Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

Basically all that is is a round that penetrates into the target then explodes. Pretty simple round and one of the earliest anti-armor rounds aside from a solid kinetic penetrator.

Simple but can be effective against some targets.

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Such as body armor (powered or otherwise) or light materiel like a jeep or transport chopper.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

More or less. It would depend on the rounds ballistic cap composition and velocity vs the targets armor composition. It should be ok for most light hard armor though.

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I'd figure it would suck against hard cover though. Insufficient mass/poor design in order to penetrate hard cover like brick walls.

Light cover such as sheet metal or plywood? Would go right through it.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

The original use was for piercing naval warship armor and later tank armor. This is the original AP shell aside from a solid slug like projectile.

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So let me get this straight. Modern SAP-HE ammunition designed for anti-materiel and anti-personnel use is no different than 1940 standard APHE? I had thought the designs were intended for partial penetration that the shell wouldn't hold together well enough and would collapse partway in about the same time the explosive went off. Thus reduced armor penetration on the whole against heavy armor but vastly increased damage against light materiel and personnel targets.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

High Explosive Incendiary/Armor Piercing Ammunition

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be a case on The First 48

Taira: The Raufoss is technically not a SAP round though. It's explosive goes off on contact with a hard enough surface vs penetration and detonation. It is more accurately called a HEIAP round. It is a fairly unique round design.

Tom: Pretty much yeah. There was a big balancing act in round design with penetrating capability vs explosive power. The lack of performance against heavy armor is what helped drive other AP ammo tech. For example the various kinetic penetrator rounds including the Squeeze Bore adaptors and their ammos. This also helped give rise to the HEAT round.

However SAP HE rounds are WWI old and replaced the earlier AP shells such as the Palliser Shot, a solid slug projectile.

The big naval shells had more body then bursting charge and relied heavily on their ability to pierce into the target before detonating. The modern SAP HE rounds have less penetration powered by comparison but have more HE filler. They are meant ,as you noted, for anti-material and lighter armored targets. Think various auto-cannon rounds for example.

The early SAP HE shells were just a thick walled shell with a bursting charge in the base. Later they would get a softer metal ballistic cap to improve ballistic performance roughly around WWII.

The Bolter Shells fired by the Space Marines in WH 40K would be SAP HE rounds for example. Delayed impacted penetrating shells using advanced fusing.

Check out this 1 Check out this Feb. 1945 Pop Sci Article. It briefly details the difference between a Stand AP(HE) AKA SAP-HE shell vs a HEAT shell on the 2nd page. Also man magazines have changed a lot. Neat look into the past.

Advanced versions may have variable or multi-function fusing. Bofors has a smart 40mm shell that does just that. I think I shared it earlier. Multiple functions with just one shell and fuse set.

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A 360 degree high fidelity trainer for your 20 minutes into the future needs.

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Youtube'd

edited 28th Jan '14 4:39:16 PM by TairaMai

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be a case on The First 48

Neat. Needs a way to walk in place without moving around that space though.

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• Chaff in space link 1

• Link 2

Both are .mil links, public release.

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be a case on The First 48

Wow those are some dated documents. Complete with hard to read digitized notes.

Driverless Military Heavy Trucks Pretty impressive. This system could feasibly work with hardened mounts for the view and control apparatus on armored vehicles and other ground combat transport.

Granted this is a commercial it does give me an interesting idea. Small individual drones for scouting/recon/targeting assistance/spotting. Launch it from a small bay that can send or retrieve carry a few on board because well shit happens.

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I've had an idea: Armored Cars.

What would your take on a futuristic one be?

I have one in one of my works called the Skirmisher UCV *

. Form-wise it's a 4-wheel armored car inspired by the Eland Mk VII used in the Angolan Civil War and South African Border Wars. Armored enough to be heavily resistant against small arms fire even handheld beam and plasma weapons (but not immune to damage) and can survive small scale explosives like grenade launchers but not enough to survive a direct hit by tank fire or other heavy weapons.

It comes in three configurations: Cavalry, Assault and Air Defense (AD).

Cavalry: The Cavalry configuration of the Skirmisher is the most common variant. Armed with a single 40mm autocannon firing Composite-HE rounds at a rate of 220-240 rounds per minute. Additionally is armed with pods containing Viper Lightweight Missile Systems. Viper missiles can be fired in salvos of up to four before internal reload and can be either dumb-fired or locked on to either land or air targets. Viper missile damage is not sufficient to destroy heavily armored targets taking more than four missiles to do so.

Note: Best tactics for taking on armor are to stay moving and either ripple fire missiles at the target (praying you don't get hit in the process) or salvo all four in quick succession ideally from ambush and long range and finish it off with sustained cannon fire until destroyed.

Assault: Heavy direct fire variant of the Skirmisher (think Stryker MGS or the Eland 90). 90mm magnetically accelerated tank gun firing Composite-HE rounds at high velocity. Fire rate is one round per two seconds. This variant can destroy another Skirmisher (or most other light and medium armored vehicles) in a single hit. Has a .50 cal coaxial machine gun (750-900 rpm) for use against infantry particularly close in.

Air Defense (AD): AD variant of the Skirmisher intended for forward short range air defense. Armed with a 25mm rapid fire Gatling cannon (1200 rpm sustained fire, 3600 rpm alternate mode) and Sunburst surface to air missiles. Sunburst missile system can independently lock onto, track and fire upon up to eight separate airborne targets. Most aircraft are destroyed in a single round. This variant also carries onboard radar that can locate and track all nearby aircraft.

edited 7th Feb '14 8:43:51 AM by MajorTom

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

Futuristic would depend on the setting. It will have armor resistant to common small arms fire and some heavy weapons fire. It may or may not sport heavy weapon in turret, pintle, turretless mount, or remote mount.

Very likely to have varying levels of automation most likely for driving and maybe targeting and engaging.

It could have anything from mundane propulsion to being a flying vehicle. I kind of like the Hammer's Slammers approach.

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I thought the same thing that's why I thought the aforementioned Skirmisher being a One Man Crew. Many of the things aboard are automated.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

I was also thinking along the lines of the armiy's armed MULE UGV. There was also an experimental UGV that was basically a robotocized IFV. I think it is The Black Knight. The Germans have an experimental version of the Wiesel that is basically a UGV as well.

I would see IFV/AFV becoming blurred or indistinct from each other. Since you no longer need a crew compartment and could cram the stuff that drives, aims, and shoots into a much smaller space the only real difference between an AFV vs an IFV would be what it holds in the open space. Ammo and supplies vs troops in this case.

Automated mobile artillery is one of those really useful fields. Everything from movement plans to fire plots and fire missions is automated. Use something similar to the Dragon Fire II automated mortar system for example. It requires the absolute bare minimum of human interaction to function.

You could decrease set up and tear down times with automation. Increase fire rates and accuracy without intervention of the more common human errors. Artillery would become a right terror.

Automated scouts of all shapes and sizes from something that fits in a backpack to something more like the Ripsaw Automated Light Scout Tank.

I can also see so called "Weaponized UGV's". Think a well built version of the WWII Goliath mobile mine. A remotely operated combat engineer device used to move an explosive charge where it is needed with a comparatively lower profile then the trooper.

The Army has long been tinkering with automated robotic ambulances with automated paramedic functions built into. Big enough to snatch up one or two wounded and carry them off to evac.

Check this page out That top vehicle is the Black Knight. Notice how much smaller it is then most AF Vs by comparison.

Army combat engineer drone

Another Combat engineer machine

edited 7th Feb '14 8:15:02 PM by TuefelHundenIV

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I'm a bit hesitant to jump onto the bandwagon of drone/unmanned everything however. Frank Woods expressed the sentiment in one line: What happens when the enemy steals the keys?

And it's not a matter of "never gonna happen", it's "when is it gonna happen". Hell idiot hajis in Afghanistan fucking hacked into the video feeds of Predators so what makes you think a UGV or anything like it will be immune to a more sophisticated army like the PLA or a futuristic army or alien race?

That said I do see some use in unmanned stuff (supply, sentry guns, recon units), just not as far as the drone fetishists think. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'll get proven wrong, but so far from what I've seen in a third rate conflict over the past 12 years, none of the pie in the sky expectations of unmanned anything will hold up in a real shooting war against a real formidable opponent.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

You can also steal the keys so to speak of manned vehicles.

The problem with our "hacked" predator feeds is they were not exactly encrypted and protected like they should have been. There was an article pointing out that security in regards to our predator control and remote feeds was at best laughable or non-existent. Minimal or no effort was put into them.

Now that is largely a problem of transmission reliant drones. It would be feasible to create a drone that needs no outside input and can smartly act.

You could in theory make it very difficult to interfere much less take control of a drone even if it is signal reliant. You could even make a drone have multi-modal controls. Hook up and control it by wire, remote, or an automated mode. Maybe even make them field modifiable so you can plug in a control unit inside a cargo space for one man to control it directly.

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But that gets into Terminator type concerns. How do you prevent friendly fire from those if you don't control it? All it could theoretically take is a busted or malfunctioning IFF identifier and suddenly that "smart" drone just ruined some poor private's day and they were on the same side. (Or worse, same malfunction causes them to fire on each other if there are no conventional forces in the area.)

Of course there's still the security concerns signal wise. It'll still need to "talk" to Command for objectives, orders and location data and it's that signal that could be what is misfed or "hacked" thus potentially leading to horrific blue on blue casualties. For example the "hacked" signal could order the drones to engage and destroy all biological forces in the region and the signal could still maintain credentials authorizing the orders, meanwhile the OpFor has quietly withdrawn from the area to let the carnage ensue. A tad improbable maybe but not impossible.

Of course then again, no amount of smart unmanned anything is immune to damage. EMP might be one counter, as could hidden explosives, ECM type devices or simple tactical ability of the other side for example an anti-tank gun buried under dense foliage.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

Who says it becomes a terminator? You have to try pretty hard to frag up even current gen IFF systems. Again if you make it smart enough to act and react on it's own as well as contain any number of assorted plans programmed into ahead of time you don't need a command signal. With advanced enough computing you can put that capability

I simply don't see hot battlefield hacks being any more then a Hollywood threat.

To add layers of difficulty "hacking" into an encrypted transmission signal with frequency hopping and synced encryption hopping is extremely difficult to put it lightly. Unless you have both the planned hops and the encryption and hops your not going to get very far.

You can also fool humans even more easily then you can fool a machine in the heat of a battle.

It often takes quite a bit of time and effort even with automated assistance to hack a decently protected system. Even more if there is something similar protecting that system.

EMP has practical limits. The big and powerful ones are generated by nukes and that has other issues attached to its use. Unless you are willing to use a really powerful emp which also entails a big foot print you can harden and protect against it. You can even to a certain point harden against nuke level EMP's.

You can blow up manned or unmanned machines. You can emp regular tech. They for the most part are not hugely different then regular vehicles or machines in that regard.

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Nobody, it's just an inherent risk when you have autonomous computing systems. And you and I both know the last thing a military is going to field is a completely autonomous system.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

No, the Crush Kill Destroy trope is a bad sci-fi cliche. Yeah, if it's smarter than you it can have it's own agenda. That doesn't mean a system will just suddenly start to activate KILLALLHUMANS.EXE on start up.

Genesis of the Daleks, the classic Dr Who serial showed the Daleks as designed to be fascist killing machines. Just having a machine come to the Straw Vulcan conclusion that humans need to die is silly.

edited 8th Feb '14 10:19:06 PM by TairaMai

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be a case on The First 48

^ No. The point I'm getting at is what do you do with a completely autonomous thinking warbot if it decides to say "No sir". Pull the plug? A completely autonomous system is probably self-preserving so it won't let you. Worse, unlike a single guy who you can just jump with a dozen guys and cart him off to the brig for an afternoon to cool down, an armored warbot probably has more firepower than a full squad.

Now if said warbot has no autonomous capabilities, it's just a dumb machine that only run return_fire_if_fired_upon.exe? No such risk.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

If a machine has to be that smart, it would have to be "trained" and run through simulations before being sent into combat. Or have programmed in a Restraining Bolt to make sure it does what it's told.

See the StarTrekDeepSpaceNine episode "Rocks And Shoals" for instance.

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be a case on The First 48