The Eldraeverse

…building civilizations with my space elves in space.

Tag Archives: guns

Trope-a-Day: Every Bullet is a Tracer

1 Comment Posted by on May 10, 2013

Every Bullet Is A Tracer: Justified for non-slugguns, inasmuch as modern slugthrowers kick their tiny dust-grain bullets up to such a high velocity – a respectable fraction of c – that they plasmate the air they hit on the way to their target.  The bullet doesn’t glow, but the resulting plasma bolus does.

(The disadvantage that this has, that firing gives away your position unless you turn the muzzle velocity way down, has been noted by the relevant tacticians.)

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Trope-a-Day: Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better

1 Comment Posted by on April 9, 2013

Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: For most things, yes.  It’s not that they don’t have perfectly functional energy weapons, or power cells which can manage the job – if you can run a mass driver that can get a flechette or slug up to a respectable fraction of the speed of light, yep, you can power a laser with it too, just fine.  Nor do energy weapons lack their place – lasers are a damn fine way of pumping heat into things, which is very handy in starship combat, for example, and electrolasers (fire the laser to ionize a path through the air to your target, then dump a lot of voltage down it) make excellent stunners and anti-machine weapons, and EMP weapons are also handy for the latter, if really hard on the infrastructure.  Blinding lasers are effective on at least many species and relatively humane.

But in practice, it’s a lot easier to solve the problems of making really awesome kinetic weapons than of dealing with beam dispersion (while you can do some cool blasting-shit-apart – not slicing it up – with a big laser or graser, you would generally prefer not to have to let it get that close), atmospheric humidity (a big problem for electrolasers), and other such things, and in some cases vulnerability that varies sharply by the precise way the energy is delivered, and suchlike.  So while energy weapons of various types are part of the arsenal, in the special uses for which they excel, the jack-of-all-trades weapons still Throw Stuff At You Really Damn Fast.

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Trope-a-Day: Dramatic Gun Cock

Leave a Comment Posted by on October 18, 2012

Dramatic Gun Cock: Modern personal weapons don’t actually need cocking (just flip the arming switch to Unsafe, and you’re done, to the accompaniment of no more than a little electrical hum or capacitor-charging whine).  On the other hand, since they fold up very nicely into a more convenient form-factor for storage and transportation, you can do all the dramatic unfoldings (push the button and let the springs, etc., do the rest) that you like.

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Sweet Kynthia

Leave a Comment Posted by on October 12, 2012

Like most ridiculously excessive weapons, the unique anti-materiel/area-denial weapon, “Sweet Kynthia”, was built to impress a lady, constructed by Sarai Iliastren-ith-Weváren during her pursuit of Kynthia Andracanth-ith-Andracanth, whose interests in heavy weapons – and indeed, whose own creations (see pps. 36, 42, 138, 196, 211, 335, 401, 545, 607-611, 720, 1196, and much of the rest of the book) in the field – have been proverbial.

Sweet Kynthia is an antimatter scattergun, firing two dozen individual coated one-gram antimatter pellets in a star-circle dispersal pattern – adjustable for wide or narrow scatter, each with an individual yield of 43 kilotons, the weapon’s total conversion yield being just over a megaton.

Given the multi-mile range of both the blast and thermal flash, and the mile-plus range of even the generally lethal prompt radiation pulse (rather less than the effective firing range), Sweet Kynthia has served primarily as a weapon of intimidation, given the essential impossibility of surviving firing the weapon – although it has been picked out of enough smoldering radioactive craters during its long and memorable career to lend the sight of it in a determined or desperate hand real weight.

- the Big Boys’ Book of Boom

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Freedom of Assembly

3 Comments Posted by on July 11, 2012

First there was the Adaptech Adventurer’s Pistol, and that was bad for those us who believe in trying to exert some sort of control over the proliferation of arms in our countries. Usually you can try and regulate the ammunition, or the fuel, or the high-density energy cells too, for the ones that inevitably slip past you — except when a corporation which happens to be located in a polity notorious for its refusal to cooperate with anyone’s reasonable measures along these lines starts marketing a gun that feeds on sunlight and can make bullets out of air.

But that was an issue for ten years ago.

And then it got worse when Adaptech invented a newer and better model of the Adventurer’s Pistol, and followed the Empire’s intellectual property law and tradition by dumping the conceptual seed for the old one into the public knowledge pool, so that any idiot with an unfiltered extranet connection and an unchained nanoforge can run off as many copies as they want, no charge.

But that was an issue for two years ago.

Today’s issue is that, courtesy of the Means of Defense COG and the Agalmic Praxis Foundation, there’s now a free-to-use-and-modify seed out there for a version of the Adventurer’s Pistol that’s self-replicating, able to construct nanoseeds which – supplied with simple power sources and raw materials – will grow more pistols, which in turn can grow more, and more, and more.

What does border security mean when to smuggle a million copies, you only have to smuggle one?

Our anarchists, lunatics and terrorists thank you for your support.

- #4, “The Top 10 Denounceable Exports: How the Empire’s Annoyed Us This Year”,
Independenf Worlds Router

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Trope-a-Day: Bullet Time

Leave a Comment Posted by on June 18, 2012

Bullet Time: Given the speed of electrophotonic hardware, it would be possible for most cybershells and many bioshells up to the current Imperial neural standard to do live-action Bullet Time, at least with current Earth guns.

Of course, in their own place and time, the bullets are a lot faster than they used to be… but it’s still useful, because there are plenty of people around who aren’t.

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Trope-a-Day: Bottomless Magazines

Leave a Comment Posted by on June 1, 2012

Bottomless Magazines: Not literally true, but due to the architecture of modern Imperial firearms, it often seems that way.  A typical example has three types of “ammunition”, in a consumables-you-need-to-fire sense: a metal-containing “magazine cartridge” that the flechettes the weapon actually fires are produced from; an energy cell to power the mass driver that makes it work; and a heat sink (containing the same high specific heat capacity thermal goo we’ll be talking about later in Deflector Shields) to give you somewhere to dump the waste heat produced by said mass driver so your gun doesn’t melt.

The flechettes are small enough and light enough (grain-of-sand size, made up for by extremely high velocity) that by and large you should never need to change the magazine, even in a whole sequence of firefights of unlikely length, although you may want to swap in a new one at maintenance time, just to be sure.  The heat sink usually only needs to be swapped out at maintenance time (the goo may eventually crystallize), because in normal operation the radiative striping on the gun should be able to get the heat dumped in between uses, but if you routinely keep up sustained volumes of fire, you can carry some spare heat sinks with you and field-swap them to let you keep it up beyond what would otherwise be the weapon’s thermal limit.  The energy cell is actually the thing you’re likely to need to swap most often, and it usually holds enough energy for a good couple of hours of firing, so while you may need to change it, you still probably won’t need to change it that often.

And of course, those magnificent legionaries in their combat exoskeletons have their guns plugged into the much larger energy and cooling reserves of their armor, so those guys really do have de facto bottomless magazines.

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Trope-a-Day: Boom, Headshot

Leave a Comment Posted by on May 29, 2012

Boom, Headshot: Life got a lot easier for snipers on this point given the amount of fancy hardware (smart targeting systems and auto-assists, predictive target analysis, off-bore firing, etc., etc.) they squeeze into guns these days, and sometimes even into the bullets.  ­Especially for snipers.  (But they still train regular weapon-users to shoot for center-mass, on general efficiency principles.)

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Trope-a-Day: BFG

Leave a Comment Posted by on May 3, 2012

BFG: Oh, several.  Let’s start with “that created by any excuse to shove antimatter rifle-grenades in your sluggun (see: Abnormal Ammo) or battle carbine and cut loose”, shall we?  There are also a variety of multibarrel miniguns, and yes, hypothetically even some that you can shove antimatter rifle-grenades into (see: More Dakka).

Specific examples would include the S-11i Mamabear, a souped-up sluggun which requires heavy bone reinforcement of most species in order to cope with the recoil, but can pull off one-shot kills on just about anything you care to name; the E40 Motherstorm, a very overpowered electrolaser that is unsafe at any setting, but very useful against mechanicals if the environment will let you use it; every single hunting weapon ever on Paltraeth, the kaeth homeworld, where the apex predators are oversized velociraptors with natural scale-mail plating; and the EI-12d Valkyrie target designator, which on its own is a tiny weak modulated laser, but which if there’s an orbital defense grid or an assault cruiser owning the local orbitals, can unleash more hell than everything else in this entry added together.

In the Fire Breathing Weapons category, the plasma-belching sets-fire-to-everything-around power-armor-mounted weapon of doom that is the KF-11 Dragonspume.  Even if its primary use is taking down cyberswarms and nanoswarms through thermal overload.

In the vehicle-mounted weapons category, that minigun-class weapon which is fitted to a G7-BU Sunhawk (see: Cool Plane) and which necessitates – as does the main weapon of the aircraft to which it is a homage – some special care in using to avoid find yourself flying backwards.

And any number of the one-off custom designs from Eye-in-the-Flame Arms, whose weapons designers (drawn, substantially, from the Cyprium-ith-Gislith line) consider the existence of any practical purpose for the weapon distinctly secondary to generating more and more extreme levels of overkill.

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Trope-a-Day: Backpack Cannon

Leave a Comment Posted by on March 2, 2012

Backpack Cannon: Found in a couple of forms.  The primary one for those of us whose body plans resemble the ones we’re used to, which is to say, vertical, involves using a backpack to hold vertically-launching smart missiles and other such guided support weapons that don’t need to be aimed in the direction they’re firing in.  (Fortunately, combat armor, powered or otherwise, avoids the problem of setting yourself on fire doing this.)

The other form is regular heavy weapons for those people with horizontal primary body axes, which isn’t every quadruped, hexaped, etc., but is a strong working majority.

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Counterpoint: Tourism

2 Comments Posted by on February 28, 2012

My colleagues have spent most of this issue telling you all the conventional reasons why you ought to visit the Empire: the outstanding natural beauty, the many places of historical significance, the music, the food and wine culture, the chance to experience their literary, gaming, and entertainment culture up close, or even just to witness all the eccentricity on display.

I’m here to tell you why you shouldn’t.

Firstly, it’s all so wretchedly anodyne. For a land notorious for its decadence – and it is decadent – it has all the bohemian credibility and counterculture of a consciously-designed theme park. Something about Imperial libertism has converted every imaginable vice from drug parlors to autophagy restaurants into friendly, commercial experiences that simultaneously defang the shock one might rightly feel at some, and robs the others of even the slightest frisson of transgressive pleasure.

Second, one of my colleagues mentioned, when discussing how safe the Empire is to visit thanks to its ubiquitous law enforcement, the to-be-avoided experience of collecting a half-dozen on-the-spot fines for littering on your first day there. Well, while the Imperial legal system is notoriously rigid, that’s not the true visiting-the-Empire experience. That would be discovering that due to the equally uncompromising use of reputation networks and the near-complete lack of any public-privacy or antidiscrimination laws, you’ve been deemed Officially Not Polite Enough to customer service staff and are paying 120% over market for everything.

Then there are the weapons. Yes, we know it’s just the local political climate – and incidentally, unless your idea of a pleasant holiday is a knock-down drag-out argument, don’t use that word or any of its derivatives; it’s almost reflexive – but everybody, everybody is carting a gun and probably a sword around, too! That they make a point of how low their rate of violent crime is compared to the Worlds’ average does not make this look any better; given that, why would well-adjusted people need to carry all that hardware around?

But most of all, it is the subtext of the entire experience. In small doses, it’s not so bad, but on any extended visit, the sheer flawlessness of the place starts to hurt the eye.

We all want to make our worlds better, our lives better, our selves better. But there’s a point beyond which further improvement is counterproductive.

And this point comes well before I start looking around desperately for any scrap of litter, any accumulated dirt, any stain, crack, or hole, any building – not acclaimed as historical – with some signs of wear on it, any traffic that’s not moving with exacting regularity, or just one single solitary person who is not one of the eldritch-beautiful people.

There’s no fuzziness to the Empire at all. No soft edges, no comforting blur, nothing that’s been permitted to be less than its idealization, and the result is a place that is profoundly disquieting for those of us from locales with more realistic expectations.

And if disliking that makes me an “entropist”, well, that’s why I won’t be going back.

- from the Empire-centric special edition of Worlds Traveler magazine

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Trope-a-Day: More Dakka

2 Comments Posted by on February 25, 2012

More Dakka: While, by and large, they are not found on normal battlefields, those wonderfully clever people at various research and development establishments have gone a long way towards the wonderfully dakkalicious, both through sheer scale and through quantities of fire.

Skipping over the more normal options available and actually used – even the IMS standard IL-15i Battlesystem, the standard-issue assault rifle/shotgun/SMG/anti-material sluggun/grenade launcher/missile launcher combo-pack, offers a respectable quantity of dakka – let’s just look at a couple of proposals, here:

On the one hand, for example, is the not-yet-built-or-engineered proposal for using the Dyson bubble at Esilmúr as a fleet killer, with the addition of a perfectly normal wormhole pair, one end of which would be axially mounted on a regular lighthugger – which would be quite the weapon when the entire output of the Esilmúr sun was magnetically focused down the wormhole using the harvesting arrays in reverse.  You could melt planets with that – although it’s probably impractically slow to actually get in position, the speed of light being what it is.

On the rather more practical hand, of course – well, thinking of things you can assemble from modular components, consider that a sluggun can double as a bore-compatible grenade launcher, that multibarrel/Gatling slugguns do exist, and so do antimatter grenades.  In short, you can assemble – using off-the-shelf components – a device which will let you high-rate (as in, thousands of rounds per minute) cycle-fire mini-nukes full auto!  (What you could possibly realistically want to use this piece of comical overkill on, and how exactly you’d go about surviving firing it, never mind paying for the ammo, are left as exercises for the reader.)

Nonetheless, it’s never enuff.

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Trope-a-Day: Mugging the Monster

1 Comment Posted by on February 18, 2012

Mugging the Monster: Oh, this happens all the time.  Mostly with tourists, in either direction.

Well, I say tourists, when I mean “people visiting the Empire with crime in mind”, which does happen occasionally due to their “just turn up” visa policy.  Such people – on the occasions that they make it through the alethiometric screening – almost always find themselves on the wrong end of Everyone Is Armed with considerable prejudice and usually fatal result.

Also happens fairly often with Imperial tourists elsewhere, given both that martial arts of various kinds are part of normal education in the Empire, and that they often take a… less compliant attitude to various people’s restrictions on the means of self-defense, and indeed other-defense.  (And who, even if they don’t bring their own weapons, or build them on the spot [see Hyperspace Arsenal], can more than likely kill you with their brain [see Psychic Powers].)  Such incidents are an ongoing headache for the Ministry of State and Outlands and an ongoing revenue stream for such specialized travel insurance/mercenary/retrieval consortia as Wolfhound Emancipations, ICC.

Also happens on a rather bigger scale.  See the Burning of Litash, and in a general sense, Disproportionate Retribution and Make an Example of Them.  And, of course, Q-ships.

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Trope-a-Day: Everyone Is Armed

2 Comments Posted by on February 15, 2012

Everyone Is Armed: Due to cultural tradition and the mutual agreement in the Imperial Charter that you will defend the rights of other citizen-shareholders as if they were your own, played very straight in the Empire.  (See also: Guns in Church and Apathetic Citizens.)  It’s actually a not inconsiderable social faux pas not to be armed (for the traditional fashion, see Choice of Two Weapons), in fact, especially when you go calling on someone.

(The Empire’s spectacularly low rate of violent crime, even in the pre-Transcend days, had a lot to do with the lack of people who were that (a) insane or (b) completely unable to grasp the concept of, or (c) recognize a force majeure when they saw one; much the same goes for why their military forces aren’t the only reason people are reluctant to consider invading.)

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Trope-a-Day: Guns in Church

2 Comments Posted by on February 14, 2012

Guns in Church: Averted in the Empire, in the direction that there is pretty much no inappropriate place to take a pistol, reasonably compact carbine, or either or both of the two swords, except for technical reasons, specifically including banks, grocery stores, airports, starports, in transit, in school, in court, in government buildings, or even attending the Court of Courts, and all the temples.  (Even that of the eikone of peace, who knows perfectly well where peace comes from, and that disarmament is not it.).  On, of course, the perfectly reasonable grounds that if you’re going to acknowledge people’s right to defend themselves and others, you have to acknowledge that that includes having the means to exercise it.

In fact, you’re likely to get in more trouble by not carrying one, since that makes you look like a pacifist or other shirker of their social duty – the one explicitly called out in the Imperial Charter, concerning defending your fellow soph’s rights as your own – which is why you find gun stores at most ports of entry, to permit visitors to comport themselves like civilized sophonts.

Heavier weapons may raise a few more eyebrows, and while it’s still not perfectly polite, are much less likely to result in gross offence should you ask someone to leave them in their vehicle.  (Doing this with the standard personal weapons, inasmuch as it’s telling someone that you won’t trust them until they render themselves harmless, is very much a serious insult.  You can insist on disarmament on your property, nonetheless, but the social consequences… ouch.)

The rest of the Associated Worlds, of course, can vary substantially.

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Trope-a-Day: Sword and Gun (also, Bow and Sword in Accord)

1 Comment Posted by on February 12, 2012

Sword and Gun: As they say, it’s a flexibility-maximizing classic for those who find it easy to handle a weapon with one hand (and, y’know, there are some biomods that do that).  It’s usually pistol and the longer of the Two Swords for formal dress, and pistol/carbine and the shorter in its utility/fighting knife role (and yes, there are plenty of people who will say that any legionary who goes into battle without his sword is improperly dressed) when dressed for combat, but either way, this is how a lot of people roll.  In the old days, this was sometimes done as Bow and Sword in Accord, with a hand-clockbow in place of the pistol.

And, of course, there’s no rule that says you have to use any kind of conventional blade on that sword…

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