Well of Souls Forums

Demarquis wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 10, 2022 1:52 am

@Dragoonfa: "Ready made counters for mini drones exist already, they haven't seen wide deployment because mini drone swarms haven't been widely deployed yet, some have gotten so small that they can even be given as a secondary armament on the individual level. There are even trial runs for anti drone targeting attachments for assault rifles with promising results."

Links! Or I can't respond.

A quick google of some results:

https://www.popsci.com/dronedefender-is ... ttachment/
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/4 ... darpa-demo
https://taskandpurpose.com/military-tec ... mash-2000/

There are far more technologies and anti drone equipment currently under development and the arms race so far seems to go in favor of anti drone technologies instead of the drones themselves.

Demarquis wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 10, 2022 1:52 am

Now, protecting yourself with an actual swarm of friendly drones, on the other hand, might just be the ticket.

Why can't my drones be rifle-fired?

@Dragoonfa: Those are really interesting, thanks. I would point out that the first link describes an electronic jamming device, the second is a type of drone itself, and the third is a type of lock-on scope that is still in the experimental stage. Of these, only the second will really help against a swarm, numbers one and three rely on targeting individual drones one at a time. In any context in which drones are cheaper and more numerous than human soldiers, something better is needed.

@Mk_C: Too slow. My comment to Dragoonfa above applies to this to: a swarm is a type of AI controlling an entire, well, swarm of drones at one time. It's not a centralized AI, instead it's distributed across the entire swarm, hence no one drone need be especially complex or expensive. The whole idea behind a swarm is that swarm intelligence has the potential to be quicker to respond, can acquire a wider range of tactical data more quickly, and can coordinate attacks more effectively than a human squad or platoon can (humans communicate in words, drones in bursts). So far, test results seem to bear this out, and that's with current tech.

Regarding the gauss gun in the video.... I found it fascinating that he remarked that it is unwise to charge the gun to fire without firing it.... since all that energy has to go somewhere and you end up with MORE waste heat than if you just fired a slug.

So in ultra-realistic scifi any commander firing a mass driver, whether slugs or particle beams from a spaceship must be VERY deliberate about it.

Like you must issue an order.... and you had better fire a slug or beam or your waste heat will be worse than it is when you fire!

I very much enjoy the give and take.... the newtonian action/reaction of the process.

You never get something from nothing.... you must expend something in the process.. either you eject the slug or fire the beam, or prepare to take on a bunch of waste heat and stress over potentially frying your coil gun or particle beam innards!

Who know ordering 'fire' could be so stressful?!

Not only do you have to worry about being blown up in combat, but your own weapons rendering you impotent!

I imagine a warship using energy-intensive weapons such as mass drivers or directed energy weapons would have massive capacitor rings distributed throughout the hull, which any weapon or system requiring sudden spikes of power that a reactor can't possibly supply would tap into. Essentially, the capacitor rings are always charged, instead of needing to be charged before firing (and then discharged if firing proves unnecessary!) like in the Gauss rifle example above. The ship's reactors (analogous in function to the battery in the above example) just spin up or down in response to the charge level of the capacitor rings.

The Honor Harrington series of SF novels discuss this in great detail; in the earlier books before some technological advancement takes place, missiles are fired through tubes which are basically coilguns, imparting a starting velocity on them they could not otherwise achieve with their own engines. The tubes as well as the ships' energy weapons tap into such rings, and undamaged weapons becoming inoperative anyway because their connections to the rings being severed by battle damage is very common during battles.

@Bamax: " I found it fascinating that he remarked that it is unwise to charge the gun to fire without firing it...."

Not entirely unlike the way they couldn't just leave unfired powder in the barrel of a cannon or a musket.

Just had a few ideas:

"rifles are not a suitable countermeasure against drones" - well this rifle might be, because the drones cannot afford heavy shielding against an EMP. But there may be better ways to create an EMP.

Also regarding the EMP: The rifle as it is now has a plastic casing. It shouldn't be too difficult to cover it with with a metal casing designed for shielding off the EMP. It just adds weight to the whole thing.

About keeping it stealthy: Usual guns work by having an internal explosion which causes pressure against the projectile which is then accelerated. Air guns don't have that explosion, this gun doesn't have it, so as long as you keep the projectile speed under mach 1 (so that the projectile doesn't create a sonic boom by itself), you can have a high speed without (much of) a sound, I don't know where the "tclak" sound comes from but it's low-noise.

There is something else: While air guns don't have explosions, they have a "single point of acceleration" in common with usual guns. This single "bang" drives the projectile forward through the barrel, working against the mass of the projectile until the barrel ends, the driving force is "set free" and the acceleration ends. But this rifle accelerates the projectile in stages, a little bit more at each coil. Which means that the acceleration caused by a single stage=coil can be and probably is much lower than the single "bang" of an air gun and a usual gun. This could be used to limit the acceleration force to some maximum value, say 10 G, but, say, 10 times instead of one time - and now you could shoot cartridges containing a drone that can't take more than 10 G of force.

Just some thoughts while I'm sick in bed. (Just a bad cold.)

If you wanted to build a weapon that used EMP as its primary kill effect, it wouldn't look anything like a railgun. This would be like claiming that a gunpowder weapon is some kind of effective sonic disruptor.

To be fair it definitely can be if its big enough.

e; although actually usually that has more to do with how hot the load is vs barrel length.

That's called a "Flash Bang".

Cthulhu wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 28, 2022 2:40 pm

The problem with such weapons is actually threefold, as far as I can see it:
1. Battery power. Current devices or portable generators do not offer the necessary energy storage density. Also, even live ammo is still "safer" than a big lithium-ion battery, considering their possible reaction to battlefield damage, "reload" speed and general handling.
2. Power output. In order to fire that mass driver with enough force, you'd need incredibly high peak output capabilities. Here, they circumvent that issue with capacitors, but even those are not yet powerful enough.
3. Magnet strength. Current magnetic coils cannot handle those energies, at least without cooling. We'd need either miniaturized cooling mechanisms, or the "holy grail" of applied physics itself, the ambient superconductor.

That makes we wonder, how high is the power density of Loroi handheld weapon cells? In Star Trek, for example, they could be set to overload, creating a "hand grenade" of sorts if the plot demanded for it.

Pretty much this, yes. Remember how the plot of Iron Man 1 and 2 revolved not so much around the suit of power armor, but the miniaturized cold fusion reactor that made it possible? True to life. It's why the whole Land Warrior program in the 90s fell through, and why it still hasn't made a comeback despite three decades of development that've seen small, power-efficient processors become the dominant section of the microchip market (i.e. smartphones.) We need an order of magnitude better power storage. Long carbon nanotubes, for instance, which would give us insanely energy-dense power storage that also doubles as supercapacitors.

Naturally, the reason the Loroi and their playmates are so technologically advanced can be boiled down to "they use improved antimatter."