Timeline for Sci-Fi weapon that can kill people through armor, but doesn't damage starship hulls?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
25 events
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| Aug 25, 2020 at 13:40 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @JoeBloggs Honestly, people have been pretty darn good at this since the late Medieval period. While blunt force killing through some kinds of armor is pretty easy (particularly flexible armors like mail), modern umm... "experimentation" proves that blunt force impact was actually pretty useless against platemail. SEE: youtu.be/IkDDBL7jNew | |
| Jul 31, 2020 at 15:19 | comment | added | Joe Bloggs | @Nosajimiki: And making armour capable of reducing a man-killing impact while still allowing for decent combat manoeuvrability is an issue best left to the engineers. Or better yet, sports scientists. | |
| Jul 31, 2020 at 14:08 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | So, let's say you fire a 30mm 1 kilogram wadcutter at about 300fps. In normal armor, it would have about the same impact profile as getting hit by a 3ft warhammer, but well designed reactive armor might make that feel more like a 100fps impact because of greater deceleration period, and spread the area of impact over the whole reactive plate. So yes, the impact event will still have about 4200 jueles of transfer, but so does getting shoved. It's all about how the energy is transferred that makes impacts dangerous. | |
| Jul 31, 2020 at 14:08 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @JoeBloggs Reactive armor works under several principles. The deflection of the slug, the separation of the plates, and the thickness of the light weight ablative medium between the plates work together to spread the impact over both time and area by creating a much longer path of deceleration through a compressible medium and spreading the force across the back plate; so, instead of experiencing the transfer of force over one unit of time, it can be stretched out over several units of time, and then again over several units of height and width. | |
| Jul 31, 2020 at 6:38 | comment | added | Joe Bloggs | If the aim is to prevent penetration of armour then reactive systems are an excellent idea. If the aim is to prevent momentum transfer then they are decidedly not, since any blast powerful enough to deflect the incoming projectile enough must also impart the same forces to the armour on a very similar timescale. The net result is the same, except there are more explosions. It would be better to have the armour actively angling deflection plates to maximise the impact time. | |
| Jul 30, 2020 at 18:02 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | You probably want protection against chemical weapons anyway. Flooding a room with tear gas (or worse) is a common first move in indoor combat settings | |
| Jul 29, 2020 at 23:06 | comment | added | Muuski | You're definitely going to want protection against chemical weapons if you plan on melting things in the general vicinity of your enemies, releasing deadly gases from whatever plastics or materials are used to build the interior plus an enclosed environment. Yikes! | |
| Jul 29, 2020 at 15:32 | history | edited | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 29, 2020 at 13:18 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @EikePierstorff Going back to asking ourselves what protecting yourself from a given weapon would look like, it seems pretty obvious that they can be hard countered by polymer armors like kevlar or just no armor at all. Like hacking and electrolasers, I think it would be pretty easy for a clever defender to make your weapon useless which makes it problematic as a primary weapon. | |
| Jul 29, 2020 at 6:10 | comment | added | user412 | @Nosajimiki, in this specific instance I define better as "more plausible to damage only soft targets", since that was the question. I certainly do not mean that an induction heater is in general a better weapon than a laser. | |
| Jul 29, 2020 at 6:09 | history | edited | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 29, 2020 at 6:06 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @EikePierstorff Depends on your metric of what is "better" I suppose. There are many ways to make things hot, but as far as I know, lasers are the best way to do it to a very specific target that is far away. | |
| Jul 29, 2020 at 6:01 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @JonTheMon Most bullets don't hit a flat surface, they hit at an angle; so, instead of blocking the weapon's full force, it just pushes it aside making it effectively glance off of you. Also dissipating the impact over a larger area does make you harder to kill. It's like the difference between getting hit by the flat or the edge of a cricket bat. Both are blunt force trauma, but one will break bones whereas the other will mostly just cause some minor bruising. Since the armor will spread the force more than the hull, the hull is still taking a more concentrated force. | |
| Jul 29, 2020 at 1:24 | comment | added | DKNguyen | "while nanobot bullets have some cool factor, why not just flood the ship with grey goo and leave your people at home?" There's nothing quite like the hands on touch of hired goons. | |
| Jul 28, 2020 at 21:23 | comment | added | user412 | If the armor contains metal, some kind of induction heating might be better than lasers. You don't have to heat people by much to kill them (and no holes required at all). | |
| Jul 28, 2020 at 21:15 | comment | added | JonTheMon | Isn't reactive armor a bad thing? Like, they shoot you with a controlled explosion/launch. You have an uncontrolled explosion on your chest. The point of reactive armor is to diffuse a projectile over an area. If you still take all the force on you, the slug has done its job. | |
| Jul 28, 2020 at 20:57 | history | edited | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 28, 2020 at 20:45 | history | edited | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 28, 2020 at 15:14 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @TheDaleks I think what he is hinting at is that a room could be vented without a hull breach. For example, if you force your way into a shuttle bay, the defenders might suck the air out of it rendering electro lasers useless. This is not the same as a hull breach where you lose your air supply and there is no getting it back so everyone dies. | |
| Jul 28, 2020 at 14:05 | comment | added | In Hoc Signo | @Nosajimiki The whole reason why you have to worry about hull breaches is because it's in the vacuum of space - a hull breach in atmosphere wouldn't be too much of a problem. | |
| Jul 28, 2020 at 13:38 | history | edited | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 28, 2020 at 13:36 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @JoeBloggs That is a good point. I assumed since the OP is worried about hull breaches that he was planning on fighting in atmosphere, but since no plan survives contact with the enemy, that could be a problem. Expanded my answer to include a solution to this. | |
| Jul 28, 2020 at 13:31 | history | edited | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 28, 2020 at 8:33 | comment | added | Joe Bloggs | End User Warning: Will not function in vacuum. | |
| Jul 28, 2020 at 7:41 | history | answered | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |