Warfare 201: Weapons
Greetings and symmachy! Well, you know, Anne and I do fight together against ignorance! Welcome to yet another warfare post, and we are going to war! For that, we need weapons, but what are they?
Weapon prototype
Definitions definitions, oh yeah I said prototype… Oh well.
Weapons are tools created with the explicit purpose to kill other living things.
Not every definition needs to be complicated, but of course, it is not the easiest! With this, antibiotics are a weapon, too, and you know what? Yeah they are, but it's bacteria, so we don’t really care. But weapons can be used in many ways and designed differently, and yes, I will get to stupid weapons like the bet’leth from star trek.
Some might talk about using other things that are not intended to kill, such as knives, chairs, pipes, but there, I would say, how do you phrase it? Used as a weapon. That phrase alone says that they are not considered a weapon but can be used for the same purpose as a weapon. Similarly, this goes for anything that is meant to be non-lethal. They are generally not seen as weapons because their purpose is not to kill, but sometimes they kill anyway.
Pew pew and stab stab
So, what is the purpose of weapons? Well, since times immemorial, people have been jackarses and troublesome, so you have had to kill them. But more importantly, there have been things to hunt, and humans are so slow, so weak, so feeble! So weapons were first and foremost for the purpose of hunting, and then later people realised, “Hey, I can use this to kill other humans,” and they thought it was the best idea since fire. Over 200 thousand years of weapon making, and people still got the idea early to stab each other.
But there is one itty bitty thing that is often overlooked when it comes to using anything as a weapon. They are not part of your body. Well, alright, you can bite and punch, but you know, that isn’t a useful weapon in most cases. But what do I mean with weapons not being part of your body? Well, as trite as the story advice of “Train until it's part of your body” or “extension of your body” and all its various incarnations, there is some truth to it that is rarely explained.
You know how your body works, and you use it every day, so you practise using it constantly. And you know the saying, “Practice makes perfection.” With this, I want to say that it takes practice, a lot of practice, to be even remotely good with any kind of weapon. Spear? Practice. Gun? Practice. Sword? Definitely practice. A bow and arrow? Holy crap, that one requires so much practice!
So, the idea that someone can just take a weapon and reasonably use it against someone experienced is laughable. Sure, a weapon in an inexperienced hand is better than no weapon, as weapons help multiply the force you, as the wielder, can create. Practice is so significant that even to this day, the English have a law where every man above the age of 15 or 16 has to practise on a longbow once a week. Though I think you can imagine how often that is actually enforced.
Another thing to remember when it comes to certain weapons is that it helps distance oneself from the actual killing. People do not like killing other humans, in general, and having a weapon puts more physical and mental distance with the act. When it comes to guns and similar weapons, the distance can be quite substantial, making it easier for the mind. Speaking of…
Weapon types
Weapons come in many shapes and forms, but I think they can be divided into three very large and broad categories.
Melee
You have to love these. Classic examples are swords, knives, anything that does damage at a close distance. They are classic for choreographed dances of fights and all. They simply look amazing, and other than light sabres and knives, they are heavy as fuck! People do not actually understand how mind bogglingly heavy a melee weapon often is. This is why training with a weapon is so crucial when it comes to melee weapons.
Because of the mass of the weapon, your centre of gravity shifts radically as you swing it around, and the further out you hold it, the greater the shift is. It is not exactly unheard of that someone swings a heavy weapon and lands on their butt because they couldn’t easily stop the movement of the weapon while they wanted to. It is difficult to get moving; it is equally difficult to get it to stop moving.
That is why I say practice, practice, practice, and a few scars are needed. But even in melee weapons, you can have different types. You can have weapons like hammers or big dull swords; their purpose is to cause blunt force injuries. Crush what's on the inside and preferably lots of bones. The other type you have is the piercing kind. Their purpose is to cause bleeding, hopefully deadly infections so that you die if the lack of blood doesn’t finish you. Many often say slashing is another type, with something like spears being piercing and swords being slashing, and one can very well make that argument, but I chose to put it under the same category as piercing where the point is still to cause bleeding.
Ranged
Ranged is at a distance, who would have thunk? As long as your foe doesn’t have a ranged weapon, you’re safe! If they do, it is a question of who manages to hit the other first. These have the added benefit of making you, generally, not have to see the person you’re killing in the eyes.
But here, too, we have a subdivision of what kind of weapons there can be. The old style of projectile weapons are similar to piercing melee weapons. Namely, their purpose is to pierce through skin and organs and cause bleeding to kill the organism. Arrows, spears (which can also be used as melee weapons), and the likes all fit this as they pierce into the body, unless armour prevents it, and then you hope they puncture something important.
The second is guns and bullets. The difference between a bullet and an arrow is that bullets have much more kinetic energy per gram of projectile, and bullets are designed, generally, in such a manner as to break apart. Break apart how, you ask? Believe it or not, when a bullet enters the body, it goes from air, which offers relatively little resistance, into what is essentially water, which offers A LOT of resistance. This causes a very sudden and extreme deceleration of the bullet. Anyone who has thrown things into the wall knows what a sudden deceleration causes: things break apart as the front of the object is trying to stop while the parts behind still want to continue forward.
This behaviour is used with bullets to make them break apart and increase the damage and uses the sudden highly focused kinetic energy to cause as much damage as possible. An interesting effect of this is that the bullet, as it travels through the body, starts dragging a lot of tissue and fluid with it, so if it manages to get through to the other end and out of the body, it will in fact drag so much tissue with it and out that the body, head, or whatever is hit, actually jerks in the direction it was shot. The momentum the gun gave going in is nothing compared to the momentum being shot out by all that tissue, so the body goes in the direction of the shot.
Mass
These are the latest type of weapon but have been used for much longer than people imagine, in general. The key property of these weapons is that they are indiscriminate. With normal weapons, you have to target and choose who dies, and the amount of people who can get hurt unintentionally is very low. Mass destruction weapons are the opposite. There is not a little collateral damage and death, there is a lot of collateral damage and death. This can be subdivided into 3 categories, if you ask me.
Physics Mass Destruction (PMD): this one generally uses physics to cause immense explosions, then uses the physics of shockwaves in order to propagate the destruction. The modern example of PMD for humans is nuclear weapons. But other classical ones from fiction are the Rod of God, using kinetic strikes from orbit, antimatter bombs, and the likes.
Chemical Mass Destruction (CMD): this one uses chemicals released on a large scale and relies on the chemicals reacting chemically with the body. It can cause chemical burns on the skin, form acids in the lungs and eyes, or anything you can imagine. These have the benefit, compared to many PMDs, that they can be sustained more easily as you can have containers release the chemicals over a period of time. CMDs have one big issue, though: if the wind turns, if you use a gas, which is the most preferred one, you can suddenly find yourself engulfed in your own weapon. Not a fun time! Examples include mustard gas, nasty stuff.
The last ordinary one is Biological Mass Destruction (BMD): you use biological beings, viruses or bacteria usually, to kill people. These have the benefit of being self spreading and adapting so they can cause immense mayhem. A small release is all it takes, and it can be spreading like mad with your enemy. Compared to a CMD, it is self-reinforcing in that with each new person infected, it can spread more, so you don’t need to keep putting out more. The big drawback is that it does not care about you or your enemy, so it can just as easily start attacking your own side and spread there like it belongs.
You might think you can make them target specific genetic triggers that only your enemy has, which you can! But then evolution comes in, and anything that isn’t bound to your artificial restriction can spread more and faster and will come to dominate, while your artificially restricted strand dies out. Evolution is nasty with BMD, as any restriction put on them will have a pressure to disappear. The only way to have a half decent chance of it not infecting you is by being different species.
I can imagine BMDs being done in species rich settings that are more strict on the species barrier thing, which few are. I am one of those, as I find it often too boring to be restrictive on species barriers–who doesn’t like hybrids?–but sometimes, I am more strict on species barriers because it's more fun for me. I don’t need to be that consistent! But even this is not 100% certain. Zoonotic events can happen where a disease goes from one species to another; it's rare, but it happens. Only when it's as different as eukaryotes (multicellular life cells) and prokaryote (bacteria) cells can it be so different that no disease jumps between them. Bacteriophages only infect bacteria, and no known case has jumped to multicellular life. Fun fact: archaebacteria has no known instances of ever making a human sick; I think it is even no multicellular life at all.
Criteria for weapons
So we have the weapons: all it needs to do is smash, stab, or dunk on someone hard enough that they likely die if done right, right? WRONG! There are certain things that must be fulfilled or at least tried to fulfill to make it a good weapon that any military would use.
Criteria 0: Convincing required
The most important criteria is that a weapon has to be convinced to work. What does that mean? It means that an operator, a human or equivalent, has to be involved to make the weapon work and do its job of destruction. If the weapon can go off and do damage just due to a power failure, simple degradation or anything else that doesn’t require an operator's active decision, it’s a bad weapon. This is where antimatter bombs fail because one moment of power failure and BOOM! Everything is dead, bad weapon! Compare that to a nuclear weapon that uses Uranium. It is made out of two halves that need to be put together; well, it is one design, but let’s use it anyway. They really do not want to be together, and, for physics reasons, tend to separate. So you need to take a conventional explosion to QUICKLY force one half to the other before they can separate again, and once together, the bomb goes BOOM. So the entire nuke has to be made to work and cannot accidentally trigger itself; that is, you “convince” it to go off instead of the weapon “deciding” on its own. Anthropomorphising, yay!
Criteria 1: The dumber the better
Anything that adds needless complexity to the weapon is a no-go. Anything you add is a point of failure, and the less it has, the greater the chance it works when called upon. So you want the weapon as simple as possible, which means it is dumb. Sure, there is a certain level at which it stops working as you want it because it’s so dumb; that’s when you’ve gone too far.
Criteria 2: Idiot operators accepted
If it requires a 500 page manual and 5 years of supervised training to even use, it is terrible. Yes, all weapons require some training to use in a competent manner, but I don't need a manual to operate a sword. Heck, if I am given codes and keys, I can go in and use nuclear weapons like a boss. That is good. Training to use it to its full extent is also good, but if a crisis happens, you want any idiot to be able to grab it and use it; it's a crisis! No one cares how good you are! Shoot, damn thing!
Criteria 3: Controlled deadliness
You have to make certain the level of destruction is the right calibre for what you want. If you cannot control the weapon’s destructive force and how much it destroys and kills, well, it's going to be a problem to use it, as you are rolling dice to hope you will not get snake eyes, and it destroys what you didn’t want destroyed. This is why CMD and BMD are generally avoided, they violate this one, CMD less so than BMD.
I think those are all important ones to think about when designing weapons: they can't go off accidentally, they are simple to make, they are easy to use, and they have controllable destruction.
Minipracticum: Weapons in Stellima
Now a little practicum from my universe. After all, I love scifi and good pewpews are important in scifi!
Coilguns
Guns are pretty much the king of weapons, and their method is incredibly simple: launch a projectile that splatters its metal around and trashes tissue. But having it unchanged for centuries upon centuries just FEELS bad; it feels stagnant. Even though, let's be honest, the gun in its general design hasn’t been modified in something like 200 years now with only finer adjustments for precision.
So how can I reasonably scifi it without it being stupid? Well, you have railgun technology that can be mastered, and it has benefits, but the contact points will cause immense destruction to the gun, and we don’t want rifles and the like to be like in the old days where you get 100 shots out of one, and then it was spent and useless.
So, I settled for coilguns! Some write it as two words, I write it as one; it feels better that way. This is not to be confused with Gauss guns, which work completely differently. The coilgun uses coils of wires to create an electromagnet to pull a metal object along. Well, it’s a series of these that are carefully timed to get max speed for the metal, and the timing thing is the difficult bit.
That method of acceleration of the projectile gives a very precise ability to control speed and thus the destructive ability for the weapon. And it satisfies all 4 criteria, with an enhanced ability on criteria #3, the controlled deadliness. One can make the case that #1, the dumber the better, is violated given it requires circuits, and more is required. But given the extra control in deadliness and power, it still satisfies #1, if you ask me. I also imagine that in the era that I’m writing about, that kind of circuitry is super simple to make.
Arcweapons
These weapons are entirely scifi and made up on my own. They are based on quantum field theory, or more the idea of fields being everywhere, combined with the idea of electric fields causing lightning strikes, or, well, arcs of lightning. Do those things have anything in common? Yes, but we’re not going to go into that; it's complicated, and in reality, it is just word connections that made me connect concepts to create my own kind of weapon.
The idea is essentially that there are fields of all kinds in the universe, similar to quantum field theory, and, similar to electric fields, you can create arcs in them. Hence the name. What these fields are, I have not all decided. One is the vita-field, or life-field that reacts to living things. Why does it do that? No one knows; it just does.
So, these weapons can create an arc that hits a body and interferes with whatever makes life tick on some unknown, undecided level. You can set it to, well, as Star Trek called it, “Stun,” and people fall over hurt but will recover. It can also be set to kill, where the life activities just stop all over all at once. Literally to the point where the cells stop what they are doing and are dead.
There are other types of fields that I have not decided or figured out yet, but it was, for me, a way to create weapons with interesting effects if I wanted to. I need to expand more on this; ANNE! (Anne: Added to the list of topics!)
Particle weapons
These are a staple in scifi and space opera, so you know, I had to include them, no matter any gripes I might have. For generic stunning and harm, I had it already covered, so this is admittedly heavily underdeveloped, but the plan for these is to create interesting effects that can be used, which for one, I actually have.
Vath-weapons
These are based on particles I call vathyrons. Their main purpose was to make it so that FTL diving–read my blog on FTL–is not the end all be all solution where you can go at any speed you want. How do these particles work? Well, I have my ideas, but the details are boring for most. Think of it more like the TV trope of acid. I mean it: if you have a room where vathyrons are located, they are like a gaseous acid that will dissolve any normal matter they come in contact with.
Of course, this is a property that my universe would looooveeee to weaponise, so of course they did. However, after several small wars where people used it, it came to light how excruciatingly cruel these are. Imagine a war where you are throwing acid on each other's faces and bodies, dissolving them, and what's inside starts falling out… Yeah, you get the picture; it is nasty!
So, in my universe, this kind of technology is banned under the Orion Accords, but you know… When have treaties stopped industrious people from getting what they want?
Explosive
Of course, you need these, too! Yes, I could do classical chemical explosions, fission or fusion warheads, and, you know, I do, but also, that is incredibly boring and something with a scifi flair would be fun, would it not? I am not doing antimatter warheads, because that violates criteria #0 so badly it is idiotic. So I took inspiration from strange matter. Or more, the speculated property that strange matter might be infectious, where normal matter can turn into strange matter if it comes in contact with strange matter.
So I asked myself,
You beautifully handsome Limax, what if you can make a detonation that turns matter around the centre into a new form of matter that then acts like antimatter and explodes?
And I really liked that idea. I have not fully developed it all in as much detail as I want, as I have not used it in stories yet. It is not as potent as antimatter, but it still allows for big explosions even against shields. Because even if the energy shields are unaffected by the conversion, the rest of the missile is not, and that all turns into explosive matter and goes boom!
Summa Summarum
When it comes to weapons, thinking about those 4 criterias is important. But, as I say often in worldbuilding, you don’t need to adhere to them super strictly, and as I show in my own weapons, I do break them a wee bit, though not entirely. I would say that the order the rules come in is also the order of importance. The later they come, the more free you can be.
Of course, the whole deadliness part is the main purpose, but it doesn’t have to be the ONLY purpose of a weapon. You can be cruel, have entertaining side effects, and much else that makes things interesting. One thing to remember no matter what weapon you devise is that they all require training to be used well. Anyone can grab a gun and use it, or a sword, spear, and many others, but it takes training to use it well. I might do a full on practicum one day on this, we’ll see, but for now, that is all!
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Copyright ©️ 2024 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as weapons and the rules of weapons are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas from the Stellima universe such as the coilgun, vath weapons, arcweapons and explosive devices based on strange matter as well as all language or exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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