Speaking of bangs, one thing that virtually every sci-fi writer ignores is the fact that any boarding party is going to need hearing protection.

Loud noises (like gunshots) are bad for ones hearing, and narrow metal corridors make great echo chambers, increasing the effect. A modern SWAT team uses suppressed weapons not for stealth, but to protect their own hearing. Anyone firing a weapon on-board a starship is going to have the exact same problem, only many times worse.

While thermal expansion might indeed be a problem, lack of lubrication probably isn't on the timescales important in a gunfight. The mechanisms of basic firearms are sufficiently simple that they will generally operate just fine without any lubrication at all, or even when coated inside and out with dust, grit, or mud. Lubrication serves only to reduce wear over the long term. One of the favorite "torture test" approaches used to demonstrate the durability of a firearm, in fact, is to disassemble the gun, clean all the parts with a degreasing agent, reassemble it, and put a few dozen rounds through it. (See e.g., XD Torture Test -- scroll down to "The Chemical Degreaser Test".) A revolver, in particular, has only three or four moving parts and should operate under almost any conditions.

On the subject of protecting guns from thermal shock and drastic pressure changes, we already have some experience. When a solider executes a HALO (high altitude, low opening) parachute jump, he goes from STP to a very cold, low pressure environment and back to STP in a very short time. The solution? Stick weapons and other equipment that wouldn't take well to the hostile environment in insulated, airtight bags. The insulation ensures the weapon might get cold, but won't suffer thermal shock, and the inside of the bag says at atmospheric pressure the entire time. The same could be done with weapons in space: in vacuum you would be limited to a knife, and some kind of laser pistol or specialized slug thrower, but once you get inside the other ship, you can simply unzip the bag on your chest and pull out whatever kind of gun you like (e.g. short barreled assault rifle, semi-auto shotgun, BFG 90000, whatever).

Moving on, I would like to point out the XM29 OICW.

The predominant feature of this weapon, aside trying to combine an assault rifle and grenade launcher while expecting a soldier to lug it around without a problem, is the TA/FC. TA/FC stands for " target acquisition / fire control system" which is, simply put, a miniature ballistic computer with its own sensors ("computerized sight"). What makes it more unique is the Air Burst functionality. Air Burst means that it can program a lunched grenade to explode at a specific moment (with special grenade only, of course).

A scenario: two guys are hiding next to a window in a building. You have to take them out from afar and without alerting them. You can't just use a regular grenade, as it would go trough the window and into the far end of the room (possibly trough an open door that leads into a hallway), from where the effects of the grenade are lessened and the lethality is questionable at best. There is simply no good way to kill the two guys without risking alerting them.

Enter Air Burst mode. With the aforementioned computer, you can program the grenade to explode at the very moment it goes trough the window. The two guys experience the explosion and possible fragmentation directly. This can work with trenches and the like. The XM307 also has air-burst capability, and can be converted into a machine gun with the replacement of 5 parts.

The important thing is the sight: soldiers waste allot of bullets to take down one guy, up to hundreds. Since WW1, soldiers always wanted sights to better kill their enemies from afar. Nowadays, we have laser-assisted targeting and stuff like night vision sights and infra red to help find targets. A computerized sight is likely to appear in a futuristic setting.

This makes the idea of a firing system that checks whether you are shooting a soldier or an important piece of equipment much more plausible.

• 

• 

• 

UPDATE: Actually, it already appeared somewhat. FN right now is making the rather sleek FN F2000 that also has a laser rangefinder with a computerized sight, usable by both the rifle and the attachable grenade launcher. The FN F2000 is one of the first ambidextrous bullpup, as the age-old problem of ejecting spent cases is solved by using an ejection tube.

The assembled rifle was blunt and ugly. All rifles are ugly. It fired a low calibre round at super-high velocity, it was all breech and recoil-reloading mechanism, snub barrel and long muzzle brake. The butt was nothing, just a flat buffer pad. You held it two-handed like a police marksman but with the butt jammed against the chest of your suit, high up over the heart. The breech and the block magazine were behind the trigger grip so that it was back heavy when loaded, awkward to aim unless butted securely. To aim beyond point blank range you snapped the sights up and forward, open sights or else with an infrared or starscope aimer fitted—you couldn't crane your head to line up a shouldered weapon, not in a spacesuit. Aiming was easy unless you wanted to shoot for kilometres, when you had to use a laser ranger that imposed a trajectory lift on the sights. Closer to, the trajectory would be virtually flat in Hel's 0.6g, and with no atmosphere to retard it the bullet arrived as fast as it left the barrel. Which was very fast. And that achieved with a minimum recoil kick because of the muzzle brake. The design was just a further improvement of what was standard. The brake deflected the propellant gases into an X-cross of four streams, two angled up and two angled down, an arrangement that neither blinded your aim while firing nor seared your leg while kneeling nor killed the friend beside you. Handling the rifles was far too easy.

And the rounds were fearful. Pointed little four millimetre things, part solid bullet and part glued on caseless charge, such low bulk and weight that you could carry hundreds. Those bullets would go through the shell of their own suits. They would hopefully go through whatever the Outsiders wore. The bullet sheared and fragmented on penetrating a rigid suit, it shredded any flesh on the other side. If it hit unprotected flesh it tumbled, dumping all its momentum in shock waves. Bones struck directly disintegrated, others connected to them shattered, soft tissue was just exploded kinetically.

Lunar gravitational pull is 1/6th that of Terra, or 32.2 / 5 = 5.37 ft/sec²

Projectile traveling horizontally while being pulled down by gravity will have a range factor of:

d = sqrt[ (8 * Y) / g ]

where:

d = range factor
Y = projectile's initial distance above the ground (ft or m)
g = acceleration due to gravity on the planet (ft/sec² or m/sec²)
sqrt[x] = square root of x
Obviously use either all feet or all meters, do not mix the two.

So if g = 5.37 ft/sec² (Lunar gravity) and Y = 5 ft (handgun's distance above ground when held by 6 foot tall person) then the range factor is:

d = sqrt[ (8 * Y) / g ]
d = sqrt[ (8 * 5) / 5.37 ]
d = sqrt[ 40 / 5.37 ]
d = sqrt[ 7.45 ]
d = 2.73

This equation is where the "2.73" from the above sentence comes from.

To find the range of a projectile (i.e., the distance from the gun muzzle where gravity manages to drag the bullet all the way down to the ground), you multiply the projectile's muzzle velocity by the range factor. So if the muzzle velocity is 3000 ft/sec, the range of a bullet fired horizontally from an altitude of 5 feet in Lunar gravity would be 3000 * 2.73 = 8190 feet.

If you are not interested in an assortment of muzzle velocities, the total equation with a fixed velocity is:

d = sqrt[ (8 * V² * Y) / g ]

with V being muzzle velocity (ft/sec or m/sec).

---

If you are not firing horizontally (angle with the ground is not 0°) then the maximum range is:

R = (V² / g) * sin[ 2 * α]

where:

R = range
V = muzzle velocity
g = acceleration due to gravity on the planet
α = angle gun makes with the ground
sin[x] = sine of x

So if g = 5.37 ft/sec² (Lunar gravity), V = 3000 ft/sec, and α = 45°, then the range is:

R = (V² / g) * sin[ 2 * α]
R = (3000² / 5.37) * sin[ 2 * 45 ]
R = (9,000,000 / 5.37) * sin[ 90 ]
R = 1,680,000 * 1
R = 1,680,000 feet = 318 miles

This equation is where the "318 miles" from the above sentence comes from.

---

If you are not firing horizontally (angle with the ground is not 0°) then the maximum height the projectile will reach is:

h = (V² / (2 * g)) * sin[ α ]²

where:

h = maximum height
V = muzzle velocity
g = acceleration due to gravity on the planet
α = angle gun makes with the ground
sin[x] = sine of x

So if g = 5.37 ft/sec² (Lunar gravity), V = 3000 ft/sec, and α = 45°, then the maximum height is:

h = (V² / (2 * g)) * sin[ α ]²
h = (3000² / (2 * 5.37)) * sin[ 45 ]²
h = (9,000,000 / 10.74) * 0.707²
h = 838,000 * 0.5
h = 419,000 ft = 79 miles

This equation is where the "79 miles" from the above sentence comes from.

• 

(ed note: The artist mentioned that this conceptual weapon was based on ideas from this website. I am always gratified when this site performs its function: helps creative people make really cool stuff. )

Guns in space are a tricky thing, so many important things all around which don't take kindly to being shot, not to mention a hole in the wall being kind of unwelcome. Still, sometimes you still need to be able to shoot, or else end up getting shot yourself. To this end, Wiolant GmbH offers the Spacer Carbine, designed with the following considerations (note - all design elements are geared towards use with a standard skintight pressure suit. Military powered hardshell suits are equipped with their own weaponry):

Due to several considerations, including the effects of harsh environments like Luna and Mars, the undesirability of spent brass cases bouncing around cabin (where they might find their way behind a panel only to short out some important system), the difficulty of cooling a barrel after repeated use in vacuum, and the variety of ammunition options available, the Spacer Carbine is of a metal storm design. One or more barrels are arranged in parallel, with multiple rounds stacked end to end inside, which are fired in sequence by electronic impulse. This allows for a very sealed system, with almost no moving parts, without spent casings and changing out the barrels with each new magazine.

Standard ammunition options are twenty-five (5x5) barrels firing 5.7mm armor-piercing ammunition, totalling 200 rounds per magazine; four (2x2) barrels firing 13mm hollow point or squash head ammunition (low velocity, good against unarmored targets when you don't want to put holes in the hull) as well as low velocity rubber bullets, totalling 40 rounds per magazine; and a single 30mm barrel which allows for shotgun, beanbag and other specialty ammunition, totalling 5 rounds per magazine.

Since there is no way for the user to inspect how many rounds are in a magazine, metal storm weapons are equipped with digital round counters (in this case, on the rear of the receiver).

The stock is designed for use with a standard skintight pressure suit (including while wearing armor plate and ammo pouches). Space suit helmets make it impossible to obtain a standard cheekweld, or even to effectively bend the neck or head to align with the sights. Therefore, the stock is designed to be pressed into the shoulder or chest and to bring the sights (ghost ring and holographic, with reticle options for freefall and gravity wells throughout the system, as well as one specifically for coriolis force in rotating habitats. A gun camera linked to the user's HUD is also available as an option) to eye level. It is not folding, but is removable should the user desire to do so.

Space suit gloves are both very large and very unwieldy, therefore the Spacer Carbine possesses an oversized trigger guard as well as simplified controls for use even with said gloves.

There is no manual safety, the carbine instead makes use of a grip safety and somewhat heavy trigger, removing the need for fine motor movements. The selector is a sliding switch, much like an Uzi, which selects between semi automatic, three round burst, fully automatic at approximately 500rpm, and a shotgun-like blast which fires ten (for 6mm) or four (for 13mm) barrels at once (the 30mm barrels operate only in semi automatic, regardless of the position of the selector). The selector switch is designed to be manipulated either with the thumb of the firing hand or by using the free hand.

The Spacer Carbine is loaded and unloaded by pressing forward on the lever in front of the trigger guard, allowing the weapon to break open and magazines to be inserted or removed from the rear.

Should one find themself shooting inside a pressurized habitat, space station or ship, it would be fairly similar to shooting inside a submarine, and therefore very damaging to one's hearing. In an attempt to mitigate this to some degree, the Spacer Carbine is equipped with a suppressor at the front (only partially effective, given the necessary 30mm square hole in the front, but still better than unsuppressed).

The Spacer Carbine is equipped with three QD sling swivels to enable the user to secure the weapon to themselves.

One interesting question raised on Rocketpunk Manifesto is the nature of personal weapons in space, particularly in an improvised setting.  In most cases, a space colony will have access to large amounts of metals, but only small quantities of volatiles, which are required for all chemically-propelled weapons.  Some things, like black powder, are unlikely to be readily made, although the components of smokeless powder are also used in the manufacture of fertilizer.  Even if the volatiles in question were readily available in the required quantities, there is still the issue of the fumes from the weapons in the confined spaces of a space colony.  The life support engineers for one are unlikely to be pleased with such a weapon.  Despite a common misconception, guns are capable of functioning in a vacuum with proper lubrication.  The lack of volatile recovery is likely to be a bigger problem.

One easy alternative is to use crossbows, which are relatively easy to manufacture from materials that should be available to a space colony.  Crossbows are somewhat harder to learn to use than a gun, but should be capable of taking out even a man in a space suit.  One potential problem, however, is that virtually all crossbows are fin-stabilized, which would be ineffective in a vacuum.   A spin-stabilization mechanism would be required, and might have to be developed more or less from scratch.  While a vacuum does not have many of the perturbing forces found in an atmosphere, some rotation is likely to occur after launch. A crossbow bolt is most effective if it hits nose-first, while a spin-stabilized bolt will tend to remain in its original orientation despite the effects of gravity.  It might make more sense to use a spherical projectile, particularly as the aerodynamic considerations against it do not apply in vacuum, and indoor ranges are likely to be short enough for the aerodynamic problems to be negligible.

Another alternative is air guns, which would be able to use pure oxygen as the working gas.  Oxygen is present in most minerals, and should be the most available of the gasses.  The actual construction of the gun would be somewhat more complex than a crossbow, but the potential utility is greater.  The largest problem is likely to be lethality.  The most widely used military air gun, the Girandoni Air Rifle, was used by the Austrian Army during the Napoleonic Wars.  It had approximately the performance of a modern .45 caliber pistol, which would appear (because of fundamental limitations of air guns) to be about the limit of air gun performance.  However, if made with modern technology, such a weapon would be smaller, lighter, and more reliable.  Gas handling would be a basic skill for a space colony, and plans are not that difficult to find or create, while the manufacturing is at the machine-shop level.  Other improvised weapons like catapults are also possible, and would be quite easy to make, as plans are readily available, design from scratch is not terribly difficult, and construction is simple.

An improvement on air guns would be a gun that uses the combustion of oxygen and some other readily-available material, probably a metal, as an energy source.  Weapons of this sort have not seen use on Earth as there are significant design problems, and there is no particular reason to conserve nitrogen on Earth.  This means there will probably not be designs available to an early rebellion, and the significant engineering challenges are not likely to be solved quickly.  However, the increased energy density relative to compressed air might be enough to drive adoption in the medium term.

Another factor that is rarely mentioned is the availability of plans for various important devices (ranging from personal weapons to kinetics) over the interplanetary equivalent of the internet.  Particularly if similar conflicts have previously occurred, such plans will almost certainly be available at a price, leaving only the issue of manufacture.  

• 

(ed note: this is an episode of classic Star Trek turned into a novelization by James Blish. Predictably, Mythbusters tried to recreate this, and concluded the myth was busted.

In the episode, the Federation is at war with the Gorn Empire. The starship Enterprise is in hot pursuit of a marauding Gorn ship when both are captured by weakly godlike entities called the Metrons. Distainful of such primitive creatures, the Metrons create a planet to serve as an arena. Captain Kirk and the Gorn captain will be placed on the planet with only their clothing and a translator-recorder. There they will duel to the death, using only the natural resources of the artificial planet to make weapons. The loser's ship will also be destroyed by the Metrons.)

      Kirk looked around, panting. He seemed to be in a gully, though there was no sign that water had ever run in it—after all, there hadn't even been such a planet many hours ago. There were rocks everywhere, some of them brilliantly colored, and an occasional outcropping of quartzlike crystals. Here and there were patches of scrubby, tough-looking brush, some of it resembling cacti, some mesquite, and even an occasional stand of a large, bamboolike growth. There was nothing that looked as though it could possibly be converted into a weapon, no matter what the Metron had said.
     He scrambled over to look at the bamboolike stuff. Each stalk was perhaps three to four inches in diameter —and, as he discovered by trying to break a section loose, it was as hard as iron. Hitting it with a rock even produced a distinctly metallic clank. Perhaps it picked up iron from the soil, as horsetails pick up calcium oxalate, or some prairie grasses pick up selenium. Useless.
     Sticking out of the clay were the pyramidal points of a number of large crystals. Hopefully, Kirk pried one of them out. It was about the size of a hen's egg, and glittered brilliantly even under this sunless sky. The shape and the brilliancy were unmistakable: It was a diamond, and one that would have made the Kohinoor look like a mail-order zircon. And not only were there more of them imbedded in the clay, but the floor of the gully, he now saw, was a litter of them, in all sizes down, to fine sand.
     An incredible fortune—and again, utterly useless. None of the gems was sharp enough to be used as a weapon point, and he had no way to cut them. Their only use was to show that this planet was indeed an artificial construction—but Kirk had never doubted that, anyhow. He would have traded the whole wealth of them for a hand phaser, or even a medieval crossbow and a quiver of bolts for it.
     Well, then, back to the Stone Age with a vengeance. If Kirk could find a flint point, another length of vine, a sufficiently long stick, he might make a spear. That would give him the advantage of reach against the Gorn's dagger. On the other hand, would a spear penetrate that hide? There was only one way to find out.
     A sufficiently large chip of flint, however, obstinately failed to turn up. All that was visible on the floor of the overhang was a wash of brilliant yellow powder.
     The stuff looked familiar, and on a hunch, Kirk picked up a small handful of it and breathed on it. It gave out the faint crackle characteristic of flowers of sulfur when moistened.
     Kirk grimaced. What a maddening planet. Sand of high-purity sulfur, veritable beaches of diamonds, iron-concentrating bamboos; and at the back of the cave here, outcroppings of rocks covered with a yellowish-white effluvium, like saltpeter. The only way he could make any sort of weapon out of a melange like that would be with a smelter and a forge—

• 

     Wait a minute. Just a minute, now. There was something at the back of his mind—something very ancient . . .

     With a gulp of hope, he ran back toward the growth of bamboolike stuff.
     With a sharp rock, he managed to break off about a three-foot length of one tube, at one of its joints. The tube was closed at one end, open at the other. Ideal.
     Now, the diamonds. He took up only the smallest, the most sandlike, measuring them by handfuls into the tube. He could only hope that his memory of the proportions—seventy-five, fifteen, ten—was correct; in any event, he could only approximate the measures under these conditions. Now, one of the large egg-shaped diamonds; this he put into his mouth, since the tunic did not come equipped with pockets.
     Back up the gully, down and around the bend to the overhang. Into the tube went sulfur, saltpeter. Covering the end, he shook the tube until a little of the mixture poured out into his palm showed an even color, though certainly not the color it should have been.
     A stone point penetrated the bamboo at the base, though it was hard work. A bit of torn tunic for a patch, and ram it all home with a stick. Then the egg-shaped diamond; then another patch, and ram again. Finally, a piece of flint; it did not have to be large, not any more.
     Shredding another piece of cloth from the tunic, he began to strike the piece of flint over it, using the translator—at last it had a use!—as the steel. Sparks flew, but the cloth would not catch. If it was non-inflammable—
     Smoke rose from the shredded cloth. He raised it to his lips, blowing gently. It was catching.

     "All right, Gorn," he told the translator. "Come and get me if you think you can. I'm under the overhang just past where you set your snare."
     There was a sharp hiss, and then the clear sound of the Gorn's claws, coming at a run up the gully. Kirk had miscalculated. The creature was closer than he had thought —and faster. Frantically he struggled to align the clumsy bamboo tube.
     The Gorn leapt into view, its obsidian knife raised. Kirk slapped the burning piece of clothes against the touchhole, and the makeshift cannon went off with a splintering roar. The concussion knocked Kirk down; the semicave was filled with acrid smoke.
     He groped to his feet again. As the smoke cleared, he saw the Gorn, slumped against the other wall of the gully. The diamond egg had smashed its right shoulder; but it was bleeding from half a dozen other places too, where diamond chips had flown out of the cannon instead of igniting.

• 

      "What's Tanith like?"

     "Almost completely Terra-type, third of a Class-G sun. Very much like Haulteclere or Flamberge. It was one of the last planets the Federation colonized before the Big War. Nobody knows what happened, exactly. There wasn't any interstellar war; at least, you don't find any big slag-puddles where cities used to be. They probably did a lot of fighting among themselves, after they got out of the Federation. There's still some traces of combat-damage around. Then they started to decivilize, down to the pre-mechanical level—wind and water power and animal power. They have draft-animals that look like introduced Terran carabaos, and a few small sailboats and big canoes and bateaux on the rivers. They have gunpowder, which seems to be the last thing any people lose.

First off, THE weapon of the (near-by) future. For settings that try to be quite realistic and want to show off a powerful weapon, then I would recommend the Heckler & Koch G11. It looks futuristic, it is futuristic and... it looks cool. It's also something that would make some gun nuts like me drool.

It was a experimental weapon that showed positive results. It was part of a research project to improve firearms issued to soldiers. The weapon is special in its ammunition: namely there is no casing for it, or more accurately, the casing is flammable thus removed when the bullet is fired. Among other things, this results in a higher rate of fire and increased accuracy, all while being lighter. These are the three most looked-after properties when it comes to assault rifles for the regular soldier, thus quite reasonably the next direction to go. Plus, you don't have to worry about spent shells because there are no shells. The only thing I can't get a hold of is the ballistic properties of the ammunition.

A curious thing about the G11 (aside the advantages of its caseless ammunition) was that it was designed to fire in burst mode. Burst mode means that pulling the trigger will fire sequentially a fixed amount of bullets (here, three bullets) and actually had a higher rate of fire in burst mode than in either semi-automatic (pull trigger = 1 bullet, for those that are unfamiliar with such terms) or automatic mode (pull trigger = bullets come until the magazine is empty or the trigger is released). This helps conserve ammunition and improve accuracy due to the mechanics of recoil. Supposedly, the recoil was felt only after the bullets left the gun.

After some research, it seems that based on the G11's caseless technology a sub-machine gun and even a pistol was also conceptualized and planned.

The G11's caseless ammunation was developed during the "micro-calibre craze" ,a subject beyond the scope of this document (but if you are interested, look up "Project Salvo"). Thus was why the bullets had the calibre of 4.7mm (4.7x36). Like most micro-calibres, lethality was questionable, a fact that was offset by the G11's burst mode. A single bullet may not cause enough damage to incapacitate a target, but three bullets will.

Since this may be hard to come by, here is the performance of the 4.7mm G11 bullet: it weighted 3.4 grams, had the sectional density of 0.210, had the muzzle velocity of 930 m/s with the energy of 1470 Joules and had the recoil impulse of 28. (Sectional density is the momentum of the projectile per square milimetre).

It should be noted that caseless ammunation is much more fragile than regular cased ammunation, a fact that plaqued many other attempts at caseless ammunation since. Dynamit nobel was able to create a stable-enough propellent to make the weapon battle-worthy.

One might wonder that if the weapon was so great and so interesting, why was it not adopted? The answer that it was about to be, but history interfered. The weapon was commisioned by the Bundeswehr, the armed forced of Federal Germany to replace their old G3 rifles. The G11 was extensively field-tested and was about to enter adoption when the Berlin Wall fell. Reunification drew away funds from many projects, including the re-arment of the Bundeswehr. H&K went nearly bankcrupt due to this (and was brought by Royal Ordance, Britain), thus it is understandable that it is rather unenthusiastic to try it again. However, attempts at caseless ammunation may see the light again or possibly underway already.

It might be ideal to increase the bullet's size and propellent loading if that were to happen. Something along the British EM-2's 6.5x43 or the current spec-ops special 6.8x43 Remington would be considered ideal, giving appropriate conversion to caseless ammunation.

The other end of the spectrum of using bigger bullets, is using small bullets but using them very fast. This is what resulted in the American-180.

The American 180 is very interesting because it uses a common ammunation, the 22LR, used for sport and small game hunting. The gun offsets the .22LR's lack of stopping power by simply using more of it, hence is large (starting from 165 to 270!) drum magazine. The game had the awesome firing rate of 1200 rounds per minute (compared to say, the MP5's 680 or the M16's 800), meaning that 20 bullets were fired in a single second! One .22LR may fail to incapacitate an opponent, but several will bring anyone down, even chewing trough body armour by sheer voloume. The weapon failed due to its high cost and possibly because it was unable to satisfy its niché.

I still very much like this weapon, mostly because it resembles the popular image of the "Chicago typewriter", the idea of a drumed Thompson taken out and sweeping the streets.

It appears that a company named Tactical Innovations INC has developed an "upper" for the M16 that is essentially a modern version of the American-180 and is sold online. Here is a video there that shows a man holding such a weapon one-handed, demonstrating the low recoil of the .22LR.

- The gun is completely missing an extraction cycle, which makes extremely high rates of fire not only possible, but mechanically very easy to achieve. So easy, in fact, that you'd probably need to pay attention to the design (since an assault rifle firing at 2000 rpm in full-auto will rapidly start pointing in a non-safe direction).

- You mention the heat issue; where this gets really nasty is if the weapon is supposed to be useable in a vacuum for more than a few shots (which any astromilitary service weapon should be, for obvious reasons). For larger weapons, water cooling jackets á la Vickers gun might make a comeback; phase-change cooling is really efficient.

- Another big problem with these is the missing extraction cycle mentioned above: if a normal gun has a misfire, you pull the charging handle and continue shooting. If a caseless firearm (case in point, harr harr, the HK G11) has a misfire, you send it back to the machine shop. Not only are these things insanely complex on the inside, but you can't get at their insides without completely field stripping them (and a 'field strip' on a G11, to my knowledge, involves a nice set of tools and quite a lot of spare time). Because of all the problems caseless has anyway (fragility, barrel fouling, heat warping, questionable shelf life, ammunition cookoff…), this becomes an unacceptable safety concern. Oh, and by the way: caseless ammo should not be assumed waterproof unless proven otherwise…

- Obturation (i.e. adequate gas sealing) is a way bigger issue than even its biggest critics make it out to be. And inadequate gas sealing on an assault rifle, particularly a bullpup design, is akin to stuffing a pillowcase full of practice grenades with half-pulled pins and sleeping on it. You can attempt to remedy this problem by lowering chamber pressure, but at some point that invariably leads to a less-powerful round or more barrel fouling due to incomplete combustion.

- I have serious doubts as to the viability of belt-fed weapons using caseless ammunition. The ammo is fragile, and such firearms tend not to be very gentle when it comes to removing the round from the belt. This is a major problem for squad automatic weapons (like the M249), and between all the other problems of this ammunition, I do not expect to see a 7.62 NATO equivalent round in a caseless form factor, if only because GPMGs are very important implements of infantry warfare.

- The only serious caseless firearm, the HK G11, was incredibly expensive. I believe it was Forgotten Weapons (a great Youtube channel that I recommend you check out if you don't know it already) who retold an old H&K proverb: the G11 was field-ready in the early 90s, and when faced with the decision to unify Germany or adopt this cool new rifle, the German government decided to go for unification — because that was less expensive.

There is one other, mostly unmentioned, notable upside: weather-/dust-sealing these weapons tends to become a lot easier. Which is good, because with the multitude of failure modes present, the disaster of the early-model M16s in Vietnam would be a picnic compared to what happens if you drench a G11 in muddy water.

Some other interesting novelties:

- If it weren't for that whole money thing, I'd put serious money on militaries pushing towards a unification of 7.62 NATO and 5.56 NATO in some intermediate form, like the 6.8 Grendel or SPC. 5.56 is nifty as a general purpose rifle cartridge, but runs into serious problems when it comes to fighting at range and penetrating body armor. This is, coincidentally, the same reason we see a lot of militaries at least partially shifting back toward "battle rifles", i.e. assault rifles chambered in 7.62, like some SCAR variants or the HK417. One of the lessons that were learned in Afghanistan (et al.) the hard way is that while 5.56 is great for house-to-house urban combat, it's not so useful when you're being pinned down at 500+ m.

And running exclusively with 7.62 isn't a great idea either; the rounds are big and weigh a lot, the rifles are big and weigh a lot, and all that translates into less carrying capacity (plus, in urban warfare, you don't want to accidentally punch through a wall and kill one of your own, or a civilian — which is very possible with 7.62 armor piercing rounds and one of the reasons why police forces rarely use actual assault rifles, and if they do, only ones chambered in 5.56).

- Cased telescoped ammunition falls into the same bag. The LSAT is coming along impressively well.

- Polymer-cased ammunition, as is so popular with shotgun shells, is an interesting concept. It's being investigated for the LSAT project and offers serious weight savings, but likely at the downside of less heat-sink capabilities.

Not necessarily something I'd want in a light machine gun, but for a standard service rifle and any pistol, it'd be great, especially if interchangeable with regular metal-cased rounds. Whether that stuff can adequately seal the chamber against a powerful rifle round is anyone's guess, though.

- Electrically-primed ammunition has been experimented with (and used in combat, most notably in the MG131 and various other aircraft weapons) for a long time. There's even a civilian sporting rifle using it, the Remington EtronX.

Essentially, the idea is to replace the traditional striker-meets-unstable-explosive with electrical-contact-meets-high-Ohm-resistor, or similar. This has some serious advantages: fewer moving parts, virtually no "lock time" between trigger pull and cartridge firing, free adjustment of trigger weight, higher rates of fire, and extremely simple and reliable safeties (most notably, absolute drop safety).

The serious downside is that it requires a power source in the weapon. Nothing like the absurd power cells for a gauss rifle or DEW, a 9V battery should be plenty, but essentially the weapon now needs two separate types of ammunition (and with batteries being adversely affected by cold temperatures, I can see some countries being especially opposed to that idea). Moreover, the gun is now not EMP- or generally EMF-proof (which, for a self-loading design, could be really nasty), and had better be perfectly water-sealed.

Maybe not something useful for a standard service weapon, but precision rifles and the like could benefit from this quite a bit. Ultra-silent firearms like a futuristic Welrod pistol as well, since there's one less bit of noise if there's no striker or hammer moving. If a power source is present anyway (weapons specifically designed for powered armor or vehicles), then why not go with it to keep things simple.

Light flechettes are only good against soft body armor; rifle plates will stop them cold. Additionally, light flechettes lack the stopping power of buckshot against unarmored targets.

I couldn't find any info about heavy flechette shells, but I would imagine they behave very differently from their lighter brothers. With each flechette having the mass of a 000 buckshot pellet and likely being made from very hard material (at least hardened steel, probably tungsten), these shells will exhibit rifle grade penetration against everything. On the plus side, everything includes hard body armor.

All around, a shotgun would be quite at home on a ship. Light flechette shells or light bird-shot would protect the ship from misses, while heavy flechettes or saboted slugs would provide penetration against heavy armor. Just remember your hearing protection! Shotguns can't be suppressed, and are very, very loud indoors.

Actually, the first weapon suppressors (silencers) WERE for shotguns. There's no trick to silencing them, though it's a bit bulky.

Birdshot will not reliably stop a person. It generally causes a flesh wound only. There are no projectiles that will reliably stop a person and not also punch the wall.

Glasers are still considered better than Magsafe by many people, though the fad for both seems to be fading.

As for shotguns, its not just about flechettes and birdshot: there are a ton of various specialty shotgun shells, from signaling whistles propelled by the shotgun, through flares and incendiary rounds to fin-aided explosives!

Example of a possible future shotgun and fin-aided explosives Video: AA-12. World's deadliest shotgun

There are even various "crazy" rounds like the infamous incendiary Dragon's Breath, bolo (two balls connected by a piano wire, thus cutting anything in its path, obviously unpredictably), self contained TASER slugs etc.

Of course, these specialty shotgun rounds are exactly that: special rounds for a special purposes. If you want to kill something, you will obviously just use buckshot or slugs or some similar variant. My point is that a shotgun would truly be quite at home on a spaceship as it is a versatile launching platform for a variety of weapons. With a little imagination and microscopic amounts plutonium, you could make even more uses for it. For example, with using a blank shot you can MacGuyver a shotgun to shot a grappling hook for you! Granted, it would take a little bit of engineering to figure out how it would do that, but still, I would like to see a laser do that.

Thus for your typical space jockey getting from one bizarre situation to the next, it would be a handy weapon, even if more powerful and futuristic weapons are available.

In sci-fi terms, think of a shotgun as a low-tech equivalent of a phaser. It's "good for everything, great for nothing" type of weapon when it comes to roles, with one big weakness.

The main issue with shotguns, is that cannot reliably pierce (level 4) body armour in almost any (known to me anyway) loading. This is a very big limitation, because most armies nowadays have body armour. I am sure that someone, somewhere is likely to develop an armour-piercing slug, but why do that when your General Issue Assault Rifle can already penetrate most types of body armour by default? Explosive shotgun grenades may seem dandy, except that 40mm grenades can deliver far more ordinance and there is a weapon devoted to just that task.

However, for broad purposes, the shotgun is an attractive weapon. Assuming you can carry the rounds, you can hunt with it, you can blow a few things up, you can incapacitate someone with it and it can be a fearsome weapon in close- quarters. For starship crews that might not want to lug around 5 different weapons that all fit for only one role, this might be an attractive weapon, especially if they expect to do special missions.

Now, for some hardcore, semi-futuristic example of a shotgun, I'd like to point towards the NEOSTEAD.

The NEOSTEAD is a rather innovative pump-action shotgun: it has two tubes for ammo, meaning that you can put slug type X in one and switch over to slug type Y that's in the other without reloading. Can be handy if you intend to exploit the ups and downs of different rounds.

Oh, and the shotgun is bullpup, allowing a large barrel while not being very large. This makes it quite compact compared to other combat shotguns. The pump-action is rather unique so far (forward-backward rather than backward-forward), but has been described by those that fired such a weapon as faster than conventional pump-action weapons.

Plus, it looks cool and has enough polymer in it to be branded "futuristic".

As a closing note on shotguns, I accidentally stumbled upon the patent for their silencers.

On the note of bullets and shells, here is an old dream: explosive bullets!

Explosives bullets have also been mentioned in non-fiction or semi-fiction in Frederick Forsyth's "Day of the Jackal" (an assassin trying to kill the a French president and how he does it). In it, the Jackal (the assassin) and the Armourer (a black market master gunsmith) discuss their business. The Jackal not only needs a gun that kills someone, but a one-off, a gun made specifically for one job and for one set of circumstances. The Jackal needs to gun to be of certain sizes, so he can hide it in disassembled form. The Jackal has a specific container in mind that would make the gun pass without suspicion (the book is set in the 1960's, thus only manual inspection).

This greatly limits the gun's size, especially the bullet. The calibre and power of the bullet in question is just not powerful enough to assuredly kill someone with one shot and that's all the Jackal wants to do. The Armourer comes up with a suggestion of an explosive bullet that would keep the bullet's size but would cause severe internal damage.

Essentially, the Armourer takes a bullet, drills a small hole in it, pours a droplet of mercury into it and fills the lead right back up. The mercury's purpose is two-fold: first, when the bullet is fired, the mercury accelerates backwards into its cavity. When the bullet hits, the droplet is propelled forward in the bullet and tears the bullet apart, making lead spray outward, thus creating a cavity far larger than the bullet, causing massive internal damage. The book notes that these bullets are far too complex to be produced en masse unless done by a factory. That, and the fact that they are supposedly banned by the Geneva convention.

The secondary function of the mercury is to be hot mercury: poison, in case the target survives the shot (the book does not mention this).

All the tests I have seen of this concept show that the effect of filling a bullet nose with mercury is just not worth the bother. It is at best no more effective than a standard hollowpoint bullet, and far, far more expensive.

A "weaker" version of these are hollow point rounds and soft-headed rounds. Technically, these are banned by the 1899 Hague Convention (third declaration, if Wikipedia is to be believed), which is part of the Geneva convention. About how this law is actually observed and followed, I would recommend getting a law student to find out.

Technically, the Hague Accord/convention only applies to declared warfare between undersigning nation states. Which means police, security forces, legally armed civilians, military forces engaged in "police actions", as well as, of course, the above-mentioned assassin, can use expanding/deforming bullets to their hearts' content. Most military forces, however, choose to follow the letter of the Hague Accord regardless of the type and scale of operation. See e.g. this document

She skipped over an array of recoilless grenades and landed between the transfer lock and her own cubicle door. She looked at the grenades. They were just flat ended cylinders sitting on the ends of one-shot disposable firing tubes. No streamlining or flight stabilization was needed. There was no atmosphere down there, only gas-ice and water-ice and rock and ice-rock powdery surface and a smear collected through the long circling aeons, a smear of cosmic dust. The grenades had electric capacitor heads which would need charging up before storing away again in the lander—the lander's system couldn't supply the necessary power. The grenades were the first ever weapons type designed exclusively for space use. The huge electrical potential discharged almost instantaneously into whatever was hit—building structure or vehicle or whatever—causing dispersal currents that vaporized the material and inducing secondary intense and disruptive electric fields. All the energy was dumped into the target. In contrast explosives were debilitated in a vacuum, with no pressure damping to confine the force of the detonation and no medium to transmit a shock wave. Even if an electric charge grenade only hit near its target it would cause such thermal disruption of the ground that debris would fly as from a fragmentation blast. What it would do to people Kim didn't know. They hadn't shown her.

• 

(ed note: could be useful if one wanted to limit firearm range inside a spacecraft. So that misses did not continue travelling until they punctured the habitat module hull.)

     PICATINNY ARSENAL, N.J. -- Three employees of the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, or ARDEC, were awarded with a U.S. patent for their proof of concept work on a limited range projectile.
     Brian Kim, Mark Minisi, and Stephen McFarlane filed collectively for the patent on May 7, 2013 and were notified of its approval on Sept. 1, 2015.
     The concept for the limited range projectile includes pyrotechnic and reactive material. The pyrotechnic material is ignited at projectile launch. The pyrotechnic material ignites the reactive material, and if the projectile reaches a maximum desired range prior to impact with a target, the ignited reactive material transforms the projectile into an aerodynamically unstable object.
     The practical use that the three men intended to apply the concept to .50 caliber ammunition. However, the patent covers the idea and technology behind the concept as a whole so it could theoretically be used in various calibers of small arms munitions.
     "We wanted to protect the U.S. government's interests and position," McFarlane said about filing the patent.

TRIAL AND ERROR

     Computerized modeling and simulation were performed to compare the inventive projectiles to the .50 caliber M33 projectile and the .50 caliber M8 projectile.
     "Conceptual designs were ran through and evaluated via modeling and simulation," Kim said. "Three concepts were submitted with the patent, however, not all were feasible," he said.
     "A proof of concept test was perfected and results indicated the need for concept refinement and pyrotechnic mix improvement," Kim said.
     The group states that there are significant benefits to the warfighter in using a limited range projectile.
     "The biggest advantage is reduced risk of collateral damage," McFarlane said. "In today's urban environments others could become significantly hurt or killed, especially by a round the size of a .50 caliber, if it goes too far."
     McFarlane said that the distance in which the round disassembles can be adjusted based on the choice of reactive material used. The benefit to this is that the round does not continue to travel, therefore reducing collateral damage.
     This benefit can best described as "a design programmed maximum range," McFarlane said.
     The ballistics also match and or exceed the standard round out to the max effective range of the round. In theory, the projectile may be any caliber from 5.56 mm to 155 mm.

HOW THE DISASSEMBLING PROJECTILE WORKS

     The concepts vary, however in theory the process would work like this:
     During launching of the projectile, pyrotechnic initiating material is ignited by energy produced by propellant in the cartridge case. Or, pyrotechnic initiating material may be ignited by energy produced by bagged propellant, if the projectile is a separately loaded projectile.
     Pyrotechnic initiating material ignites the reactive material. Prior to impact of the projectile or with a target, and while the projectile is airborne, energy produced by the ignited reactive material transforms the projectile into an aerodynamically unstable object. The transformation into an aerodynamically unstable object renders the projectile incapable of continued flight.
     In one concept, the projectile is rendered unstable by the melting of the copper jacket, which produces a highly irregular shape. In another, the projectile is rendered unstable by the separation of the cylindrical portion from the base portion and the separation of penetrator from the projectile assembly.

(ed note: this is not from a novel, this is reality. Tim Bixler purchased his first gyrojet in 1965.)

I once took my Gyrojet out there, number 67, and the scuba gear. I jumped off of the police boat and went down about, I don’t know, five or ten feet, and I shot the Gyrojet underwater. It was really, really neat. The bullet went out but it left a spiral trace of bubbles from the four rocket nozzles. As the rounds got farther out, I imagine about five or ten feet, but this has been a long time, the bubbles expanded. When I looked where the round had been, and I have no idea how far it went but probably not too far after the burn out, the bubbles kind of expanded. It was kind of like looking down the big end of a megaphone. That’s the best way I can describe it. As they were expanding, they were also deforming. The bubbles were trying to float up. I can’t describe it better than that, but boy was it neat.

After shooting a few rounds like that, then, from about five feet under water, I shot a couple up into the air. They went to the surface but the bubbles didn’t deform the same way. Since they were going up, the spirals stayed round. You probably don’t care about all this but it was neat and I am reliving all this in my mind as I tell it.

Anyhow, after I shot five or ten more rounds, I came up and my partner on the boat said, “Man! What were you doing?” I said I was just playing with this gun I got. He said, “Things were coming out of the water going 'phew' up in the air.”

It put me in mind of the atomic submarines launching missiles. I know that’s an exaggeration but it was neat.

Rocket guns are very simple contrivances so far as the mechanism of launching the bullet is concerned. They are simple light tubes, closed at the rear end, with a trigger-actuated pin for piercing the thin skin at the base of the cartridge. This piercing of the skin starts the chemical and atomic reaction. The entire cartridge leaves the tube under its own power, at a very easy initial velocity, just enough to insure accuracy of aim; so the tube does not have to be of heavy construction. The bullet increases in velocity as it goes. It may be solid or explosive. It may explode on contact or on time, or a combination of these two.

The Gyrojet: an ancient toy or weapon, depending. It was a rocket pistol, made during the 1960s, then discontinued. This one had been stolen from someone's house and later sold to McAllister, secretly, a full twelve years ago.

A rocket pistol. How could any former Buck Rogers fan have turned down a rocket pistol? He had never shown it to anyone. He had had the thought, even then, that it would be untraceable should he ever want to kill somebody...

The true weapon was the rocket slug. The gun looked like a toy, flimsy aluminum, perforated down the barrel. Anderson might have thought it was a toy—but Anderson was bright. He got the point immediately. He turned to run.

McAllister shot him twice in the back.

(ed note: In the original 1928 Buck Rogers comic strip, the American freedom fighters are armed with rocket pistols, while the sinister Mongol Hordes have deadly disintegrator rays.)

I'm very familiar with firearms of most types, and I honestly have no idea how this thing feeds or ejects. It's possible it uses some kind of ejection tube, where the brass falls out of the front, but that's only a guess.

The Korobov TKB-022 has a vertically moving breach and it ejects out the front, above the barrel, as noted [on "Modern Firearms & Ammunition"]. The relevant text is quoted below:

"The TKB-022 assault rifle is gas-operated weapon with annular gas piston located around the barrel. To achieve minimum length, it is assembled into bull-pup configuration and uses vertically sliding bereech block (bolt), rather than traditional and most common bolt that cycles back and forth. Since the movement of the bolt (breechblock) in this design cannot be used to extract, eject and load cartridges, Korobov developed a special U-shaped rammer / extractor, that strips the frech cartridge from magazine, pushes it into the chamber, then, after the discharge, pulls the fired cartridge case back from the chamber. Upon feeding the next fresh cartridge, the fired case is pushed forward and slightly up, into the ejection chute above the barrel. Spent cases finally fell off the gun above the muzzle. Gun was capable of full- and semi-automatic fire, with combined safety / fire mode selector switch located above the trigger on the left side of the gun. The gun housing was made from reddish-brown plastic, with metall structure hidden inside."

Note the angled-forward ejection, allowing left-handed use of the rifle.

An experimental Brazillian design from the 70s.

Was formally adopted by the British but never put into service. The idea of a service rifle equipped with an optic and utilizing folding back-up iron sights is accepted now, but it was far ahead of its time when the Enfield was designed.

A bullpup autoloading shotgun with a built-in light. Weapon lights are common now (and likely would be in space, because it's dark on a ship if the lights go out), but this design was ahead of its time. It would have been better served with a full-length magazine tube, allowing it to hold more shells.

Or how about the Whitney "Wolverine," the .22 pistol from about forty years back that looked like it had come from sixty years in the future? I once helped out a friend in dire need of hand-props for a SkiFfy movie by suggesting he use some of those. Saved him a bundle.... the problem was prying them loose from the actors so we could return them to the folks we'd rented them from!

Note that the picture is one of the blued/anodized models; the ones you want to use as hand-props in SkiFfy movies are the stainless-steel and passivation-anodized ones, a creamy silvery color with iridescent rainbow highlights. some production runs used a magnesium-aluminum alloy shroud which wouldn't take bluing, but anodized nicely, in some very pretty colors.

While this is a single-shot breech-loading target pistol, it chambers rifle ammunition with five times the volume of a comparable caliber pistol round, making it a heavy hitter. With only minimal alteration, the design would work as rocket-firing pistol, especially if the telescopic sight contained a dedicated ballistic computer.

One could even make a good case for keeping it a single-shot breech-loader rather than a magazine-fed design like the GyroJet: it's probably not a good idea to have multiple round of volatile ammunition contained within the weapon at all times. Better to keep the rockets that it fires in a separate container and load and fire the weapon only when necessary.

This might be even more credible it fired a wide variety of rocket types: anti-personnel, armor-piercing, biochemical, concussion, explosive, gas, incendiary, marking, netting/binding, smoke or thermonuclear. There's even a precedent of sorts in the "Caster" using in the anime/manga series Outlaw Star, although that fired magical spells rather than technological warheads.

If I were making a 80th anniversary Buck Rogers movie, this is what I'd use for the standard-issue rocket pistol.

The US Army experimented with light-weight, high velocity projectiles in the 1960s. The big downside to such projectiles is poor penetration. Lacking momentum, featherweight flechettes are easily deflected when fired through intermediate barriers (walls, trees, etc).

I'm sure there are many other sci-fi looking weapons out there, but I thought I'd call your attention to a few in particular. The Beretta CX4 storm carbine, since I own one in .45 caliber. It certainly is a very futuristic looking weapon. Add a few accesories, like a tactical light & a scope and you have a future SWAT weapon. The ejection port & the cocking handle can both be swapped side to side.

A few weapons that would look right at home on the set of Bladerunner is the Kel Tec SU 16 C. Or the Kel Tec 16 D.

But for real Bladerunner looks, you can't beat the Kel-tec PLR 16 pistol. Comes from the factory looking like it has Deckard's name on it!

Oh, yes. One more thing: please make a footnote or something about infantry-portable gattling guns. They do not make sense on many, many levels, most importantly, there are already machine guns that have overwhelming firepower. There is simply no need for such a weapon.

(ed note: somebody asked Luke Campbell about a hypothetical coilgun with a 5mm round fired at 1.5 km/sec)

Note that a 5mm needle is not much narrower than current bullets army grunts shoot out of their service rifles.

Still, if I plug the numbers into my rough interpolation formulae, I get something like:

5mm x 25 mm tungsten needle, 9.3 grams, 1.5 km/s

• Muzzle energy 10.5 kJ (about 6 times the energy of an M16 bullet)
• Armor penetration about 6 times that of am M16
• Penetration through meat of about 3 times that of an M16 (not that this matters, both can punch all the way through a man with plenty of oomph left over)
• Loses half its kinetic energy after flying about 400 meters.
• Assuming a 5 kg gun, the felt recoil is about 5 times greater than that of an M16. The recoil momentum transfer is about 4 times greater than that of an M16.

This seems to be a lot of overkill for a typical grunt's service rifle. You could, for example, go with something like:

2.75mm x 20.6mm tungsten needle, 2.33 grams, 1.7 km/s

• Muzzle energy 3.36 kJ (about 1.8 times that of an M16).
• Armor penetration about 3 times that of an M16.
• Penetration through meat about the same as that of an M16. With a fragmenting bullet, it would produce a wound cavity of about twice the volume as an M16's fragmenting bullets.
• Loses half its kinetic energy at about 300 meters.
• Felt recoil about the same as an M16, assuming a 4 kg gun. The recoil momentum transfer is also about the same.

Gauss weapons would greatly reduce the need to clean the barrel of your needle gun, since you won't have burning junk gunking up the inside of the weapon, but this forces you do deal with energy density issues to fire the weapon.

• 

Going up to a blank wall, he manipulated an almost invisible dial set flush with its surface, swung a heavy door aside, and lifted out the Standish — a fearsome weapon. Squat, huge, and heavy, it resembled somewhat an overgrown machine rifle but one possessing a thick, short telescope, with several opaque condensing lenses and parabolic reflectors (opaque to visible light but not to the frequencies of the ray-beams).

Laboring under the weight of the thing, he strode along corridors and clambered heavily down short stairways. Finally he came to the purifier room, and grinned savagely as he saw the greenish haze of light obscuring the door and walls — the shield was still in place; the pirate was still inside, still flooding with the terrible Vee-Two (poison gas) the Hyperion's primary air.

He set his peculiar weapon down, unfolded its three massive legs, crouched down behind it, and threw in a switch. Dull red beams of frightful intensity shot from the reflectors and sparks, almost of lightning proportions, leaped from the shielding screen under their impact. Roaring and snapping, the conflict went on for seconds, then, under the superior force of the Standish, the greenish radiance gave way (the green protective force field has been penetrated by the Standish's beam). Behind it the metal of the door ran the gamut of color — red, yellow, blinding white — then literally exploded; molten, vaporized, burned away.

Through the aperture thus made Costigan could plainly see the pirate in the space-armor of the chief engineer — an armor which was proof against rifle fire and which could reflect and neutralize for some little time even the terrific beam Costigan was employing. Nor was the pirate unarmed — a vicious flare of incandescence leaped from his Lewiston, to spend its force in spitting, crackling pyrotechnics against the ether-wall of the squat and monstrous Standish.

But Costigan's infernal engine did not rely only upon vibratory destruction (ray beams). At almost the first flash of the pirate's weapon the officer touched a trigger, there was a double report, ear-shattering in that narrowly confined space, and the pirate's body literally flew into mist as a half-kilogram shell tore through his armor and exploded.