Can guns be rendered unusable by changing the atmosphere?

Question

I have an idea for a story in a post-apocalyptic setting where guns and other explosive devices unusable or otherwise impractical.

Is it possible to do this by changing the atmosphere (either by adding, removing, or changing the proportions of the chemicals that make up the standard earth atmosphere)?

The resulting atmosphere must be capable of supporting life, although it would be acceptable if human life required artificial support (e.g. portable supplementary oxygen supplies). Ideally, I would like to avoid removing oxygen completely; instead I want to change the environment the minimum amount to prevent combustion.

Answer 1

Make the atmosphere more combustible by adding lots of methane or other super-volatile gases. It won't stop the guns from functioning, but it will make using them suicidal for the wielder.

It does not even have to be super volatile gasses (as the presence of such might prevent human to walk around without life support systems), it is enough to increase the oxygen concentration to slightly over 30% to make it quite dangerous to fire rounds. If the atmospheric oxygen concentration is over 30%, then even wet plants will ignite and burn if there is anything to light them on fire, yet humans and animals will not be in any danger from breathing it (it will even slightly enhance performance when using your muscles). As a bonus, you will also get giant insects as their size limit is a function of how well oxygen can diffuse in to their bodies.

Answer 2

Considering the propellant in all munitions that I'm aware of (except fuel-air bombs and spud guns) is self-oxidising, that is to say, it requires nothing from the atmosphere (guns and bombs work fine underwater or even in space - well... they work fine once anyway) I'm inclined to say that, other than some kind of corrosive atmosphere eating the shells, that there's probably not much you can do about atmospherically preventing munitions from functioning.

However, as combustion engines are dependent on the atmosphere to run (they get their oxidiser - oxygen - from the air) so there is probably something you could do to stop the engines, maybe something that causes them to gum up or something that makes them rust really fast (really salty sea air works well)

Answer 3

If you are willing to go for a bit of hand waving: There are nanoparticles in the air that makes it act like a non-Newtonian fluid, or oobleck.

Usually, the nanoparticles float around completely unnoticed, like dust. But if something starts moving very quickly, the air around it seems to solidify, destroying and stopping the object. Then the air quickly reverts to normal. Maybe it kicks in at high speed, near the speed of sound. This would make guns infeasible. You could also make it depend on acceleration instead - this would still allow high speed vehicles or planes in the affected air, but still rule out guns. It might also have an effect on arrows. Just make sure people don't get killed when they sneeze.

I imagine the way it works is that the nanoparticles are tiny electronic floaters, like large molecules or nanoscale transcievers. They have a kind of electric field between them. If one starts to move rapidly between the others, they induce some power in the particle - like if you move a conductor through an electric field. This in turn causes the particles to attract each other. But if they come closer together, they also repel each other - the result is that they quickly form a long range lattice or crystal. The surrounding air is also locked into the lattice, via an interaction between the activated particles and the air molecues. Either something like static electricity, or a long-range version of Van der Waals-force. The result is that the viscosity rises quickly, and the air becomes very thick or even solid.

Note that my explanation how it works uses a lot of "kind of" and "something like" and is total BS :-). So you'd need to be comfortable with "nanotechnology as magic", or work a bit on the science of it first.

Answer 4

if its post-apocalyptic you can just be truthful and have making the bullets difficult. Making modern propellants is not something you can do at home, especially the primer. reloading bullets is based on being able to buy these materials. Using black powder (which you can make) in modern firearms, will gum them up rather quickly.
preventing the making of explosives is much more tricky. basically you might want to look at a different way to disable firearms than changing the atmo, since life still basically runs off of really slow combustion of carbon, so any change that prevents one will prevent the other.

Answer 5

Reduce medium range visibility

A typical way to reduce the usability of ranged weapons in general, and thus guns, is by ensuring that there is no clear line of sight from attacker to target.

This can be achieved in numerous ways, some more, some less realistic.

Fun solution: Weird visibility

Rather than making people invisible, let the air have a highly variable refraction index. This means you can see enemies all around you, but that you just can't point out exactly where they are. Never mind shooting them from a normal range. As a result, people may find a knife on a chain to become a more efficient weapon than a gun.

Realistic solution: Low visibility

Make sure that, you can't see very far. There is simply so much smog that one can just see who is walking in front of you. Once the average range of an encounter becomes small enough, people will go for swords and the like to maximize their killing potential.

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Note that if these conditions were to be so extreme that gun usage would drop to near zero just because of them, there would be a significant impact on daily life as well. If you are just interested in disabling distance shots the impact on daily life could be fairly minimal.

Answer 6

Since most explosives don't even need an atmosphere (you can fire guns under water), it must a special atmosphere that is actively preventing explosions of all sorts. You could make the atmosphere to have higher density and higher viscosity. A fancier atmosphere would be one laced with super-nanobots that dissipate all motion energy to heat quickly, sort of like reverse-Maxwell's daemon.

Answer 7

Aside from the explosive atmosphere answer, having the atmosphere be the thing that prevents firearm usage is rather implausible. If the story allows it, I would say use other factors, such as a combination of history, manufacturing practices, and technology!.

Even if a single factor is unlikely to eliminate firearms and explosives, the combination of multiple factors makes it so impractical/dangerous that none would be used in favor of other weapons

1. Technology. This one might be a major leap culturally, but technologically it's entirely possible. Consider the worldwide weapons ban mentioned below and add in a dash of government that (at least in the area your story takes place) implemented heavy Live Fire Detection Systems, which detect and respond to gunshots and/or explosions. Though the Geneva convention currently prohibits computers targeting and engaging (i.e. shooting at) humans without another human pulling some sort of trigger, I'm guessing the events leading up to the apocalypse threw that out the window. Combine aforementioned LFDS with advances in self-sustaining aircraft and laser weaponry, and a sky full of drones that fry anyone that fires a bullet is entirely possible. The kinda scary thing is that it's possible today, it would just be expensive before the systems enjoyed the economies of scale of mass production. South Korea's border already has a gun deployed that can auto-kill a human from 3 kilometers away, and that tech isn't even cutting edge!

2. History - Consider that there is first a worldwide gun ban similar to Australia's ban, which massively reduces the number of guns in the world by physically destroying them. After a subsequent worldwide ground conflict and a sufficient amount of time, most modern ammunition may be spent. Not 100% foolproof on its own, but making guns and ammunition rare adds to the other factors. Some regions of the world (like yours, perhaps) would likely be gun-free altogether.

3. Manufacturing - In a post-apocalyptic world, it can be assumed mass manufacturing is no longer possible. Modern ammunition was not produced until the mid-to-late-1800s, and neither were interchangeable parts (such as barrels, magazines, revolver cylinders, etc.). Before then, projectiles and powder were loaded into guns separately. They didn't have nearly the range or accuracy, were much heavier, and reloading was extremely slow. Practical for large-scale firing lines between standing armies, not so much for any other purpose... unless you only want one single, fairly low-accuracy shot. You can safely assume modern firearms are impossible to recreate in such a world, and who would risk a crappy musket shot when there are flying death lasers everywhere?

4. Add in pockets or "springs" of explosive gasses leaking from underground from the explosive atmosphere answer. Why not? I think it's a good idea, and credit where it is due!

Answer 8

Short answer is, no.

Cartridges are essentially self-contained and (can be) environmentally sealed objects, very durable in every way (compared to humans or vehicles). Nothing in the atmosphere is going to stop a cartridge from going off when primer is hit right.

A basic gun is also so simple, just barrel to contain the explosion, a lock to keep the cartridge in place, and a mechanism for a hammer to hit the primer, that nothing in atmosphere is going to prevent that from happening. Even some complex guns, such as the iconic AK47, are very robust. Tough conditions just need looser tolerances, which reduce power and accuracy, but even the most loose, but otherwise well designed gun is still going to be superior to any more primitive kintetic weapon in almost every way.

Doing "magic" with atmosphere which limits maximum velocity (like that non-newtonian fluid answer) would make existing weapons ineffective, but new ones would be rapidly designed and produced, which would fire heavier projectile with lower speed.

If you made explosive atmosphere, you would get gun designs which would cool down the explosive gasses so that they wouldn't trigger atmospheric explosion, or you would get remotely operated guns which would not be harmed by a little local atmospheric flash. Or just blast shield around the muzzle for very local flash. Or whatever. In any kind of stable (think of lightning and volcanoes) atmosphere, there's a way.

Basically, if you can shoot arrows/bolts, or just throw spears, you can make a gunpowder version, which will fire bigger projectiles more rapidly, with optimal velocity, more accurately, without it tiring you or requiring long training. The gun models we have on Earth today are optimized for our conditions, different conditions would result in different designs. But the basic advantage, the energy stored in the gunpowder, turned into kinetic energy of projectile with a twitch of a finger, "point-and-shoot", you can't hand-wave that away. If you threw modern humans with now-unuseful guns and lots of ammo into alien environmemt, they'd open the cartridges, repack them, and create ad-hoc "guns" working in that environment.

Answer 9

All ordinary explosives are self-contained, they work totally independently of the atmosphere. Thus the only way you can stop explosives from working with atmosphere is to have an atmospheric pressure above the detonation pressure of the explosive. At that point when you set them off they'll get bigger because they're warmer but that's it. The highest detonation pressure I can find is about half a million atmospheres.

Unfortunately for your story such atmospheres are not compatible with human life. Everything becomes toxic long before this sort of pressure is reached.

Answer 10

Maybe up the humidity - a lot.

A wetter, more humid atmosphere would make it harder for things to burn, and harder to ignite. It would take more to start a spark, and more to make that spark catch something else afire. A wetter atmosphere might have prevented the rise of firearms, as earlier versions wouldn't light when the air or accelerator was damp.

Of course, modern firearms are designed not to be so vulnerable to environmental conditions, they should be able to go off even under wet conditions. That's sort of not the point.

However my point was less about firearms and more about manufacturing. Accelerates might be designed to work independently of the atmosphere, but they have to be carefully manufactured, controlling many variables, to even get to that point. So, if the gunpowder manufacturing plant has a hard time keeping itself dry, we can see how well bullets work packed with damp powder (or how well they don't). Heat might help dry things, but there's a limit - and it can be pretty energy intensive. Or dangerous, given you're working with explosives to begin with.

Of course, there will be ways to make explosives and bullets work anyway - climate control on that level takes a lot of tech but it's doable - but they will be a lot more difficult and expensive, which might be enough to make them unpopular, or put them out of price reach for average gangs. And the tech involved (heaters, air conditioners, dehumidifiers), might be difficult to produce or maintain in a collapsed society, without a solid tech base behind it, especially since the individual skills would likely have been let lapse as luxuries, until they realized the secondary effects on manufacturing stuff like gunpowder.

Answer 11

If the atmosphere is thick enough, the projectiles fired will just slow down from friction very rapidly and end up falling to the ground harmlessly shortly after leaving the barrel.
Can still use the gun at short range, say a pistol at near contact range, but at longer ranges they'll be all but useless.

A bigger question is how to explain a massive increase in air pressure as having been caused by your apocalyptic event.
And of course building a world where such an extremely dense atmosphere (it'd have to be just about liquid) can exist and your creatures survive in it who previously survived in a far less dense atmosphere. The atmospheric pressure would be immense, and their bodies probably incapable in dealing.

Answer 12

You would need to have some kind of electrical/static field in the air that would penetrate the bullet casing causing the gun power to ignite prematurely. Even just building a bullet, it would explode seconds later.

Answer 13

I believe Memming gave an awesome idea about nano-bots, buts it gets problematic with motion-preventing, affecting everything that moves. My idea would be nanobots infesting the atmosphere in a way that they sense gunpowder or other explosives (extremely sensive AI-like bots) and render all encasings and shells unusable, entering ammunition and changing propelents and explosives structure at molecular level etc. Well, this approach depends on how high-tech and Sci-Fi-ish you wanna get.

Answer 14

Invent some molecules, able to quickly stick to iron (or whatever metals gunbarrels can be made of) and create thin film on it. (These molecules probably must not cause harm to most plants and animals.)

Then, two possibilities. If such film is thick and hard enough, then shooting will be problematic, gun may explode or bullet speed will be very low. If it is not, then it may change its properties after exposing to high pressure and/or temperature and for example bind enough something from atmosphere after shooting and making guns unusable again.

Answer 15

One alternative way at coming at it which might suit an apocalyptic scenario would be the occurrence of a universal and severe allergic reaction to explosives. It would make making ammunition very difficult in a technologically regressed world, while firing a weapon would be virtually suicidal (as the residue would spread through a fair amount of the local atmosphere)

Answer 16

As other posters noted explosives often work totally independently of the atmosphere since they contain everything needed to explode.

How about making explosives much more sensitive because of some sort of radiation. If this radiation is present globally (atmosphere with radioactive particles for example) it would make really hard to create and carry explosives safely. While local radiation would prevent use of explosives in critical areas because they would explode on borders of radiated area.

Local radiation could be also from atmosphere or from some radiation generator. Radiation should be harmless to life, like electromagnetic waves that are all around us.

Answer 17

Perhaps a chemical could be added to make the atmosphere a non-Newtonian fluid (like oobleck, except a gas). This make it difficult to exert force on the air around you, maybe not enough to make running hard.

the most obvious effect will be that bullets, with incredibly high velocity, will slow and fall to ground much quicker.

I think this may also mean that vibrations in the air will be dampened, such to reduce the effects of an explosion. It may also make shouting or producing loud sounds difficult.

Answer 18

Weather

Some other answers suggest adding humidity to prevent combustion. This is a terrible idea, as has been stated. However, it could work for a different reason, especially if we add some sand.

Firearms can be unreliable

Or, at least, the modern version, with high effective ranges and fancy concepts such as "semi-automation". More simple weapons aren't quite, though.

The most basic version of a gun (as we think of it) is as follows:

• Take a projectile.
• Stick it in a fireproof tube.
• Make an explosion that launches the projectile out of the tube at a high velocity.

This can be an improvement over bows and the likes at very short ranges, if your goal is piercing armor, but it's very unreliable at longer ranges. Guns of this sort have been around since around the 1100s, and the basic gist of it wasn't drastically improved upon until around the 1850s or so. They were mostly used for armor-piercing purposes and due to needing much, much, much less training to use effectively than a bow at similar ranges. However, they were exceedingly inaccurate and took long to load.

These would still be viable, but only due to simplicity... and even then, only to an extent. Though, I suppose the title of this subsection is somewhat innacurate...

MODERN firearms can be unreliable.

One of the more popular handguns in pop culture is the Desert Eagle. While it may look cool and sound nice, it's really a terrible weapon. It's incredibly heavy (making it hard to hold steady for aiming), and jams exceedingly frequently, especially in humid or sandy areas (ironically making it useless in deserts). Despite all that, it's also WAY more expensive than most other guns (just under $2000 USD) - you can buy actual, military-grade, melt-through-steel-in-an-instant laser weapons for around that price.

Most firearms are, to an extent, similar, anymore.

Guns, these days, are astoundingly intricate. If I tell you to go make a .44 Magnum, you wouldn't be able to. If I went to someone who regularly machines things as a hobby and told them to make one, they wouldn't be able to either. Only a huge assembly process specifically created for the production of .44 Magnums would be able to make one with any efficiency, because there's just so many tiny parts that all need to be perfect to even get off one shot.

As such, even if I already have an assembled, working .44 Magnum, it can still have issues firing if it gets full of sand or starts to rust or the likes. And a good, old-fashioned revolver is one of the most reliable weapons you can own - just imagine what it's like for even more complex weapons with 35 extra parts for feeding an ammo belt and another 12 for ejecting spent cartridges, 17 for feeding in new bullets from a clip, et cetera.

Let's just get to the point already

Now imagine some incredibly-humid, sandy-as-all-getout land where so much action goes on that you'd never be able to sit down and do maintenance even half as often as you should under good conditions. Within ten years, nearly all complex firearms would be so rusted and ruined that they could never fire a single bullet again.

Now, as for explosives...

There's just no stopping explosives

A bomb is even more simple than a gun.

• Get something that can explode
• There is no step two

People make bombs with a quarter-cup of laundry detergent, an empty milk jug, a piece of flint and some metal to hit it against. These are effective enough to be as costly to troops fighting in a war than the actual "fighting in a war" bit. Making the air more wet isn't going to stop it. Making the air amplify that explosion just makes it an even MORE attractive option! There's just no stopping bombs without deoxygenating the atmosphere. Sorry.

Answer 19

I also do not see you can stop the guns themselves from working without radical changes affecting all normal life, but perhaps if you make use of guns very dangerous for the person using the the gun it could achieve the same result.

One avenue of thought might be something in the air which reacts violently with exhaust gases from shells created when bullet is fired. It might be chemical reaction, or it might be biological agents or nanobots which activates when those specific fumes are present (as most of normal life uses does not smell like gunshots, it would not create problems in normal person life, unlike most of the suggested answers)

Answer 20

There's more than one way to make a gun, making the atmosphere flammable seems popular, but airguns don't make a spark.

Airguns aren't toys, modern airguns kill big game, can be automatic and there's even a few really powerful air rifles such as 20mm.

But what about war? Look up pumpkin chuckin air cannons.

So, a flammable atmosphere is pointless. The weather isn't a bad idea but if the weather was so horrible that it destroys guns fast enough to make them worthless then you'd probably be dead standing outside for too long.

A non Newtonian atmosphere is nonsense for a couple reasons.

Atmospheric fusion sounds awesome but a bullet doesn't have enough energy to initiate fusion, like not even remotely close. Making the atmosphere unstable enough for this to happen would set the atmosphere on fire.

To make guns entirely impossible to use you'd probably have to chop off every humans hands. Or idk, make everyone blind? Maybe this specific planet has a common shared gene that permanently reduces their ability to see but not enough to make everyday tasks impossible?

Perhaps the planet is in a constant dust storm? Or just extremely dense fog? Not much point using a gun if visibility is near zero.

Answer 21

Forgive me science if this is too absurd.

Disperse into the atmosphere molecules with 2 characteristics:

1. Their atomic nuclei are unstable enough to be smashed together (nuclear fusion) if they impact other molecules in the air at velocities that a bullet pushing the air can cause. Make the energy released enough to smash the bullet.
2. The new element produced by the nuclear transmutation is solid and strong enough to mostly contain the released energy (so that the energy release is localized and doesn't eg destroy the entire town).

Now when a bullet is fired the air pushes back and smashes the bullet then solidifies into a small ball which falls to the ground. You might even have it decay in some days or weeks back into the first element so the supply in the atmosphere stays more or less constant.

You probably have to invent a couple exotic chemical elements to make this work.

Answer 22

Don't play with the atmosphere, play with SULFUR.

Maybe the Apocalypse in your story somehow removed, bound, or destroyed sulfur. This would pretty much kill most life on the planet, since small quantities of sulfur are necessary for animals, plants and bacteria to function. It is also a fundamental ingredient of chemicals used for just about any modern industry, from agriculture to plastics, from rubber to gasoline, paper, medicine, advanced metallurgy, etc etc

Moreover, sulfur is an indispensable ingredient of gunpowder, and sulfuric acid is needed to make most explosive substances, especially gun nitrocellulose.

Without sulfur, explosive combustion ammunition for guns is extremely hard to make, and explosives impractical.

Sure, there are designs for electric guns, or even pneumatic guns, but these tend to be under-powered, cumbersome, and largely made of parts that require sulfur to be made. Good luck with your pneumatic gun if you cannot make rubber for the seals (rubber vulcanizaton requires sulfur).

Sulfur-less world would quickly devolve into near Medieval level.

Bonus points, sulfur always had strong links to the supernatural. It was the Brimstone of Christian Hell, and sulfuric fumes were sacred power behind Delphic Oracles. Sudden and dramatic disappearance of sulfur could be interpreted as a divine punishment of sorts.

Answer 23

Yes, you can use millimeter waves to basically turn any matter into liquid, decompose the electron magnetism or extinguish flames if that's what you're after. It's a powerful wave and this device is theoretical ,but not particularly difficult to comprehend. It uses a series of magnetrons and a series of pulse guns oscillating at or greater than 192ghz targeted at the gun using a laser guide.