/k/ - Weapons

This is a really interesting topic, but how much battery can one dude carry on him for a welder? do man-portable electric welders even exist?

Also, what would be ther best filler material to put between the electrode plates? best metal for the plates? thickness?

How much energy does it take to melt a single bullet?

what happens if the melted bullet connects the two plates and they melt together?

I think this technology's best application will be a railgun tank. Railguns in the field are juuuust starting to become feasible, but we'll see them as ship guns and stationary artillery first, then an SPG, then perhaps a tank(it'll probably be more like a infantry fire support vehicle, taking the role of the stryker dragoon). A railgun tank would be kinda like the abrams but without most of the armor, same two turbines running generators, a huge capacitor bank, and lots of fuel. This thing will drink gas even faster than the abrams, because gas is also your gunpowder. However, you get a railgun; you can shoot the same projectile much faster and further than before. This kind of standoff range can be decisive. Another thing to consider: torque. Electric engines are bi-directional and very torque-y, making them very suitable for tanks, which need to be able to forward/reverse a few feet as fast as possible. This electric armor is just icing on the cake.

railgun tank vs conventional tank:

>greatly reduces logistical needs because:

>is a very efficient generator for the unit

>ammo is smaller

>no explosive ammo so cheap ammo and no shipping hazards

>only need diesel and ammo

<but lots of it. which we already can and usually do supply.

>can shoot further than conventional guns

>extremely high velocity rounds

>fast reverse acceleration cus omnidirectional motor

<guzzles diesel like a fucking jet hovering when firing at full power

<no explosive ammo

<you must now train tankers how to deal with extremely high voltage

<tankers will have to manage their charge level in battle and may not be ready to fire when needed

<high-end capacitors are explosive

i have a feeling that some explosives can handle being accelerated faster than a standard cannon but not quite at railgun speeds, so a 1/2 of 2/3s power railgun might be able to fire a HEAT shell with reduced range. But thats assuming that the projectile heating up is accounted for too. It could probably fire conventional shells, but at conventional (or moderately better) velocities.

Interesting idea, could potentially mean that there will be some sort of ammunition that will have an extremely high melting point that will be meant to suck up as much energy as possible. Maybe layer of the APFSDS round being made of volfram?

>HEV suit

It had no intention of providing ballistic protection. The HEV suit was meant for hazardous environments, such as extreme radiation and cold.

Although we have been over the power armour question a thousand times here and the answer is still the same, we lack batteries that are energy dense enough to actually feed a suit of power armour and the current leading edge of battery technology, Lithium Ion, would be extremely dangerous to put on the back of a soldier since the tiniest penetration would mean a very rapid discharge of all the cells and a pretty big explosion. Putting a nuclear reactor on the back of a soldier is also questionable.

>>647397

The HEV suit explicitly states ballistic protection and reactive armor systems enabled during the HL1 boot sequence actually.

>>647404

>The circuit would be stuck open

Fuck, I mean stuck closed.

>>647401

Did it? I completed the game for the first time in January, I don't think I noticed that. I always assumed that it was meant for day to day work in Black Mesa and dealing with hazardous chemicals.

>>647380

What happens after the first hit though? wouldn't it make the whole thing useless then?

The problem of power armor is lack of power source to power it on the go.

So let's make a power armor that requires EVEN more power as protection.

I will stick to ceramite and kevlar.

>>647411

>>647380

Electronics tech here. You'd have to create a faraday cage around you, otherwise the arc flash will weld the armor to your skin in the best of cases (the worst case being the amperage from the impact would need to be high enough to insta-weld/melt bullets meaning it would be high enough to stop your heart or light you up like a flare.

Electricity is a cruel mistress where about 1 in 5 people who work on high voltage will die before age 30 due to fucking up. There is no forgiveness when you fuck up with high voltage/high amperage and there's a reason they use it on tanks and not humans due to this potential for fuckery when you stick it on some window licker who would just as soon poke the holes where he was hit with his bare hands or intentionally try to activate the protective feature by stabbing the armor with a knife (and frying himself in the process) among other Darwin Award-winning moments.

>>647435

It would melt and you'd eventually end up with red-hot liquid metal slag against your chest until it can spread apart/lose contact, or a dead battery occurs from shorting it for too long. It's great for a tank where a little red hot metal won't affect the uranium-steel armor plating, not so much for human flesh. Go connect a copper wire to a car battery and connect the two ends together with a primer/powder-removed load to see what would basically happen (or don't remove the primer/powder if you want to create a tiny frag grenade).

>>647524

>>647487

Which reminds me, if for ANY reason this armor gets penetrated and goes into you, you've just shorted your body to ground and have created one more reason having a giant capacitor as body armor on a meat bag is a bad idea since the voltage threshold of blood is ridiculously low. An Army electrician killed himself a few years ago on a 12 volt voltmeter because he pierced the probes through his thumbs- your skin having a voltage threshold in the 20s before current can pass through you whereas your blood has a threshold of like 3 volts for current to pass through you.

>>647531

>Does the 4th picture really suggests that the Abrams is already equipped with electric reactive armour, and it's just a well kept secret that nobody found out?

That's just the normal spaced composite armour of the Abrams. I think the OP just posted that as a show of where he would put the electrodes between.

>>647389

Rails are FAR easier to manufacture than barrels.

in order to make two perfectly flat long surfaces like the rails, all that's needed is to rub the two surfaces together, and rub each against a third surface for the same amount of time to prevent a curved surface. The only common plane between three surfaces must be flat.

This is done a lot to produce surface plates, standards for perfect flatness in labs and machine shops. A british guy discovered this in the 1800s and its part of what brought in the industrial revolution. It was the first perfectly flat surface mankind had ever made. This process would be stupid easy to apply to rails on railguns, its already used to produce perfectly flat surfaces on big, heavy chunks of metal. Yes, this process takes time, but its INCREDIBLY simple. Just extrude two rails if possible, you may need to machine rails(or maybe one piece), cut your firing surface to nearly what you want, then rub the rails together, then rub the rails against a standard surface plate. It must be the same surface they rub against for this process. Im an engineer and have an idea about how an industrial machine like this would work, too drunk to draw/explain it rn.

This is far, far more complicated than drilling or hammer-forging a barrel, both of which must be machined extensively to include the breach and other things before drilling/forging, then going back to check your clearances/headspace/other bullshit. Railgun rails are relatively simple pieces the only challenge being the size, and they only require a single, flat precision surface. The rest can be as precise as you want to pay for.

vid related is a couple boomers explaining how to rub rocks together just right. Same principle, applied to railgun rails.

>>647404

I read on wikipedia that the plates acting as capacitors is part of the functionality of the system, and the plates' capacitative charge is the charge that melts the bullets, meaning larger plates hold more charge and melt larger bullets. Charge rate would depend on power lines going in and the power production onboard. Charging from caps in my railgun tank was just because the capacitors replace batteries, for more railgun power. (it would also charge the armor faster)

>>647531

>he wants a brap gun

>instead of a railgun

brap guns are already as mature as they are going to get. NASA has been using them to simulate high-velocity asteroid impacts for several decades now, and when through several generations optimizing them purely for velocity, at the expense of all else.

>>647411

You have to remember that the suit was made with pentagon bux for the marines and that it was also made for scientists exploring zen. Its a bit more than your average hazmat suit.

>>647437

Not nearly as much power as power armor would need, that's why this could work using something similar to a car battery and power armor wouldn't without an onboard fusion reactor

>>647487

Could the Faraday cage be divided into separate pieces placed just under the plating so that the user could still move or would it have to be an uninterrupted single piece of cage? If its the former, it seems like it could be done, that and rubber could be placed beneath the cages to insulate further and to separate the cage from everything underneath

>intentionally try to activate the protective feature by stabbing the armor with a knife (and frying himself in the process)

Bonus points for enemies trying to stab the user and getting fried instead (or at least melting their knife)

>>647531

idk I just found it on google images lol

>>647539

This isnt WW1, we aren't firing barages for days on end. Arty barrages these days are as precise as possible and focus on putting maximum boom on target in the minimum amount of time. railguns (and clggs) are advantageous because you can shoot the projectile faster. Its roughly the same acceleration for both clggs and railguns, but railguns will put a bit more heat and absurd electromagnetic forces on the projectile. When you do need to bomb something for days on end, you use rocket artillery and bombs, not conventional arty.

clggs would introduce a new fuel into the army(and navy)'s logistical nightmare. Having a tank that doesnt need any propellant and uses diesel instead sounds pretty nice to me. Also, what makes you think railgun projectiles cant be guided? Its explosives that tend to not work, and its from the heat from the plasma and the compression from the extreme acceleration. Its a solvable problem, but one that clggs face too.

>>647556

>Can you make a Faraday cage with openings in it?

Short answer is "no." You can't build it that way. The closest you could do is a flexible mesh, but it would still have to extend over basically the entire body underneath the armor in order to prevent contact with skin. Vid related is memery but it shows what I mean by needing a cage around the soldier. I say "faraday cage" but really any "cage" that shorts the electricity to ground or disperses it BEFORE it reaches you would do the job. Chainmail has a similar effect if I recall correctly.

>>647563

Ah fuck, I meant to address the use of insulating material as well. Most insulating materials melt really easily under electrical arc flash conditions (or even just under high amperage conditions). In practice, you wear specially rated rubber gloves because they'll prevent you from accidentally touching a live wire, but if that wire has too much current in it (or god forbid it arc flashes), the rubber is more likely to melt/weld to your skin rather than protect you, so I'm not sure an insulative material would help either.

>>647561

>This isnt WW1, we aren't firing barages for days on end.

That's because since Vietnam the US armed forces were either used as glorified gendarmerie or faced sandniggers.

>When you do need to bomb something for days on end, you use rocket artillery and bombs, not conventional arty.

What? You can reload a howitzer after every shot, but you have to reload all tubes of a MRLS at the same time, and that's quite a long process. Airplanes are even worse, because you also need to refuel them, and they need constant maintenance. Not to mention that it's a lot more demanding on the pilots and on the ground crew. How the hell are those faster than simply reloading a tube?

>clggs would introduce a new fuel into the army(and navy)'s logistical nightmare.

Read the report, you can manufacture hydrogen and oxygen from either water or fuel. You just need an additional truck with this equipment for every battery, and all of your problems are solved.

>Also, what makes you think railgun projectiles cant be guided?

I didn't wrote that it's impossible, I wrote that it's easier with a clgg.

>Its a solvable problem, but one that clggs face too.

You don't have to deal with plasma in a CLGG. It really is like a conventional cannon that uses gases, so you only have to face the problem of high acceleration.

>>647564

>insulating material

easy, ceramics. Its whats used in most tiny capacitors certain ceramics are both excellent insulators and excellent armor. I'm sure there's one that's a good compromise for this situation.

>>647611

>reload all tubes of MRLS

but 6 MRLS trucks cost the same as one 150mm SPG, dumb rockets are also cheaper than shells. No high-precision parts.

>i wrote that its easier with the clgg

You mean cheaper. Those cost benefits will very quickly be overrun by the cost of moving either methane or nullified by the fact that they are powered by hydrolysis machines, which need power, and on a large scale, it will inevitabely come from a similiar turbine generator and put roughlt the same strain on the fucking cobweb of JP-8 supply lines the US already has throughout the globe.

Transporting methane(or any compressed flammable gas really) in the field is dangerous, probably more than transporting explosives; you can choose between highly compressed tanks that may detonate when pierced, or large less pressurized tanks that only spew flames, but still lose all the product on a single penetration to a now larger target.

>dont have to deal with plasma in clgg

There's still more heat than a conventional cannon, and less then a railgun.

CLGG's advantages over railguns right now are durability and somewhat better potential for explosive ammunition, but CLGGs havn't had any major advances in several decades compared to railguns which, since 2000, have seen capacitors get much more dense, rail life supposedly double,

>>647670

>but 6 MRLS trucks cost the same as one 150mm SPG, dumb rockets are also cheaper than shells. No high-precision parts.

That only works if you are doing saturation bombardment with those dumb rockets, and (assmuning you are the same anon) you wrote this:

>Arty barrages these days are as precise as possible and focus on putting maximum boom on target in the minimum amount of time.

Using 6 MRLSs is the exact opposite of a precise barrage, therefore this argument doesn't make any sense.

>You mean cheaper. Those cost benefits will very quickly be overrun by the cost of moving either methane or nullified by

You aren't even responding to what I wrote. The subject there is launching guided projectiles, and that has nothing to do with what you wrote.

> it will inevitabely come from a similiar turbine generator and put roughlt the same strain on the fucking cobweb of JP-8 supply lines the US already has throughout the globe.

But you can put that additional truck in a corner of a base and supply the gases together with the ammunition. You don't have to build it into the SPG. Meanwhile the railgun needs the capacitors on the vehicle.

>still lose all the product on a single penetration to a now larger target.

The gas tanks would be a part of a magazine, and so that penetration would be fatal to a conventional SPG. Read the report, with hydrogen and oxygen you'd just have a jet of flame spewing from the tank. It's much safer than conventional propellant.

>There's still more heat than a conventional cannon, and less then a railgun.

Do you have a single fact to back that up?

>CLGGs havn't had any major advances in several decades compared to railguns

That's because of retardation and corruption. Railmemes are features in media as some kind of a superweapon, and they are a very expensive technology. It's only natural that corrupt idiots would rather spend money on a more expensive and less useful alternative. From what I can gather Utron already built a perfectly fine 155mm CLGG that was simply abandoned, and that's why CLGGs aren't advancing: nobody is paying the R&D.

>>647677

Forgot this link: https://web.archive.org/web/20131208170621/http://utroninc.com/tech.html

>>647380

Electric armor sucks comparing to explosive reactive armor. Its very simply explosives store order of magnitude more energy than capacitors and can deliver much more powerful action against projectile.

BTW Russians unironically develop explosive reactive body armor.

>>647728

There are no dumb rockets for MRLS anymore, silly.

>>647730

It keeps happenig!

IT IS THAT OTHER FUCKING ANON WHO FUCKING SUGGESTES TO USE MRLS WITH DUMB ROCKETS, YOU FUCKING MUTT! THIS IS WHY PEOPLE KEEP SUGGESTING TO JUST CLEANSE ALL OF NORTH AMERICA WITH NUCLEAR FIRE!

>>647729

>BTW Russians unironically develop explosive reactive body armor.

Sauce, schnell!

>>647670

>dumb rockets are also cheaper than shells. No high-precision parts.

You have that backwards. Most howitzer shells are made from cheap castings, whereas a rocket needs a precisely machined nozzle in order to achieve a useful level of accuracy at standoff range.

>>647773

Not rocket truck anon, but can't you just cast said nozzle end and then do some finishing work to smooth it out, or stack a number of cheap stamped, perforated plates on top of each other with each set of nozzle holes twisted relative to the last in the stack? I know for a fact the latter was used to decent effect, I just can't remember where. Plus there's always the option of flip-out fin stabilization.

Beside that, this Combustion Light Gas Gun business. This is a strange and interesting thing that I have had no awareness of before now. I don't know how much faith I have in the gas tank pseudo-magazine with the scaleable gas mixture I'm seeing on research guns and garage builds, it seems gimmicky, but it is still very interesting. My question is why no one has considered making a CLGG cartridge system? In other words, simply replacing solid propellant with a light gas canister, fired from a conventional/old-type tube.

That seems like the simplest way to take advantage of the technology using existing equipment & science, if you can somehow overcome the economy of scale of existing tooling/industry that'll still be displaced in regards to propellant; just trade a certain amount of solid propellant for an equivalently energetic and denser, proportionally lighter gas can. The fiddly part would be figuring out how to prime it. Maybe a small hard-plastic high explosive plug in the cartridges' internal can, which is ignited by the primer and easily protects it from getting kicked off by gas pressure? Since it's internally seated, it's being pushed into place instead of out of it.

Now, the acceleration is much higher, and it puts a load on the functioning components of a shell. But what's the overall pressure load like, venting a controlled light gas explosion instead of a nitro solid? I would think that more energy in=more pressure load out, but maybe there's some peculiarity to the way it combusts that I don't understand just skimming? As far as I can understand, the use of more energetic gasses combusting and accelerating at presumably faster rates is sort of an inverse of the high-low pressure system gradually shunting projectiles to max velocity. But the shitty wiki stub notes that it has 'higher efficiency' in bang in-shoot out without elaborating further. What, it puts more energy onto the projectile, while imposing less on the chamber and tube due to being more of a 'fsssh' than a 'bang' at least relative to nitro propellant? Is it something like a high-low system that simply reaches far higher acceleration? What am I looking at here?

And, really, the crowning question here; why aren't we being assed with putting more efficient propellant in our boomsticks and more richly alloyed, rougher and tougher stick to our boom in general? If we're going to do some major paradigm shifting changeover to railguns or CLLGs or coils or whatever else that will upend the old order anyways, why not just design a better solid propellant, in a better cartridge, with a better projectile, in a better conventional guntube? At least then you have the opportunity to keep at least partial compatibility between new weapons and old ammo as you roll out the suped-up versions of the old faithfuls. Is the material science just not there, or is it pure procurement corruption heebery?

>>647786

>I just can't remember where

USSR I believe.

>>647773

Before Obama ban of MRLS dumb rockets they were cheaper than 155 arty rounds. If you calculate cost per 1 DPICM bomblet delivered.

>>647786

>Combustion Light Gas Gun

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a462130.pdf

>>647831

This is very strange and very interesting. Horizontal autoloaders, with no breech at all. The bulk of the complete system definitely lends itself to naval use, versus having a kind of wagon fort of supporting gas trucks for towed guns. But then again, all you're really doing is changing the propellant and how it's stored, so maybe that's not really a concern? But I feel very remiss about trailing gas lines from truck to gun. It seems like so much clutter, and just another step if you have to get the guns set up or torn down quick, though the extreme range advantage should minimize the need for that.

So, you can make it a self-propelled chassis as Magyarnon seems to be proposing as I look over the previous posts again, but depending on how much gas and how many shells you'll need, I wonder if it won't bloat in either size and weight or in support apparatus if you put them on a separate vehicle? It'd take a far harder look at the data than I'm giving it to figure if pressurized gas and CLGG projectiles will be logistically superior to shells. It's certainly safer, as the report indicates with the hydrogen jets. But it seems highly vulnerable to sabotage, if the enemy can get far enough behind the lines to get the super-range guns.

All it takes is one man with a clear line of sight and a high-velocity anti-material gun or high bore rainbow trajectory rifle to pinhole the storage tanks- almost no matter how many individual tank compartments you make- and suddenly you're shit out of propellant. A stack of shell boxes somehow seems easier to hide than the tankers I'm envisioning and a little stiffer against projectile sabotage, at least as far as compartmentalization; the pierced shells are writeoffs, but that's a shell or two lost per shot on target instead of a barrages' worth of propellant. Again the idea comes to mind of some kind of prepackaged CLGG pseudoshell, with a gas can bonded to the projectile as a kind of cartridge, but then you lose the benefit of being able to cook up whatever propellant mixture and resultant velocity, range & ballistic arc you want. You just get a nicer, flatter and cleaner shooting slug thrower at that point.

>>647834

Ruskie gyrojets. Yeah, I think that was it. Has the stamped plate ethic been applied to artillery scale rockets before? It seems like the perfect solution to keep launcher bore/rail spacing as close to 1:1 with the rocket bore as you can get, while also being cheap as dirt and nearly if not exactly as precise as expensive machined thrust-stabilizing nozzle plates, which as I recall the Germans tended towards for barrage weapons in the second war. Far too much work for a disposable dumbfire rocket. But fixed fins are sort of shit for accuracy as I understand. Stamped thruster stabilization, that's the best of both worlds for a penny-pinching procurement or a total war environment.

>>647990

Yes, all are options. I considered spaced armor for the gas can farm, and obviously digging a hole is always an option. The question is how big an inconvenience it would be to have the additional weight of anti-antimaterial gas tank pavise shields or more deep dug-out duty for the artillerymen? Probably not very much, considering you can get 200 nautical miles/230 standard max range out of a 70 caliber barrel in naval mounting. I doubt you'll lose an incredible amount of that range downscaling to a 52 or 60 caliber barrel, compared to 25 miles with current US 155/52 gun-howitzers with fancy GPS guided rocket boosted shells. Let's be (un?)charitable, pull a number out of my ass by doing doubtless completely wrong monkey math that just associates range in miles to caliber length by percentage, 3.2ish miles per caliber length, and say that you go to 170 miles with a 52 caliber barrel, 197 with a 60 caliber barrel. That's still a 680%-788% increase in range, and we're sitting at about a third or a fourth the range of the Big Babylon super duper fuckoff space guns right there.

Of course, this is without minimizing the size and mass of the stern end of the gun assembly, which will probably be simpler, smaller and less capable of the absurd pressures of the naval testbed version or else will have a double-carriage to stick the gas compressor on, use a breach housing of some kind instead of a chunky autoloader and will have externalized the gas cans themselves. That will probably do far more to cut your range down than shortening the tube. But a CLGG that could pull even a 50-100% boost in range would be massive, and I don't think it would be too bold of me to say that a 400% increase of 100 miles would not be unreasonable in an M198/M777 replacement gun of similar tube/carriage/breach mass, though a very likely greater total mass including integral gas tanks.

That's scraping the lower end of small/air launched cruise missiles' operational range, except in a rapid-fire capable guntube with vastly cheaper ammunition. I feel stupid for thinking digging an extra ditch or having an extra truck is a meaningful issue, because nevermind that the general rule is shoot and scoot, and not to dig in, but you can chuck a kinetic shell from one border of some US states to the other. Or directly over one and juuust into the next for the itty bitty East Coast states. The guns are so far in the backline that enemy counterbattery action is a pipe dream, and trying to launch an effective commando attack on them, assuming they stay in place, is probably outside the reasonable ability of many guerillas or special forces- even if they bring indirect fire weapons like light mortars or lance grenade launchers- if the security forces aren't being intentionally mismanaged and thus outside the bounds of cost-effectiveness. You can still try to brute force it and blow the whole firebase or HQ down with a truck bomb, but that's another issue entirely.

any power armour needs an easily charged supply, not something reliant on resupply.

we already see the marines switching to batteryless/rechargable optics with the m27,

there's no way in hell a soldier will wear a powered suit that only works for like 4 hours before a bettery swap into battle when he's already fed up with changing batteries on his optics.

not only does it need to be easily charged in field, it needs to charge efficiently and quickly.

all i can think of is charging the armor with body fat and kinetic motion.

if the powered armor is something like an exoskeleton or (more realistically) a nanosuit-esque IPMC suit, movement alone won't be enough to power it.

charging from movement and from body fat are both passive and don't require the soldier to do any more than what they already would be doing, barring eating more food to maintain a suitable calorie surplus.

if i'm not mistaken, animal fat has an energy density close to diesel fuel, which is leaps and bounds ahead of any battery.

ofc, a genetically engineered soldier will always be better than an exosuit,

because you can build the suit into them, shaving the total weight considerably.

and that's why exosuits are nothing but vaporware, because by the time exosuits are good enough, genetic engineering will have already been more than good enough.

the only reason we don't genetically engineer humans right now is because it's illegal, the technology is already mostly here.

that's not to say that it doesn't need to be developed further, but it's the difference between needing to invent a lathe and having a lathe that you refuse to use.

there will always be prototyping as with any project, but the tools are already there.

>>648738

That's not power armor though. It's a light vehicle.

>>648738

Literally every country tried this in the interwar period and found they were all universally shit.

>>648796

>its a light vehicle

>not power armor

Power armor is by definition a vehicle.

>>648884

of course that drawing wouldnt work, it would be clumsy and retarded unless you made it quite a bit larger. But, when the biggest hinderance to us having power armor is that battery tech isnt there yet.. why not forego the battery and throw a fucking 2 stroke and a 10 gallon gas tank on it.

>>648897

>Power armor is by definition a vehicle.

It's apparel.

>>648897

>But, when the biggest hinderance to us having power armor is that battery tech isnt there yet..

The biggest hindrance* to us having power armor is that almost any rifle round that can reliably take down a deer can also pierce "bulletproof" armor. Batteries are a secondary concern you disingenuous cunt. We just focus on batteries because battery technology would make working hydraulic suits, not armor but suits for allowing some military guy to act as a walking forklift as an example, need better power supplies if we're not keeping them stuck to cables.

>>648967

The other reason we focus on batteries is because to make armor thick enough to stop most ammunition, you'd need a large amount of energy to do so at which point you're dealing with objects such as tanks or light vehicles out of necessity, not apparel.

>>647380

To think HEV suit is from the 90s with AI assistant.

In-game it felt more like a "modern" representation of a metal armor that was hard enough to resist small arms while using energy to keep its armor plates "hard", not disintegrate or react.

In HL2 it felt more like a power-armor due to the aux power letting you go fast and zoom.