Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

To shift gears, a quick query.

Assuming a fight against a conventional peer/near-peer foe, would there be any place for flamethrowers or derivatives? How might future flamethrowers work? What improvements might be made in order to overcome their weaknesses?

Though it'd be a bit tricky to answer, would a force using powered armour be more or less likely to use such weapons than "normal" infantry?

Flamethrowers while nasty and reasonably effective weapons to a point were left off for incendiary rockets and other incendiary projectiles.

The flamethrower is often heavy and has very short lived period of use and it is unfortunately short ranged. The trade off was the burning fuel was effective against a wide variety of targets from Tanks, bunkers, infantry in the open, fighting positions, pretty much everything short of aircraft. The fuel not only produced a steady constant hot burn, it seeped into crevices and cracks, under doors, and produced a thick choking smoke.

Contrary to popular portrayal shooting a flamethrower would likely not cause an explosion so much as a sudden venting of the pressurized gas and stabilized fuel. If it was ignited you would have a stream of fire until the pressure dropped and then a dribble of burning fuel out of the hole unless fuel level fell below the line and then it would just burn in the pack.

Users of the system were often vulnerable and high priority targets for enemy gunners, snipers, and infantry in general. They did not live long in combat in most cases.

Instead there are a few approaches used now in place of flame throwers. The first one is Incendiary Rockets like the M 202 Flash. It fires 66mm Rockets filled with Pyrophoric Gel. This is not Napalm but a different chemical mix.

Another common alternative is to use white phosphorus also a Pyrophoric agent. The typical attack variant is a dense cloud that coats the target in the substance. If you search the weapon and see a high flying cloud with streamers/smoke trails in large pieces that is a smoke shell which uses white phosphorous impregnated silicon sponges to produce dense smoke.

The next variation on it is the Thermobaric/Fuel Air Blast weapons. While they have a powerful blast effect, they also have a strong intense thermal property and are often considered a type of thermal weapon. Examples are usually rockets like the Russian Made RPO-Shmel A or the USMC SMAW NE rockets. There are some supposed examples of 40mm Thermobaric grenades meant to act as a intense blast grenade for use against rooms and entrenched enemies.

Incendiary rockets have been popular for a while but from around WWII on they were more effective. The Germans had a version they fired from their 'Walking Stutka' launchers.

So just from that list we have Pyrophoric Gels kind of like napalm but they self light and often have accelerants like aluminum and magnesium impregnated into the mix.

White Phosphorous which is a old and well known incendiary agent. Often found in self igniting powder forms.

Finally the Thermobaric variety which add a very powerful and intense blast with a strong thermal flash.

The gel and the Thermobaric would be my two choices. The Gel will likely raise the temperature of the target area more effectively as it keeps burning longer. The Thermobaric is great for slapping the shit out of something giving everything a powerful scorching effect. Both would work well against infantry in general.

edited 1st Apr '14 4:36:54 PM by TuefelHundenIV

I can see flamethrowers having great utility use in everything from countering biological or nanotech weapons to scaring the local fauna but that's probably not your question.

Flamethrowers themselves aren't terribly effective weapons. Yes, they're incredibly deadly. Yes, they can root out fortified positions effectively. Yes, they terrify the enemy like nothing else. This doesn't make them very good. Bullets are just as deadly as fire. Hand grenades can wipe out an entire room in an instant. Just about battle is terrifying on one level or another.

Most of all, flamethrowers have inherent drawbacks. The first is range. Liquids, even dense ones, tend to scatter in the air. This shoots surface area through the roof and thus air resistance. More are resistance, more velocity drop off. Second, even the huge flamethrowers used in WW 2 tended to suffer from ammunition issues. Flamethrowers would eat through fuel like an american through fast food. There are tails of WW 2 flamethrowers in which the user had to keep running back to get another flamethrower and those designs were gigantic. Forth, flammable liquid is tricky to deal with. With high explosives you can redirect the blast out and away. With napalm, you're only option is to drop it and run.

Lastly, most of what you can do with a flamethrower you can do with a grenade launcher with incendiary rounds.

They do use flame throwers for clearing dense foliage and even severe snow and ice clearing.

Something to remember about the flamethrowers was they were typically used against targets that gunfire was ineffective. Entrenched enemies, bunkers, and armored vehicles for example.

Even hand dug entrenchments often incorporate features that defeat or lessen the effectiveness of grenades like grenade sumps. Angled walls mitigate blast and fragmentation reach as well. Flame throwers were used because the fluid would splash and seep around inside defensive positions. it could even be fired around a corner by shooting the stream at an angle at a wall in the hall splashing burning fluid down the hallway beyond.

For things like caves they could be fired through crevices, cracks, air holes, and other openings that might have natural or artificial twists and turns that blocked gun fire or grenades. The Marines also use improvised incendiary weapons such as a 55 gallon drum filled with a incendiary mix and a explosive attached. They lit the fuse and kicked into the cave mouth. It would blow and shoot flames all over the entry and down into the caves itself.

But the assessment that incendiary launched grenades and rockets have better reach is an accurate one.

If you have generally secured an area except for a bunker an armored unit or vehicle with a flame thrower could roll up and hose down the bunker with fire.

An interesting idea I once saw for fiction was drill/thrower combo. It would bore in through ship hulls, armored hatches, and similar structures. The Drill bit would open up and reveal a flamer nozzle and would then spray inside the bunker with nozzle.

Also saw a similar idea that used a shaped charge to blast a lead hole with a bursting/propelling charge then shooting incendiary gel through the gap. It was basically a limpet mine that attached to the target with some sort of adhesive or magnet clamps.

edited 1st Apr '14 6:22:19 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Don't forget about Germans on the Eastern Front in WW 2 using flamethrowers as Mundane Utility against Geo Effects (namely, melting the frozen mud immobilizing their tanks' treads after stopping for the night).

Thanks for the answers! I was already well aware that flamethrowers leave something to be desired as a weapon system. As a result, I was curious to see if they could be made less situational (the prevailing opinion is "no" it seems).

One thing I would add is that it seems incendiaries would be very effective for dealing with powered armour - strike the target with incendiaries of your choice, and even if said armour is tough enough to prevent serious damage (unlikely) it will probably cook the wearer alive. It would also be impractical for the powered armour to have a fire suppression system or other means of putting out the flames. The closest to what I'm thinking of that I've seen in fiction (though only loosely and on a vastly different scale) is Battletech and how incendiary weapons can cause the heat level of a mech to shoot up excessively with unpleasant effects.

My only query would be that although gel would probably be relatively trivial to scale down to an infantry scale (incendiary grenades for example), I'm not sure how you would make thermobaric weapons smaller. Then again, that's because I'm more familiar with air dropped FAEs than other systems (though I am aware of Russian rocket artillery with incendiary warheads).

Cool! Another possibility would be a kinetic penetrator that punches through the target's armour and then releases the gel into the interior. That might be a better way of conserving as much of the incendiary as possible, though it could be less effective against more heavily armoured targets.

@Entrenchments, etc.:

I see, very interesting. Would there be any way to create pyrophoric gel/incendiary weapons that have a similar effect to flamethrowers (scouring hardened targets that are hard to get into) whilst retaining the advantages of these systems (accuracy + greater range)?

Only idea that occurs to me is a grenade that after travelling a short distance sprays gel at random (this wouldn't be due to any internal mechanism so much as the forces acting on the grenade). Might work best with a UGL system due to the greater forces involved and the fact the grenade can go further before triggering. The idea is that it would still manage to get those hard to reach areas whilst being simpler and safer to handle. For maximum coverage the gel should probably be less viscous than normal.

edited 2nd Apr '14 9:50:35 AM by Flanker66

Thermobaric grenades are done the same way you do the bigger thermobarics just with a smaller oomph by comparison. All they are is a scattering charge which scatters a payload of aerosolized explosive or fuel into the air which is this then detonated/ignited by a second charge giving you the blast.

Rockets might be able to do what the flamethrower did ie splash burning substance in a decently wide area especially with an air burst type weapon.. With incendiary grenades you could set a room on fire and you could easily carry several of said grenades to set fire to several rooms.

There have been two grenade sized projectiles that use it. One in the 40mm For NATO gear and one in the 25mm for the US Army XM25 CDTE which had its funding cut last year right around when the Army was going to ok it for full production and upgrade programs.

edited 2nd Apr '14 12:31:37 PM by TuefelHundenIV

However they make poor armor against things like shells, explosions, bullets, shrapnel, and fragments. Kind of a damned if you do damned if you don't.

Well Chobham armour certainly isn't monolithic is it? You've just got to remember to keep the aerogel layer between the actual armour and any delicate equipment.

Aerogel is brittle and fragile and it takes a little hand pressure to destroy it, its not really going to work as an armor component. Composite armor is made of far more robust materials.

They do get used as insulators though. Maybe if you put on the inner layers it can stop most of the heat. It supposedly doesn't stop radiant heat. I would also wonder how it would react to something like napalm.

edited 2nd Apr '14 6:04:05 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Well most of the heat soaking through it going to come via conduction, so that's not a problem.

There will be a fair bit of radiant heat as well especially from something as intense as the pyrophoric gel for example. The gel can cause intense heat burns and injures up to a meter away from radiant heat alone. Most of that intense heat is because it has an aluminum compound as an accelerant and literally burns white hot.

Soaking a target in said agent will definitely get radiant heat through. Never mind it would be likely that not everything is so insulated and being a gel it has a good chance of getting into those spaces. It is pretty much impossible to perfectly protect every surface and area. There will be vulnerabilities somewhere that can be taken advantage of.

Perhaps a silica aerogel compounded with say something like aerographite which has really good resistance to compression or maybe even aerographene. Possibly improve its durability. It can bear some wait and strain but sudden hard impacts tend to cause it break down. Wearing something that is going to attract regular weapons fire and suffer said impacts is not exactly the most friendly environment for such a substance. There have to be other more durable insulators that can provide some insulation and survive such impacts.

Edit: Ok I am a chowder head. The aerogels estimated melting point is 1200c. The Phyrophoric gel burns at 1200c. It would melt the aerogel. What about advanced ceramic composits in powder or solid form instead? Highly impact resistant, a form of ceramic is used as a re-entry shield on space craft, and it has a very high thermal melting point.

edited 2nd Apr '14 6:40:01 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Personally, I'd go with an outer layer of boron carbide. This will keep the insulative aerogel out of direct contact with the pyrophoric gel. Boron carbide it'self doesn't melt until 2700C so it's not at an any risk.

Stil, this just buys time. The best response is to scrape the gel off before the aerogel reaches 1200 C. Even diluting it with sand or mud would do much for survival.

So, we're back to stop drop roll

What do you guys think, how unbelievable would it be if a sci-fi verse were to have tablet P Cs powered by (around ten) rechargeable AA batteries each?

Too thick.

Well, yeah. A 2-by-5 pack would be quite thick. My primary issue is the fact that those batteries would be drained quite fast if the tablet would be a high-performance one^note As it is, it would have wifi and enough processing power to run stuff like a Sega Saturn emulator but HD videos would be beyond its capabilities; it also has an internal SSD and USB ports. It's possible to plug the tablet into AC but it won't recharge the batteries; it merely stops the tablet from draining them. To recharge, you need to pop out the entire battery block, fish out the AAs and recharge them with an external charger, kinda like the ones we have in real life.

Speaking of power drain... how much difference do you think there would be if the tablet would use graphene instead of semiconductors, presuming that graphene has lower electrical resistance (thus less energy converted into waste heat) than contaminated silicon? Also, I have a laptop myself and have noticed that the screen is the biggest individual power hog in the system - but I seem to recall something about a display technology (though I might be confusing it with e-paper) that only requires power to refresh (and illuminate) and none to display a static image.

edited 4th Apr '14 11:57:23 AM by amitakartok

Or the tablet could just be able to recharge the batteries...

edited 4th Apr '14 12:02:28 PM by m8e

edited 4th Apr '14 12:15:26 PM by MattII

I say skip the aerogel and just use the ceramics and carbon boride with some sturdier insulator that isn't going to be damaged from combat impacts. The high melting point and natural insulative quality of the ceramics should help out quite a bit on it's own as well as provide the general protection from impacts and a wide range of weapons.

The problem with trying to "scrape off" incendiary gels including some variants of napalm is that they don't scrape off and instead smear, they adhere and keep burning. Adding oxidizers and pyrophoric agents only further complicates the matter and has been a common practice for incendiary weapons at least since WWII. The oxidizer makes it harder to extinguish the flames and the pyrophoric agent will cause it to reignite unless you keep it smothered. Stop drop and roll just spreads the fire and likely smears more on you as you roll around like loon on fire. You need something that can cut off the oxygen supply nearly completely to the incendiary agent. If you wanted to be a real dick you impregnate the gel with small thermite pellets which now thanks to the gel are adhering to the target.

A possible solution is an ablative layer that peels, falls, or blows off in such a way that it removes the burning surface. Your not scraping off the burning agent you are removing what it is adhered to. Something like a lightweight anti-incendiary ERA type layer that goes off when it reaches a certain temp to blow off the agent could possibly work.

For tablets and batteries keep in mind fairly small but high capacity batteries are in various phases of experimentation as it is now. As well as passive charging tech like piezo electric chargers that use movement to generate power.

For the curious this is what White Phosphorus incendiary rounds look like in use. Unlike the puffy smoke streamers of air bursting WP smoke shells these weapons produce billowing burning clouds of agent at target level.

edited 4th Apr '14 1:20:21 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Hey, good to see you again Matt and m8e!

Anyway...

Whoops, I should have probably figured that out. Still, thanks!

I do agree that rockets would be useful for such work, but I think that they would work best in open spaces - it might be very tricky to get a rocket to, say, get into a bunker via the firing slit (unlike a grenade, which you can simply roll or throw in^note Ignoring the obvious dangers of doing so). Thus, I think that if you were handling room/bunker clearing it'd probably be best to do it via incendiary grenades.

Well, at least my idea isn't too farfetched!

The issue here is that semiconductors have useful electrical properties that make them ideal for transistors and diodes - vital parts of any modern circuit board. For example, if I remember correctly semiconductors will only allow current to flow in one direction.

Therefore, you couldn't feasibly replace them unless you could somehow come up with a method of doping graphene to create a new type of semiconductor or something (and in certain applications I imagine the increased power dissipation of the "older" types would be more useful).

That's a very interesting concept! Of course, said layer could get damaged by enemy fire (as in shooting ), but not a single defence is perfect (and if there was it would be mighty boring). So I can forgive it that.

edited 4th Apr '14 3:10:07 PM by Flanker66

Incendiary rockets would work just fine on bunker slits that is in fact one of the intended uses for the M202 for example. They don't have to hit the opening perfectly just get close enough and the rocket going off scatters contents by spatter and splash into the aperture and inside the bunker.

If you use a sensor fuse that goes off before it hits the target it can project a wide cone of incendiary agent that would splash a lot of inside the bunker that way as well as coat a wider area in incendiary agent. Using similar fuses you can more effectively coat large targets, armored vehicles, and even groups of enemy infantry with a single projectile.

Armored things are only vulnerable to incendiary devices when they are buttoned up. The burn-y liquid, gel or film takes away the oxygen. Powered Armor would depend on whether it's an exoskeleton or full armor. The heat may cook off ammo and burn away antennas, lighter armor could cook the pilot but only if it's soaked or the armor is damaged.

It would be better combined with a mine, bomb or IED. Crack the shell and roast the nut inside.

Taira: I take it you meant not buttoned up. Because a armored vehicle not buttoned up is easy pickings for even hand thrown incendiaries. Even then buttoned up armor is vulnerable to being set on fire by something like an M202. Molotovs have proven to be incredibly effective against armored vehicles. Not only does the burning fluid seep into spaces like vision slits, imperfectly sealed hatches and even weapons ports, it rapidly heats up the entire vehicle including the main and secondary gun, burns rubber seals, seeps into air intake and exhaust ports etc.

Not even MBT's are immune. Both the most modern T-72 and M1 Abrams are vulnerable to incendiary weapons hitting their air intake and exhaust ports. They have designs to mitigate small amounts of burning fluid but the contents of say a single m202 rocket or a full one hit from a couple of molotovs is enough render that useless what do you think dedicated incendiary weapons burning at 1200 degrees or hotter will do? Never mind the fact that a couple of molotovs have been known to knock out armor never mind dedicated incendiary weapons.

Something like power armor is going to be even more vulnerable. For starters they are not armored vehicles there is a lot less surface area to set on fire and heat up. For something burning as intensely as the m202's mix you would not need to coat the entire target just small portion is enough to not only cause injury but likely cause noticeable damage the power armor. That is unless you take extra steps or measures to protect against incendiary attacks. Small spatters or small amounts of agent might not do much against a protected suit but a direct hit from a weapon like the 202 rockets would likely be end of that power armored trooper. Things like molotovs would likely be equally as effective.

There is a reason that molotovs are the rioters, insurgents, and rebels choice for first AT weapons. Not only can they damage even MBT's they can immobilize them.

If a tank is open the danger is not from air being sucked out but fire getting in and turning the inside into an easy bake oven full of people. Unprotected ammo and other bits inside will be damaged and destroyed and the crew very likely killed. The vehicle at that point needs a visit to a full on depot at best.

edited 5th Apr '14 6:22:35 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Any open hatches are a danger of course. But only older MBT's or other APC's have open tops. Incendiary devices are better on soft skinned vehicles. Now some MBT's have the negative overpressure system: air forces through a filter and it "leaks" air out. THAT would suffer from a bath of napalm. Armored cars or wheeled vehicles would get stopped as tires pop and view slits are blocked.