Some TL8-9 weapon ideas & stats

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Varyon

To be fair, REF 25 (if accurate) gives us room to play around some.

True, but the actual ratio we can manage is something like a million to one containment mass to material. It's not clear that dramatically superior explosives are impossible, but there isn't firm enough evidence for any of them to support calling them TL 9.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The performance in Spaceships is pretty close to the 216 MJ/kg of metallic hydrogen (I think I calculated it at 75%-80%), so the scaffolding becomes part of the reaction mass (the temperature would vaporize anything used as scaffolding).

"Consumed as reaction mass" works too. With the performance being so close, the scaffolding seems like it's probably roughly of negligible mass (80% sounds pretty solid to me, but I don't know what sort of efficiencies rockets usually get).

Originally Posted by Anthony

True, but the actual ratio we can manage is something like a million to one containment mass to material. It's not clear that dramatically superior explosives are impossible, but there isn't firm enough evidence for any of them to support calling them TL 9.

GURPS seems to assume pretty serious improvements by TL9 in many areas. Of course, with us being (presumably) fairly late in TL8 at this point and HEDM still having such a poor ratio, getting to the 6.25:1 (total mass:HEDM) ratio required for REF 4 by the time TL9 is mature does seem a bit unlikely.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Varyon

GURPS seems to assume pretty serious improvements by TL9 in many areas.

An awful lot of the current-ish tech path was originally set in the early 90s and somewhat updated for Transhuman Space, and looked more plausible when it was first written.

[AlexanderHowl]

Well, late TL8 makes certain assumptions. I do not think we will average TL9 until 2050.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Anthony

An awful lot of the current-ish tech path was originally set in the early 90s and somewhat updated for Transhuman Space, and looked more plausible when it was first written.

Indeed.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Well, late TL8 makes certain assumptions. I do not think we will average TL9 until 2050.

If mid-TL9 is 30 years away, I'd say we're in late TL8 (this would be under the Fast progression, where TL9 starts in 2025). If TL9 is going to start in roughly 30 years, we're in the middle of TL8 (this would be under the Retarded progression, where TL9 starts in 2050). Personally, I suspect we're somewhere between Normal and Slow, but TL9 is going to look quite different from what UT predicted (which is fair, it was written quite some time ago). With TL9 starting in 2030 or 2040, I'd say we're roughly in late TL8, although perhaps mid-late would be a better descriptor (we're roughly 4/5ths to 2/3rds of the way through by those progressions).

[Jack Sawyer]

Originally Posted by Nightrider_88

So for one can only assume, that if even lower-density RM are... denser than conventional explosives, han it's possible to stuff about 1 gram into normal rifle round (some patents like RU2616034 suggesting even hard outer shell with RM-filling like PELE rounds).
Also, tests were made with RM slughs with about 6-7grams of weight.
http://book.sarov.ru/wp-content/uplo...dej-2017-1.pdf

So I think that .338 would work, especially if it can pass as strictly anti-materiel round, not violating Saint Petersburg Declaration. )

Dunno. apart from having to fit in the triggering mechanism... explosives tend to be not very dense (1-2 g/cc vs 8-11 g/cc for lead, copper, etc.) Means you need more volume for all that explosive, and that screws with your sectional density like I say. It may require a longer bullet, and I'm not sure you can fudge spin stabilized ammo much longer. And HDRMs again don't detonate.. https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.5044770

Reactive materials are a class of energetic materials that react to produce energy, though currently slower than deflagrating or detonating explosives. The common reactive materials are solid material mixtures, such as thermites
(metal and metal-oxide mixtures) intermetallics (metal-metal mixtures), metals with oxidizers, and metals with polymeric ‘binder’ materials. Reactive materials are being investigated because synthesis of new C, H, O, N explosives with higher energy (and necessary properties) is very challenging. Reactive materials (RM) are more readily available, and also contains much higher energy than these CHON explosives [1, 2]. These reactive materials can be used as powders that are incorporated in to explosive or other material formulations, or as ‘structures’ where the powders are pressed or coagulated to form a structure, shape or component of a weapon.

As commonly known, RMs don’t react as fast as explosive crystals do. Instead they burn or oxidize in a diffusionlimited reaction, with the reaction taking place at the contact surface or interface between the metal and oxygen or
oxide. With bulk metals or large pieces of metal, oxygen is in contact with only the surface of the bulk. The metaloxygen interface or reacting contact area can be increased with various methods, such as by using smaller particles, or by milling, grinding or rolling to achieve increased contact area. Therefore, this century’s RM research has focused on processing methods to prepare reactive materials that have nanoscale mixing. Materials processed in different ways have different reaction rates depending on the chemical composition of the processed material, and the intimate contact or interfaces between the reacting chemical species.

If you want to make an incendiary bullet I suppose a HDRM core will maybe make a decent and more compact incendiary bullet and not totally screw SD but I've yet to hear of a high density detonating HDRM.

That's nice. ) Do you hink, that tripling penetrating damage is good enough approximaion?

Compared to regular HEAT? I don't think so? It doesn't suggest that its necessarily a better penetrator than conventional heat. If there is more damage its going to be in some other form (thermal, probably) its incendiary because the inside of most armored vehicles have alot of combustible stuff)

Question is, would be it the same dice of damage with reduced range?

I tend to be very laid back about game mechanics compared to 'real life', but I'd guess the damage would have to correspond to yield. Wiki gives a DIME of unspecified yield a few meter radius, or more precisely 40x the diameter of the charge. A mk 67 frag grenade has a kill radius of 5 meters and a diameter of ~64mm. which is about ~2.56 m radius for a DIME equivalent or about 1/4th the kill radius. You could either figure a given explosive's damage a a radius equal to the DIME in dice.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The performance in Spaceships is pretty close to the 216 MJ/kg of metallic hydrogen (I think I calculated it at 75%-80%), so the scaffolding becomes part of the reaction mass (the temperature would vaporize anything used as scaffolding).

I had a link somewhere that said that was just part of the energy (recombination I think is the term) and it doesn't include what the hydrogen gas itself (140 MJ/kg) might or might not contribute. So it might be higher assuming it was possible to create it efficiently and stabilize it.

There might be other possibilities, but I'm too lazy to go diving into my capacious and many-times-resurrected bookmarks to find them all. I do know that the US military has a whole branch dedicatd to disruptive energetics which tries to find concepts that could fill the gap between conventional and nuclear (stuff that would be like metallic hydrogen, the aformentioned SBERs, isomer bombs, and so on.)

On the other hand.. it a military powerpoint. Take with a huge grain of salt.

[Nightrider_88]

And HDRMs again don't detonate..

As a matter of fact, they always said things like "intense exotermic reaction on impact", never "detonation".

As for incendiary effect, as seen here:
http://tetrazolelover.at.ua/WpnryInT...00273-main.pdf
Fuel tank contains was ignited with cover parts of tank departed (blown away?). Notice how they mention overpressure effects affecting damage.
So that's why I tend to compare it's follow-up damage effects as comparable to small explosive.
Hm. Maybe it's more "burn ex" instead of "cr ex"??

[Nightrider_88]

Hm. I suppose I said something rong as my rely is on premoderation. )

Ok, now it here..))

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by Nightrider_88

Hm. I suppose I said something rong as my rely is on premoderation. )

Because of the prevalence of spam from Ukraine, posts that link to sites from that top-level domain are automoderated.

[Nightrider_88]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

Because of the prevalence of spam from Ukraine, posts that link to sites from that top-level domain are automoderated.

Oh. I didn't notice that.