How to fight effectively on a space station [duplicate]

Question

So the question here is fairly simple. What kind of weapons can you use on a space station that can kill someone in advanced body armor, and even the occasional person in powered armor, without too much risk of poking (too many) holes in the station itself? Depressurizing the entire station while taking it is not preferable, although a few small holes are probably fine. But how would you penetrate body armor, to actual power armor with the durability of a light armored vehicle, without having those same rounds that miss going straight through the skin of the station?

EDIT: This is different from the recoil weapons question since that question is asking about recoilless firearms, but this one doesn't care about that and is asking about ways to not poke holes in a station you are fighting on(Not necessarily zero, but as few as possible). This is important because civilian stations can have thousands of non-combatants aboard who would prefer to not breath vacuum or get shot with a stray bullet that went through the walls. The goal is to minimize civilian casualties. This question applies to weapons both the attackers and defenders can use.

Clarifications: This is focused on military action, although suggestions on how policing might work are welcome. The station has artificial centrifugal gravity. It spins and makes artificial gravity. They range from the size of small outposts to orbital cities. The station is not necessarily more armored than the body armor of the soldiers, for the same reason most buildings aren't bulletproof. Some might be armored, but most aren't. Also, this may be a civilian station, so it is preferable to not implement measures that could negatively impact other spaces in the station(Gassing a room is fine, but gassing the whole station is not. This means that things like disabling life support across the whole station is a war crime and not allowed).

The weapons technology is mostly kinetics, basically spoofed-up rifles and pistols. The station is large, enough so that Light powered armor is sometimes feasible(nothing too big). Also, the armor itself varies from just standard modern body armor like we have today, to 2 cm of armor plate. Said powered armor is uncommon, so not every weapon needs to be able to penetrate it. It is fully enclosed but with a limited air supply(~30 min). Finally, tiny drones are possible.

Answer 1

Self-Sealing Flechette.

The thin, dart-like high-velocity projectiles with super hardened tips will punch through anything; armor, flesh, equipment and station alike. One won't do a huge amount of damage to a person - much like being hit by a stray miss at a dart-board. It'll produce a yelp of pain, a heated conversation, then a conciliatory round of beer.

5 or 6 of them through a limb will immobilize it, 25 of them will incapacitate the toughest marine. A single lucky shot through the heart or brain-stem will kill.

So, what use is that then if it pierces the station too?

The capsule that fires the dart also fires a small lump of self-expanding foam, that acts like a sealant, tough and flexible. On armor it'll pinpoint where someone was hit, on a station-wall it'll create a seal over the hole, some will get pushed through by the pressure differential, and fix on the hole in the layers below. The vacuum causes it to outgas and "dry", much like any solvent-based glue.

For indirect hits to the station through ricochet or miss, ones that pass through a military target first, such that the sealant gets stopped by the armor - the hole is small enough (perhaps 3mm) that the rate of gas-escape is slow. This gives time for repair-bots to fix the hull at their leisure (when there's no more fighting).

Dart-Doping:

For extra effect, have them release a paralyzing compound on entry, a nerve-toxin that numbs and immobilizes the local flesh, muscle and all - or go the other way, causes severe pain on entry like a bullet-ant sting ("waves of burning, throbbing, all-consuming pain that continues unabated for up to 24 hours").

Answer 2

Why risk our guys at all? A space station is a hostile environment life-support system. All we need to do is reversibly break the life-support system and we win for free.

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Turn up the heat.

1: Wrap the radiators in a big space blanket.

2: Position a big mirror on the dark side of the station to reflect sunlight at it.

3: Wait for the enemy to surrender or die of heatstroke.

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Turn down the heat.

1: Disable their power source.

2: Block the sun. (2 for the price of 1 if they're solar powered!)

3: Wait for the enemy to surrender or freeze to death.

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Steal all the air.

1: Little hole. Big pump.

2: Wait for the enemy to surrender or die of hypoxia in their space suits.

3: Pump the air back in.

Answer 3

The same way you would fight elsewhere

A bit of a frame challenge. You have a giant space station. Not a tin-cans we use today, but a proper space station. With thousands of people living there. And rotating gravity.

Such a space station is definitely not a tin-can. You need a certain tensile strength if you want a space station to not fall apparty because of rotation. Which means you cannot have thin walls. Interior ones, sure. But exterior? And the backbone of the station? Those would need to be far stronger. So you wouldn't be able to cause a hull-breach from small arms fire. And even if you somehow could breach it, that wouldn't cause much damage. You won't lose all that much air from a hole made by a gun. You have a lot of it, since you house thousands of people on board.

An analogy of fighting on a space station would be a fight on a aircraft carrier. It's not that easy to cause a hull-breach on it. And it should be impossible to achieve it by guns. And even if you magically made some holes, that still wouldn't sink that ship.

As for the argument about material being a premium in space some people have mentioned: if you have a capacity to build a space station that can house thousands you either have extremely cheap launch options (orbital rings perhaps?) or extensive off-world infrastructure (asteorid mining for example).

So to answer your question: you fight normaly. Not that in a military campaign one would expect much fighting on space stations. Terrorist attacks, mutinies, heist - yes. Military actions - no. It should be easy to defend a space station from boarding action, and even easier to just destroy it outright. To try to take it over would be just like trying to invade an aircraft carrier mentioned earlier. Sure, it is theoretically possible. But higly unlikely.

Answer 4

Energy Weapons

Depending on the sort of tech you are dealing with in your universe, energy weapons are a good way to go. Personally, I normally shy away from energy weapons as they are almost entirely handwavium, but this is one of the few logic loopholes that really might work in your favor. Since you can define a lot of aspects of how your energy weaponry works, its easier to use this as a very solid reasoning as to why energy weapons might be more widely used over kinetics.

One of the biggest real hurdles in space travel is temperature control, and real world laser weapons are essentially insanely precise heat guns. A space station is designed specifically to be constantly radiating the heat generated by all the components and occupants of the station, usually by means of actual radiators. A suite of power armor however, likely doesn't have much ability to radiate excess heat pasta certain point.

Thus, a weapon designed to heat a surface it comes in contact with would be more effective as a means to essentially cook the occupant of the armor, without severely damaging the armor or surroundings except for possible warping or scorch marks. This also is a fairly solid reason as to why so many spacecraft and space suits/armor are all white or mirror polished, because it would reflect the widest range of the visible light radiation and likely has a degree of reflection against radiation outside the visible spectrum.

Answer 5

• Smart fuzes
  Take a handheld grenade launcher, fit it with a computerized sight and laser rangefinder, and program the grenades to explode only if they did hit a target at the expected point of their flightpath. If they miss, the fuze goes inert or it self-destructs.
  On the plus side, this technology also allows "barricade-penetrating" fuzing.
• FPS drones
  Arguably a variant of the above, put your warhead into a drone and have a pilot (or computer) fly the warhead into the target.
• Smart triggers
  Instead of upgrading the projectile, modify the computerized sight and trigger so that it can only fire if there is a valid target in the crosshairs. This depends on good image recognition and short flight times, but lines of fire inside a station should be short.

Answer 6

Foam Guns

Globs of Neodyte Premium Bonder®, mixed in certain proportions with various other chemicals results in an air-drying foam. Just like flamethrowers, you can put the diluted Neodyte Premium Bonder® in one tank and then the chemical cocktail in the other tank. Then your space marines can go and hose down anyone suspected to be an insurgent. They can’t go anywhere, and if it’s a civilian, they’re not dead

Pros:

• No harm to the station, or risk of civilians being shot through walls
• Civilians hit by stray fire won’t die
• Allows for capture of targets
• By spraying walls/roofs/floors, you can build up some cover to hide behind
• If your terrorist use normal guns and pop a hole in the wall, there could be some sort of mini-foam gun mounted to the wrist (Like a hand flamer from Warhammer 40k) and that could be used to quickly fill holes on the space station.
• Practical, non-military uses exist for this Foam gun

Cons:

• Be a pain to clean up (Unless Neodyte® has some sort of solvent that will undo it, but then you risk your terrorists carrying some of that)
• If you want the terrorists dead, you will need a secondary weapon or an alternative way of doing that
• Could be obtained by your terrorists if they buy it for some of the practical, non-military uses, but then funnel it into a Foam Gun
• could result in respiratory problems if inhaled or suffocation if sprayed over the mouth (although this could be a deliberate strategy to silently kill enemy operatives, spray over their mouth/nose and then drag them away

Answer 7

You fight like normal and patch things up afterwards.

A bullet is not going to create a hole that that loses critical amounts of air during a the time frame of a normal fight. you are talking about a very small hole and liekly less than 15PSI diffrence in pressure. A space station has to deal with micrometriotites so the walls may even be too tough for the bulllet to pucture. Shooting civilians is a bigger concern than shooting holes in the wall. So you fight like normal forces trying to minimize civilian casualties. try not to shoot civilians patch things up afterwards. The unique thing is the special task force that goes out as soon as fighting is done and starts finding and patching damage. Or they leave it ot hte space station crew to do it, better to drain the enemies resources. You can even imagine a game of chicken ver who will blink first and save civilians.

Now I would assume the choice to use weapon that can make holes in the hull is only going to happen when absolutly nessisary. Equivilent to using missle platforms or similiar forces on earth. I would not expect everyday soldiers to be carrying around weapons that can do this. Most of the time they only need to take down soft targets. this is like when you start rolling tanks and artillery into a city, civilian casualties are a low priority at this point.

Answer 8

You watch the "ringing" of the station.. as in every time somebody moves about the station, impacting the wall, it changes the rotation, movement of the whole station, measurably. And if leaves heat marks in the walls.

Then you mercilessly drone sniper through the tin-can walls. As this turns the holes into thrusters, you want the space-station empty beforehand, so you need to hacker-hijack the station and evaccum-ate the whole thing ahead of time.

So, if you want a sonar picture of the whole thing, you will need to get that first. Attach drones outside, ring the whole thing like a bell. Map the acoustics. Again, if anything seems like a enemy in the metal-space-shack, blast it through the corrugated roof. Drones will patch the swiss cheese later.

If some part makes more trouble then its worth- laser cut the whole affair into two parts. Again, its a coke-can in space. Not worth loosing life and limb to stumble around in it.

Answer 9

First of all: Air seals

Air seals, that can divide the station in very small chunks, would reduce the danger of hull breaches from "everyone dies" to "a handfull of people die".

Melee

If you go in close combat and hit your enemy with a (high tech) stick, the risk of accidental hull breaches are very low. This would also give nice story hooks. A raiding party that is not specifically interested in keeping the population alive and the station intact, could use ranged weapons and be at a considerable advantage against the defenders. For power armor wearing enemies you sent your own power armors in to brawl them.

Blunt projectiles

A blunt projectile to the head of even a well armored soldier can cause deadly trauma. Our brain (and neck) are very fragile when it comes to concussions. A mighty blunt blow with a heavy rubber projectile can make an enemy unconcious or outright kill them depending on energy, angle of impact and distance. Yes you can reinforce the neck against braking but at the cost of head movability. But you can't protect the brain against the effects of sudden movement. But the bulkhead will only get dents. Not pretty but safe.

Electricity

Electricity can kill a soldier and cause malfunction in powersuits, but the hull gets only a little warm at worst and quickly dissipates the electricity and heat. Yes you might fry the cable works in the wall but at least you won't have a hullbreach. Yes the body armor might be non conductive but with enough voltage you can get any material to conduct. If it doesn't conduct you aren't using enough voltage. Also you might use small projectiles to pierce the armor and deliver the charge directly. Yes those small projectiles can pierce the bulkhead but at least it's only a small hole.

Last but not least: Smart weapons

The weapon calculates the distance to the target on the fly and combusts the round a few centimeters after supposed impact. Even if you miss, the projectile won't hit the bulkhead. Alternatively the weapons have a full detailed map of the station and all bulkheads and detonate the projectiles shortly before they hit the wall. This could make interesting stories as you can have an arc about aquiring the scans of the station before the assault. Or the hero having his "smart module" damaged and now be very careful to not break the hull, while his enemies can fire at will.

Answer 10

some options:

• first, a minor Frame Challenge: a space station is unlikely to have very heavy powered armor. Space is at premium at a station/spaceship, and every gram of weight had to be dragged out from a gravity well, or created in space from asteroid mass: either way, the power armor becomes stupidly expensive: about 25000$ per kilogram, and I would assume a tank-like power armor weights about 100kg at least. So even if the armor is absolutely necessary, it will be very lightweight, and likely integrated into EVA suits which are necessary anyway. It is extremely unlikely a space station would have tanklike power suits that can stop anything more powerful than a bullet from a civilian firearm.
• second frame Challenge: space gun control. It is very unlikely that weapons would be allowed on a station, let alone weapons that can pierce the hull. Sure, this rule will be occasionally broken, but it is far more likely that any kind of space mutinies, piracy, takeovers etc will be done with very low powered weapons 3D printed at the station itself, not military-grade guns.

Having in mind the two above:

• very precise laser weapons. Im not talking some silly sci-fi laser blasters, but actual, plausible laser, possibly a laser cutter or a scientific tool repurposed as a weapon. A laser cutter leaves a neat hole, which is very likely to self-weld instantly due to heat, especially in low-oxygen environment (like the surface level of a hull) however, the same hair-thin laser beam will definitely kill, or severely injure a person inside a power suit. A one second blast with steel-cutting laser to the face will melt a neat hole through the power armor helmet, the enemy's head, and the hull, but the holes in the hull will esentially insta-weld back, because you just made a 1mm hole in them, surrounded with molten metal. Human brain though, does not weld back.
• drone darts. A space station very likely already needs a whole fleet of tiny drones to whip around like worker bees, repairing the hull, replacing faulty electronics, cleaning etc. Some of these drones will by necessity be equipped with things like laser torches, diamond drills, and other tiny powertools to do their jobs: and they do not care if the job is "fix the wall in cubicle 34" or "drill a hole through powersuit 76 and whoever is inside, Safety Protocol Overriden".
• actual hand-held powertools. Sometimes a hull breach is really bad, and you need a heavy plasma torch to mend it. The same plasma torch is usually used to weld damaged power armor. Which means by definition, it must be also able to melt through the same power armor. Any tool that can be used to fix armor can be used to destroy it, if you are brave enough for melee.
• pinpoint EMP. The space station itself is most likely ruggedized against EMP 20 times over, evidenced by the fact that everyone on board is not dying after every solar flare or Jovian gust event. Power armor on the other hand is likely not, it would have to be absurdly thick and heavy for that. Just shoot them with a magnetic pellet that stick to their armor and releases a directional EMP blast to fry the suit's electronics, turning power armor into a cool metal statue with a dude trapped inside.
• pinpoint radiation blast. Ship hulls are extremely well ruggedized against radiation, evidenced by the fact that the crew is not all dead from radiation poisoning. But if you are fighting for your life anyway, releasing a little bit radiation inside the station is a tiny price for saving your life. A handheld device that blasts someone with a narrow cone of x-rays or gamma radiation (if you are extra, super nasty and want them to die in agony) or microwaves (if you are just regular nasty and want them to suffer unimaginable pain, but survive) will go through armor just fine, and make the enemy regret they attacked you. Come to think of it, radiation guns are so scary that they make space warfare almost obsolete. The very idea of someone hitting you with a single shot of acute radiation sickness that will make you collapse and slowly melt to death in mind-destroying, incomprehensible pain, is enough of a deterrent.
• just regular melee weapons. I know it sounds silly, but it is not. Space stations, and moreso spaceships, are made of small, cramped rooms and long, very narrow shafts. If you are fighting against someone there, you are not shooting at each other from hundreds of meters away, but almost at arm's reach, usually across obstacles from all angles. Doors and corners, that is how you get them. Just sneak up on the armored dude, hug them in a jiu-jitsu hold, and stab a screwdriver between their armor joints. If you want to be extra fancy with your melee weapons, Im sure you can 3D print a knife out of monomolecular carbon glass that is sharpened to near-atomic precision and can cut through armor just fine.
• shoot them with sealant. A space station already has to have tools that can shoot sealant foam to quickly close hull gaps, and harden fast enough to prevent outgassing. The same foam, if sprayed all over an opponent, will make them immobilized, or at least blinded. With enough foam you can even stick them to the wall and make them trapped. If sealant gun is not available, shooting the opponent with a blast from a fire extinguisher is good enough to blind, distract and possibly throw them back, which can be enough distraction to close into grappling melee.
• tasers. Sure, hitting some delicate electronics with a taser is likely going to fry them, but any sensible space station or a spaceship is ruggedized against power surges and has breakers everywhere, so you are unlikely to damage anything more vital than an input panel or a lamp. The same taser applied to a person in metal armor can both cramp them, and possibly fry their power-armor actuators.
• tear gas or just straight up nerve gas. Sure, using dangerous chemical sprays on a space station is super dangerous. However, space vessels are designed in such a way that every room, corridor or section can be independently sealed and vented out if needed. If your enemy is in a different compartment from you, blast them with tear gas, or if you really are not playing around, some kind of neurotoxin with a seconds short halflife. Close the door, wait for them to die/pass out, then wait some more for the nasty chemical to decay into a safe form.
• finally, your main weapon, if you are in control of the station and attacked by an outside force is "airlock chess". A space station is a maze of airlocked compartments. If you have access to the lock-control system and they do not, you can simply lock them in a room or a corridor and vent the air out, or even open the whole compartment completely to hard vacuum. Sure, most power armor models will have their own emergency air supply, but will it last long enough for them to cut through the airlock? I think not! Even if your enemies are too clever to be vacuumed or spaced like that, you can trap them by surrounding them with vacuumed compartments. If your station is segmented, it might even be possible to detach the whole section where the enemy is, and let it drift off into empty space.