Eat leftovers. Specifically, leftovers nobody wants anymore.

You shouldn't be surprised that we use them still. They are still far better at tracking people and finding explosives and other things than any machine we have to date. They can also go to places we can't such as very tight spaces and are good in tunnels and caves.

Yeah, no machine comes to mind that’s quite as versatile as a dog when it comes to detection. Special forces have put them to excellent use, they can detect hidden enemies and booby traps, chase down fleeing targets, tell you if a room is occupied before you enter it, all kinds of things.

There’s also the morale angle to consider. Squads operating in tandem with dogs consistently report higher morale, even after extended deployments.

Hard to outdesign a billion years of evolution.

Tactical tablets to aid in precision strikes and fires are now being doled out to Marine grunt squads

The MAGTFCH, huh? That's quite a mouthful.

Sounds like the Blue Force Tracker with some upgrades.

Those tablets sound like potential gold for Russian and Chinese hackers.

Wouldn't trust that shit in the field in the slightest.

Everything is already networked, this just puts it in one place. As far as I know the Russians and Chinese haven’t had much luck penetrating military satcoms.

Could be said as "Mag to Fitch". Or given the average Marine, Smuckatelli or otherwise it'll become known as a "Mag to fix".

Or worse a "Mag to fuck".

I’m betting it’ll just be pronounced as “magtech”. That F is just one little line away from an E.

Okay question, you mount railguns along the spines of ships for maximum punch correct? Would it make sense to do the same for a particle cannon?

One would not expect recoil to be a significant consideration for a particle cannon, since most of the yield of the weapon would be in the energy states of the individual particles, not their gross momentum. The main problem with the idea of a particle cannon is exactly that those energy states are so high — the particles will want to fly apart from one another and radiate away their energy very quickly. It's effectively useless outside of point-blank range.

Aside: from a literal point of view, every kind of ranged weapon is a particle cannon. Photons are particles. Bullets are made up of particles. It's as scientifically precise as calling a sword a "hitting stick".

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 12th 2019 at 9:10:43 AM

By that metric isn't a normal gun also a "Directed energy weapon"

...

Given that you are using a bullet to direct kinetic energy into the target.

From a really, really pedantic scientific point of view, yes, but usually people mean energy in a state other than physical matter when talking about an energy weapon. Of course, I was being very pedantic too, and nobody would ever refer to a bullet as a "particle weapon", either.

particle beam cannon, directed energy alright, I thought having a longer cannon would be better containment.

The length of the barrel is irrelevant, or largely so. You can certainly accelerate the particles faster, but the problem is that once they leave whatever form of confinement you use, they will want to spread out very rapidly. Energetic particles don't like being close to each other. This is a fundamental law of physics. Particles also don't like being more energetic than their surroundings, and will radiate that energy as quickly as possible.

The only way to deal with these problems within the laws of physics is to confine them in something, typically a magnetic field. This field would in turn have to be actively generated by something, and since the strength of a magnetic field falls off as the fourth power of distance, that something would have to go along with the particles.

These facts make any sort of plasma or charged particle weapon inherently very short-ranged. Now, short on the scale of space is a relative term. Depending on how fast you can get the particles going, you might get a few hundred kilometers of effective range from the thing, but that's trivial compared to the tens of thousands of kilometers you might expect from other weapons.

There's also the question of what effect a particle beam weapon would have. It wouldn't slice through things. If you want to heat something up rapidly, you'd do much better to use a laser. If the particles are charged, as one would expect, then they would have a very strong EM effect through induction or ionization, possibly overloading or interfering with electronics. For this reason, a short-ranged particle weapon might be very effective for non-lethal ship-to-ship combat. Extremely high-energy particles could irradiate their targets, causing damage to organic tissue and/or sensitive electronics.

Neutral particles, like neutrons (natch), wouldn't disperse in a stream and wouldn't cause ionization, instead disrupting the atoms that make up the structure of the material they hit. A concentrated, high-energy beam of neutrons could cause nuclear fission in the hull of a spacecraft. They cannot be accelerated or steered magnetically, though, so there's that problem... One sci-fi idea that I've heard (no idea if it's realistic) is to accelerate ions of some material and then cause those nuclei to release neutrons, perhaps via a fission reaction. How you'd make that work is anyone's guess.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 13th 2019 at 6:39:59 AM

Are human infants born with a finite number of stereocilia? I’ve always wanted a procedure done at birth where human hearing was augmented by making the ear cells much much more resistant to loud noises and able to hear much better.

Essentially the idea was to have every soldier and citizen complete immune to gun shot hearing issues and ear plugs literally being relics in museums. Their hearing would essentially deafen loud sounds to acceptable human conversation at least that’s how they’d perceive it

So in other words, if you fired a full SAW machine gun next to them at the absolute worst they might wince, slightly, if even that.

Are there any implications I need to worry about?

I've begun to think of charged particle beams as more lightning guns than anything else. It's not an accurate model but it describes the electrical effects better than a garden hose model.

Alternating the charge should still do wonders for accuracy as you give the target an electrical charge that attracts the next hit. However, you do end up with the charged particles trying to ground out on whatever matter they can find.

Short answer is that stereocillia don't regenerate but we're trying to figure out how to change that. Lots of theory work but no big leads. And yes, stereocillia cells are limited.

On the other hand, you might want to look into cochlear implants.Our current models are crude but with enough research and refinement they could perfectly replicate hearing.

Edited by Belisaurius on Aug 19th 2019 at 9:58:37 AM

I'm pretty sure that a "lightning gun" of the sort you describe would only work in an atmosphere, due to the need to create an ionized pathway for the electricity to flow across. In space, there's nothing to conduct the charge.

Now, you could conceivably use accelerated plasma to create a conduit for an electrical discharge. I have no idea how that would work, or what the range would be. I'm trying to imagine the voltage you'd need to force electrons to flow through such a medium.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 19th 2019 at 10:11:36 AM

Like I said, model is still pretty terrible. Electroboom proved that you can have arcs thrown in a vacuum even if it's a neigh-perfect insulator.

Yeah, but at what range? Are we talking millimeters, meters, or kilometers?

Electroboom managed a couple centimeters but that was with a tesla coil, which can only be called a particle gun after several strong drinks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb0kyRm0gyc for reference.

I imagine a particle accelerator should have more range than that but you'd run into the same issues with electromagnetic interference and bloom.

I think it's possible to strip the charge from the particles as they're leaving the muzzle of a particle beam, but it defocuses them as well. If it's less than the natural repulsion of like charges, then it could be viable.

"Using particle beams allows us to use all the other things that make SF 'fun.'"

—Atomic Rockets

Particle beams make decent point defense weapons for stories where the author doesn't want to use rapid firing guns.