Is there any way to make a nonlethal railgun?

Question

Riot police are marching across the burning fields of the UN capital on Mars to quell pro alien insurrectionists. Ethics and activism dictate that no lethal weapons can be used on other humans. But since handheld railgun tech is already widespread for anti-alien use some generals in the chain of command want to save money. Here is their paraphrased conversation:

Steve: Bob, we need to get rid of these rebels, but we can’t use our big supply of lethal railguns. How can our police quell the riots without using the money we have set aside for personal use?

Bob: If only all those railguns we have could be nonlethal!

The railguns are similar to assault rifles, but they can get up to 2kps and rapid fire. Is there any way to make a railgun nonlethal without spending too much of the generals' vacation money?

Answer 1

It's a railgun where the round is accelerated by the gun itself down the barrel by electronics...It's not like a gunpowder cartridge where the power level is determined by the powder charge in the round so you're trapped at whatever power level the round is.

So just dial down the acceleration in the barrel and at some point it would just be like lobbing bullets at people with your hands. Nothing says a railgun has to shoot at hypersonic speeds.

Then you would also need to to modify the bullet materials so they aren't so hard. Since there are no explosions and the acceleration is more gradual than a bullet you could conceivably use other materials designed to reduce the impact (putty or something maybe?).

The metallic part of the round would have to be minimized such that it is foil or powder and sheds so it can be slowed down by air resistance. Or impregnated through a softer medium.

That's about as nonlethal as you could manage with something like that where your impact surface is small making it difficult to distribute the force out and reduce the pressure exerted on impact. The smaller diameter your regular railgun rounds are, the more challenging this will be. Larger round diameters and round lengths let you do things like fire long sticks of putty that have much more mass but can also deform.

Answer 2

Shock-Bayonets

A railgun needs to have a big powersource in form of a battery to work. We could use this electric energy to power a bayonet-like device, which the police could use as a shocking stick, kinda like an electric cattle prod.

Answer 3

Fit them as rifle grenade launchers. When the railgun projectile gets to the end of the barrel, the fast-moving but lightweight projectile hits a much heavier grenade, sending it off at a sedate pace that-a-way. Inside the grenades, you have traditional less-lethal payloads: tear gas, flashbangs, etc. Disadvantages are indifferent range and accuracy, not huge drawbacks under the circumstances.

The size and shape of the railgun itself (fairly lightweight, long durable barrel) would make it ideal for close quarters combat, which may or may not be lethal depending on how much practice your troops have had with it.

Answer 4

Much depends on how the railgun technology works.

For example, would it be possible to replace the bullets with very small metal pellets (possibly metal foam or wireballs) covered in soft rubber and ablative foam? This would enormously decrease the range, but the weapons could become nonlethal - less metal to be electromagnetically accelerated, way less kinetic energy, no penetrative power to speak of.

Or the other way round: heavier projectiles, that would not be accelerated to the same disastrous speeds, and whose nature could be further rendered less lethal. Imagine a rigid steel wire, powering a nerf bullet with a soft (or not so soft) rubber tip. This could still have a significant range - it would be a sort of arrow - while not being necessarily lethal. The energy transfer from the railgun coil would probably shorten the railgun lifetime significantly - instead of a quick electromagnetic fling you'd get a comparatively slower build-up.

Or "micro-flechette rounds" - depending on the size of the flechettes, air friction could slow them down enough to not be (immediately) lethal, or not unless some vital organ gets mulched (e.g. liver or spleen). The railgun would still be lethal at point-blank range, which could be useful in some scenarios. And of course it would depend on which bullets were fired.

This might have any negative effect on the railguns' life that we might desire (from none at all, to turning them into one-shot blunderbusses when the internal linear coupled coil overloads and cracks, or even melts down).

Also the firing could have lots of attached special effects, like the ablative foam exploding with a loud bang (2 kps is way over the speed of sound), or the wireballs igniting due to atmospheric friction (that is actually very unlikely at sea level, but who knows... maybe magnesium-steel wireballs were selling for a song and someone thought they might cheaply replace pure steel ones).

"Nonlethal" means actually "not intentionally and directly lethal". Someone hit in the face, or at point-blank range, or set on fire by an unintentionally incendiary round could still die. A hard hit in the wrong place can still kill someone with the appropriate condition. Hitting someone who is driving... etc.

Answer 5

Gas Parachutes.

The bullets are long and include a fluid chamber. Further they have an air duct leading from the front of the bullet to a parachute-like part of the bullet. As long as the bullet is faster than x, the parachute-like part expands outwards slowing the bullet down greatly. Below speed x it doesn't expand anymore so the bullet won't instantly fall to the ground.

The bullets have a foam tip so they don't hurt.

The foam is connected to the chamber - but only when or after the parachute expands. This way you can put in a non lethal contact poison which doesn't hurt people handling the bullets.

Answer 6

A big problem with these "less lethal" guns is the projectile speed and muzzle energy are set by the explosive charge, which means they're always the same. But the large projectile slows down quickly as it flies due to air drag, so it will be "less lethal" over a short range of distance, useless at long range, and at close range it will crack skulls. If it was weak enough to be safe at close range, it would then be useless at 20 meters...

Sure, the military want railguns because they can shoot projectiles much faster than powder, but being electric, railguns and coilguns have another feature: adjustable projectile speed.

So you could make a "less lethal" railgun by having a scope rangefinder that automatically measures distance to target and adjusts shot power to deliver the required projectile speed at the target.

This could lead to some interesting plot twists, for example:

• The integrated face and shape recognition software which was originally designed to avoid shooting people in the face doesn't work that well with aliens, leading to various losses of appendages, and of course accusations of "racist guns designer to murder only aliens".

• Likewise, power should be adjusted depending on the target ; after all some aliens come with thick scales and would shrug off bullets and others are quite squishy and would explode if they receive a shot intended for the former. Great opportunity for unintended misbehavior of software "features" and class action lawsuits.

• If you aim at someone far away, the gun will set itself to high power, then if someone steps in front of it at the shot is fired, they get obliterated.

Although... I'd recommend a coilgun instead. Railguns require a conductive sabot to propel the round, and that will fly off and split into several pieces, possibly sharp and very hot, turning the thing into a kind of shotgun. But everyone knows the real reason it was decommissioned was cost ; after all those sabots (and lawsuits) are expensive, and if you use a coilgun you can shoot the same projectile several times if you recover it...

Answer 7

This answer considers the case where a railgun works under the same principle as current technology.

Step 1: Calculate the % of the default current needed to make the railgun bullets as slow as they need to be to be considered non-lethal. Eg: 10% of the original power makes bruises but doesn't penetrate people.

Step 2: Add a resistor (obviously low resistance, high power) in parallel to the rail-bullet-rail circuit in order to suck out the remaining percentage of the current. Resistors, and their accompanying metal connector modules, will probably be dirt cheap.

Answer 8

Ferro-fluid adhesive gel balls. The ferro-fluid provides the ferrous material necessary to accelerate the ball electromagnetically. Then the ferro-fluid causes the ball material to wrap around the target immobilizing them. Maybe a binary composition that mixes on contact and causes the ferrous particles to simultaneous repel and attract each other causing them to spread out evenly around the target. Then quickly hardening to impede movement. Removal could be done with a ceramic knife to part the gel and peel it off of the target. Or an antagonist component that breaks down the gel.

Answer 9

Bolo projectiles. When launched from the rail gun the weights separate drawing a thin cable between them. The cable hits the targets and the weights cause the cable to wrap around the target and then lock somehow when they finish wrapping. Of course, as with any seemingly non-lethal weapon, accidents will happen (wrapping around the throat, crushing the skull, etc.) but they are rare incidents.