[UT] Fictional late TL 8 designs

[WaterAndWindSpirit]

So, I've got a universe where the bad guys make massive money causing political instability and misusing end user certificates to make sure to earn as much money as possible to fund a private army and some top secret research.

So I need cutting edge fictional late TL 8 designs that fit three niches:

Middle range all rounder weapons, the kind most countries would arm it's police forces and armies with, not terribly expensive, but not junk either. There are rules for smart guns, but these have an extra option: a kill switch that's remotely triggered to disable the weapon, thus wrecking havoc with Gov't logistics when the baddies trigger the kill switch so that their newly built guns are useless.

High technology expensive weapons, for their own elite troops and to sell to special forces. Same kill switch as before.

Cheap mass produced weapons with high power to sell to insurgents and irregulars, and generally flood the markets with.

[AlexanderHowl]

I think you mean HT (for High-Tech) rather than UT (which would be Ultratech), as TL8 is now, and we are either mid- or late-TL8, depending on your perspective. Why not just have an organization that possesses early TL9 technology? It would possess a significant advantage over nations with just late-TL8 technology.

An organization with TL9 technology could have a number of toys at its disposal to cause chaos and panic. How about a small reservoir of DMSO-LSD mixture is the grip or stock of the weapon that is computer activated to 'sweat' on command? The mixture would penetrate the skin of the user and cause them to hallucinate without warning. I imagine that a bunch of cops or soldier suddenly hallucinating during stressful encounters could be quite devestating.

[WaterAndWindSpirit]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

An organization with TL9 technology could have a number of toys at its disposal to cause chaos and panic. How about a small reservoir of DMSO-LSD mixture is the grip or stock of the weapon that is computer activated to 'sweat' on command? The mixture would penetrate the skin of the user and cause them to hallucinate without warning. I imagine that a bunch of cops or soldier suddenly hallucinating during stressful encounters could be quite devestating.

"Police Brutality" incidents increasing by orders of magnitude worldwide, thus making ways for their private militia to replace the police... Love it!

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by WaterAndWindSpirit

"Police Brutality" incidents increasing by orders of magnitude worldwide, thus making ways for their private militia to replace the police... Love it!

They'd need to create some new difficult-to-impossible-to-detect drug in place of LSD or similar, because nearly the first thing that's going to be done when an officer-involved shooting has the officer freaking out and describing things that didn't happen is a drug test of the officer, and from there it's not going to be too difficult to find residual traces of LSD on the gun's grip. Maybe they can cover things up the first couple of times, but eventually someone's going to look at the gun and figure out it's literally designed to leak LSD, and then the jig is up. In fact, even with some untraceable drug there's a decent chance someone's going to stumble across the mysterious liquid reserve in the grip.

As for the kill switch, that's going to be software-level, basically just a backdoor in the user-recognition code that allows you to temporarily disable it (so even the registered user can't fire it). Smart gun user-recognition is probably going to at least initially be RFID using a ring or glove to identify the user. This means you don't need to put anything special in the weapon to receive the kill signal, you just need a sufficiently-powerful antenna to broadcast it. You'll probably want some sort of communication-jamming equipment before pulling off this trick, as a few cases of groups of soldiers/cops getting wiped out after their weapons all suddenly failed is going to raise a lot of eyebrows and will likely result in audits that may identify your backdoor. For the same reasons as you need to jam their communications, you'll also need to kill every single affected soldier/cop, as well as all potential witnesses, which is already likely to make the incident high profile. And don't forget to dispose of any recording equipment they had on them, like body cams and the like.

So far as the actual designs go, you're pretty much just going to use the same statistics as the modern weapons that are in use (notably, military and police forces are going to want to use the same ammo as they've already stockpiled, and parts commonality is a plus), and add the smart gun electronics. These probably aren't as good as standard UT smart gun electronics (UT149) - any sort of HUD link probably doesn't show where the weapon is being aimed (or if it does, probably doesn't do so accurately enough for an attack bonus). It can probably give basic weapon diagnostic readouts (including if the weapon is set to Fire or Safe, and firing mode if it has multiple), and can also give at least a readout of number of shots fired, if not an actual measurement of shots remaining.

An exception to the new weapons just being old weapons with added bells and whistles is if the new ones represent some sort of paradigm shift, like a switch to effective caseless ammunition. Even then, the weapons currently in use fit the users' needs fairly well, so you'd probably be fine just copying the stat lines of existing weapons and just increasing the amount of ammunition they can carry (which is the primary advantage of caseless - that, and ambidextrous bullpups are more feasible, so you may want to improve Bulk by 1 to represent a switch to bullpups). Larger calibers may become more popular (smaller calibers are used today because they let you carry more ammunition, some organizations may decide to keep current ammunition capacities and use the weight and bulk savings of caseless ammo to increase caliber).

[The Colonel]

You could switch out the LSD for a dose of aggression boosting hormones - effective doses for most hormones are very small and whilst results wouldn't be guaranteed (as they wouldn't be for LSD), detection would be a lot harder.

A self-disabling gun lock would probably be indistinguishable from one that didn't work properly.

The government hackable gunlock would be suitable dystopian for private use.