So I have shown in the last three installments on this topic that we will probably come up with new and inventive ways to kill each other on the battlefield of the future, and that they will probably be a little bit different that what is commonly portrayed in science fiction. Along with this lethality will have to come better protection for those using the weapons. Otherwise, the life expectancy of an infantryman will measure in the minutes, if not seconds. Now, I will diverge for a moment to talk just a moment about the history of battlefield armor. One of the reasons the Spartans held out so long against the Persians at Thermopylae was better armor. Breast and back plates of bronze, helmets, greaves, and big round shields versus the wicker armor of the Immortals. The Romans also wore better armor than most of their opponents. Armor achieved is culmination with the armored knight. The plate armor offered great protection, even though it eventually got to the point where the general effectiveness of the cavalryman was degraded. Then armor went by the wayside, though it was still effective, at least the heavier grades, at stopping bullets. It was now the time of mass conscripted armies, carrying easy to master firearms. And so it went for centuries. In World War 1 the helmet made its reappearance to protect the head against that greatest of battlefield killers, artillery. I had read a study at one time that body armor was being considered in that war, and would have prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths, if not the harder to prevent woundings. Now we come to the present, where US Infantrymen wear Kevlar armor with ballistic plates that can stop most small arms rounds. The men and women are still vulnerable on their arms, legs and lower torso. The major problem with the current armor is weight, always a precious commodity in infantry warfare. An infantryman can only carry so much, and weight of armor must result in something else being left behind. Ammo is another prime consideration, and there are very few soldiers who will not pack as much ammo as they can carry, so something else must be left behind. Heavy weight means slow movement. The solution seems to be to make the weight carry itself. And so the Army is experimenting with exoskeletons that can carry the soldier and all he packs. The main problem with exos is the power supply, they use a lot of energy, and rapidly exhaust batteries. That is something I am sure will be solved, eventually.
The future battlefield will be a hell of flying projectiles, light beams, high energy explosives, and radiation. A helmet and Kevlar vest just won’t cut it. Armor will have to evolve to cover the entire trooper, and move him at speeds at least as fast as a lightly burdened man, if not faster. Robert Heinlein introduced the solution to the problem, at least in fiction, with the powered armor of his seminal work, Starship Troopers. In its day it was groundbreaking, and has since become a common trope of science fiction. Almost everyone equips their soldiers of the future with powered armor. Why? Because it just makes sense. Even a genetically engineered soldier will die quickly in the hell of the future battlefield without protection. Khan would be dying of radiation poisoning soon after entering the future battlefield, if he wasn’t first incinerated by a swarm of particle beams. So they will have heavy armor, and that armor will enhance their strength to allow them to have the ability to carry it. From there it just makes sense that the armor would have many times the strength needed to just carry it, allowing the soldier of the future to carry more gear. Flying, or at least hovering over the ground, increasing speed of movement, is also a given, whether it be from rocket propulsion or something yet to be developed but much more advanced. Of course flying around is not always a good idea either. Hovering twenty feet off the ground would probably make the soldier the most noticeable target around, but not for long. What about force fields? If such a thing can be developed, and beside the electromagnetic fields we already know about it does not seem likely, given our current stare of knowledge, there would still be limitations. Things will still penetrate and burn through. Armor and force field combinations would be the best, if such could be developed. And of course the suits would have other features to enhance the survivability of their wearers. Built in medical systems, sensor suites, deployable scout robots, as well as the nanotech within the body of each infantryman. They could still be killed. Even nanotech won’t save a man with a quarter meter wide burn hole through the center of his chest. There may be exceptions to that as well, which I will discuss in a future blog entry. Invisibility fields could also prove useful, maybe not for total concealment, since sensors would surely be developed to pierce them, but as a way to reduce enemy acquisition of targets. Anything that buys the infantry precious seconds to maneuver through the open without being destroyed would be useful.
And of course as a result of this protection, weapons will get better at destroying armor. That’s been the game of warfare since the beginning of recorded history. An example of this is tank warfare, in which the infantry acquires new weapons to destroy tanks, and new tanks are developed with heavier armor to defeat those antitank weapons. No armor would long be impervious to enemy weaponry, unless that enemy were complete idiots. It probably wouldn’t protect a soldier from a close burst nuclear, antimatter or kinetic weapons dropped from space, but proper tactics would ensure that casualties were at a minimum. It’s all about beating the odds and having enough left to fight back.
I use powered armor in all of my far future military scifi. Some would ask why? Isn’t that just copying someone elses idea? To me that would be the same as not using swords in Sword and Sorcery, or tanks in military stories. It just makes sense that such protection would be developed. The one name for soldiers on a future battlefield without good protection is Dead. Near misses by some future weapons would kill such soldiers, while an armored soldier would need a direct if not sustained hit (and with some weapons sustained would be the word). In some situations a light stealth body suit would serve, infiltration missions and raids for example. In others systems with no electronic signatures might be best. But putting lightly or unarmored troops up against soldiers in heavy battle armor would be as wasteful as sending a battalion of highly trained Airborne Rangers into a frontal assault against an entrenched mechanized infantry. Or as George Patton said when watching Afrika Corps soldiers walking into an artillery barrage, that’s just a waste of good infantry.
infantry weapons
All posts tagged infantry weapons
In parts 1 and 2 of this entry we discussed future infantry weapons as represented by projectile weapons, explosive devices like grenades, a short sojourn into blade weapons, and then on to a staple of science fiction, the laser. In this entry I will discuss other energy weapons, such as particle beams, something already possible today in a somewhat weak form, and other, more fanciful weapons. The first thing to discuss is just what the hell is energy? In scifi movies it is colored light that flows like water. Creatures of great power are said to be made up of pure energy. In fact, except for photons, which are massless, and neutrinos, which may or my not have a tiny bit of mass, all other energy is made up of fast moving particles of matter. Remember the E=MC2 formula, which tells you how much energy you can get out of a given quantity of matter. Not colored light, and not really anything I can see a creature made out of, since fast moving particles, and we’re talking really fast, don’t really suit themselves to sitting around as a blob of color. A book I have recently read on particle physics seems to state, at least to my layman’s sensibilities, that anything that has no mass has to travel at the speed of light, and anything with mass can’t go that fast. So energy is photons or fast moving particles. Even an electromagnetic field is made up of something.
The first weapon I will talk about is the disintegration beam, a staple of science fiction. You know, you fire the beam, the person glows for a moment, and then they are gone, as in there is nothing left of them. Or, if the effects budget is low, they simply disappear. Problem is, there is a thing called the conservation of mass and energy, meaning the stuff just can’t go away, like toxic waste dumped in a river. Unless you are using negative matter, which is really just hypothetical at this point, the mass has to go somewhere. Where it is likely to go is a mass of very fast moving particles, which results in a very big boom where the target once was. The original phaser was said to turn matter into energy, not a healthy proposition in close combat. In the original movie War of the Worlds, the alien rays suppressed the atomic forces holding matter together. Again, very pretty in the movie, but very bad in reality. Now maybe a beam that converted a tiny amount of matter to energy could be used as a close in weapon, blowing apart the target. Lary Niven had a disintegration beam in his Known Space series that was kind of a gentle weapon. It turned off one of the charges and left dust in the aftermath. He had some scenes where someone being hit by the beam had time to get under cover with the loss of some skin.
There was a lightning gun in District 9 that was some kind of electron beam, taking us into the realm of particle beam weaponry. Electrons, in my opinion, are not the best particles, and I think there are too many ways to defeat that beam through insulation or channeling of energy. In the movie it caused bodies to explode, but the fluids should have been superhot, burning everyone they touched, another thing we will get into later on. I don’t think this kind of weapon can penetrate the combat armor of the future, and so is a non-starter.
Sonic weapons are the next entry. Sound can be used to stun, and to cause people to lose control of their bowels, and in some applications may actually cut through hard surfaces. Sound could be the weapon of choice for police operation in atmosphere, when stunning the target is the objective. In vacuum it does not work, and against armored suits I see little utility for this kind of weapon. So maybe as a good non lethal to handle riots and other civil disturbances, to bring down criminals, but not as a standard infantry weapon.
Which brings us to particle beams. Today we can generate beams of protons that have sufficient energy to knock down a missile. But they are big clunky things, too large to be carried. That may not always be the case, and eventually we may have heavy particle beam rifles, and even pistols, if the accelerators can be made small enough. In The Deep Dark Well and its sequel, To Well And Back, the heroes use a particle beam which does not contain the accelerator. The accelerator is at another location, and the matter is transferred to the weapon through a wormhole. Now, unless making wormholes becomes an efficient and energy cheap process, I don’t see this becoming a standard infantry weapon.
So what kind of particles can we use? Protons would seem to be the best, as they can be accelerated in a magnetic field and are heavy enough to pack a lot of energy. The problem with protons is they repel each other, causing the beam to widen over short distance (say kilometers to thousands of kilometers). This would not really be a problem in close in infantry combat. But they can also be repelled by a sufficiently strong positive magnetic field. So we strip the charge off the proton at the last second and send a beam of neutrons at the target. They are slowed a bit but still pack a punch. Or we could just send fewer neutrons into the target and short circuit their nervous system. I had read years ago that it took the same amount of energy as what propels a forty-five slug to propel sufficient neutrons to kill a person. And it’s a really messy way to go. But I feel that the armored suits of the future will be able to handle a low dose of neutrons, and anything that gets through can have their damage repaired by nanotech. So a high dose of neutrons, enough to burn through armor, seems to be the way to go. Antimatter is another possibility, antiprotons. Not a lot of them, that is a prescription for suicide. But a small amount, as long as the action is not in a realy thick or particle filled atmosphere. And there is the possibility of negative matter, if such really exists. It could burn through matter, even really tough superhard matter. I see negative matter more used for cutting through things that are in the way and need to be breached. The last problem I see with particle beams is the recoil. They are shooting a beam with mass at extreme velocity, which means there is recoil the other way. So the beam would have to be limited in how much mass it puts out or its velocity, if being used by someone without a suit, or have to depend on the armored suit to absorb the recoil, unless some other method can be developed to absorb the force. Of course use for personal combat, the lower powered weapon would be fine, while, if used for heavy combat with other suits, of course the user will have a suit as well.
What about vaporizing the target, something that the newer Trek has opted for, since even they have realized that turning a hundred kilo body into energy was a bad idea? Enough energy could vaporize a body. I’ve done the math, and reasonable sized weapon could turn a human body to vapor without shooting the user to the moon. Of course, there is all that pesky superheated steam that used to be the body to deal with. Not a good idea in a closed room and if the weapon bearer is not wearing some protective gear. Bad burns at least, and burned to death as a distinct possibility. The other question would be, why bother? A lot of energy might be needed to burn through a suit, but whatever was left when it got through would surely char broil the occupant. And an unarmored opponent with a big hole in him and the flesh around if cooked is just as dead as one converted to vapor. In Exodus I use a particle beam (in one killing) and a laser (in the other) to vaporize bodies, not even leaving the DNA, because the murderer didn’t want the police to know who the victims were, at least not for sure. Otherwise, vaporization is just a waste of energy, and does not leave a clean murder scene.
Next segment will talk about the protection the warriors of the future are sure to want. Protection that give them at least the same chance of survival against the high energy weaponry of the future as current infantrymen, with Kevlar helmets and ballistic plates in their vests, have against current weapons. Or enough to allow most of the infantry to survive long enough to fulfull the mission.
In part one of this blog entry I discussed projectile weapons, which may still be a factor in infantry warfare for many centuries, maybe even into the next millennia. Nothing at all like our projectile weapons, they will instead use magnetic propulsion to achieve the great velocities needed to penetrate future armor. They may also be explosive, or have the capability to explode on contact. Shaped charges or superhard penetrators may aid in armor penetration. So what about other explosive shells? We use grenades today, both thrown and propelled. In World War 2 the rifle grenade was a fixture of many battles, allowing the infantry to use explosive charges against both other troops and armored vehicles at range. And today the grenade launcher is commonly used, firing a small shell with much greater range and accuracy than a thrown object. A couple of years ago I saw a grenade the size of a twelve gauge shell, fired from one of those shotguns using a drum magazine. That is the way I think I will go, with smaller grenades that can be fired from devices built into rifles, or possible rapid fire from a dedicated launcher system. The explosives we use today will not suffice, and we will either have to develop more powerful chemical explosives, or something else. One possibility is antimatter. Now before anyone freaks out about the use of antimatter, remember, in very small quantities it is not the continent destroying bomb of Star Trek. One atom of antihydogen, an antiproton, combining with one proton, would not even be noticeable. And it can be scaled up from there, until we could have any possible charge, from a firecracker up to a large conventional bomb. Of course there is the danger inherent with antimatter. It takes power to contain antiprotons in a magnetic field. Ammo sitting around might go off spontaneously if it runs out of power. Some kind of warning device would have to be incorporated.
In Exodus I use a crystal matrix battery as a power source, feeling that chemical batteries would not suffice for storing the energies needed for emergency functioning of large military vessels and vehicles. These same batteries, or whatever they come up for real to solve the problem, could probably be rigged to release all of their energy in a burst, like a grenade. One advantage to this might be the programing of the grenade to go off with a particular force. A small charge for a single target, like that needed to stun a single soft target such as a terrorist. Or maximum charge against hard targets or groups. Hand grenades might still in use, with the same programmed charge as the propellant grenades. They won’t have the range of the propelled weapons, though being thrown by a soldier in a strength enhancing armored suit might give it quite a bit of range. Will weapons like mortars be practical as organic support weapons? We can already track them on radar today, and methods are being developed to knock incoming shells down with lasers or sound, so they may become obsolete. Or, using some futuristic countermeasures, they may be able to get through to the target.
We have drones today that can loiter in the air for hours before seeking a target. In the future drones may be the answer to indirect close support weapons, though being nowhere near the size of what we use today. Drones the size of birds could be used for surveillance, and then sent in to attack when needed. Or better yet, insect sized pizzoelectric drones could saturate an area, sending back the sights and sounds of the battlefield. And when needed they could be vectored in to a target, in dozen, hundreds or thousands, they could provide a satisfactory assault on a target. Infantrymen could carry containers of insect or smaller drones to release when needed. The major problem with the smaller robots would be vulnerability to EMP, background and aimed, so the small robots would probably be carried in shielded containers until needed.
What about blade weapons? Not swords, though Larry Niven had a contraption called a variable blade that was a strand of monomolecular wire held in a stasis field, capable of being deployed a meter or a hundred meters from the handle. Other writers, like Ringo, use monomolecular blades (the boma blades of the Posleen) that can actually cut through armor. I don’t think a blade weapon would be of much use in normal combat, but might be useful in close in situations or as a last resort. Maybe mounted on the armor itself, like the blade weapons of the alien hunters in the Predator movies.
Which brings us to the topic of light amp weapons, lasers. Lasers have been used and misused in science fiction for decades. Thought by some to be the death ray of ancient scifi, they can be an effective weapon, with limitations. In some past TV shows lasers have been shown to be disintegration beams. Lasers basically put photons into an object and generate great heat. It’s a hole burner, though it can also be used to cut things up. In space, lasers suffer from a limit of range, as the beam does spread over distance, and spreads greatly over great distances. Also, at range, it takes time to get to a target, time in which the target can move. In close in combat neither is a problem. On the surface of a planet or the corridor of a spaceship it is beam of destruction that hits instantaneously. Modern lasers generate quite a bit of waste heat, and hopefully this problem will be solved in the future, with efficiencies approaching ninety-five percent or more. Lasers can be generated in many frequencies, across the spectrum, visible and invisible. Gamma ray and X-ray lasers would be very powerful, and would bypass some of the defenses that visible light lasers might face. Of course, lasers are invisible, unless there is a lot of dust or debris in the air, such as would be encountered on most battlefields.
Light amp could vaporize a target, a topic which will be discussed more in the section on energy weapons. Enough energy could turn soft tissues into superheated steam, and even burn bone, leaving little more than some seared chips behind. Of course the question would be, why bother? In most cases killing the target will be enough, and a soldier may want to conserve energy. A burst of light strong enough to burn a hole in the target would probably be enough. Why waste the power? A heavy weapon might use a continuous beam to burn through multiple targets, or sweep through a charge, sort of like the final protective line fired by modern machine guns. But cutting the enemy into two pieces should be enough, unless they have a very unusual biology.
The limitations of light amp? For one, even though the beam is invisible, in an atmosphere with a lot of particulate matter the beam is very visible. Even with a short burst there would still be a line linking target with firer, a shout of here I am. With a long burst it would be like a neon sign. And particulate matter, be it dust, fog or rain, would also absorb some of the beam. Lasers work best in clear atmosphere or no air at all. This might not always be the case, as some of the work the Navy is doing shows that some forms of laser may penetrate clouds just fine. The targets may have their own forms of defense to limit the usefulness of lasers. Reflective materials can defeat the beams, maybe only for a short time, time enough for the target to get to cover. Light bending fields could also defeat lasers, such as the fields being tested for practical invisibility today. Even if they don’t totally stop the beams, they may attenuate the effect enough to provide survivability for a target wrapped in sophisticated armor. If they’re just wearing red shirts? Well, then they probably get burned really badly.
Part 3 will discuss other energy weapons, like particle beams, and hypothetical weapons that act on matter in various ways (can you say disintegration beam?)
As most people who follow this blog know, I write science fiction and fantasy. In the Science Fiction arena I tend to write Military Scifi or Space Opera. I try my hardest to get the tech right, and that includes the limitations of any such tech. Sure, I make some stuff up. I would be very surprised if the eight layers of hyperspace and one of subspace from the Exodus series ever becomes fact. But with the weapons and other tech I try to stay true to fact. When possible I stay within the realms of the possible. To those who say what I write is not possible, I say, five hundred years ago people said the only way to travel on the seas was with wind or muscle power, and they would have called nuclear powered warships pure flights of fantasy. I have several books out that explore future military action, including The Deep Dark Well series and the Exodus: Empires at War series, as well as the stand alone novels The Shadows of the Multiverse and We Are Death, Come For You. Closer to our time period are The Scorpion and Afterlife. But I really like to write the far future novels, five hundred to forty thousand years in the future.
Starship Troopers, Heinlein’s masterpiece of future warfare, was probably the first military scifi novel I ever read. With its far future look at combat, especially ground combat, using the high tech powered armor that has been copied so much since (including by this writer). Heinlein really didn’t delve too far into the field of infantry weapons, though. Some projectile weapons were mentioned, as well nuclear tipped rockets and many types grenades. Perfect weapons for use against unarmored targets or ground installations. Probably not so good for use against opponents armored as they were. I will touch upon what I think will be the weapons that these kind of soldiers will use in the future. Many of these ideas come from other books, some are my original ideas as far as I know. Since I haven’t read everything there may be instances of those ideas already out there, but if I don’t know about them I still consider them original ideas. In this series of blogs I will be discussing infantry weapons, the kind of instruments used to fight on the surface of a planet or in actions to take and defend spaceships and stations. In most cases this will involve close in fighting, no more than ten kilometers apart, and most often much closer. This is not to say that an infantry soldier in powered armor can’t take to the skies and hit something fifty kilometers away. But that will be rare, and would expose the soldier to a counterattack by powerful weaponry as well. Weapons that obliterate everything within kilometers, including people in armored suits, will not be suitable as an infantry weapon. They could be used as orbital bombardment weapons, but not in a man on man fight.
Part one of this blog will concern itself with projectile weapons, part two with light amp and explosive devices, and part three with other energy type weapons. Part four will talk about what people might wrap themselves in to ensure some survivability in the environment of these kind of weapons. So let’s start off with projectile weapons, familiar today in the form of rifles, pistols and machine guns. Now, I will be the first to admit that these weapons may survive, even in their chemically powered forms, in the arenas of hunting and personal protection, though I really think other options will become available in protection and law enforcement. When I see a movie that is not post apocalyptic and is set a century or more in the future and uses current projectile weapon technology I cringe, and wonder why the writer couldn’t come up with something better. As personal protection, in the form of powered armor, improves, then projectile weapons must improve as well. The best Barrett fifty cal sniper rifle would bounce off good armor as it is forged in the future. A machine gun would simply make noise pinging its useless rounds off the armor. To get through that kind of protection we will either need a more efficient penetrator, or a greater velocity. Putting shape charges in the projectile, especially with some kind of superhard penetrator, might do the job, but I think against really good armor this would also not be the answer. But increasing the velocity of the round would increase the power to the square of the velocity. In other words, doubling the velocity quadruples the kinetic energy, the hitting power of the bullet. Chemically powered bullets probably have a limit, unless we can come up with some really powerful propellants. The answer would seem to be in the realm of magnetic propulsion, the mag rifle or railgun. Weapons could be set to send a projectile at a desired velocity. Slower for soft targets, faster for heavy armor. I doubt a weapon sending its projectile at its maximum velocity would be fast firing. It would probably be a tradeoff between velocity and rate of fire, unless it was a crew served mounted weapon. There is also the physics problem of equal and opposite reaction. If you fire a super high velocity round, like Arnold did in Eraser, the recoil is going to fling you through the air in an equal reaction the other way. Powered armor may help, the actual propulsion units of the armor compensating for the recoil. In Exodus I use grabber units (the standard propulsion units on Imperial ships and vehicles) on some of the heavy rifles to pull the barrel in the opposite direction of the recoil.
In John Ringo’s Posleen series, the humans and Posleen invaders use hypervelocity weapons that fire small pellets at an appreciable fraction of light speed. At rapid fire these things are deadly, capable of killing thousands of soft targets in a second. The fast moving rounds transfer their kinetic energy into the target with explosive results, and are capable of going through a line of targets before losing their velocity. They are essentially mag rifles of highly advanced design. But there are also self propelled projectiles in some works, like the hyper-v rockets in Ringo’s novels, a rocket using advance tech instead of propellants to get up to ultra high velocity. These things would be suit killers, as well as tank and aircraft destroyers. In the third Exodus book I introduce a sniper rifle that flings a self powered projectile that accelerates all the way to the target. There were examples of rocket rounds in the past, and may be again in the future. Smart rounds are another possibility, projectiles with propulsion, a sensor and a brain that allows them to track a target, even going around corners to track on an enemy. I think that projectile weapons will still have a place in the future, but I think that for most uses one of the more advanced weapons will come to fore. The limitations of projectile weapons are of course the need to carry ammo and a power source, the same limitations as some of the energy weapons I will discuss in the third part, or even light amp weapons, which still need a power supply. And a weapon that has terrific penetrating power would not be the first choice for defending a spacecraft, where hull penetration might be a problem.
Explosive projectile weapons, like rifle grenades, will be discussed in the next part.
