MGT Only: Using the Gauss Pistol?

[coliver988]

The way to stop kinesthetic weapons like railroads or missions is with emergency weapons like plastic or fuzzy guns.

(Yeah, some of those weren't really the first -- or even third -- suggestions from auto-complete; others were from partial words... in other words, I cheated. )

kinetic, railguns, energy, plasma, fusion

the MadLibs of Traveller strike again!

 

[whartung]

I wrote the scene , it'll play out.... but there's this part of me that knows that TL14 is as far from now as now is from Rome

Yea, but this is sorta nonsense too.

Consider the ever popular story about the size of the shuttles space boosters are depended on the size of the rear end of a horse.

There's some fundamental parts of apply kinetic energy to targets that hasn't changed a whole lot even in a hundred years. The M1 Garand is pushing 80 years old and the modern battle rifle is not magnitudes better in most any way materially, save for plastic and aluminum. Put a fancy electronic site on an M1 and, boy, it catches up really fast. Cartridge development has not change dramatically, rather simply more specialized. They're still flinging lead balls via expanding gases.

Even things like air-to-air missile have not changed dramatically in the 50 years of development. Yea, we have better electronics, but the fundamentals are very similar, and the newer missiles don't actually solve new problems. The biggest change is radar direction where everything becomes an autonomous drone at some level or another and the command and control infrastructure in place to direct those vehicles.

The most obvious Traveller "big deal" TL game changer is the meson gun. You show up with a meson gun, and they show up with anything without a meson screen, it's dead. Everything is dead. Your ship is dead, your cities are dead, your lakes are boiling. Get in close enough, you're dead. The meson is THE "game changer" in the TL arms race. Surprising whoever came up with them first didn't do a crash program with them and then rush off to obliterate competing fleets before they had a chance to catch up. They're safer and more controllable than nukes and, arguably, more destructive. Plus you don't run out of them. Meson guns make implementing "General Order 24" from Star Trek child's play.

Before the meson gun, there's not much magic. Kinetic forces are still carrying the day, and that just doesn't change a whole lot over time.

 

[Baroun Tardis]

Yea, but this is sorta nonsense too.

Consider the ever popular story about the size of the shuttles space boosters are depended on the size of the rear end of a horse.

There's some fundamental parts of apply kinetic energy to targets that hasn't changed a whole lot even in a hundred years. The M1 Garand is pushing 80 years old and the modern battle rifle is not magnitudes better in most any way materially, save for plastic and aluminum. Put a fancy electronic site on an M1 and, boy, it catches up really fast. Cartridge development has not change dramatically, rather simply more specialized. They're still flinging lead balls via expanding gases.

Even things like air-to-air missile have not changed dramatically in the 50 years of development. Yea, we have better electronics, but the fundamentals are very similar, and the newer missiles don't actually solve new problems. The biggest change is radar direction where everything becomes an autonomous drone at some level or another and the command and control infrastructure in place to direct those vehicles.

The most obvious Traveller "big deal" TL game changer is the meson gun. You show up with a meson gun, and they show up with anything without a meson screen, it's dead. Everything is dead. Your ship is dead, your cities are dead, your lakes are boiling. Get in close enough, you're dead. The meson is THE "game changer" in the TL arms race. Surprising whoever came up with them first didn't do a crash program with them and then rush off to obliterate competing fleets before they had a chance to catch up. They're safer and more controllable than nukes and, arguably, more destructive. Plus you don't run out of them. Meson guns make implementing "General Order 24" from Star Trek child's play.

Before the meson gun, there's not much magic. Kinetic forces are still carrying the day, and that just doesn't change a whole lot over time.

80 years on this scale is .... not really much.

Let's try it keeping the 2000 year delta:

Let's imagine this is 2000 years ago, and we're in the tavern sitting around talking about playing "Viatorem: casus in quantum futurum!"

You've rolled up a Sky Legionare, and are looking at the weapons chart for the awesome science fiction weapons of Rome's Far Future. Based on real-world hard sci-fi technology of 23AD, you choose the ... well, rifle isn't even on the list of weapons envisioned. I mean, in 23AD they had no idea that rifles would someday be invented. There might be the HFB-13 (Homo Ferri Ballista-13) but that's just a really nice (from a TL2 perspective) crossbow.

Now take that forward: you and I, sitting here, do not have a clue what gets invented in 2000 years. We're making stuff up based on what we know, but just like Centurion Smith pictured his character charging off the sky-ship with a pilum and gladius, we picture coming off the Type-A with a caseless 10mm on our hips. I'm suggesting that we're as right about our guess on future weapons that many tech levels out as Centurion Smith was.

Even when Centurion Smith got way out there, and had a "Spear of Zeus" that shot lightning bolts, and we're talking about particle beam weapons, we're likely to still get it wrong; PAWS don't work well in atmo. Even when we stretch our brains with things like meson guns, we decades later find out the physics doesn't work quite like that and meson guns wouldn't be a thing.

But we leave them in because they're part of the story.

And that's where we end up; we make games that sound realistic and suspend disbelief based on what we think the world is like, and we enjoy the heck out of them and have this fantasy life of a galaxy where things make sense, where people of honor work to hold the Imperium together against all odds and all comers. That's the important part, and the 'hard science' is window dressing... and probably wrong.


Edit;
Crap, now I want to play "Viatorem: casus in quantum futurum!"

 

[whartung]

Now take that forward: you and I, sitting here, do not have a clue what gets invented in 2000 years. We're making stuff up based on what we know, but just like Centurion Smith pictured his character charging off the sky-ship with a pilum and gladius, we picture coming off the Type-A with a caseless 10mm on our hips. I'm suggesting that we're as right about our guess on future weapons that many tech levels out as Centurion Smith was.

I dunno, at a personal level, things we can wield, and touch, and manipulate, I think tech wise we're reaching a plateau.

The amount of energy we can personally marshal (and, at it's core, that's what personal combat is all about), whether as air pressure, chemical expansion, electrical discharge, I honestly don't see any orders of magnitude change in the near to mid-future. I think as a society, we have the fundamentals of the physical universe pretty well figured out.

Granted, I don't know anything. In many ways I'm as ignorant of the future as anyone before the wheel was invented. But based on our progression in physics and thus chemistry, material science, etc. I think we're about tapped out as to how much energy a person can carry and deploy (especially safely).

I mean, consider something like the RPG-7 and the Javelin. The Javelin is almost twice as big (from a warhead point of view) as the RPG-7. This part of what makes it more powerful. It's simply twice as big. But this limits the carry capacity for the soldier. That limit in the warhead size is advanced chemistry. I don't know how much research there is in more powerful, yet as stable explosives than what's in systems like the RPG and Javelin. But I'm betting whatever research is being done, doesn't offer an order of magnitude advancement. For many use cases what we have is "powerful enough" to where they can specialize in other ways (notably for the Javelin, in the electronics).

Look at the new XM5 rifle for the US. It's a larger, heavier cartridge, with a case that can withstand enormous pressures, but for twice the weight of the M4 5.56 cartridge, it offers 40% more energy down range. A key design of the new case is handling the higher pressures. A steel base mated to a brass body. The steel base is better designed to withstand the high pressure of the primer area (which it normally not very well supported by the action like the rest of the cartridge) to keep the higher pressures from blowing out the cartridge.

But, it comes at a cost of payload. Soldiers can carry half as many rounds now. And it should be powerful enough to defeat near term personal armor advancements, notably in composites and ceramics, as that was a primary goal for the cartridge.

We have more powerful explosives and propellants. We have better armors. But not necessarily that are usable by men. We're still limited to total payload and usefulness.

Things like the Gauss rifle use extraordinary amounts of energy. Orders of magnitudes in terms of battery density, wire stability (can you imagine the wires necessary to conduct the electromagnetic energy necessary to discharge a gauss rifle?), etc. Room temperature super conductors, perhaps, to the rescue here.

We already have problems with batteries spontaneously catching fire as it is now, they have so much energy.

Most of our tech development since Rome has been stumbling allong figuring out the fundamentals. Today, we seem to have a pretty solid understanding of at least the high level fundamentals that manifest for aptly in our physical world, at least at human scales.

The new XM5 is in no way fundamentally different from the same cartridges we were using 100 years ago. The new casing development is novel, but it's a blip on the power curve, not an order of magnitude we need to transcend this path of empowering people with power to kill each other, nor is it enough to stop being killed. Other than the case, the XM5 is just another predictable cartridge, another point on the same power curve we've been using since smokeless powder in steel tubes was perfected.

Advances to come, to be sure, but I think were plateauing the power were able to comfortably, and safely bring to bear at a personal level as human beings.

 

[Baroun Tardis]

I dunno, at a personal level, things we can wield, and touch, and manipulate, I think tech wise we're reaching a plateau.

The amount of energy we can personally marshal (and, at it's core, that's what personal combat is all about), whether as air pressure, chemical expansion, electrical discharge, I honestly don't see any orders of magnitude change in the near to mid-future. I think as a society, we have the fundamentals of the physical universe pretty well figured out.

Granted, I don't know anything. In many ways I'm as ignorant of the future as anyone before the wheel was invented. But based on our progression in physics and thus chemistry, material science, etc. I think we're about tapped out as to how much energy a person can carry and deploy (especially safely).

I mean, consider something like the RPG-7 and the Javelin. The Javelin is almost twice as big (from a warhead point of view) as the RPG-7. This part of what makes it more powerful. It's simply twice as big. But this limits the carry capacity for the soldier. That limit in the warhead size is advanced chemistry. I don't know how much research there is in more powerful, yet as stable explosives than what's in systems like the RPG and Javelin. But I'm betting whatever research is being done, doesn't offer an order of magnitude advancement. For many use cases what we have is "powerful enough" to where they can specialize in other ways (notably for the Javelin, in the electronics).

Look at the new XM5 rifle for the US. It's a larger, heavier cartridge, with a case that can withstand enormous pressures, but for twice the weight of the M4 5.56 cartridge, it offers 40% more energy down range. A key design of the new case is handling the higher pressures. A steel base mated to a brass body. The steel base is better designed to withstand the high pressure of the primer area (which it normally not very well supported by the action like the rest of the cartridge) to keep the higher pressures from blowing out the cartridge.

But, it comes at a cost of payload. Soldiers can carry half as many rounds now. And it should be powerful enough to defeat near term personal armor advancements, notably in composites and ceramics, as that was a primary goal for the cartridge.

We have more powerful explosives and propellants. We have better armors. But not necessarily that are usable by men. We're still limited to total payload and usefulness.

Things like the Gauss rifle use extraordinary amounts of energy. Orders of magnitudes in terms of battery density, wire stability (can you imagine the wires necessary to conduct the electromagnetic energy necessary to discharge a gauss rifle?), etc. Room temperature super conductors, perhaps, to the rescue here.

We already have problems with batteries spontaneously catching fire as it is now, they have so much energy.

Most of our tech development since Rome has been stumbling allong figuring out the fundamentals. Today, we seem to have a pretty solid understanding of at least the high level fundamentals that manifest for aptly in our physical world, at least at human scales.

The new XM5 is in no way fundamentally different from the same cartridges we were using 100 years ago. The new casing development is novel, but it's a blip on the power curve, not an order of magnitude we need to transcend this path of empowering people with power to kill each other, nor is it enough to stop being killed. Other than the case, the XM5 is just another predictable cartridge, another point on the same power curve we've been using since smokeless powder in steel tubes was perfected.

Advances to come, to be sure, but I think were plateauing the power were able to comfortably, and safely bring to bear at a personal level as human beings.

Well, I'm at something of a disadvantage here, since the whole premise of my position is "we don't know"
I will mention that Lord Kelvin (yes, the thermometer guy) said that we'd never have sufficent energy density in a power plant to allow powered flight.... and he was the acknowledged master of thermodyamics at the time, so people were in agreement right up until the Wright brothers first flight.

One reason we've not pushed for more energy on our infantry weapons is there's not been huge advances in body armor... and we're seeing nanomachining with graphene and other stuff starting to become a thing now. If that turns into body armor that is light weight and usable, but requires a Javelin to kill the wearer, then we're going to see change in personal weapon design. Now that change might be to use the material used in the armor in making the receiver, chamber and barrel of the new infantry rifle and loading it up with C4 or something instead of powder, or it might be Gauss weapons or ...
... or, in 2000 years, something that's as far from a rifle as a pilum is from a rifle.

 

[mike wightman]

The TL;DR - we don't know as much as you think.

Towards the middle of the 19th century physicists were pretty sure they had discovered nearly everything with just a few minor areas to pin down.
They were wrong.
The discovery of radioactivity, spectroscopy, the ultraviolet catastrophe to name but a few turned physics on its head.

The atomic theory was not widely accepted even during Einstein's miracle year, but gained acceptance once Einstein's papers from that year were more widely studied, the work of Max Planck on quantising energy, the importance of the Boltzmann equations all turned classical physics on its head. Note that Planck supported Einstein's relativity paper, but dismissed his photoelectric paper, while Boltzmann had to defend his theories vigorously especially after Ernst Mach dismissed his ideas on statistical modelling and denied the atomic model.

A classical physicist or an experimental chemist of the early 19th century couldn't even imagine these things

Modern chemisty and materials science are still not perfectly understood, but are much better modelled by quantum physics than anything that existed before.

There is so much that popular physics handwaves and hides away all the stuff that can't be explained, and some areas of physics are now religious beliefs rather than science.

There is still a lot to discover in materials technology, energy storage, magnetism, superconductors, but all will be based on the current paradigm.

A new paradigm will offer new science that we can not imagine as yet, or we would be researching it. New physics may offer gravity manipulation, the strong and nuclear force manipulation, wormhole construction, who knows what the next 3000 years will bring.

So back to the gauss rifle. The true science fiction of the gauss rifle isn't the concept, it is the energy density of the battery.
Which begs the question of if you can safely store all that energy in a gauss rifle power cell what other uses can you put those power cells to, or banks of them.

 

[Baroun Tardis]

So back to the gauss rifle. The true science fiction of the gauss rifle isn't the concept, it is the energy density of the battery.
Which begs the question of if you can safely store all that energy in a gauss rifle power cell what other uses can you put those power cells to, or banks of them.

If we had power storage that matches what a gauss rifle has, then we're looking at the electric car outperforming the ICE car in every area: range, accelleration, torque, speed, and ease of maintenance. Who cares if it takes 8 hours to charge, if it has a 5000km range?

Same thing for aircraft - might see cars go away and get replaced with personal quadcopters if batteries were light enough to make that work better. We're almost there now, but the batteries in a gauss rifle magazine would do the trick quite nicely.

 

[kilemall]

Yea, but this is sorta nonsense too.

Consider the ever popular story about the size of the shuttles space boosters are depended on the size of the rear end of a horse.

There's some fundamental parts of apply kinetic energy to targets that hasn't changed a whole lot even in a hundred years. The M1 Garand is pushing 80 years old and the modern battle rifle is not magnitudes better in most any way materially, save for plastic and aluminum. Put a fancy electronic site on an M1 and, boy, it catches up really fast. Cartridge development has not change dramatically, rather simply more specialized. They're still flinging lead balls via expanding gases.

Even things like air-to-air missile have not changed dramatically in the 50 years of development. Yea, we have better electronics, but the fundamentals are very similar, and the newer missiles don't actually solve new problems. The biggest change is radar direction where everything becomes an autonomous drone at some level or another and the command and control infrastructure in place to direct those vehicles.

The most obvious Traveller "big deal" TL game changer is the meson gun. You show up with a meson gun, and they show up with anything without a meson screen, it's dead. Everything is dead. Your ship is dead, your cities are dead, your lakes are boiling. Get in close enough, you're dead. The meson is THE "game changer" in the TL arms race. Surprising whoever came up with them first didn't do a crash program with them and then rush off to obliterate competing fleets before they had a chance to catch up. They're safer and more controllable than nukes and, arguably, more destructive. Plus you don't run out of them. Meson guns make implementing "General Order 24" from Star Trek child's play.

Before the meson gun, there's not much magic. Kinetic forces are still carrying the day, and that just doesn't change a whole lot over time.

I’d say the nuclear damper is on a par.

 

[coliver988]

From the Wikipedia: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (spoiler: I've yet to actually finish reading this, but is it interesting and worth reading) I think supports Mike Wrightman's position (and incidentally mine): we don't know what we don't know. 5000 years is a really, really long time for things to change. Even a century. Knowledge growth is not linear: there are these sudden paradigm shifts that change a lot of things is the crux of that book.

For the gauss rifle energy needs: we think of energy as something we need to store - I remember one of the Foundation books (not the original trilogy, think it was much later) where the ship got its energy from basically the quantum foam that fills the universe (basically, particles keep popping in and out of our reality). Unlimited energy. Realistic or plausible? I've no real idea, but it is definitely something outside of what we even think of now. So while Traveller extrapolates current technology, there will be technology that we've not even thought of yet to come.

 

[mike wightman]

I can't believe I have never heard of that book - it is now on its way from Amazon

Edited to add that my view on the history of science was heavily influenced in my youth by James Burke

Connections (British TV series) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

and

The Day the Universe Changed - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[aramis]

Even things like air-to-air missile have not changed dramatically in the 50 years of development. Yea, we have better electronics, but the fundamentals are very similar, and the newer missiles don't actually solve new problems. The biggest change is radar direction where everything becomes an autonomous drone at some level or another and the command and control infrastructure in place to direct those vehicles.

The last 20 years have changed how the AAM is steered... no longer is it the front fin pivot, but now a rear air brake system coupled with vectored thrust. (The forward fins are still there, but now are fixed.)

The electronics now allow datalink firing - the lock is passed from aircraft A, but the missile launched from a/c B. It has a wider spectrum, better target discrimination, better ground safety measures, better range, better speed, better turn rate, bigger bank for its shotgun... the only thing it's not improved (from a user perspective) the price. (The AIM-9 series basically is a 1-shot self-aiming shotgun on a self-guiding missile.)

As it sits, it's also pretty clearly the inspiration for the ship's missiles in CT... Tho CT, for playability reasons most likely, restricts missiles' thrust but gives it some incredible delta-V (18 Gee-Turns, vs around 900 Gee-Seconds)

The next revolution is likely to be some form of neural network where it "knows" what is and isn't a friendly. The air brake and vectored thrust are also likely to see more improvements, too.

 

[aramis]

[...] there's this part of me that knows that TL14 is as far from now as now is from Rome.

Wrong, at least for the OTU. Rome didn't exist 3000 years ago. (The 3I was not TL14 in the first civil war, in IY 650 or so; it wasn't TL15 until SRW 3I/SC in late 900's IY). 1107 is AD/CE 5625... so 3600 AP, with the last firmly not TL14 being 622. (I've only MT sources to hand.) That puts the end of ICW only about 3000 after now... and rome was founded only about 2746 years ago... (723 BC).
Your encounter is thus is as far into the future as are the height of Egypt and Babylon in our past... Much further if using M 1900...

As for the tech... Much of our tech would be usable by an Egyptian... but not repairable. Tho' I'm pretty sure an Egyptian would recognize cars as derived from wagons... and wonder where the horses or oxen are...

Now, the Egyptians were making toy gliders at least 2000 years ago, more like 3 or 4 thousand.
Also remember: Cleopatra is closer to us than to Ramses the Great. Egypt, as a cultural cluster, goes back almost to about 2700 BC (first dynasty), or just shy of 5000 years. And the Copts (a religious/cultural/ethnic subgroup) would likely be able to discern the words of the first dynasty period. The culture itself goes back further still, before the dynnasty, but that's fuzzy...

Oh, and just for real fun sniggers... late republican Rome and early Imperial rome have the first known space travel stories with other worlds... reached by flying boats... so, 2000 years ago, spacecraft were being envisaged... kind of.

 

[Grav_Moped]

This is part of the problem:

Reality is occasionally unrealistic.

Most all of the high tech stuff in Classic was either common SF material or gee-whiz stuff out of pop-sci magazines of the time. It'd be recognizable, if not necessarily comprehensible, to late-1970s military who were also SF fans.

The other part is that the OTU is a setting for a RPG that has to be comprehensible to contemporary players.

Thousands of years from now, in a distant part of the galaxy, there could indeed be weapons that use forces we cannot imagine, directed by means we cannot envision. You know, "... indistinguishible from magic."

That's not (usually) Traveller, except by referee or setting fiat.

 

[Grav_Moped]

I mean, of course the Drives and grav stuff are "magic".

On the other hand, outside of the places where the game explicitly breaks engineering and physics for playabilty and relatability, most of the really weird stuff is Ancients or suchlike ("a lizard did it.")

 

[aramis]

Thousands of years from now, in a distant part of the galaxy, there could indeed be weapons that use forces we cannot imagine, directed by means we cannot envision. You know, "... indistinguishible from magic."

That's not (usually) Traveller, except by referee or setting fiat.

The problem is, fundamental changes in the working model have largely been "proving the preconception" filling in of the Standard Model's predictions. For about 50 years now.

Astronomy is getting a few new mysteries (ORCs, certain other anomalies), and systems incompatible with current system formation models... but physics seems pretty stalled, and only the issues with Dark Energy and Dark Matter being the real mysteries that befuddle the supremacy of the standard model.

 

[aramis]

I mean, of course the Drives and grav stuff are "magic".

On the other hand, outside of the places where the game explicitly breaks engineering and physics for playabilty and relatability, most of the really weird stuff is Ancients or suchlike ("a lizard did it.")

CT has two sets of "Ancients"... we have the winged mini versions of the ST TOS Gorn (The Droyne), and we have a genuine xeno-lizard species as shown in Shadows... and we know from A12 and AM Droyn that the "Real Ancients" are in fact the Droyne...

 

[kilemall]

CT has two sets of "Ancients"... we have the winged mini versions of the ST TOS Gorn (The Droyne), and we have a genuine xeno-lizard species as shown in Shadows... and we know from A12 and AM Droyn that the "Real Ancients" are in fact the Droyne...

WHAT?

Didn’t see that coming…

 

[mike wightman]

There are a lot more issues with the standard model than you think. The standard model has become dogma, as has general relativity. At least experiments are providing evidence that general relativity is mostly correct, while standard model experiments are usually followed by re-writing the equations.

I am not saying quantum field theory is wrong, just that it is presented as a done deal and it is far from being so. Once upon a time phlogiston and the ether were uncontested scientific fact.

Dark matter exist - the neutrino is one example and there are issues with out understanding of neutrinos. We don't know how many other types of dark matter there may be.
Dark energy may or may not be a thing, JWT is re-writing the book on that one.
The Higgs mechanism is a useful theory, but there are lots of unknows, then there are tachyon fields, magnetic monopoles, dark photons all sort of wacky conjecture.

And then there is the grand daddy of science turned religion - string theory, super string theory, the super symmetry standard model.

Physics degrees teach the dogma, and if you want a research grant you toe the line. A breakthrough will not come by doing the same things over and over

 

[Spinward Scout]

CT has two sets of "Ancients"... we have the winged mini versions of the ST TOS Gorn (The ...), and we have a genuine xeno-lizard species as shown in... and we know from... that the "Real Ancients" are...

Spoilers?

 

[Grav_Moped]

Spoilers?

OMG, I've never seen that one! Yikes!

Why, no, of course my currenr PbP featuring a Type T carrying one of the small craft from the other half of that Double Adventure, and a world that has architecture from a different Adventure, has absolutely nothing to do with my amusement here.