Last week we had an overview of weapons throughout history and how it's a constant game of balance and oneupmanship. Now we're looking at future weapons and Scifi stuff! There's a lot of potential and a lot of interesting ideas you can use in comics and stories. We talk about a few of these and some of our faves, as well as our own inventions. Future weapons can take all different forms, many kinds of directed energy weapons, energy propelled projectiles, satellite based weapons, drone and robot technology, autonomous weapons systems etc. Biological and chemical weapons are super scary but generally pretty useless in reality, even as terrorist weapons because they're so imprecise and uncontrollable and take a lot of work to set up and deploy. This means they will hit people who aren't your target and they also have an excellent chance of not even working at all despite all the preparation and cost, so we're not even bothering with these in the discussion. One future Scifi weapon concept that always comes up are “plasma” weapons. These are super undefined and no one really knows what they are because they can be so many things. When it comes to weapons what we mean by “plasma” is the very hot gas that has free ions so that it's electrically conductive like metal. We know dangerous plasma mostly from its use as a cutting torch in welding and also the gigantic planet sized solar flares that seem to erupt from the surface of the sun are plasma that's following the huge loop of a magnetic field projecting from the sun, because it can be controlled by magnetic fields. Given this it can be used in a few different ways as a weapon: you can use it like an explosive chemical propellant for firing bullets, you can use it as a sort of flame thrower (especially effective if you can direct it with a magnetic field), you can contain balls of plasma with magnetic fields and throw them like canon shells, or you can use the plasma as an electrically conductive medium to direct lightning bolts. Directed energy weapons are very traditionally SciFi but have only ever seen limited practical usage despite the old popularity of the “Death Ray” and lasers as weapons. They're attractive because the only limiting factor is your energy source, you don't need to carry ammunition so theoretically you can have unlimited shots, they travel at the speed of light so you can't miss, they're not affected by friction or gravity so there are no ballistics to work out either, there's also no loss in energy like there is with traditional guns where the propulsive explosion badly transfers energy to the projectile. The trouble is that they don't work very well as weapons because you need to put in a LOT of energy to do any damage over a distance because they don't work well in an atmosphere, you also have to hold it on a target for a long time. This category includes the aforementioned lasers, microwave weapons, electron beams, particle beams etc They have a lot more potential as space weapons where atmosphere isn't an issue and their lack of recoil is a huge advantage. Electrically accelerated projective weapons known as “mass drivers” are another category. They are capable to much higher speeds than traditional guns or missiles because they're not limited by the compression of gasses. In this group we have Gauss guns aka coil guns, rail guns and some other variations. They use magnetic or electrical fields to accelerate projectiles. The main advantage is speed, increased safety because they don't need dangerous propellant, and shots only limited by your electrical capacity. The disadvantages of these systems is that they're very complicated, they can't use explosive projectiles, and they have a high failure rate- Railguns are the most promising system but each time they fire they produce clouds of burning fire, which is caused by layers of metal being stripped from the rails inside them, which means they degrade very quickly and the rails have to be replaced constantly. We all know the potential of drones, but the use of autonomous self directed weapons where the drones can pick their own targets is where they become scary. Autonomous weapons are already a reality in large defence turrets on ships, around army bases, and important buildings (like the Whitehouse). They can be set to radar directed target acquisition, which they need for defence against fast moving missiles. Machine gun turrets on the defences along the DMZ between North and South Korea also work like this. Even cruise missiles are somewhat autonomous in that they can find their own way to their targets. What we're really worried about though are things like predator drones or tracked bomb disposal robots coming after us with weapons like mounted machine guns, both are possible and have been tested. Satellites have limited weapon capability, none have enough power onboard to carry useful energy weapons, while mass drivers and traditional projectile weapons ...
