with the AP ........... Especially when torpedo spam is the preferred killing method.
@@dwwolf4636 Pretty sure they had proxy fused 40mm in WWII. Why do you think Kamikazes were so ineffective. That was the literal birth of the modern transistor.
The Reapers in the Mass Effect Universe throw molten jets of metal at some crazy percentage of the speed of light. Refer to the book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".
Here's something about Halo. The MAC cannons actually do deal damage to Covenant ships that get hit by it. However, for a different reason than why you may think. The shields of a Covenant ship absolutely can stop MAC rounds, but the round moves so damn fast and, unlike Plasma and Lasers, *actually has mass.* So, even though the shields stop the round, the energy involved in the MAC round will damage the shields either in that specific spot well enough to weaken the shield or just break that part of the shields. Sometimes, though this is likely headcanon, the force of the MAC round being stopped would damage some of the ship underneath the shield. The MAC was the UNSCs best weapon against Covenant ships. Sadly, MACs can only point in one direction in Halo's setting, and that's where ever the ship is facing. Almost makes me think of the A10 Warthog...
A question like this and trying to weigh in like "guns are so slow, everyone would move their ship away from them", kinda suggests a hollywood understanding of how guns work. When gunpowder detonates, it turns into gas and expands. It feels instant to us, but in reality, it is a process that takes an amount of time. The more gunpowder, the more gasses are expanding and the longer they continue to expand, until the bullet leaves the barrel. (Therefore longer barrels do impart more energy to the bullet, if there's enough gunpowder to keep pushing until the end of the barrel.) So really, you could make a bullet fly as fast as you want by just putting more gunpowder behind it. Magnum rounds are literally the same sized round, but in a longer case, with more gunpowder behind it. So for example, a .22lr might fly 500 to 1000-ish fps depending on the load and barrel length, and a .22 magnum could fly 1200 to 2000-ish fps also depending on load and barrel length. The only limitation really is: how strong the bullet is, how strong the chamber is, and how strong and long the barrel is. If you want to fire heavier slugs, or just fire the same slug faster, you just build a thicker chamber and a thicker and longer barrel and put a ton of explosives behind the bullet.
Fun fact, there's actually an upper limit to the velocity of projectiles propelled by explosions, and because of this, experimental hypervelocity projectiles use specialized air pressure systems.
While I'm here I'd like to shill a soft sci fi kinetic weapon concept I've had floating around in my head for a wile now. CSA or Chrono Stasis Acceleration. essentially if a civilization becomes advanced enough to get time manipulation technology and can place objects or locations in a sort of super slow motion almost time stopping bubble, and then were able to let another object move through the time bubble at normal speed, the can create a hyper viscosity cannon. The "barrel" of the gun will create the slow time bubble with the ammunition already inside. Then the "primer" would push the object outside of the bubble. Since force is mass x acceleration and the time manipulation would make the object move near infinitely slow, then the normal speed primer would technically be moving it near infinity fast within the time bubble. Once the ammunition is pushed out side of the time bubble it will accelerate at astronomical speeds as it catches up with normal time.
Universe I created has the fleet using kinetics because they follow the naval/tanker tradition of a dozen or more different ammunition types. Lead spam is also counter intuitively safer (if frequently less effective ) than the fleets guaranteed termination method, which is called dominion. (Basically hyper advanced ai attempt to lock each other out of there subsystems , which may sound less violent but includes ftl, when you lose ftl your ability to keep opposing warships from opening fold gates (basically a worm hole without an exit point) in places they shouldn't be goes away) the terran fleet is very good at achieving dominion but SOP is still to blast the shit out of enemy sensors and comm equipment, reducing points of attack.
Now now , you see a space ship , you know its speed and heading. You got your battery of firearms. You know how long it takes for the projectiles to get there. So , given you know how fast can the given ship change direction and velocity , you can safely calculate every possible space the ship will be present when the projectiles get there. This calculation is done on earth too. Anti aircraft defenses relayd on this. So its absolutely feasable in space too.
@@Wastelandman7000 maybe teleporting has some limits too , and thst can be factored in. Now shooting to all these locations with energy based or beam weapons or whatever .. would be extremely expensive. Missles torpedos etc are the same. And still , its in space so nothing stopping missed rounds etc till they eventually hit something. It was a problem for anti aircraft battery too on earth. Shells not hitting an aircraft did fall back down. Even if they exploded prior. From that altitude even a small fragment was a hazard. So over civilians/sensitive places it was not wise to fire em . For that reason plain old bullets kinda make a lot sense in space combat. Has to be small enough so stray projectiles don't make a mess later... and they have a very small radar / heat signature. I see plenty of reasons to have space weaponry very simular to anti aircraft battery. Many many "turrets" that can be synchronised by a ballistic computer. Given the extreme ranges thats the only likely workable thing. A guided missle of some sorths sounds nice , but it be a Hell lot of expensive , and frankly does not offers the advantage of a swarm of bullets.. limited fuel , with the ranges we talk about means , the missle would eighter be very big (easy target for a gun to hit) or would loose fuel to manuver. Then its Just.. floating away with its momentum. And way more dangerous when it finally hits something , somewhere. As.. it will. But none knows when , where, or what.
Something I like to think of is that it might just be cheaper and easier maintenance to use kinetic weapons over something more tech based like lasers or plasma.
One thing about any weapon in a vacuum is that it will require some sort of method to extract heat from the weapon. A fire arm being discharged at a high rate of fire will need to cooled somehow. A directed energy weapon will likely need the reaction chamber were the laser pulse or whatever is generated to be cooled.
![PLANETARY DEFENSE | How to protect your world from invasion [FIXED]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/m8rkp7NPgvs/mqdefault.jpg)
Gunnery Chief:
This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city-buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-b*tch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law?
Serviceman Burnside:
Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief:
No credit for partial answers, maggot!
Serviceman Burnside:
Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief:
Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
Serviceman Chung:
Sir, yes sir!
LOVE that scene.... and it's 100% true! In Stellaris there is an event where one of your ships is almost hit by a Mass Driver round from deep space, damn thing came from another galaxy and was fired millions of years ago!
Was looking for this comment. Was not disappointed.
This is pure poetry....❤
Neat trivia - Gunny is within an order of magnitude, if not closer on the amount of energy carried by a 20 kilo slug doing 0.013C.
Impact energy will depend on how much of that energy is dumped into the target, how quickly. (anything from a hole the diameter of the slug straight through from one end to the other, on up to a 6 mile diameter crater that doesn't quite penetrate the 7 mile thick armor)
Was looking for this (and would have posted it myself if not found) ^^
As a Army infantryman I was both a machine gunner and a Bradley Gunner at times. I can assure you that flinging lead at your enemy is full of middle finger energy. Hard-on inducing energy.
...until they give you the opportunity to microwave your enemy's brains inside their skulls and watch their eyes pop like over ripe grapes.
@@Nemoticon 😀 that sounds so awesome lol 😂
@@Big_Black_Dick It might very well be far too entertaining actually, lol
@@Nemoticon
After three tours, I've seen worse.
@@Nemoticon Eh. Big part of that "Fuck you!" energy is feeling the recoil, that makes you aware of the fact you're about to ruin someone's day in a very visceral manner, and that's missing with energy weapons.
Fun fact: That's why Fatshark added recoil to lasguns in Darktide, apparently, using them just didn't feel right without it, even on a screen. Of course, we just have to take their word for it.
One of my absolute favorite tropes in science-fiction is people still using the M2 Browning hundreds if not thousands of years in the future. Shoutout to Brigador, which specifically brings attention to this in its weapon description.
"This weapon predates Terran space flight"
link please?
40k did that lol
Or the AK-47
>2066
>Stationed on Mars to quell a rebellion
>Become side door gunner for atmospheric dropship.
>No miniguns or gatling cannons, just some metal brick with a pipe on one end.
>Get sent in to extract some wounded.
>Reach the evac zone and come under attack.
>Hoard of rebels charging in with their new plasma guns and compact rocket launchers.
>Let loose a stream of bullets.
>The sounds of the rebel's screams are nearly drowned out by the heavy "Kachunk chunk chunk chunk" of the machinegun.
>The wounded are loaded up and returned to base.
>Inspect MG afterwards.
>Thing was made in 1942.
>Tunisia, Italy, and Germany are scratched onto the gun.
>Scratch "Mars" on with a knife.
A practical reason for not using high energy weapons in space scifi is heat management (which is frequently neglected). Getting rid of heat in a vaccume is difficult and flying around mid combat with huge radiators deployed sound like a good way to break them. Lower energy requirements -> less heat generated -> better combat stamina before cooking your crew alive.
well, to some extent that also applys also for kinetic weapons. the need for cooling the barrels is ignored almost 100% but there are some sci-fi books which at least adress the issue of radiating heat of the ships. just recently read one where ships had to drop out of a battle and deploy radiators. if they dont, the crew gets cooked...
Huge radiators glowing brilliant blue make stealth much harder to pull off too.
@@certhassthat sounds like an interesting book. Do you remember the title or author?
@@certhass One big thing about modern firearms is that most of the heat generated by a powder explosion is ejected with a shell, hence why the G11 wasn't really considered a good gun since that heat had nowhere to go, so it had a lot of heating problems.
I always thought a cool idea for space heat dissipation would be to have a backup stock of a liquid compound that has a ridiculously high boiling point and temperature transfer. You fire until the liquid hits a pre-specified heat and then vacuum it into space and turn it into a heat ghost in space. Or store it so deep in a vacuum container the middle of the ship until the end of combat that a scanner couldn't just read the heat. (Of course this may not be great in an extended battle)
The Expanse solves the recoil proble really well.
If you look closely at the martian PDCs you can see a small rocket engine firing out of the back of them. They have a built in recoil compensation rocket engine.
And with the railguns they are usually mounted on warships massive enough to not be affected by the recoil or they are built in a way so that the ship's main engine automatically fires every time the railgun is used.
I was thinking about SPG-9 style recoilless guns but belt fed, i mean ignition problem (see RPG-7 firing pin placement and method of actuation), we could use electric spark instead. This way we have guns that have no positive or negative recoil and thus did not disturb space ship movement pattern. Actually in space we could make recoilless guns of practically any size if there be no atmosphere (cause that would be dangerous).
It is likely not a rocket per se, but redirected gasses from the fired cartridges.
It would reduce the overall velocity of the fired munitions slightly, but it would reduce a percentage of the total force of recoil.
There's also the factors of recoilless rifles which we still use in modern day, like onerxowns2202 talked a bit on. So long as you design it recoilless, a weapon can technically be as powerful as you wish it to. Just be sure of the backblast, of course.
If you watch closely, once the roci has her railgun, she burns the drive for a very short duration upon firing, to counteract recoil...
There is at least 1 scene I remeber going- damn, they don't miss anything do they.
@@cl5258 And in Cibola Burn, they use the railgun's recoil as an ersatz thruster when their reactor was offline.
I like how Battletech handles ballistic weapons. They trade the higher heat of energy weapons for ammo dependency.
Always bring a CASE
*mumbles about crits*
And also that lasers are nice but we can make the guns *really* big. Who will win? Bunch of pew pew M lasers, or 1 giant AC20?
@@epithet052 That would depend on the heat sink capacity of each mech.
@@thunberbolttwo3953It's just a urbie
Ballistic weapons: The only reason an Urbanmech can kill anything in its preferred terrain.
Well, that and the Raven handling ECM.
I think with kinetic weapons it's also often a matter of aesthetics and how "realistic" they want things to come across. Reboot Galactica and The Expanse were definitely going for a much more grounded grim and gritty mood than something like Star Wars or Star Trek, and part of that was using more "realistic" weapons than bright colorful lasers beams.
I also really liked how Halo used the UNSC relying or kinetic weapons while the Covenant used energy weapons, to highlight how the Covenant had more advanced technology.
Kinetic weapons are absolutely terrifying if allowed to benefit from the same technological advancement that makes DEWs viable in a setting. Not only do kinetic weapons do significantly more damage for a given amount of energy than lasers, they also have this interesting property where their wattage on target increases the quicker defenses try to stop it.
UNSC technology was inferior to the covenant's, but that has nothing to do with kinetic weapons. If UNSC small arms used MAC technology, ground battles would have been a slaughter. A tungsten toothpick doing even mach 20 is going to do terrible things to whoever it hits.
@@jacobnebel7282 unsc had the advantage on ground battles, every time the covenant went for ground battles they had to use massive numbers to win otherwise they would lose big,
@@jacobnebel7282 And to look at what parity in power would do for MACs... A planetary defense super MAC shot will punch clean through two Covenant ships, shields and all, and still blow up a third one behind them.
@@zchen27I remember that it was super Mac as was supposedly capable of punching through two super carriers which are over 29km in length.
@@JoaoSoares-rs6ec urban warfare is tough for anyone, but I'm not going to lie seeing plasma guns in the streets would terrify me, near misses would boil skins, needler's needles exploding shortly after impact in the same room would kill unarmoured targets within the day
One cool thing about kinetics or missiles is that you only have a limited amount of them and need places to store it. Logistics can add a good amount of realism to a setting and make ships less do everything types to specialized warships.
If you've seen the director's cut of Aliens, you've probably felt a chill watching the ammo counters on their defense turrets tick down
It’s also way cooler in a story for racks upon racks of missiles and bullet cases to be described or shown to you vs a big battery bank.
@@thepiratemongoose8965 Yes! I was on the edge of my seat watching those counters run dry.
Battletech does this well, energy weapons don't require ammunition unlike ballistic and missile weapons but the price is that you have to deal with the heat generation, forcing you to choose between taking on ammo or extra heat sinks.
@@vodamiinurl1337but Not all Energy weopons are that hot Theres also the ones with ammunition (i forgot the Name)
Gunpowder does have oxidizer, so does nitrocellulose (smokeless powder) and so does cordite, all common gun propellants have included oxidizers, because in the chamber and barrel of a gun the access to atmospheric oxygen is practically none, especially with the very short combustion times available.
People not knowing this is driving me insane.
Thank you, I did not know that. I'm only starting to get into guns and a lot of the inner workings might as well be magic to me.
"Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of gun in space"
The most effective weapon in space is a fast moving rock. Just ask Earth how it liked stealthy asteroids being hurled at it, or what the dinosaurs thought about it.
Just ask Theia. Oops, you can't it's gone. One fast rock hitting another and only one will survive.
Well, when you need to fight the replicators sometimes propelling small pieces of metal via a tiny exposition in a toob is a better option than fancy plasma weapons.
ADAPT TO THIS CRAWLER!
TOOB
Your plasma is clearly too cold. Try fusion plasma instead. A few million Kelvin should solve your replicator problem.
@Jasmin-lg3gf yes, in addition to your own existence and everything else remotely close to said plasma beam.
@@kyleheins That's just poor design. A properly contained plasma sheath is perfectly safe to operate, _guaranteed!_
The Expanse's guns don't push their ships back because the gun turrets themselves have thrusters behind them to compensate for the recoil (the thrusters ignite whenever the guns shoots). Battlestar Galactica guns may have a system to compensate recoil too.
You mean propellant exhaust? Like on a RPG 7 and Carol Gustav.
So recoiless guns then.
@@yurimikhail6907"Carol Gustav" for the LGBT inclusive army lol
Also with a close in anti ordinance barrage, muzzle velocity does not matter as much, therefore less propellant and recoil.
they do its caled hidraulics, like any other heavy gun out there
It is relatively easy to shield something against heat. Laser weapons are nothing but heat.
Shielding something against kinetic energy is actually quite harder.
Yeah, clouds already attenuate lasers to the point that most wavelengths longer than X-ray are nearly useless at any range longer than a CWIS shot. Imagine what would happen in space if a military ship started dumping literal tons of shredded aluminum foil into the battlespace.
I mean physics just kind of works no matter what so Kinetics will just kind of keep working.
Except on spacecraft, where they are awful, simply because they can't go fast enough. Realistically, anyways. SoftFi have no limits
@@argokarrus2731 We already accelerate mass to near c in particle accelerators. Increasing the mass or the acceleration is not a major leap by any stretch.
@@jacobnebel7282 Sure but UREBs are a totally different animal
@@argokarrus2731Depends on the effective range of other weapons and the velocity of the projectiles. Beams diffuse, missiles run out of propellant, but the fast rock keeps going fast until it hits something. They’re harder to justify as a main weapon in a sci-fi context, but even then I wouldn't say it's impossible.
@@justinthompson6364 Beams diffuse after thousands of kilometers at worst and can be a whole light second or three before they're diffused, missiles can conserve remass like a ship can, that rock? Move one millimeter up, or down, or too slowly, and you've dodged it. Jitter your barrel a radian and you've missed.
It would be nice if Scifi shows lean more into the limited ammo aspect of using kinetic weapons because usually the most well known ships seem to have endless supply unless plot demands the heroes be nerfed to give the villains a minor victory.
I wouldn't say the supply is endless. It's just bigger than what they need in that fight.
@@HappyBeezerStudios I know that is the rational but it would be nice if they some throw away line or display to show it. They could even just have the ship be supplied or go into a station for resupply. You can open up new story angle for the characters if you do. I don't mind it for one or two battles, but the overall plot you need to show limits. BattleStar reboot did a goodish job with it.
Look at ww2 naval battles you see the battleships and cruisers shelling the islands the aircraft carriers launching strikes but you hardly see the thousands of supply ships crewed by tens of thousands people
The meta angle on including kinetic weapons in military sci-fi (of varying hardness) is a fascinating one. A standard slug or an HE shell is understandable for the general audience, one thing punches a hole in thing, and the other explodes in its face with sharpel. But then you can really scratch the proverbial technobabble itch with various colorful and cool descriptions. A guided HEAT shell, a gigantic uranium spike, the holy canister of flak. It kind of manages to satisfy both the casual part of the audience and the hardcore military science enjoyers. To various degrees depending on execution but still.
And yes, guns are simply cool as hell.
Ammo too is a nice plot device to create tension or issues that energy weapons don’t have as much.
which is why the Imperial Guard uses lasguns. No need to have logistics for ammo if each guardsman could theoretically carry on through a campaign with three power packs. Plus any additional packs harvested from the ones who didn't exceed their 15h life expectancy.
Energy weapons should have heat or power draw limitations, but most settings with that sort of stuff assume some kind of limitless energy and then handwave the heat.
I think a big point you missed for Kinetic weapons is that they are generally cheap and easy to create, so most civilisations will have access to them at some point.
I mean when you think about what could be achieved in Star Wars when you use the energy of all the Turbo Lasers on a Star Destroyer to simply accelerate lets say 10tons of hyper dense space magic material. Rods from God mixed with Space Magic. Lets say "Why use the Death Star at all" ^^.
@@smurfo-pax4423 Rods of god can not destroy a planet the death star can.
@@thunberbolttwo3953 With enough Kinetic energy almost ANYTHING can destroy a planet. As long as the projectile holds together, then it can transfer the energy and wipe out a planet.
Thats why in Warhammer 40k The Space Marines shoot Bolters while the normal soldiers only get a lasgun.
@@urazoe8240 Funny enough 40K Lasgun's are lower tech than Bolters. Those Bolters are a lot more complicated than they first seem.
If the setting is anywhere close to realistic, projectiles are always going to be one of the cheapest and efficient ways to transfer destructive energy into the target. They work for the same reason wheels and levers will still be around: physics and math.
I like the way the Eve Online universe handled it: 2 races developed magnetic accelerator guns, one developed lasers, and the 4th...guns. Just plain guns. Why? Well that race were slaves fighting against an enslaving empire, so bullets go brrrrr is simpler and easier to produce by the resistance. Fits the universe and still gives the rule of cool as your 1400mm artillery cannons go off and one shot someone dumb enough to sit still.
Guns are simple, both to understand, and to engineer. They can also be much more robust, have a _theoretically_ unlimited range (the round will travel until it hits something, which energy weapons will lose energy or cohesion with distance), and depending on size can be loaded with a variety of rounds. It's also imaginable to have different types of projectiles on the same vessel, big coil/rail-guns for anti-ship work, and chemical-projectiles for point-defence work.
exactly, i was playing a space based table top game, and i used a bunch of slugs to hit their ships by using orbital mechanics to hit them when they couldn't even see me.
Fire arms aren't as easy to engineer as you think. One thing l think with weapons firing a ballistic slug is that the rounds themselves may have an auto destruct built in. Something similiar to an RPG-7 that has a maximum range of 900 meters after which it goes boom.
@@mpetersen6 Not easy, but easier than other kinds of weapons. After all, machine-guns date to a time before electricity was a major development.
@@mpetersen6 in space it would be better for the slug to stay together all in one piece, otherwise you will just make a wall a shrapnel in space moving at the same speed the slug was
Kinetic energy weapons are simple, and easily understood.
Even a monkey can figure out to pick up a rock and huck it at the Jaguar stalking him.
And kinetic energy does not degrade over distance.
Throw a can of paint or a thousand kilo rock and it will become a hazard to shipping until a gravity well pulls it in.
Or some small, enterprising miner grabs it, pulls it into a stable orbit, and exploits the hell out of it for resources before dumping the useless bits into the designated "trash" orbit. Which we will have at some point, because throwing it just everywhere is a recipe for Kessler syndrome, and throwing heavy elements into stars accelerates their lifecycle.
Actually even if monkeys can figure that out they don't have the biomechanics that humans do to lob anything with lethal force.
A note on the railgun versus coilguns: railguns are certainly physically simpler than coilguns and easier to engineer, but they're not necessarily easier to maintain. The rails need a gap between them to fit the projectile, and the narrower the gap the easier it is to fire. It needs to do that because the projectile is a point in the circuit and the electricity needs to arc between it and the rails. This arc though can create problems with ablating the surface of the rails every time it fires. After a few shots it begins to degrade.
So something using a railgun is going to need to replace the rails between battles, and probably will need a machine-shop to smooth the rails again after they've been used. It might also involve secondary systems on the railgun itself. For example, railguns in The Expanse mitigate the wear by pre-cooling the rails with chilled hydrogen gas vented over them. This gas also becomes the medium the electrical arc goes through, so they can have a wider barrel gap. This also produces the visual effect of the gas glowing purple from the arc and getting blown away when it fires because it too had become charged. (which also just looks really cool on camera.)
So fun fact if you are a fan of the expanse, the point you made about recoil for mass accelerators in that show is addressed in the cgi,
Eg: when roci shoots pdc's their is a burst or discharge behind the pdc same goes for the railgun
A railgun making contact with armor won't just punch a hole. It's gonna cause substantial frag and spalling on the other side which will bonk a lot of soft tissue and cause plenty of respiratory issues as well as damaging unarmored systems.
Also massive expansion as the shock way of the slug passed through your body. A lot of the time ruptuing organs. Ever see a .50 cal on a human body in slow mo? The body expands to double it's size because of the force following the round
@@bombomos 50 cal terminal ballistics aren't really relevant here just because of how absurd rail guns are but yeah energy be bonkers on that round
Railgun round actually function a lot like HEATs round when they hit armor. They hit the armor so hard that they shatter at the molecular level turning into a plasma cloud. Which is why whipple shields are very effective against them and why the ISS is covered in whipple shields
@@groomschild1617 TLDR: I agree with the broad strokes I just think APFSDS is a better comparison than HEAT
a whipple shield or spaced armor which would be the nearest ground vehicle equivalent work for very different reasons. But I definitely get what you're saying.
Spaced armor works against heat because the plasma jet from a heat warhead can only remain cohesive for a certain distance, and you're just keeping that distance further away from important stuff.
Whereas a whipple shield relies on that projectile fracturing you mentioned. By shattering the projectile and scattering it in a bunch of different directions making it so each piece doesn't actually have enough energy or mass to penetrate.
But APFSDS doesn't just instantly break up on impact, It is essentially erodes itself and the armor simultaneously. The rate at which either one is eroded is based on the relative density of the materials. But this only applies for relatively homogeneous armor. If there's a big enough gap in spaced armor It can actually work like a whipple shield causing the projectile to deflect witch changes the impact angle. Which could do anything from shatter the projectile to just increase the apparent angle of the armor by forcing the projectile to hit it at an angle.
My understanding of rail guns is they're going to behave like something between modern sabot and very heavy space debris. Which is handy cuz they both do damage in a similar way. Which is essentially the projectile and or the armor shattering inside of the vehicle. Shooting spall everywhere.
@@groomschild1617 It all comes down to energy. There are videos of real railguns that punch through a dozen steel plates like nothing.
Simple...because they work.
Rail guns, slug throwers, flechette guns, shard shotguns, flak guns, they all have real world analogues that we all can understand.
Also, projectile weapons require less power than energy weapons, and are more ruggedly designed and less likely to malfunction than those delicate high energy components that compose energy weapons.
And there's something just so satisfying making something go "bang" and then seeing holes appear in whatever you're shooting at.
A note on flexibility with kinetics; in universe they are also flexible due to being able to be loaded with different kinds of ammunition (HE, incendiary, various sub-munitions, hollow point rail gun slugs like the Autumn in Halo, etc.).
There's also the brutality implied in kinetics (something lent into by the original 40k designers), a laser or other energy weapon will burn a little hole or disintegrate a target and is very clean, a kinetic will punch a giant hole doing insane damage to the target if it didn't paint the room with their insides.
Actually, pulsed lasers can basically deliver an explosive right to the skin of a target. They're experimenting with that for non-lethal use and secondary effects on target, because explosions on a hard surface have a nasty habit of propagating through the material and creating shrapnel on the inside, a la the HESH round in common British use. Additionally, you could use an AESA as a weapon by focusing the effects on a particular area, flash-boiling the water _inside_ a target. From the outside, it would look like nothing, and then the guy just explodes into steaming chunky salsa. No crack-bang, no nothing other than maybe a mild sunburn, just BOOM, cooked Jerry nuggets.
@@mage3690 laser can flash boil metals too (in space mostly). In space you can use FELs, those are actually very simple because the lasing medium is electron gas in vacuum.
FELs are so powerful that they can reach the max power density allowed in vacuum. And also capable of making x-ray laser, which is super difficult to protect against.
One word - Destruction.
While you have fancy energy shields battle going like "Oh no, we are in danger, our percent gone lower!"
Meanwhile with kinetics: "Last enemy fire volley ripped out two guns, create a hole for extence ventillation and nearly hit command room as you can see that our room now have new exit. So, things going kinda smooth for now - we even able to move and return fire."
Would Ion shields work against projectiles? Cause I can understand it working well against plasma, any type of waves and maybe to a small degree railguns but what stops a bullet?
@@tarektechmarine8209 With enough power, literally everything works great against everything. The question is more like “what would work *best* for (X type of weapon)?”
For example, mass and electromagnetic shields would work wonders against kinetic projectiles (strong enough EM fields can literally lift living beings in the air - you only need to put more power into them and voila, you stopped a MAC round mid-space) but then again, you need lots of energy as opposed to just slapping on some good ol' heavy armor.
@@benz505good thing most sci fi has convenient fusion or a/am...
@@trazyntheinfinite9895 True! I'd like to see how strong an EM field/shield we could produce with today's best energy production systems
Hilarious that irl lasers and particle beams do even worse damage than guns
I've yet to see a sci-fi universe handle laser in the way I would. They either throw them out completely or make them the main weapon choice, replacing guns with them.
Lasers, in reality, would be death by heat to the enemy. Even better, it can be completely invisible to the enemy, who wouldn't know till their ship started getting unusually warm, in which case, they'll then panic and frantically look for your ship, hoping to take you down with them.
that only works if laser weapons are very rare, otherwise every warship would have special sensors for detecting lasers and dielectric mirror cover to reflect 99.9% of the energy.
And other countermeasures, like ejecting lots of small thin plastic dielectric mirrors (glitter). Covering the warship with a mirror layer would work better than throwing out glitter. Below the mirrors could be a thin ablative layer to delay the overheating somewhat by boiling away (and the gases also catch some of the laser too).
These mirrors weight almost nothing, but would wear out under harsh conditions, so that layer would need regular maintenance.
If mass allows it, the ships could have an emergency phase change cooler, the simplest is just water, but there may be better choices.
Also if the range allows it moving randomly can help to avoid being focused on. That only works with long range like 300 000 km, but it would be interesting to calculate what is the closest range where the random movement avoids most of the laser energy, but the acceleration does not kill the occupants.
The Expanse did so much right with it's space combat. One of my favorite things it did, without pointing attention to it (until that specific episode you mentioned) was that their ships would do a brief burst of their main engines whenever they fired their dorsal railguns, so that their ships wouldn't start drifting backwards during battle.
Capital Naval Autocannons in Battletech use a plasma explosion to fire the projectile several kilometers at the target. At least in game there is a reason to have them since they can to critical damage through armor, just like ACs on tanks and Battlemechs, since lasers are mostly used to melt away armor.
And the larger the cannon, the greater the damage but the shorter the range, just like regular ACs. For example, the Naval AC 10 (10 Capital Damage, 100 Standard) has a maximum range of 44 hex, which are 792 Km (one hex on a space map is 18 Km if I remember correctly), the NAC40 (40 capital damage, 400m standard) only got 24 hexes, but can almost one shot any smaller ship.
Or to just to bomb a city from orbit if you don't want to deal with it and save the nukes for later.
The ballistic weapon with the most range is the Light Naval Gauss Rifle, with a max range of 56 hexes, or 1008 Km. That is the same range at which railguns in The Expanse are used in CQB.
I would just like to note that while your ranges for the hex grid are indeed correct, the in universe weapons ranges would not be the same. Much like the Battlemech weapons having laughably low weapons ranges, the Aerotech ranges are designed to work on a game mat and do not represent a realistic range for the weapons. In reality the space range of ALL kinetic weapons is *until it hits something.*
It isn't more about how far a round can go but it's operational range. If you're too far or the round is too slow, it can be detected and intercepted by point defense or evaded. So you do need to be mindful of your range. Solutions are making sure you are within your optimal firing range or increase your round's velocity.
For me, Kinetic weapons go further since the projectile is solid. Lasers are like flashlights, further out more spread. Plasma is a excited ball of energy giving off its energy throughout flight. All 3 can exist because they do different roles for damage. But good old mechanical firearm functions regardless, plus dakka
Range will also be a factor. Plasma and lasers lose energy over distance, so that may also be another use for them, even just more penetrating power, get through stuff instead of needing to melt the entire armor section. Cost can also be a factor on larger systems where you need to use a ships power source in order to use an energy weapon.
Lasers have the lowest range dropoff because they're light. They can hit the furthest fastest.
In principle the maximum range of a kinetic projectile itself is infinite. But usually at some point it either hits something or gets moved off course by gravitational pull.
Carrying a bunch of bullets may seem heavy till you change your car battery
Former army ranger and avid sci-fi enthusiast who was designed space guns for games and four giggles you are spot on especially about the part of we are monkeys who like throwing metal rocks at other things it makes us smile please more of this
I've always liked gauss/rail weaponry since I find it a happy middle ground between classic gunpowder and laser weapons since it's still kinetic you still get punch and impact but the mechanics still give that advanced tech feeling.
I think you are pretty much right on the money, especially with guns already being familiar to most people. Putting them in in some form creates a point of connection that helps to ground that fantastical setting ever so slightly into reality.
Kinetically hitting something with a lotta speed shall never come out of fashion
0:18 Holy shit, the entire city will be flattened by the concussion of those guns.
Something interesting for coil or rail guns, which also apply to normal guns but a bit more fiddly is the payload of the projectiles, or more specifically the speed is variable which is great if you want to launch a small probe to peak around that planet
Oh good point, the railgun can not only yeet out the brick of death, but also do low power science stuff or medium power missile launches.
@@HappyBeezerStudiosthe scary thing is rail and coil guns can yeet out any payload as long as it's properly containerized. So you can have a rail gun yeeting out nuclear fusion explosive rounds if they were built to withstand the G force GREATLY enhancing the efficacy and destructive power of the weapon system.
In the homegrown sci Fi stories I make up, larger higher end warships are absolutely terrifying because they can rapidly ripple shoot multiple of those rounds at planets completely undetected because unless you specifically saw the ship fire you'd never know the rounds were coming.
Excellent deterrents
Love this stuff, good work guys! The effect of solid state firepower is significant in creating energy and tension in a setting. The tension of when the thunder sticks start running low and stopping is especially but clenching. when the
The main thing I love about kinetic weapons is the potential for variety. When you get into the details, there are a TON of different kinds of munitions you can be throwing around. That's something most energy weapons don't have, unless you get so specific that only a particle physicist will understand the differences. In general, laser acts like a laser, whether its 40 megawatts or 400 terawatts.
But with bullets and shells, you have SO MANY OPTIONS. Is it a kinetic penetrator? Does it fragment? Is it incendiary? Does it explode? What kind of warhead does it carry? Is it guided? How is it fired? Is it a chemical explosive? Is it magnetic? Is it rocket propelled? Is it accelerated by an artificial gravity well? Does it create an artificial gravity well when it impacts the target?
I always like it when a universe makes ballistic weapons really common, coming in all shapes and sizes. And there are a few exotic energy weapons that are extra special. The game Brigador does this really well. Many of the guns in it are actually the future evolution of WWII weapons, like the Browning M2, and MG-42. But then you have some more exotic stuff, like a gamma ray emitter, sonic cannons, and a static discharge gun. And of course, some giant lasers and railguns to really make a mess of things.
Actually no, there are lasers that deliver differing effects on target that have nothing really to do with wavelength. Pulse the laser rapidly, and the laser doesn't heat as much, and you get a nice explosive effect as the laser burns off the surface material of whatever you're shooting at, then turns that little cloud into plasma. Continuous, focused use has a penetrative effect. Unfocused, it's a dazzler or heating weapon. Use a weaponized AESA to create a relatively short-ranged but much more powerful lance that you can point anywhere at will, solid-state. If you can use wavelengths that penetrate a target, that AESA could also focus its effects _inside_ the target, blowing it up from the inside out. As a bonus, an AESA also has built-in redundancy, but makes for a much larger target. If you have truly colossal amounts of power and enough precision, focusing enough lasers on one spot will create a tiny, temporary black hole, allowing you to bend a shot around a chaff screen, or redirect an enemy shot to somewhere it wasn't aimed, up to and included right back where it came from. NASA has already created a tractor beam using lasers, use that to push the chaff out of the way, or catch incoming projectiles. And I'm sure that I haven't even begin to imagine all the possibilities, just like I'm sure no one imagined all the things that projectiles would become back when the cannon was a thing only carted around by horses.
You are absolutely right! But one of the best space battles i have seen was in 'Space Battleship Yamato 2199' where the Yamato filleted a whole gamillan fleet withe its shock cannons and killed a small planet with the wave motion gun.
The Yamato's wave motion gun is my favorite answer to "Wait, the warp drive puts out HOW much power? Why don't we weaponize it?"
Don't forget how the Yamato's shock cannons are dual purposed, they can fire either an energy beam or projectile. This became a huge factor when Dessler ambushed them in hyperspace and beam weapons couldn't be used for some technical reason.
The way I see ballistics vs. energy technology is this: Ballistics are more deadly, but energy weapons have better logistics. At least, that's how it would be in my world building. Your point defense weapons would likely be lasers, but your mid ranger weapons would be ballistics, and your long range weapons would be missiles.
In EVE Online, every faction favors a different type of armament. The Amarr Empire runs lasers. They don't need ammo, but they also lock you into the thermal damage type. And they run off your capacitor bank. The capacitor bank that runs your targetting computers, your microwarp drive, your repair modules, your entire goddamn ship. So you better manage that carefully. The rest of the galaxy chose to haul their ammo.
The Gallente went with the other option: Miniature guns-with-wings (drones)
I love the unit of measure you use. 'Mach Jesus' is a real unit of speed. 'Holy wall of Flak (blessed be His name)' is a unit of area...mostly where you don't want to be when it arrives.
Sometimes throwing projectiles are as fun as yeeting plasma bolts.
It would be hard to have a tactical battle with lasers and shields. Perfect tracking, effectively instant travel inside conversation distance - how do you write a dogfight or naval battle with that?
Heavily armored, and reflective hulls would help against lasers.
Realistic ranges for space combat make energy weapon combat much more practical. Ships that can and do travel between stars won't be restricted to ranges that would make a tank commander flinch. They won't even be restricted to ranges that would make sea-navies think "Hmm, not much has changed." When ranges are measured in light-seconds (at least) instead of meters or kilometers, aiming with lasers seems much harder - and aiming with kinetic energy weapons seems downright impossible.
@richardkenan2891 tbf there is realistic range for energy weapons and then realistic range for kinetic weapons. For the most part it comes down to the power of the energy weapon and the targeting capability of the kinetic one. Energy weapons have a limited range by nature where as kinetic ones trade their range advantage for speed disadvantage. Laser weapons would be faster than plasma but also potentially substantially weaker as they required prolonged contact with the target for maximum damage. I find Halo does some of this the best as most weapons systems on UNSC ships, most definitely the MAC weapon is controlled by a miniature super computer which is able to do the calculations necessary to get an accurate enough shot.
We built a rail gun at university
- It burned thru the Plexiglas structure
- Melted the Contacts to the Capacitor
- Set a Sandbag on fire 😐
Sounds like my kind of party!
Mankind loves it's dakka-dakka. We love it so much we have gun attachments so if you want to attach a shotgun to your rifle, you can do that. The KS 12 has a pump action shotgun underbarrel attachment so when your magazine runs out of shotgun shells, you can continue to fire shotgun shells.
- Why kineticks ?
- MORE DAKKA !!! THAT'S WHY !
You can never have enough dakka.
Commenting before, guns are super easy, super effective and just super versatile to not use. Esp in space. Fuck a Vulcan defense turret could make entire waves of explosive or hard punching rounds in space and the best part is they would be fully capable of keeping and maintaining there highest velocity possible
a reasonable question though I suspect the answer lies in convenience and cost to manufacture or as the lasy general says if it aint broken dont fix it
In my personal 'verse, infantry firearms are jacketed in an alloy that allows projectiles to go through low-level personal shields. The problem is that the jacket ablates and you're left with the core of the projectile, so you're hitting your shielded target with unjacketed bullets.
An enemy faction fires pellet hyperbursts: super-hardened pellet followed by an unjacketed pellet, with a superheated or supercooled pellet as the third projectile.
There is something primal and inherently practical about lobbing an object at the enemy at high velocity. We've done that for millennia and it's unlikely we will ever stop at least thinking about this kind of engagement ever in our existence. The feeling given by firing a battery of ludicrously oversized guns, lobbing projectiles close in mass to a car, is simply hard to beat.
In Black Fleet the destroyer in the first book had two huge cannon turrets firing 1600mm shells, but it was an old ship and newer ships just had lasers and missile launchers. The alien ship disabled the engines and came close to grapple it, until they fired a broadside into it at less than a mile away. The shells were tipped with HE that went off after going half way through. Didn't destroy it but the damage was extreme, allowing them to repair the engines and finish it off with missiles later.
If memory serves in The Expanse, their point defense gatling guns got this kinda mini rocket thing at the roughly back middle of the barrels, firing in tandem with the barrels to compensate for recoil.
Dead Space's seeker rifle is also a funny one. If you crank its damage with nodes to high heaven, you can drop if not all then at least most necros even with a single bodyshot.
Why use guns in sci-fi?
Simple... monkey throw rock. Make monkey happy to throw rock harder and faster with loud bang.
Edit: yes, you covered this perfectly well as the zinger. Good lad.
In an episode of SG-1 the team is giving weapon and supplies to the free Jaffa to fight the Goa'uld. The Jaffa want true/warrior weapons. Jack explains to them that their staff weapons are weapons of terror and oppression. Jack then explains to them our weapons are for killing your enemy. Those of you who have fought us already know.
what i like most is versatility of amunition
enemy laser point defence,shell em with smoke, ap dont penetrate, try a heat shell, they trying to ask for help, emp shell and aim at the bridge
Long time ghost viewer first time (speeking) your commentary is funny and informative it's right to the ape mind we all have.
I will note that you have swapped around the roles of the Railgun and Coilgun, Railguns are extremely poor magnetic weapons, mainly because their rails disintegrate significantly faster when fired at reasonable velocities.
Also I love your vocubulary man!
"Metal as hell to fire Metal across Hell!"
The thing about the Rocinante shooting its railgun to propel itself reminded me of that episode of stargate where the prototype x-301's systems got hijacked, so they tried to set the missiles to burn in an attempt to slingshot the vehicle back to earth
My first Windows computer came with a Mech game called G-Nome. I was so taken by it I wrote a sci fi novel based on the game. I even acted out the battle scenes on the game. I went into detail on the advantages and disadvantages between energy weapons and missile / projectile weapons. a) Logistics: Missiles and projectile weapons require a supply chain where energy weapons only require a power supply, albeit a large power supply but if one has power for propulsion, one has power for weapons. b) Effectiveness: Missiles & projectiles are less effective against energy shields while energy weapons are less effective against armor. So the tactic would be to wear down the energy shields using energy weapons and then pound the armor using missiles and projectiles.
absolutely love the descriptions of various levels of firepower
"fire everything" one of the quotes of all time, from a very movie.
By the way, modern propellants contain their oxidizer so you wouldn't need to change that, current guns literally work in space. Easiest way to understand this is the fact that the compellent is never exposed to air in typical operation. Because if you have big enough gaps that the propellant gets exposed to atmosphere then instead of deflagrating the charge detonates, which basically means that instead of pushing the bullet it cracks the chamber or the bolt and you know, explodes in your face.
Kentucky ballistics style, Though what happened there was due to undercompressed powder which is probably kind of the same thing on a technicality but not really.
This reminds me of one of my favorite npc conversations in mass effect when one of the alliance officers is drill his gunners that if you fire a piece of metal at a quarter of the speed of light you had better hit your target because every time you fire that gun you ruin somebody day either your target or some poor smuck on the other side of the galaxy i always loved that because of newton's laws.
One factor that I think makes ballistics still common is the energy density is high compared to mass. While can be heavy, the trade off is you take a stable explosive powder and slug that is able to transfer a lot of energy into a target. One thing we're seeing with things such as lasers is that they are not the scalpel that some settings show them as. They are hot, but they need to stay on target for long periods of time to heat up the surface. This requires a lot of control and a lot of energy needed to power the laser. For a bullet, just ignite the powder and make sure it is going in the right direction.
"They're both slowly drifting into an atmosphere with no power left"
_Ground Control to Major Tom_
Btw this reminds me the absolute wallbanger of a conclusion to BSG should have been rolling the credits to _Who Made Who_ - bad and cheezy but at least badass epic. There: fixed their terrible ending with a song.
Nice to see you've started a different project, this sort of video suits your style of commentary really well, excited to see more!
Because throwing a rock will never go out of style. No matter how much the rock actually changes.
i recall one chain many years ago parsing the same question and answering it like this "remember a rock thrown at your head still hurts". also he used Hinelin's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" as a way of displaying this when a moon colony uses hyper accelerated asteroids targeted at earth as a way to declare independence
"What stopped the Tri-Tach plot (Guns!)
What was it that ol' Ludd forgot? (Guns!)
Wha've we got that they have not? (Big, big, guns!)"
- Drinking song of the Hegemony navy
No matter how advanced technology gets. An object with sufficient mass. Traveling at high enough speeds will always remain dangerous to anything in its path.
I would add, that it is simply what we know best at them moment and it is hard to imagine something different from what is so omnipresent. Great angles though, thanks!
I really prefer energy weapons because they're just plain cooler. So, when designing my own sci-fi setting I went out of my way to include a reason why nobody uses regular guns or bombs. My solution was simply to make the space magic shields everyone uses completely immune to all kinetic impacts and for that matter any conventional damage that isn't the special energy weapons that only work because they also run on space magic. This had some interesting ramifications, for example crashing your ship into a planet at ludicrous speed is 100% survivable provided the shields are up, ships can just ram straight through asteroids or dive into suns, dropping nukes on shielded infantry does absolutely nothing, etc.
And sure, this seems kinda overpowered, but I feel that's a small price to pay to ensure no gun nut boomstick fanboy can go: "Actually, they should just use guns because bullets better than lasers!" Because I guess I'm just that petty.
Regarding the idea that "the heart of creativity is limitations"... Eh. I understand the reasoning but I also feel that it can end up an excuse for lazy writing. It reminds me of that brief period in the 90s where writers would just sorta pretend cellphones didn't exist because they'd never learned how to tell stories where the characters could simply contact each other at any time. To writers of that particular generation, cellphones were just too convenient and kept ruining the suspense of their plots. Obviously, we've managed to adapt since then.
So, I'm generally skeptical towards the idea of creating by limiting possibilities, because that sorta goes against the whole point of being creative. Especially when writing speculative fiction, it's more important to establish what is and isn't possible, resolve to keep that consistent, and find ways of telling good stories within the context of those possibilities. If this renders traditional tropes and storytelling devices unusable, well, that's when you need to get creative and come up with new ones.
"Why do uns keep showing up in science fiction?" "Go ahead. Make my day."
There's one sci-fi series that has a very good reason for using guns: Confederation series by Tanya Huff. The in universe explanation is that both sides possess tech that can disable "smart" weapons at a distance. But there's no disabling a chemical explosion that hurls a metal rock at the enemy at high speeds.
oh. You reminded me about FTL game, and now Im going to play it because of your background music.
This was great. Both thought provoking on the subject and freaking hilarious. Great job dude.
Star Wars's greatest failing is not embracing the holy wall of flak (blessed be its name). Halos greatest failing is not showing UNSC ships unleashing it on screen, like, ever
20 km frangable and\or canister coil gun PDC and smart a spread in the magnetic drive. Also, for a fun book and early sci-fi one would do well reading "the moon is a harsh mistress" by Heinlein where he gets Into a mag driver sitting atop the gravity well and bloody huge rocks
one of my favorite books, you can just see the lightbulb pop when mike says he's serious about throwing rocks
If you're into reading and enjoy scifi guns, check out the Honor Harrington series. Future space navy stuff, warring space nations, massive space naval battles. In the very 1st book, they are trying out an advanced new laser weapon, but the thing requires so much power, and needs to be at such a close distance to be effective, that it's basically worthless compared to tactical nuke missiles that can travel at fractions of the speed of light and cover hundreds of thousands of kilometers. The author was either former Navy, or did consulting with retired Navy, and he applies that knowledge incredibly well to the scifi setting.
Watching this after watching the shield video that was posted recently. There is another reason why kinetic is still used compared to others and it is down to how effective they can be realistically. You can disrupt energy or take out a missile with defenses, stopping heavy mass projectiles that are really tiny compared to other things. It's really hard to stop comparatively, you just need thicker armor and even that buckles.
Always wondered why you would have 40mm CIWS guns and they are NOT firing PROXIMITY shells mixed in with the AP ........... Especially when torpedo spam is the preferred killing method.
Its only been cost effective since the 90s for smaller form factors.
@@dwwolf4636 Pretty sure they had proxy fused 40mm in WWII. Why do you think Kamikazes were so ineffective. That was the literal birth of the modern transistor.
The Reapers in the Mass Effect Universe throw molten jets of metal at some crazy percentage of the speed of light. Refer to the book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".
The frequent quoting of the "just as the founding fathers intended" copypasta had me in stiches 😭
Here's something about Halo.
The MAC cannons actually do deal damage to Covenant ships that get hit by it. However, for a different reason than why you may think. The shields of a Covenant ship absolutely can stop MAC rounds, but the round moves so damn fast and, unlike Plasma and Lasers, *actually has mass.* So, even though the shields stop the round, the energy involved in the MAC round will damage the shields either in that specific spot well enough to weaken the shield or just break that part of the shields. Sometimes, though this is likely headcanon, the force of the MAC round being stopped would damage some of the ship underneath the shield.
The MAC was the UNSCs best weapon against Covenant ships. Sadly, MACs can only point in one direction in Halo's setting, and that's where ever the ship is facing. Almost makes me think of the A10 Warthog...
Yeah the Holy wall of flack is awe inspiring (or the holy wall of Up yours,as i think of it)...Great video...
A question like this and trying to weigh in like "guns are so slow, everyone would move their ship away from them", kinda suggests a hollywood understanding of how guns work.
When gunpowder detonates, it turns into gas and expands. It feels instant to us, but in reality, it is a process that takes an amount of time. The more gunpowder, the more gasses are expanding and the longer they continue to expand, until the bullet leaves the barrel. (Therefore longer barrels do impart more energy to the bullet, if there's enough gunpowder to keep pushing until the end of the barrel.)
So really, you could make a bullet fly as fast as you want by just putting more gunpowder behind it. Magnum rounds are literally the same sized round, but in a longer case, with more gunpowder behind it. So for example, a .22lr might fly 500 to 1000-ish fps depending on the load and barrel length, and a .22 magnum could fly 1200 to 2000-ish fps also depending on load and barrel length.
The only limitation really is: how strong the bullet is, how strong the chamber is, and how strong and long the barrel is.
If you want to fire heavier slugs, or just fire the same slug faster, you just build a thicker chamber and a thicker and longer barrel and put a ton of explosives behind the bullet.
Fun fact, there's actually an upper limit to the velocity of projectiles propelled by explosions, and because of this, experimental hypervelocity projectiles use specialized air pressure systems.
While I'm here I'd like to shill a soft sci fi kinetic weapon concept I've had floating around in my head for a wile now. CSA or Chrono Stasis Acceleration. essentially if a civilization becomes advanced enough to get time manipulation technology and can place objects or locations in a sort of super slow motion almost time stopping bubble, and then were able to let another object move through the time bubble at normal speed, the can create a hyper viscosity cannon. The "barrel" of the gun will create the slow time bubble with the ammunition already inside. Then the "primer" would push the object outside of the bubble. Since force is mass x acceleration and the time manipulation would make the object move near infinitely slow, then the normal speed primer would technically be moving it near infinity fast within the time bubble. Once the ammunition is pushed out side of the time bubble it will accelerate at astronomical speeds as it catches up with normal time.
Universe I created has the fleet using kinetics because they follow the naval/tanker tradition of a dozen or more different ammunition types. Lead spam is also counter intuitively safer (if frequently less effective ) than the fleets guaranteed termination method, which is called dominion.
(Basically hyper advanced ai attempt to lock each other out of there subsystems , which may sound less violent but includes ftl, when you lose ftl your ability to keep opposing warships from opening fold gates (basically a worm hole without an exit point) in places they shouldn't be goes away) the terran fleet is very good at achieving dominion but SOP is still to blast the shit out of enemy sensors and comm equipment, reducing points of attack.
Now now , you see a space ship , you know its speed and heading. You got your battery of firearms. You know how long it takes for the projectiles to get there. So , given you know how fast can the given ship change direction and velocity , you can safely calculate every possible space the ship will be present when the projectiles get there.
This calculation is done on earth too. Anti aircraft defenses relayd on this. So its absolutely feasable in space too.
This is correct. Unless the ship can teleport or similar fuckery.
@@Wastelandman7000 maybe teleporting has some limits too , and thst can be factored in.
Now shooting to all these locations with energy based or beam weapons or whatever .. would be extremely expensive. Missles torpedos etc are the same. And still , its in space so nothing stopping missed rounds etc till they eventually hit something.
It was a problem for anti aircraft battery too on earth. Shells not hitting an aircraft did fall back down. Even if they exploded prior. From that altitude even a small fragment was a hazard. So over civilians/sensitive places it was not wise to fire em . For that reason plain old bullets kinda make a lot sense in space combat. Has to be small enough so stray projectiles don't make a mess later... and they have a very small radar / heat signature.
I see plenty of reasons to have space weaponry very simular to anti aircraft battery. Many many "turrets" that can be synchronised by a ballistic computer. Given the extreme ranges thats the only likely workable thing.
A guided missle of some sorths sounds nice , but it be a Hell lot of expensive , and frankly does not offers the advantage of a swarm of bullets.. limited fuel , with the ranges we talk about means , the missle would eighter be very big (easy target for a gun to hit) or would loose fuel to manuver. Then its Just.. floating away with its momentum. And way more dangerous when it finally hits something , somewhere. As.. it will. But none knows when , where, or what.
I love the phrase “Mach Jesus” so much
Just found this in my feed to funny at times but spot on through and through😁
Something I like to think of is that it might just be cheaper and easier maintenance to use kinetic weapons over something more tech based like lasers or plasma.
One thing about any weapon in a vacuum is that it will require some sort of method to extract heat from the weapon. A fire arm being discharged at a high rate of fire will need to cooled somehow. A directed energy weapon will likely need the reaction chamber were the laser pulse or whatever is generated to be cooled.
Boom boom guns are usually cooler than the pew pew guns