Guns for Space Combat

>We'd still be wondering if exploring space is even worth it.
we dont really have a choice. gotta find a way off Earth while we still have to resourses to leave.

oh yeah i know that. scary shit too.

Have to get past the Van Allen belt first.

>All the greenies won't strangle us to stay on this shithole instead of colonizing the stars

IKR, We could have gone to mars in the 80's if we worked with the Russians instead of feared and "Fought" them.

retard alert

>implying that (((they))) would allow whites to leave
Oy Vey, what about the billions of minorities that live in poverty you bigot! Besides, launching rockets will put CO2 in the atmosphere, so to reduce the (((carbon footprint))) you can't have children, but take in millions of immigrants instead!

The only way for whites to achieve space travel is to exterminate EVERY other species of hominid. Using every available weapon regardless of "legality" or "morality". Biological weapons, salted nuclear weapons, nerve gas, hollow points, nothing is forbidden. I want a future where I'm throwing Jewish babies into a bonfire while their mothers watch, a future where Africa is virtually depopulated by turbo Ebola, and there are videos of them puking and shitting their literal guts out.

For the white traitors in our midst the above mentioned deaths would be a KINDNESS, Day of the Rope for niggers and Jews, but for traitors it's the Night of the Long Knives. I'm talking about torture so sadistic that most of liberals would kill themselves rather than fall into our hands.

lol you actually typed this
based but also cringe

Lubrication would be tricky. In vacuum most gun oils simply evaporate. So you’d have to move to a heavy grease. That would probably need some stronger springs. Also vacuum welding would nix using stainless or non-ceramic coated parts.

True Dat.

The truth is sometimes cringy as fuck user.

I miss stellar conflict thread series...

Dry lubricants could work. Graphite powder. If you intend to operate in vacuum you could use some kind of cooling system, maybe compressed nitrogen flushed though channels in the barrel and receiver on firing. Divert the coolant gasses backwards to counteract recoil.

Again, What about the Regolith? Lunar combat would be a pain in the ass. Guns would jam all the time.

Sealed weapons and electromagnetic repulsion at loading ports, with no exposed ejection port, could prevent dust failures, along with lots of training on keeping magazines and coolant bottles clean before loading.

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That... That is fucking awesome. It sounds like it came from a fucking movie.

>What guns would be used for combat in Zero-G or Low gravity.
They've had guns capable of firing in vacuum for decades. The problem isn't the firing mechanism, the problem is heat dissipation and offsetting thrust.
popsci.com/this-soviet-space-station-fired-gun-in-orbit

You couldn't really use bullets in space because they'll push you in the opposite direction they're fired. That's why missiles and solid projectiles (ie: metal slugs jettisoned into a magrail relay, clouds of spaceship-shredding titanium chaff, etc.) would be king. You don't have to compensate for any of their heat or their thrust. You just dump them into the void and let inertia take care of the rest.

If you're talking about some kind of rifle that would work on Mars or the moon, you're still going to run into problems with heat and recoil. You don't really need a 7.62mm equivalent rifle on the moon, however. Something simple that can penetrate a mask or a suit of enemy personnel would kill them pretty fast. So maybe some kind of combination of railgun/flechette blunderbuss would work. You pull the trigger, electricity gets fed into a series of sequenced magnets, and you fire a cloud of arrow-shaped metal darts at someone at incredibly fast speeds. Very little heat or recoil would be involved. It would also work a lot better up there than here, because there's no air friction and less gravity drop to throw projectiles off target.

Aren't we gonna have one on next friday?

> You couldn't really use bullets in space because they'll push you in the opposite direction they're fired.
I had an idea for a way to counteract that,
Has anyone here seen Interstellar? In the movie there are thrusters on the back of the forearms on the EVA suits, If you are able to make a system to fire the thrusters at the same time the gun fires, you could counteract the recoil.

youtube.com/watch?v=lNiscigIgBc

The suits are acutely resistant to small arms fire now, being built to handle micrometorite impacts. A Mars suit would likely be much lighter by 2025, given the thin but present martian atmosphere means you don't need to worry about a mm sized bit of dust killing you.

Small rips in the suit aren't a death sentience either. No matter the pressure difference a leak is limited by the speed of sound in the material leaking so the suit won't lose air fast from a small puncture. Putting on a patch and staying calm can fix it without much air loss.

You can compensate for the recoil of a firearm. Pushing the other way with equal force is the easy way.

You could do that, but then you generate heat and have to carry extra fuel just to offset firing a rifle. The point is: You can have a rifle without needing oxidizing agents. You just make a downscaled railgun.

youtube.com/watch?v=TWeJsaCiGQ0

A I R B U R S T

That would work. Equal and opposite reaction. This could introduce more vibration, especially during long burst. If you have a choice your best option is to be anchored to something big and solid, like a ship with your boots strapped, magnetically locked or otherwise held to the deck, but in free-fall you could just use a thruster, or some expended coolant, as a rocket to balance the thrust from recoil.

This would make an awesome game now that I think about it. But yeah. These are all awesome ideas.

>You couldn't really use bullets in space because they'll push you in the opposite direction they're fired
>solid projectiles would be king

Hello, user. I'm with physics, and I'm afraid I have some bad news for you...

Long term I like the idea of electromotive, minimal moving parts firearms in space. The ability to go with very, very small projectiles that go very, very fast means recoil energy is minimized compared to a conventional projectile weapon.

The downside is we aren't there yet with energy storage. The 2025 timeline makes me think it's best to go with our nice, dense energy storage in gunpowder.

A gun that shoots rockets?

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>2025 in 6 years

Gezus how old I am. I remember times when it was far, fantastic future

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Rockets are nice, but require time after launch to turn their fuel into energy. Not a big deal if you have a warhead on it to do the damage, but bad if you are hoping to kill via kinetic energy. (This is the problem with gyrojet weapons).

MKVs?

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Remember when we were supposed to have flying cars by this age? We'll never even make it back to space at this point because nearly all of our cultural and economic capital is spent importing hostile orcs who hate our civilization in order to appease the worst, and most base, dregs of society.

For those worried about Newton's third law, how the fuck can you be on Jow Forums and not know about the AK-107?

youtube.com/watch?v=lJs9sBBjLls
Forgot video

Pretty much this, anything that will poke a hole in a space suit will work. Let decompression do the heavy lifting for you, smarter not harder kids.

There'll be self-sealing and armored suits.

Neat contribution to the thread. Now fire it in zero-gravity or low gravity with no heat dissipation.

The AK-107 generates thrust, it just minimizes felt recoil via moving counter-mass.

Space suits are made with Kevlar to resist micrometeorite impacts and decompress very, very slowly from small holes.

The concern was about recoil. The heat issue has been discussed. You can have liquid nitrogen cool a mini-railgun.
Gunpowder firearms are dumb in vacuum.

TP-82

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I'm not saying bring an AK to space jesus people don't be so dense. Use the counter-balanced system to make the recoil system mechanical instead of chemical, so you don't have to bring extra propellant.

Or do what the other user said and redivert barrel cooling gas to counter the recoil.

Real life solutions are probably more elegant than shitty sci-fi novel and hollywood movies's lazy ones.

>not understanding chemistry

nice 1

You can cool a conventional firearm with liquid nitrogen too.

A railgun firing 2mm, 2 gram darts at 3 kilometers a second and hitting with ten times the energy of a modern rifle round at half the recoil? Awesome, but we just aren't there yet for technology.

Countering the thrust of the projectiles fired means putting thrust the other direction. You can do that by diverting the gasses from the gunshot, or opening the back of the weapon to eject countermass with every shot like a recoilless rifle.

Explain.
There's no reason to modify existing guns for space when you're likely to build them from the ground up.
Look here There are people building portable railguns in their garages.

There's no thrust if it's not fired from gunpowder m8.
How is a railgun going to have thrust other than the mass of the projectile?

That is a coil gun.

The mass of the projectile. The momentum of the railgun listed would be 9 Newton/Seconds

The recoil is tiny though. You weigh a hell of a lot more than a bullet. You'd only get up to a fraction of walking speed if you emptied a magazine in a single direction. If you're already behind cover, just brace against the cover and you won't go anywhere. If you're not behind cover, why aren't you?
>heavily armored
They still have all their inertia, even if they don't have their weight.
There are many other vacuum rated lubricants, most ARE greases but you don't need to go so far or so heavy as to necessitate stronger springs.
Vacuum welding is also overrated. You need similar metals, no corrosion or passivization layers, no lubricants or coatings. Its something to be considered but its not going to significantly impacts most gun designs.
Dry lubricants yes, but graphite no. Graphite requires water adsorption to function as a lubricant and that will quickly escape in a vacuum.
Moly and BN powder are vacuum rated though.
An MMU would have enough dV to counter about 1500 rounds of 5.56 but again its not really necessary.

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Graphite doesn’t work as a lubricant in a vacuum. Graphite lubricants rely on atmospheric water adsorbing to their surface (molecular level) to slide past each other. In vacuums that water desorbs. But something like copper platelets or making the bearing surfaces out of Teflon would probably be doable. It’d take some redesigning.

You do know that the current U.S. administration has given NASA a directive of landing humans back on the moon by 2025 right? NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has been not-so-subtly bashing the SLS rocket recently and pushing heavily for congress to shift away from it and move toward private launch contractors. Basically SLS is a gigantic congressional jobs program that senators keep funding because the manufacturing process is creating jobs in their regions. It's been a monumental financial joke that has gone way over budget and exceeded the deadlines by at least 4 years now. NASA does not like this but they don't get much of a say in the matter since they are funded by taxpayer money and are forced to use that money as the government sees fit. NASA would like to get out of the rocket launching business, leave that for the 'private' players like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, ULA, etc. and focus their efforts more on mission design, landers, rovers, telescopes, exploration and similar science.

To be fair that's tiny compared to the energy. Getting 13,500 Joules into a projectile in return for 9m/s per second impulse is pretty rad. It's like a .50 BMG with basically the same impulse of a .44 magnum.

Even better. Theoretically less heat because no contact to rails.
How much force is a 5.56 ar? You can use recoil dampeners, balanced recoil, etc.

If your suit is armored, it would take a hell of a lot of force to push your mass in any appreciable manner.

>Heat
You still have the same amount of thermal capacity in space you just void it slower. You could still empty your entire combat load through your rifle nonstop without failure.
And its not hugely slower either - its very hard to keep things at a temperature that humans can live at but radiative cooling is proportional to 4th power of temperature. At temperatures that a rifle can comfortably stay at, you're still getting 50% of the cooling rate you would get in a still atmosphere.
You'll replace barrels more often ad you might need something for machine guns, but rifles are fine.
Conservation of momentum - if you throw a bullet out one side, you will get pushed back no matter what you do inside the subsystem. If you want to cancel the velocity from a bullet, you need to throw mass the other way to slow down. A muzzle brake does this, rocket ammunition does this, an MMU does this. A balanced recoil system does not.

>Heat
Either way it's not that big an issue.
>momentum
Balance recoil may not cancel out the bullet's force, but it will dampen it enough to be negligible.

Sustained rate of fire from an M4 is 12 rounds per minute. With only radiant cooling the sustained rate of fire would be maybe 10% of that, and you could expect a thermal failure well before you fired 300 rounds automatic. Past 200 you may as well just throw it at someone when it fails, it's not going to be repairable.

the recoil is bigger than you think, demo ranch literally moves a canoe he's sitting in with a mag of 308

>current guns would still work fine
Nope they'd overheat after a couple shots
Heat barely dissipates in space through radiation like it does in an atmosphere
Realistically something like a harpoon gun would work really well, low grav or free fall combined with extremely low friction

Even assuming we don't armor space suits, that we don't compartmentalize spacesuits, that we don't use mechanical counter pressure space suits, that we don't use the various self sealing materials we have now, that blood or debris or the skin etc dont seal the breach, and assume you cut a nice clean hole you're still talking about time to vent on the order of a minute.
That's plenty of time to shoot back. You still need terminal ballistics.

Not him but .308 has about 3 times the momentum of 5.56 and he still doesnt get that canoe moving that fast.
And his point is still valid, even basic bracing will prevent you from going anywhere, even if you decide to mag dump down a hallways with .308 for some reason.

>Either way it's not that big an issue.
Agreed.
>Balance recoil may not cancel out the bullet's force, but it will dampen it enough to be negligible.
No it wont. The problem with recoil in space isn't that it hurts or something. Its that it physically pushes you around. If you push a bullet one way, you'll get pushed the other way. Momentum must be conserved.
As said its not a huge amount and there are ways to deal with that, but BARS is not one of them.
1) Combat load is 210 rounds
2) How often are you dumping 210 rounds in one single burst for that to be a reasonable requirement for design.
3) The gas tube should fail well before anything else would become irreparable, and even that should survive the dump. Significantly shorten your barrel life though.
3) 10% is bullshit, because again you maintain thermal capacity and by the time you get it hot enough to approach failure, almost all of your cooling, even on Earth, is radiative. It doesn't even take a very high temperature (relative to the sort of temperatures required for failure) for radiant cooling to become the majority. Even 50% RoF reduction would be overly conservative.

Ruger 10/22 takedown would murder everybody on mars.. single hole in ur suit and it’s lights out

Only if you're a Mass Shooter and not a Soldier

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.22lr for anti personnel, .45ACP for anti armour.
You cannot dispute this.

guns don't work in space you fucking retard
go back to playing halo on /v/

Yes they do retard.

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Can someone with math and physics skills do the calculations of how much a single round of 5.56 or 5.45—based on mass only disregarding pressure from gunpowder and reciprocating mass—will push an average sized human in a spacesuit around?

Sure. But for reference, reciprocating mass can't have any effect on resultant astronaut velocity, because it remains attached to him and gunpowder only matters in so much as the escaping gas ends up acting as a tiny thruster. The latter is essentially how muzzle brakes work. But we'll ignore everything but the bullet going out.

Based on the astronaut requirements and average Marine weight (easy to find), a decent mass estimate is 75kg for the man in the suit. A current EVA suit weighs 145kg. A 62gr/4g at 3281fps/1000m/s is close enough to 5.56 and makes math easy.

So momentum = p = mass * velocity and is conserved so the math is easy.
>p_bullet_before + p_astronaut_before = p_bullet_after + p_astronaut_after

Both befores are zero because that's what were using as a reference frame. We know the masses of the bullet and astronaut, and we know the bullet velocity after.
> p_bullet_after = - p_astronaut_after
We only care about the magnitude of velocity so we can ditch the -ve and sub in for p=mv.

>mv = mv
>(75+145)*1000g * v = 4g * 1000m/s
>(75+145)* v = 4m/s
>v = (4 m/s)/(220)
>v = 18mm/s
Or approximately 215 ft/hour.

You can tweak the math as you like. The next gen Z series suits are predicted to be only 70kg, bumping the resultant speed to a blistering 29mm/s or 5.6 feet per minute.
The average soldier carries 60lbs of gear, so thatd drop the speed back down to 24mm/s. Sub in whatever values you like if you feel the assumptions are off.

It's a rule of thumb that recoil due to propellant gases is an order of magnitude smaller than recoil due to projectile in typical (straight-wall) handgun cartridges, and is of the same order of magnitude for typical (bottleneck) rifle cartridges.
With a good muzzle brake, and a rifle-like cartridge selected to have more propellant recoil than projectile recoil, it's possible to null out the recoil from firing completely. This is probably worth doing.

The real problem in space is not the linear velocity as calculated by as much as rotational velocity.
When you shoot a gun standing on the ground, the gun and to a lesser extent your upper body rotate up, but then you return to your original position for another shot, ultimately by exerting force against the ground. When you shoot the same gun in space, your entire body will start rotating up, and just keeps rotating -- you go into a slow backwards somersault, and have to reposition the rifle "down" each time to get it back inline with the target.

For this reason, even though the velocities are slow enough to not be a serious problem (fire a few rounds, then cancel the velocity with thrusters), it will become much harder to quickly put multiple shots in the same target. Thus an effectively recoilless rifle (whether by a separate counter-thruster, or just an efficient muzzle brake and load selection) is still very desirable.

This, but instead of BB use tiny plastic explosives. Or the suit will absorb most of the things (as many others mentioned )

fuck off commie sympathizer

Modern MMUs can already automatically cancel rotation very quickly and very well. But it really shouldn't be necessary. Moonraker style open space battle shouldn't happen for the same reasons that we don't line up and march at each other on the battlefield anymore.
Its suicidal.
What little infantry combat that does happen in space will happen in, and to a far lesser extent on the surface of, vessels and stations. You should always have cover and because you should you always have something to arrest your slow af rotation and floating.

>sending 200lbs of meat into space just so that it can aim monkey guns at other monkeys with its shaky monkey hands

all tactical combat in space will be carried out by robots and autonomous missile-mines.
they will use small rockets and flechette coilguns at first, and eventually switch to lasers as battery density and materials science improves.

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Beautiful

>they'd overheat after a couple shots.
Stop with this meme shit. We've had countless Anons debunk that

OKB is great for bunker busting but that's about it. The issue is any OKB projects it's destructive force downwards so while you do get area damage it wouldn't be as useful as you think. I got to find the screencap I took of the physics user who posted about it last time

Every thread we have to go through "yes guns will go off in a vacuum", I think you might be asking too much of them.
>also enough room to do everything with gloves...
I seem to remember an user here a while back that said he got to try field stripping an AK in a glovebox built out of spacesuit gloves and under vacuum that used to be a museum exhibit or something.
I wonder if hes still around or if the post is archived somewhere, I can't remember how he said it went.
>Glovebox like pic related, not like the glove compartment in a car.

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If you leave the weapon alone for too long it'll supercool and the grease would solidify.

Mind, at that point you'd also worry about the springs shattering like glass so lube isn't really the biggest issue.

Graphite should work fine and even help sink the heat.

Only if you're on the moon. If you're in orbit or on a planet it's less of a problem.

Probably there won't be man-to-man combat across open ground in space, both because microgravity makes natural movement awkward but also because the cost of life and equipment in space is enormous and to expend your resources and risk damage to vital equipment is suicidal in the strictest sense of the term. Assuming though there is a necessity for war in space, the basics of a modern firearm will still do just fine, bullets carry their own fuel/oxidizer mix and do not require atmosphere to function, they also don't have to be designed with aerodynamics in mind for use in a vacuum and will probably be shaped more like a needle than the classic spitzer shape. Telescoping rounds would be useful as a space (and thus weight) saving technique. Lubricants will have to be dry or components will have to be designed to operate without conventional lubrication, and contacting surfaces of components will have to be made of differing materials to avoid vacuum welding, barrels may have radiator fins added onto them to help reject heat or may even have an active cooling system using some mostly harmless high thermal capacity coolant to allow them to operate in sunlight. Guns will have to be able to operate at temperatures anywhere from nearly 400k to as low as 100k (120C to -100C), propellants will have to be highly stable not ignite at those kinds of temperatures. Operating on the Moon or other bodies with fine dust may require guns to have a sealed ammunition feeding system (rounds may be fed from a sealed belt and expended casings can be discarded into a removable hopper). Components under the most heat stress (chamber and barrel) may be made of alloys optimized for retaining their mechanical sturdiness under high temperature strain and able to withstand high degrees of thermal shocking, such as Inconel or hastelloy alloys.

Jesus christ dude, this isn't even basic high school stuff.

Let me pitch some ideas, see what y'all think.

First, Lasers
Pro
-Very easy to use
-No (well...practically no) recoil.
-Perfect accuracy for small arms range
Cons
-Heat. By God, the Heat.
-Electrical energy hard to store
-Limited stopping power.
Recommendation
-Second line infantry
-sidearm.
There's too many ways to counter it for frontline use but the shear ease of using and supplying laser weapons can't be ignored.

Recoilless Rifles
Pros
-Simple to make and produce
-Reasonably accurate against stationary targets
-Recoil almost negligible.
-Allows for very large projectiles that can be loaded with explosives.
Cons
-Hard to engineer for rapid fire
-Slow muzzle velocity, bad for long range and moving targets.
-Backblast.
Recommendation
-Scaled down to a CQB weapon. Potentially useful if you've got armor proof against backblast.
-Anti-structure\tank weapon.

Gyrojets
Pros
-Decent penetrations at medium to long range
-Can do automatic fire
-low recoil.
Cons
-Terrible short range penetration
-expensive ammo
-small defects in ammo may result in bad long range accuracy.
Recommendation
-Honestly, I'm on the fence about this

Conventional firearms
Pros
-They work
-Probably the most lethal long range weapon on this list.
Cons
-you need an anchor point or a complicated counterthrust system.
-Rapid fire leads to heat and lubrication issues
Recommendation
-Specialist weapon.

Caseless ammo

Caseless causes heating issues in terrestrial guns, it will be exasperated in space where anything exposed to direct sunlight can reach several hundred degrees. My primary worry with fully caseless ammo would be whether or not you could get a propellant which is both powerful and highly stable at oven-like temperatures and beyond.

Thermite squirt guns and souped up crossbows.

Maybe for something conventional, they could just use the balanced recoil system the Russians came up with and scale the cartridge down even further to something like 4.6x36 to minimize the impulse as much as possible.

(You)
Now fuck off

Seems to me like the solution to to avoid cookoff would be some sort of stable explosive, like C4. Not sure how well that would work for propelling things, though. Could you somehow retard the reaction to make more of a wave than a spike?

Spear guns