The Deadliest Hard Sci-Fi Weapon You've Never Heard Of (Macrons, Dust Guns)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.พ. 2023
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Spacedock delves into a powerful but lesser known sci-fi space weapon.
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Star Trek Fleet Command is not free if you want to get anywhere in the game
But can I mine AFK?
Starfleet's most iconic enemies were the Klingons, not the Borg.
Can you do a video on Maser weapons? Keep up the good work.
fuck no
Now we have one more reason for Anakin Skywalker to hate sand
It gets into everything.
...One of those scenes I sometimes hate watch and sometimes skip 😂 the dialogue crackles like pudding in Ep 2 at moments
Because it's so... sandy.
Is he here?
Hehehe
I came to same conclusion when playing Children of a Dead Earth. It's a realistic space combat simulator that has part editor. Tried to optimise railgun for range and noticed better speed with smaller payloads. After editing minimum mass in configs i got the sandblaster - it fired 0.01g pellets at 10-100km/s in steady beam, and grinded through everything at ridiculous ranges
The lag sandcasters
Bro made a sniper sandblaster💀
(They are 1/2 of a football field away from each other) Guy 1: OI FUCK YOU
Guy 2: WHAT I DIDNT HEAR YOU?
Guy 1: HAVE SOME FUCKING SAND (BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT)
I also enjoy this game but for all it's detail I don't think it simulates the wear and tear on the rails these weapons would experience.
The thought of making a "tsar bomba blowtorch" by stuffing tiny pieces of uranium into microscopic particles, and accelerating them to relativistic speeds so they undergo fission on impact, is genuinely the scariest idea for a weapon I've ever heard because it actually seems scientifically sound. Your sand blaster wouldn't be measured in megajoules per second, it would be in megatons per second. An honest to god Wave Motion Gun, that leaves everything you touch uninhabitable for a thousand years. That is, sincerely, an evil weapon.
Designing a projectile that will actually fuse a hydrogen pellet on impact sounds like it might either require already-pretty-crazy velocities, or some very funky projectile engineering to get it to work - and you don't have much to work with there given how tiny they are. Might or might not be feasible. Also very tiny fusion blasts - but still a lot of extra energy, so yeah, potentially nasty.
Perogie/dumpling gun
And then you think of what might happen if you can somehow miniaturize a Penning trap down to the size that a macron gun can manipulate it.
For reference, "Penning traps" are the device that we currently understand best that is able to contain antimatter.
So I'm talking about using a macron gun to fire a beam that contains matter and antimatter in it, but in a fashion that the matter and antimatter only annihilate when the macron particles impact something.
Say each macron particle thus produced can store maybe a nanogram of antiprotons (I have no idea about this number, that could be far too much antimatter or it could be far too little, but I had to start somewhere and I picked a number that looked small enough to be plausible to me).
Now say your macron gun can fire not just single macrons, but bunches of them. Say it can accelerate 100 particles per bunch. And for good measure, let's say that the macron gun can operate at a conservative frequency of 1 kilohertz.
So in essence you're firing 100 macrons x 1000 hertz x 1 nanogram each, or 100k nanograms per second of antimatter.
Unit conversion says that's 100 micrograms of antimatter per second delivered to the target in a fashion that the containment devices fail on impact.
How much energy is that? Well, let's do the math!
We need our old friend the equation for mass-energy conversion, E = mc^2.
Now to address something. Antimatter is only half of the total mass that we need to input into the equation, since antimatter only goes bang when it touches matter, and likewise matter only goes bang when it touches antimatter.
Now FINDING that matter isn't the hard part, the macrons that form the antimatter containment devices and the target itself will supply this.
However, for the purposes of the math, we'll need to adjust our numbers and say that we're converting 200 micrograms per second of mass directly to energy, in total.
So, what does the math say for the power output of that?
I'm gonna make a small adjustment here, because E=mc^2 gives us an Energy, but we need a Power output.
The good news is that Power is just Energy divided by Time. We're calculating the Energy, and we already know the time is 1 second.
So we can just replace the Joules unit with the Watts unit and it all works, because we're calculating over the time period of exactly one second, and X divided by 1 is X.
Anyways, back to the math.
E = mc^2 expects the mass to be in kilograms, because the speed of light is measured in meters per second.
Unit conversion says that 200 micrograms is 2e-7 kg, or 0.0000002 kg.
OK, we've got our numbers sorted out.
E = 2e-7 *c^2 (not typing out that many zeros again, I'm lazy).
E = 17975.1 Megajoules in one second.
P = 17.9751 Gigawatts.
Not much is gonna stand up to that kind of power focused on a tiny spot.
Beats any kind of laser I can think of in terms of power imparted on a small area.
It's just a plain old fashioned "better than yours by a lot" death beam. But I did the math to back it up.
Matter beams that rely on mass-energy conversion to produce effects on target are gonna be the end-game of beam weaponry I'm nearly certain, unless things get a lot better at dodging.
@@44R0Ndin Wouldn't you just be able to fire a beam of anti-protons at an enemy ship and have the matter of the enemy ship provide the protons? Inside a particle accelerator, you should be able to keep the anti-matter from touching any matter because of the nature of particle accelerators, right? How would putting it in macrons be better? (Genuinely curious =). )
@@MyriadSkies That's gonna have a shorter maximum range, because the anti-protons will have electrostatic repulsion from each other, but the macrons won't if the charge on them was neutralized.
Reminds me of a tactic used in Ian Douglas's Star Carrier series where a common defense for their fighters and capitol ships against particle and energy weapons was to launch a cannister of what amounted to sand at the incoming enemy to stop anything they may fire from passing through, one of the pilots in the first book comes up with the brilliant idea of using the cannisters against enemy capitol ships, in effect sand blasting off sensors, armor and anything else unlucky enough to be attached to the outer hull.
The difference in tactics that made it work is that the squadron launches it's sandcaster rounds at close to c, it had been used at slower speeds up until that point to intercept missiles in the past.
@@50Stone Been a few year since I read the series so I may have forgotten some details, but that sounds correct.
what a brilliant yet DUH moment when Sandy Grey is like why not shower them with near C sand. and it works with devastating effect. melting half that moon planet base thing. i was like DAMN....great series WEIRD ending. USNA America all the day
And then they used it to solve literally every problem in the series
That's the only place I've heard mention of this weapon.
The scifi equivalent of pocket sand
I love it
Nice 😆
Never underestimate pocket sand lmao
Relativistic pocket sand!
Or like nuclear Super Soaker
When you're in a space battle and your opponent is the USS Rusty Shackleford
Townsends and Spacedock was not the crossover I was expecting today 😮.
We absolutely stan for Townsends.
I read your comment before that part, and was thinking "I only know of one Townsends, but it wont be them" ...But lo, T'was indeed.
You got my hopes up and it wasn't even a crossover. Just a few seconds from the most popular video when searching "macaroni".
The internet may be for prn but TH-cam is for nerds. All kinds of nerds;).
@@pBIggZz yep. That is such a wholesome channel. Educational, fun, and no advertising, even for their own stuff!
I'm surprised I've never heard of this. I have heard of dust weapons, but I thought it was just a linac yeeting buckets of dust for a shotgun effect.
A good example of this is shown in Halo wars 2, at a larger scale anyway. Take the never ending stream of sentinel drones crashing into the Banished cruiser, shrink it down about 1000 times, make it 1000 times faster, and cover a smaller area. You are just cutting holes into whatever the particals hit.
And with the point about a payload, that about filling one somehow with antimatter. Thats an even bigger explosion.
@@AttilaDToth The antimatter issue is that then you aren't getting the crazy energy savings on your input. Antimatter is super hard to make, so your input costs are going to go way way up. Also not sure how you could create antimatter containment that small.
@@Bearmauls You certainly couldn't neutralize the electric charge on the shell as it leaves - as that would presumably be the only thing keeping the antimatter contained.
@@Bearmauls It’s sci-fi, that can solve how to make small containers and mass produce antimatter. Same with @Jesse comment.
Thought I guess that if you are making that much antimatter, you might as sell make the Macron out of antimatter for simplicity, then use the combo accelerator to properly contain and manipulate it when loading.
in Traveller a sand caster is a defensive weapon effective against lasers which deploys a field of sand close to your own ship in order to disperse enemy laser fire or stop enemy missiles.
And they're good for scraping attempted boarders off your ship. Absolutely shreds 'em.
@@Evil0tto I hate boarding. The sand just gets.. everywhere
I was gonna post the same thing! Nice to see a fellow Traveller.
Was about to say the same! Hail, Travellers!
@@payton.a.elliott +1 SOC!
Love that you talked about dust shields. I love when a universe does more with shields or armor than just making them being walls that you pound down.
Personally I like designing shields to be more like a loose field that can take hits but too many hits in a single area or to strong a hit can pierce a shield while it’s still up. Would also open up the idea of ships such as fighters whose job is to get close to an enemy to locate the weaker sections of the energy shield field to better target and breach
In the universe I'm working on there's a race called the Ruthari who have developed a munition which carries a payload of super heated ionized plasma. When it hits an energy shield this plasma is released and "sticks" to said shield causing it to draw exponentially more power from the ship causing overloads in the emitters and/or the energy management subsystems.
At the time of writing the only real way to deal with this is to turn off the shield which has its own problems (namely the shells now impacting your armour directly and burning it away in the best case scenario or piercing your hull and detonating inside it in the worst)
That's basically how military technology is developed in the real world. Stronger armor lead to sharper swords.
@@twistedyogert ...no? It lead to bigger and longer hammers to bash in the skull of the guy who brought full plate into battle, swords were useless against any hard armor no matter how sharp.
@@michigancube4240 you're not wrong, though half swording was still a viable technique against armoured opponents
The book "The Mote in God's Eye" has cool shields where they absorb all energy they come in contact with and radiate it back out as heat; if they get overloaded they release all their stored energy in a giant explosion. The ships use the plumes from their engines as their main weapons, to heat up and overload each other's shields.
As a Traveller RPG player, sand casters are what we call an ablative cloud surrounding a starship. I think you called the idea a dust shield.
Never met another human being that has heard of Traveller! God that was the absolute tits back in the day.
@@CoffeeFiend1 here, meet another one! Just watch out for those damn sneaky Zhodani!
Huh, not a Traveller player, but... I had concept for another unusual shield idea - liquid shields, employing non-newtonian ferromagnetic liquids that ship controls around itself with magnetic fields. Unlike armor liquids don't have "damage" to them after impact.
There is a Japanese sci-fi (forgot the name) that has liquid shields
I'm absolutely shocked that I've seen two Traveller comments on this video so far. I picked it up years ago because I thought the character creation was extremely novel, but have never had the opportunity to play.
There's a book series I read where they come up with using their defensive sand rounds (which expand in space and set off missiles early etc) as an attack weapon as they come out of ftl, making a near lightspeed sand blaster.....let me find the book series...Ian Douglas Star Carrier series
great series weird ending
@@TheNightrunner666 think he ran out of ideas.....
Any trick involving using FTL drives to accelerate items to sub-FTL near-c velocities is a bit of a cheat. Even if we grant that FTL is possible in a fictional universe, it really should be inertia-less and shouldn't accelerate anything in real-space.
Otherwise you've definitely invented infinite energy and can now blithely ignore the laws of thermodynamics altogether.
That would still be genius in The Expanse as a PDC round and/or torpedo warhead.
@@dgd947a15fl So, proximity detonating nano-shrapnel rounds? Sounds like an excellent anti-personnel round fired from high caliber small arms (something like a hybrid between birdshot and a FRAG-12 round, but with a proximity airburst fuse instead of point-detonating, and being able to configure the detonation stand-off range would be nice too).
Work the fusing out right and you could even make it a non-lethal weapon when fired from low-velocity firearms like the typical shotgun.
After all, if you have a high standoff detonation range and the payload fragments are small enough, you can have the fragments slow down and spread out a lot in the remaining distance between the point of detonation and the target, effectively reducing the weapon to the ability to spray sand in someone's face from a great distance. The projectiles should almost certainly be fin-stabilized for purposes of accuracy tho.
If intended to be lethal, the only parameter that needs to be changed is the distance at which the proximity fuse sets off the explosives and creates the fragments, and you can freely increase the launch velocity of the projectile if you don't need it to be non-lethal.
The general rule of thumb is that lethality increases as the fragment size is increased, and as the proximity fuse trigger distance is reduced (tho reducing the proximity fuse trigger distance does slightly reduce the ability to hit multiple spread-out targets with one round).
If a small amount of armor-piercing ability is needed, say to deal with unarmored vehicles such as those that are usually turned into VBIEDs, you could even make the whole fragment-producing shell thick enough so that the round can survive past the point of impact and detonate after punching thru the fender of a car or something like that, delivering the shrapnel effect to the engine bay or passenger compartment (just don't aim at the glass).
Of course in a vacuum, the whole equation changes.
In that case, you want the fragments to dissipate in a different fashion.
Ideally, to damage incoming missiles , fragment size should be on the order of BB shot.
Fragment material and therefore what material you make the warhead's casing out of matters as well. To damage missiles, the material of the warhead casing should be at least mild steel, but stronger materials are better.
If the explosive filler of the shell is a high explosive, high hardness alloy steel is preferred, as that is easier to fragment with a concussive force such as the detonation of high explosives, and the fragments thusly produced will have an easier time shredding any incoming missile's typically aluminum fuselage.
The shape of the warhead also changes if being used as a missile defense. As an anti-missile defensive measure, I think the warhead should be shaped something like an "inside-out shaped charge warhead" (to be more specific, a long, skinny cone, with the inside filled with explosives and the outside made up of the material to become fragments).
The idea is that this would create a radially dispersed (aka disc-shaped) cloud of particles, the better to intercept missiles with.
This shape of particle cloud would be the result of the shape of the warhead because particles that were closer to the pointy end of the cone (or conical segment) will have less radial acceleration imparted on them (and therefore disperse less in the same time period) than the particles that came from the casing closer to the wide edge of the cone. This is due to the simple fact of there being less explosives producing hot gas to accelerate the particles in the first place.
If i remember correctly that's how weapons in mass effect games work so instead of managing ammo which is virtually unlimited you have to manage heat.
They got rid of this mechanic for personal weapons after the first game (iirc only a few Geth weapons retained it).
@@crestdazoltral7705They changed it to clips, but it was still managing heat, not ammo.
@@martinjrgensen8234 yeah the thermal clips are effectively just really efficient heat sinks that you can eject to manually cool the weapon. but a lot of people don’t get that
@@thestarscape2446 Because lore aside, in terms of gameplay functionality it made it very similar to managing magazines in any other game with shooting elements.
@@thestarscape2446 Partially because the games themselves are kind of weird about it. Theoretically most of them fire tiny metal slivers, but the game lets you swap between ammo types with different effects, and some weapons explicitly use some other kind of projectile (like the Krysae's exploding rounds or venom shotgun's grenades), which is occasionally handwaved as being fabricated instantly in a way that just happens to produce a lot of heat, and sometimes ignored.
This reminds me of the photoids used in the Three Body Problem series. Tiny objects accelerated to relativistic speeds, used to destroy stars and by extension any living thing in a system facing the star. It’s a powerful weapon, second only to dual vector foil in destructive potential.
While its something we have no idea how it works, assuming your space setting has artificial gravity, weaponizing such systems into a compact beam is always my favorite. you basically break their ship from torsion
I like the idea of a graviton laser that makes micro-black-holes as it passes through matter.
The beam only exists for a microsecond, but it's like an atomic bomb in a straight line that goes across the universe instantly.
You could shoot planets with it from the other side of the galaxy *right now* as long as you could aim it precisely enough.
It’s been proven that the effects of gravity move at the speed of light.
Assuming you have artificial gravity, you should be able to just bend any and all conventional weapons right around your ship and fire them right back where they came from. Someone shoots a laser at you? Take your artificial gravity generator and create a pseudo-black hole with the event horizon tangent to the laser at such a distance between the laser path and the event horizon to where gravitational lensing simply bends the laser exactly 180 degrees. Congratulations, the enemy shot himself. Ditto for any other type of unguided weapon, beam or projectile. All you're left with is missiles, and even those you could drag back to the enemy ship via gravity, unless the missiles are FTL-capable.
Easy, hit them hard enough to accelerate sideways and break the keel
Today I shall demonstrate why ramming is a better gravity weapon than gravity weapons
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitor that reminds me of the Graviton Beam Emitter from "Blame!"
This idea was in a series called the swarm cycle, canisters of sand were atached to a ship, the ship accelerated to 20%-30% C then release the canisters...fractional C sand is really lethal.
meth sand mayhem
schlockmercenary has a ship use disks of aluminum foil to aim that kind of weapon at a whole planet.
Macarons... Oh my, those can be lethal. I know someone who makes the most deadliest macarons; you can brake diamonds with them or crack a hole in a quantum singularity.
That's why I stick to Thin mints or do-si-does this time of year.
Time to break out the Hardtack.
*Clack, Clack!*
BattleTech has a similar tool in AeroTech called the Screen Launcher which is a giant canister of radar reflective and low mass dust designed to put up a smoke screen in space.
It can also shoot down fighters and missiles and damage DropShips and Warships if they fly through the cloud.
That's interesting. IT reminds me of Mass effect weapons, which are "micro-scaled mass accelerators" that shave a projectile the size of a sand grain from a dense block of metal contained within the weapon's body. The projectile is launched at supersonic velocities by decreasing its mass in a mass effect field.
Maybe they should be replaced with Macron rifles instead. Imagine those things with mass effect fields.
I think macron weapon will only work in space, because at that tiny scale your macron projectiles will crush into air and shatter itself
@@_furydance8890
could take a page out of electrolasers and use a laser-induced vacuum channel to fire your macron through, the projectile is fast enough to hit the target before the channel collapses (or self-destruct at a fair range)
for extra hilarity, use the fusion fuel pellet macrons for 40k plasma levels of user risk, if the vacuum channel timing is off by a few microseconds it explodes in the barrel lol
I think in effect Thanix cannons is probably closer.
What you see as solid beams fired by Reapers and late-war Alliance ships are actually streams of metal propelled to relativistic speeds.
The mass effect sets the mass of an object to 0, right? If this is true, any projectile impacting with 0 mass would have 0 effect, because the momentum which causes the damage to an object would be 0, because of newtons 2nd:
F = dt/dp, while p = γ•m•v. If m=0, p=0.
Thats of course only if i understood leibnitz notation on wikipedia correctly
@@zeux5583 It reduces the mass to miniscule levels during the acceleration process only, not permanently.
I had actually developed a similar concept for small arms in my post apocalyptic sci-fi world, at least close to the fusion variant you described. I call it "nuclear charging", where the weapon moves a line of protons at immense speeds using pressure and magnets down a barrel. Depending on the density of the target, it may simply heat up, or it explodes dozens of times a second until it isn't there anymore. The trade-off is that it is effective in shorter ranges, meaning the user is at risk of being hit by shrapnel and there is still relevance to traditional kinetic arms. The tech was initially developed for space travel, but things went to shit before that could really happen. Really crazy and cool to see that such a similar concept existed.
One thing to consider with that type of weapon: they do the exploding thing to the air on their way to the intended target.
The guy _behind you_ might get fried by X-Rays from the protons hitting the air.
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitor interesting, i hadn't thought of that. i'll certainly put the tech through some scrutiny but at the end of the day it is just fantasy, physics be damned!
@@bobbirdsong6825 An idea I enjoy is having completely different types of weapons for planetary vs space combat:
Beam weapons work better in space where they're the most useful anyway and power supply is "narratively unlimited."
Meanwhile, your grunts/marines are still using "modern" firearms and melee weapons for combat.
When you're fighting corridor to corridor on an enemy ship, it pays not to poke too many holes in the walls.
Sand casters are great thing to have on your ship in Traveller. It’s pulled our ass out of a difficult situation multiple times.
Thanks that was really interesting.
When I was researching macroparticle accelerators for modelling micrometeoroid impact, both electrostatic accelerators and lasers seemed be accepted as ways to model impacts from particles of less that 0.1 grams at velcities in excess of 10,000 m/s.
We were more interested in the ball park of ~1 gram at 10,000 m/s and looked at both railguns and two stage light gas guns for that.
Please, what is a "two stage light gas gun" ??
Think of a light gas gun as a spring piston air-gun, useing light gases like helium or hydrogen, and a chemical explosion (useually gunpowder) to push the piston (instead of a spring) which pushes the gases down the barrel to accerlate the projectile. There is also useually a burst disk to get a higher pressure gas build up, and thus greater acceleration.
Two-stage simply means that partway down the barrel a second burst of gas is pushed into the barrel at that point in the barrel to maintain a higher pressure behind the projectile.
Light gas guns can get super high velocities, as much as 8.5km/s. 1 Arnold airbase two-stage light gas gun accelerated a projectile down a barrel with a bore of 84mm to 7km/s.
High surface area to mass ratio actually makes it much easier to heat the particle to sublimation temperatures. If even a small part of a particle sublimes, the resulting acceleration will tend to change the trajectory of a very small particle significantly. For 1 micron particles (note the the pics you were showing early in this video were on the order of 100 microns, but you were talking about 1 micron particles, so that's what I'm responding to.)
And with very small particles, radiation pressure alone can create a significant force on the particle stream.
I think beam weapons might be a useful defense against this sort of thing.
Also, you blithely mention stripping the charge from these particles without mentioning how that would be done. It's non-trivial and becomes much harder as the particle velocity (relative to the "gun") increases. And if the particles remain charged, charging the target will tend to act as a force field defense.
Finally, turning hyper-velocity dust into tiny fusion weapons (fission seems _extremely_ unlikely to me) would require absurdly high particle energies. Is it possible? Maybe, but "non-trivial" doesn't begin to address the difficulties.
It's a potentially viable weapon, but it's nothing like as easy as just turning on the "hose" and eroding your enemy away.
If the particles remain charged, they won't form a beam in the first place, they'll disperse.
This is my first time finding this channel and I see Townsends and Gundam. You have good tastes, as well as having a good way of explaining technology.
That’s fantastically terrifying.
"Macronii"
There's a "Yankee Doodle" joke in here somewhere, but I'm not smart enough to see it.
Your use of the anthill theme from XCOM: Enemy Unknown was making my brain try and understand why I wasn't managing the anthill.
Same here, immediately just for "new cool research option", then the brain understood it is looking at youtube video :)
Ive had in mind a similar gun, based off the ancient Earthsiege description of the Particle Beam Weapon being a laser that ionizes dust, kind of a favorite soft-sci-fi weapon.
A chamber collects ambient dust particles (or is fed specially designed particles, so macrons in this case), and they get charged. A laser is projected through the chamber, using the ionized gas as a focusing element to tune and amplify the beam. At this stage, its just a strong continuous beam weapon.
The next stage, the chamber charges and ejects the cloud of dust, which begins riding the beam at an appreciable fraction the speed of light, before impacting on the target.
This has a practical benefit on spaceship scale, since the cloud is kept coherent and projected by the beam; it can be carefully 'guided' along the path, so long as contact with the beam isnt lost.
7:40 *DEFENSE SOLUTION:* A multi-layered counter rotating Whipple Shield COULD maybe work?
Imagine a sausage shaped ship, along the ship sides it has like several barrels around the ship, the barrels are nestled inside each other (like Russian Dolls), and each one is rotating in opposite direction from the outer & inner ones, and each ones that rotate in the same direction (each odd or even layer) rotates at different velocities compared to each other.
So a hole made from an impact (assuming full penetration) would almost never line up again, at least not for several hours, because of the speed differences. (cool weapon anyway) :D
"Matryoshka Lock Armor" (MLA)? 🙂
The rotation frequencies should have a ratio according to prime numbes to maximize the effect. Not sure if the counter rotating spin is necessary.
@@volrathsstronghold3989 Pretty sure counter-rotation intensifies relative rotation of adjacent layers, such that comparable effects can be achieved at lower absolute rotational velocities.
Don't know if that would be meaningfully beneficial, though, or if simply having higher rotational velocities would be easy/cheap/simple enough to render it superfluous.
@@BardedWyrm I mean, if nothing else, making the layers counter rotating would probably help with keeping the rest of the ship from rotating as well, if that's undesirable.
@@volrathsstronghold3989 counter rotation could at least make the ship have a net zero angular momentum so it can maneuver easier without having to worry about precession.
@@volrathsstronghold3989 I wager the ratio you want may be golden.
This must be why the Noisy Cricket from Men In Black was so OP!!!!
Love that Knights of Sidonia shot at 2:25
Knights Of Sidonia was not expected, but had nonderless :)
Here is a simple armor design:
Make your craft a cylinder (ball may also work) and layer the armor on the sides like you normally would, but make every layer rotate around at a different speed, possibly even very fast, and possibly even in opposite directions. That way even if a hole gets punched into two consecutive layers, both holes will stop overlapping almost immediately and unless your armor gets horribly degraded you have an almost guaranteed 9 out of 10 layers of armor intact at any given spot.
Plus free reaction wheels!
I present to you "Continuous Beam Laser"
As your layers of armor rotate they will be sliced to ribbons in turn.
Or If I hit you with a projectile and punch a hole through, your inertia will be thrown all out of whack.
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitor Depends on the power of the laser. It has to have enough power to go through all armor layers in a shorter time than it takes for the fastest armor layers that rotate in opposing directions to move the diameter of the hole your making away from each other.
If you cant do that youre in for the long haul and hold that laser down on the same exact spot until you worn away that entire line of armor on every layer.
@@builder396 Nah, I just have to do enough damage to throw off the center of gravity of some of the layers and your own armor's inertia will vibrate your ship apart.
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitor Dont you have it all figured out then? Who said the outer armor layers will go at a billion RPM?
The Risen Empire book series makes lovely use of thousands of kilograms of sand, accelerating at speed to shred a massive drone swarm
Excellent, good to see all us Risen Empire fans coming out of the woodwork.
I'd love a video on shields (unless there already is one), especially for unusual things like this dust shield, which is actually one I'd like to hear more about, specifically.
I thought this was gonna be more along the lines of graphite dust used to destroy power stations. Was horrifyingly surprised
I see you've used some footage from Knights of Sidonia! Very impressive series, hope you cover it some day!
thought of this as a mass accelerator with specific ammo
Townsends..? in a Spacedock video? Mad as a box of frogs. They do have some surprisingly interesting recipes though.
By the way Miles Cameron's recent novel "Artefact Space" talks about using superaccelerated sand as a weapon.
Props for using XCOM: EU music in this one, really underrated
Mesons are also awesome and unheard of. They are noninteracting like nutrino's until they decay into gamma rays beyond some arbitrary amount of armor. They have a very short lifespan from their creation, so we would depend on time dilation to determine how far they get before they decay. I am mostly sure I am remembering this right. This is from Isaac Authur's Interstellar warfare video from several years ago.
The best thing about that from a game design perspective is that it gives a plausible reason for a weapon to have both a max range and a minimum range. You need it to decay post the armor after striking for maximum effect after all.
@@Sorain1 If the particles are as fast as neutrinos then they might only be effective against targets on the far side of a planet (which is a cool idea, IMO; you have to use a planet or other stellar object as a lens to focus your weapons)
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitor Good lord that could be a fascinating mechanic. Needing to avoid certain angles of position around gravity wells because it'll extend beam range/angle into getting you shot up.
@@Sorain1 You could have some cool submarine style ship combat: the ships can't actually detect each other with the planet in between and they have to guess where the other ship is based on where their beams come out of the surface. They'd also be vulnerable to fighters coming up from the close side.
Mesons are two quark hadrons, they have strong-nuclear interactions. Particle detectors use metals such as steel plates to cause mesons to have strong-nuclear interactions and dump their energy into the calorimeter for measurement.
Another win for the liquid metal surface of Iserlohn Fortress! Like your "dust shield" idea, but far simpler :)
You'd think the surface tension and maybe a magnetic field could keep liquid on the surface of the ship pretty easily.
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitor It's an idea I haven't seen explored much in hard sci-fi, and it works extremely well in the source material (Legend of the Galactic Heroes)
I'm thinking these would be insanely easy to defend against. At least if you are using an "active" shield. If you have a macron gun, then your ships are likely going as fast as you describe. Which mean a need to take care of normal dust particles, especially in-system. The one, hard-science, way of doing that is a double-stacked electromagnetic shield around the ship. The first one to impart a charge to the particles and the second, bigger one, to divert them around the ship. From what you describe, that first one would destroy the macrons right out. 'Cause the charge that needs to be conveyed to a regular dust particle is more than what a macron could handle.
Not fast enough. Besides, even ripped to atoms, these beams of sand would be moving at potentially double digit C fractions. Even ripped to atoms they would to a good impression of an ion beam, and also probably shower you in breaking gamma radiation and positrons from pair creation. The way you actually stop them is by standoff flak clouds.
Love a Townsends reference here, fantastic!
Any plans to cover plasma weapons?
Good job with these videoed by the way.
Plasma Weapons are worthless, really. No practical way to make them work, and besides, if you wanted to get plasma to a target, well, kinetic weapons at hypervelocity turn into plasma
@@argokarrus2731 ackchually, particle beams and casaba howitzers can be considered plasma weapons
@@argokarrus2731 sci fi makes a lot of liberties with things, and that’s assuming some new discovery doesn’t make it more practical (though unlikely).
Also, by the kinetics logic, you’d think plasma weapons would be quite common as a HEAT round on steroids.
Maaaaaaaybe
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
You could always combine the two. Mass Effect's Geth Plasma Shotgun is an interesting take on the concept.
Wasn't this a possible ship weapon in Mass Effect?
Iirc it is the actual ammo that you fire from handheld weapons, ship weapons use heavier projectiles, like the instructor in ME2 tells us.
Not exactly. The ships did have mass accelerators, but those were metal slugs, and came standard. They were also 20 kg (for dreadnaughts), which makes them a tad larger than dust.
The regular human guns do use tiny bits of accelerated metal, though.
this video gets me excited about new possibilities in space combat in future media. i hope a concept like this is adopted by a universe like the expanse or something similar, imaging a war where this technology is the backbone of both weaponry and propulsion on both sides, forcing the portagonests to get inventive with the way that the engage in combat. awsome video :)
I appreciate the XCOM music, and did I spy a Knights of Sidonia clip there? I hope you guys cover it more, underrated series.
Interesting weapon, I have never heard of this!
What if instead of maintaining a defensive cloud outside of the ship, the ship has a layer of hull like that layered armor, but with particles between layers, like sand or dust, to absorb the impact energy, like a bullet stop... I'd figure that layer would need some self-sealing capacity so the material doesn't just leak out after absorbing a hit...
That'd screw with the mass of the ship and kill the thrust to weight ratio, of course, but would that be an at all effective countermeasure?
A form of reactive armor that either orbits the ship or is plated around key and vulnerable systems.
While that would be somewhat effective, you would probably be better off using an equivalent mass of a solid material because the sand would get blown off much more easily. You would lose more mass per hit from each macron from a loose particulate material than you would from a solid one, so your armor would erode and fail faster. It would be good for areas where mass is not a consideration, but would be outperformed mass for mass by solid options. As for leaking/self-sealing, anything external would be eroded by the the macrons before they even hit the sand, so you would probably need to use a magnetic material that is attracted to the hull for the concept to work. I would expect and macron weapon to hit to be either too fast, or too continuous for you to recover any meaningful amount of armor.
@@wasderlike Someone else suggested a liquid instead.
I'm not that deep into Physics, but I know water dramatically slows down bullets, even high-powered ones, to be nill in surprisingly short amounts. Even .50 cal from a strafing plane becomes useless once you dive 1-2 feet below.
A solid might be better initially but would erode away as it was shot up. A liquid however doesn't have solid structure to begin with. And a liquid exposed to the vacuum of space I would assume would freeze up into solid layers anyway.
@@WritingFighter A liquid would function basically the same as dust or sand, the most relevant factor is how much mass is getting blown off of your armor layer per hit. Macrons hit hard enough that their impact is explosive, and the impact shock wave of a hit will remove a lot more of a loose or liquid material than it would a solid, so a macron weapon would go through an equivalent mass of water or sand much faster than it would through steel.
While fluids are good at absorbing energy from impacts, that is only true for relatively slow impacts. Macrons are moving far too fast for any meaningful energy absorption to take place before the material is blasted away. Ice, being a solid would last much longer than liquid water, but be brittle and shatter apart fairly quickly. I still think you would be best off with a very hard solid material, plates of layered graphene armor would probably be about optimal for protection per mass.
If you don't care about mass, or are operating at enormous scale (like armoring something on the surface of a planet) then fluids have the potential to be more effective due to its potential for flowing into damaged areas. Armoring something that doesn't move would be much cheaper to armor with water or sand than anything else. So fluids are a practical armor solution, just not for spaceships.
@@wasderlike _" While fluids are good at absorbing energy from impacts, that is only true for relatively slow impacts. "_
You might need to elaborate because this isn't true as a general statement. Projectiles like bullets and missiles that will puncture solid blocks of metal armor lose significant energy in a body of water. The same is true in a viscous material like a gel. Explosions are also weaker. This isn't because the material is so hard or solid that it stops the initial impact, but because the material disperses the energy of the force in a way that is reactive.
A missile that slams into a warship and can penetrate it well enough to spit out the other end would fail to have the same energy in the same depth of water as the width of the ship. Air and metal don't provide the same amount of rippling resistance.
It's why bullet proof glass works: it crackles and breaks apart, being significantly weaker than something like steel, but it spreads out the impact force over the area it covers. As such, a hardened steel the equal thickness will be penetrated by high velocity, armor-piercing rounds, but be stopped by the same thickness of the glass, not because the glass causes the bullets to bounce off but it intakes and absorbs and disperses it. Solid materials like metal don't disperse energy very well.
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As far as a liquid hardening into ice when exposed to the vacuum of space, that wasn't about stopping projectiles. It demonstrates that you don't "lose" your protective layering in the same way as like a sheet of armor. Once your piece of armor is eroded away, it's gone. Once the liquid or gel ripples, some of it would be lost, but the outer layer of it would harden, gluing it as it were in place.
Not suggesting the liquid/gel replace armor, but that liquid/gel would have far more uses in density around your ship than just ungodly thick layers of solid, stiff metal.
One of the deadliest weapons in the universe: the French
Can’t wait to see you do breakdowns on the new vehicles in Avatar.
Nikola Tesla proposed this as a solution for domestic defense and an end to World War II. His reasoning was that a macron particle beam would require an entire power plant's worth of electricity and thus would have to be stationary and never used for attack. While it's another case of the "weapon powerful enough to end all war" it's also amazing to think that he was prototyping a weapon that we think of as science fiction 80 years later.
the townsends is a great historical cooking channel
Traveller RPG has "sand casters" that blast a load of sand in the path of laser weapons, reducing their effectiveness.
I do know that the Zearth from the series Bokurano makes use of this weapon by flaking off tiny fragments from its body and then rapidly accelerating them to relativistic speeds. The end results are nothing short of devastating.
good to know i'm not alone in being reminded of how the mechs can do that in bokurano
Thank you! I now know what the new advanced weapon is going to be in my ttrpg mech game.
Ten more Townsends crossovers and I’ll join your patreon.
Reminds me of the "liquid railgun" a guy theorized on a board i was on. Hypothetical rail gun or mass driver that accelerates a liquid ammo to high velocities. You loose som of the round to vaporize the air but the advantages are numerous compared traditional slug rounds in that you can shape the ammo to a variety of exotic shapes making it suitable for everything from small arms to anti ship weapons.
Also the path of the weapon would create an incredibly powerful tube that genrated microwave powerful enough to seriously injure nearby humans.
That's basically what the Reaper's magnetohydrodynamic cannons are in Mass Effect, it's a pretty badass idea honestly.
god tier water pistol
Read The Killing of Worlds, by Scott Westerfield. He goes into incredible detail concerning a battle between the Risen Empire frigate LYNX, and a self-aware, democratically intelligent swarm of RIX Cult Drones. Sandcasters feature heavily, and a broken one is used in a clever way in the final sequence.
It's my favorite battle in literary sci-fi; hands-down, and followed closely by the palace drop-invasion in the same series. The way he connects the macro-scale, man-scale, and micro-scale of a sci-fi engagement and describes the interacting relativistic systems and their effects on their human crew captivated me as a young man, and still does when I read it today.
The time-travel romance was oddly satisfying too; not least because it was all realistically portrayed.
The Risen Empire might just be my favorite sci fi book of all time. Very underrated, which makes me love seeing so many fans of it in this comment section
@@doom_371blahblah5 Agreed, like I said to another one of us, it's so good to see us Risen Empire fans coming out of the woodwork.
4:26 - Well well, I swear everyone loves Townsends :D He shows up in the weirdest videos haha.
That was highly interesting! Thanks for the video. :)
Even if an individual macron could radiate heat extremely quickly, that heat has to go somewhere. And if you've got a dense cloud of macrons flying towards a target, that "somewhere" is going to be into the adjacent macrons within the cloud. So from a science-fiction narrative position, it would make sense to have some sort of balance/strategy between macron-cloud offensive destructive potential versus laser defense effectiveness.
A cloud would have this issue, but you may well be firing them in rather narrow streams instead, if you are in effective range to do so accurately. At that point your macrons would mostly be radiating out into open space rather than each other, particularly if they are flying edge-forwards. Seems to me that a highly pulsed laser might still do the job, but that sounds like pretty hard math to figure out. :D
A moving cloud shield is what I used in a screenplay for school! This video inspires me to revisit the story to improve the tech.
Was very pleasantly surprised to see that shot from Knights of Sidonia
Ah yes, the deadly macaron…😊
Space italians
But how would it look like? Is is like a beam weapon? Or like a "laser projectile" in SW and such? Or is it just a randomly shaped dark cloud, that erases anything on impact? What about travel speed? How would the impact look like?
I feel like this weapon is just too rare in sci-fi, so that I watched the whole video, but have no (practical) idea what was it all about?
The ~undetectable bit rules out the idea of it emitting light during travel. Also depending on the density and size of a beam/cloud/zone in practice, it might be as transparent as any ultra sparse space dust.
Impact sounds like a lot of heat and light though, and probably too many particles per area per second to distinguish individual impacts at a distance or without slow-mo. Maybe it'd just look like an armored surface becoming white hot while sparking and eventually deforming while a bunch of lethal heating/shreding/penetration has started behind it?
It wouldn't really look like anything because the macrons are so tiny. Only a huge cloud of them may be visible as a faint dark patch if there was something bright behind them.
Their travel speed ranges from similar kinetics up to particle beams, and they do damage much the same way as kinetics. Solid thing hitting other solid thing, digs out a crater.
And yes it is rare and extremely niche, we struggled with footage here!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@hoojiwana Do we know how effective if could be?
Given the totally physically correct hard sci-fi universe with armoured space battle ships and such, would this weapon look like a space shotgun blast? A dark undetectable cloud of tiny projectiles, that turn armour plating into hot plasma upon impact? One shot, heavy hit, large spread?
Or would it be used as a beam weapon with continuous stream of those particles?
I would assume, it's more like a close range (spacewise) weapon, since it travels at kinetics speed?
Sorry for bothering, I just haven't heard of it before and find those fascinating
@@someonewithsomename I suggest you look up the ToughSF blog on them for some more detail, it's what I based this video on.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Awaiting heatsink vid keep up good job!
Thank you! This was very cool.
I am so on board for new sci-fi ideas like this.
Another use for "sandcasters" is as defense against lasers in the Traveller RPG setting. Charged carbon nanostructures are blasted towards an enemy in a cloud, scattering any incoming laser from that direction to the point where armor can easily soak it up.
The 'anti-beam' torpedoes (and depth charges in the SEED timeline) in Gundam use a similar concept. Though the fact that I've now seen three comments about Traveller sand casters is super surprising.
Oh god I saw Knights of Sidonia on this channel, I’m excited.
Great video! I especially enjoyed the Background music from the modern XCOM games
I love sandcasters! They have shown their ugly head in a few Japanese sci-fi stories and at least one anime. I forget which, but it was not Crest/Banner of the Stars; the Abh tended to make use of particle beamers, railguns, and mobile, hyperspace-capable, anti-matter mines. Nor did they appear in Legend of the Galactic Heroes, which love-loves them some particle beamers, big-huge lasers, and torpedoes. Argh. I will remember sooner or later.
Sancasters/dust guns also feature in Death of Wisdom (Paul Brunette) and Star Carrier (Ian Douglas). I have a nagging feeling that Scott Westerfield had them as an afterthought in his Succession duology (Risen Empire & Killing of Worlds).
Didn't Schlock Mercenary also have a story arc or two with macron weapons, that Howard Tayler referred to as sandcasters?
IIRC, Traveller RPG has a missile also called a sandcaster, but it deploys a cloud of granulated tungsten (or was it lead?) or literal sand. Used to counter beam weapons or to erode ship hulls.
Traveller is the only place I've run into sand-caster style weapons outside of their occasional impromptu use in sci-fi books like Startide Rising where a dolphin ship dumps a bunch of water to create a cloud of ice crystals that a pursuing ship pancakes against at some %c. Really can't think of one in anime yet, though there may well be one I missed.
Yep. There were sandcasters in the Risen Empire duology. First thing I heard of the from actually
Only time I've heard of this one is in Neal Asher's Polity books. I can't remember what he calls them, it might have been dust gun. Or powder gun, something like that. Shoots ionized aluminum powder. I think. Been a while since I read them, but I thought it sounded familiar.
There's not a whole lot of difference between an ionized aluminum powder gun and the thrusters your ship is likely to use already.
If you turn the ship around and use the main thruster to decelerate _already..._
Then one of your best weapons would be the plume from your engine; focused to a point or injected with an ionized metal for maximum effect while you decelerate towards the target.
Townsends is an amusing juxtaposition
Another fun hard sci-fi weapon is positioning a dense chunk of metal in front of a nuclear shaped charge -or Casaba Howitzer, if you're an enlightened being- and having the particle jet accelerate the relatively light projectile to about 1000km/s, or .003 C.
A 10kg projectile would hit with about 1.2 kilotons of tnt, which may not sound like a lot in sci-fit terms, but they can scale in any direction very easily in both size and velocity. Add to that the fact that they're stand-off weapons that don't suffer from bloom or refraction, they're an exceptionally flexible and deadly way to communicate your nuclear displeasure with someone over long distances.
You and your team have outdone yourselves. Bravo!
Im always excited when a video from you comes thanks for the great content
You use Space Odyssey footage, im so happy
Learn something new everyday. I don't think I've ever seen this in shows/movies/games before.
This is brilliant!! Ive never heard of this kind of theoretical weapon, it sounds fascinating! Can anyone recommend some scifi that’s incorporated Macron Weapons/Technology?
There's a book (series, technically, but it was only used in the last book, never translated to any globally relevant language) where the main character uses something similar as a handheld weapon... originally intended as a tool for cutting metal, it makes for a pretty effective, if very short-ranged (about 5 meters) weapon. Just a quick sweep (using silver dust for vampires... it's a weird book) is enough to repaint an entire room.
So instead of a lightsaber... A lightspear?
@@EdKolis Much messier. It was a seriously beefed up sandblaster that could cut through steel beams instead of clearing rust from the surface. (un)Living targets just turn into a spray of fine red mist.
The Eliksni "Wire Rifle" from Destiny appears to be some manner of Macron gun, although it might not fire microscopic projectiles.
It clearly has a hybrid circular/linear acceleration design, with a drum leading to the main barrel.
It leaves a trail of lightning and ionized particles in the projectiles wake.
It never needs to reload despite firing wire segments (likely carbon nanotubes), only recharged via swapping battery packs.
Overall, it definitely meets the criteria to be a Macron gun.
Thanks for the content.
Really dig the xcom music. I first heard about dustcasters in one of the many versions of the antarctica expedition conspiracy story in which navy ships got attacked by nazi flying saucers supposedly using such weapons. They where only called that and their firing rate was described as high while the individual damage output was described as very low. I never looked into those but its terrible to know that those kind of weapons could exsist.
They wouldn't work in atmosphere. With such light particles (yet not as like as electrons) it'd be like fireing a gun underwater. Super short effective range due to friction.
@@adriankoch964 Not only that the individual projectils might get burned up instantly upon leaving the barrel making the firing within the atmossphere destructiv to the gun.
idk if this fits with your channel, but I think a video about realistic things like legacy systems in a scifi setting would be interesting. I always found it weird how every scifi show seems to just ignore basic realism things like how people usually adopt new tech, especially in large organisations or governmentments where it would be difficult to upgrade systems
'I always found if weird how-' -- '-scifi show seems to just ignore basic realism things like how people usually adopt new tech, especially in large organizations or governments where it would be difficult to upgrade systems.'.
define?
That’s one thing I absolutly didn’t know about.
I’m pleasantly surprised and awed.
Wow, never thought my favourite scifi YT channel would reference my favourite cooking YT show. *golf clap*
Are these only useful in void, or is their velocity enough to work in mediums?
I think air/medium resistance would negate the macrons. Best way to visualize them is as EXTREME sandblasters, where extremely damaging in an abrasive manner, but atmo or such would spread/slow the particles til they have negligible KE.
@@TheCaptainTrout I figured so. But just thought I should make sure. Thanks.
6:00 Isn't that a power gun essentially from the Hammer Slammers series? The series uses fusion powered "blowers" or air cushion iridium armored tanks that use a "power gun" that use disks as the main armament and they are quite powerful.
No. The Disks used by the power guns in Hammer's Slammers are some kind of very energetic plastic matrix that releases stored energy in a direction exactly perpendicular to the disk's edge when triggered by an electric field, so they are basically just lightweight ammunition for a powerful energy weapon.
This weapon is rather more like the Shuriken Cannon used by 40k Eldar - if the shuriken were microscopic and fired thousands per second.
@@Vastin True.
I never expected to see Knights of Sidonia on this channel, niche mecha franchises are fun
BR?
4:23 I totally cracked up at Townsends here! His peaceful mellow persona couldn't be more out of place; it's hilarious! :D Wait wait... what you're saying here is that electrons are like nutmeg, right? The right amount is good, but too much will kill the poor macrons! XD
Aaaand what if defence systems try to ionise incoming macrons with lasers before deflecting them with magnetic fields ?
As far as I know, it takes too long to reionise them after they've been neutralised, unlike with particle beams.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Even the smallest thing can lead to great discoveries or terrifying destruction.
"Macrons become macaroni" was such a great line! :D My stupid brain instant pictured a beaten army returning home and telling their superiors that they were destroyed by freaking pasta! XD
Townsends reference in a hard sci-fi weapons video? Deep cut. I like it.
Glad to see more gundam references in the videos. But could you please do some ship/vehicle/mobile suit breakdowns. Could you start with the Whitebase ms carrier?
we also had Knights of sidonia footage
Playing Space Empires IV, one of the weapons I always tried to research was Null Space Projectors. I think that's pretty terrifying, getting shot at by nothing.
How does empty space do damage? If someone is shooting empty space at you wouldn't that just move you further away from them?
@@onepangaean3018 From what I imagine, anything that a null space projectile (usualy depicted as a sphere) touched was either moved into that region of null space or was simply made nothing/disintegrated.
Picture this, someone fires a hollow hole punch at your ship and that projectile was the size of a car. Acording to SE IV, null space projectiles skip shields and armour; and who knows how long it'll take for that shot to dissapate once it hits you if at all. Suddenly all that material that was enveloped in it's path essentially disapears and those compartments are exposed to the vacuum of space.
@@onepangaean3018 True Vacuum causes "false vacuum" (i.e. everything that is our universe) to decay into more true vacuum.
@@onepangaean3018 Well basically it's a weapon that fires a field that completely destablizes the molecular bonds of anything it hits and causes them to break down into their component atoms and basically turns a section of a ship into nothing. The Lost Fleet series had this kinda weapon that they used to great effect against Syndic ships.
A man of culture, I see.
"I don't like sand. It's coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft, and smooth."
-Sun Tzu
Well, this is the first time I’ve heard of firing a French president at a spaceship