What is the next frontier of firearms? I'm talking about more fundamental changes to the concept of "ranged weapon", like going from bows to muskets or at least from "packing exploding powder down a tube" to "each bullet is self-contained". Surely, firearms 100 years from now aren't going to be "magazine of traditional primer+powder+payload bullets", for example... right?
>>65003290>firearms 100 years from nowWill be rocks. The future of humanity is doomed.
firelegs...
i have some ideas
>>65003356woah
I wonder how handheld coil guns are coming along. Any portable models as useful as a handgun for say home defense?
>>65003290>>65003438Weren't ME1 guns basically just a brick of metal that repeatedly had tiny slivers shaved off and accelerated using the eezo/mass effect shit? So your gun effectively lasted forever and you only had to worry about overheating (I guess lorewise you'd replace it every 50k shots or whatever the capacity is).Then ME2+ was like "hmmm fuck it just make them normal guns that have to be reloaded".>muh thermal clipsstupid
Honestly without a world changing breakthrough I don’t see much changing with firearms. I do expect we will see improvements: with powder efficiency and cleanliness; bullet composition, and probably a trend away from lead and maybe copper if they can find something that can compete; and continual pushes for non reloadable brass and/or single use cases that are lighter. Probably larger changes in optics, especially inclusion of tech to make it easier to shoot at longer ranges.
>>65003438The thing with coil guns in my opinion is you have essentially two ammo sources to worry about running out, the battery plus the projectiles you shoot. Traditional chemical cartridge guns already shoot pretty damn fast and far with an all in one ammunition. My bet would be some sort of direct energy weapon or miniaturized grenade/rocket rifle that can give you an alternative effect on target that you cant get with just bullet going very fast and punching through. I think traditional slug throwers will always have their spot just as tech develops alongside many other alternatives that do various other effects on target.
>>65003290Handheld lasers screw coil guns or mass drivers dynamically adjustable lasers that change apature and power and spectrum for target
Various types of laser and electronic warfare guns.
>>65003486>>65003488ZAPhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Energy_Laser_with_Integrated_Optical-dazzler_and_Surveillance
>>65003495I could be armed with Heavy bolters, plasma guns, inferno guns... anything from the arsenal of my chapter.But I chose this.The Venerable Madeus-pattern heavy stubber. A pattern so old its origins are lost to the mists of time... It might possibly be as old as the Age of Terra and Solar Exodus. Either way, it is ubiqutous to the Imperium of Man. You can find some variation of it on almost any planet. From the great forgeworlds to the underhive back-alleys to great voidships and space stations. There are planets where they are made with nothing but basic tools... no manufactorums or techpriests involved. And yet, they serve the humanity. They have always served humanity.Yes, it may lack some armor penetration. Yes, it requires heavy and bulky supply of ammo. Yes, baseline humans may require multiple soldiers working as a team to operate one. But what it lacks in those areas, it makes up in sheer volley of concentrated fire.It still serves. It cuts down the foes of Emperor EVERYWHERE it goes. A design truly tried and tested in countless wars of the Old Night. And after it.It is Madeus-pattern Heavy Stubber, and I chose it over all others. Because I trust it. Because it will not fail me. Because it has proven itself time and time again to be ...a humanity's friend.How could I abandon an old friend?
>>65003453I swear we have this conversation every thread. The original intent was that it was an emergency cooling option you could use in the shit, but the CoD kiddies they focus tested on couldn't keep their fat fucking fingers off of the R key and got upsetti spaghetti when they burned through it all in the space of 3 kills. In practical cope, it does allow a higher volume of fire in those opening seconds of a firefight when you need to establish fire superiority due to the lower amount of downtime, and with the way they're implied to work (Andromeda animations notwithstanding), it really shouldn't be that much of an issue to carry 5k+ shots worth of heat sinks on a fighting rig.>heat sinks are loaded into thermal clips>thermal clips are loaded into the weapon like a magazine>after ~30 rounds (weapon depending), action is cycled and spent sink is ejected>when all sinks in the clip are expended, the clip is replaced (not depicted in-game)>in-game ammo limits are one thermal clip
>>65003453They are railguns that used spess magic (eezo) to cheat at physics by lowering the mass of the projectiles, then accelerating them so fast they ionize the atmosphere, yet somehow don't instantly turn to plasma or destroy the weapon the process.
>>65003453>thermal clipsThey were supposed to be like the heat sinks in Helldivers 2, but the fucking game devs thought that would be too hard for gamers to remember, so they just made it into generic ammo.
>>65003551this is kinda how I thought it worked, retarded game dev concessions aside.. basically two magazines but one is internal and you dont really remove it in combat, its just a block of material. Even if one little brick could burn 1k rounds its like 3x more then a combat load and around when an AR starts to want to explode/catch on fire if you shot all that anyway..
>>65003290Coilguns and pulse lasers. Pulse lasers wouldn't do much if your opponent is ready for them but as a convenient civilian gun they're excellent. They're effectively hitscan weapons that use electricity for ammo. On the flipside, lasers are Notoriously inefficient and the right materials can make them even less efficient. Ceramic materials can withstand the heat and reflective coatings can bounce most of the energy. Smoke and fog can disrupt the laser even further.Coilguns are Railguns' less temperamental cousin. You don't have to worry about arcing electricity melting the rails or how a short can put a couple thousand volts through a drop of water. You don't even need a particularly strong barrel because the barrel is just there to keep the bullet from tumbling. There's not even a big muzzle flash other than horrific things being done to the air and yet you still get the extreme speed that far exceeds the limits for chemical propellants on a reasonably sized barrel.
>>65003290>What is the next frontier of firearms?Smart guns, and guns on more and more flavors of UGVs with no human involvement except at most teleoperation.>firearms 100 years from nowOnly way firearms are relevant as anything but historical artifacts or toys in virtual worlds or whatever 100 years from now is if there's some sort of massive tech collapse that halts the trajectory we're on now. Which then would screw up all sorts of other tech advancements.The most likely path of the future is boring and weird OP. Sorry.
>>65003297Lmao we're living through the doom at this very moment. This technological nightmare world is the bad part, it's destruction is something to celebrate.
>>65003551If your game doesn't filter millions of "people" it's not good definitionally.
>>65003290Sorry anon but the future of rifles came and went already, and it passed us by. It's M4s forever now
>>65004907based and Kaczynskipilled
>>65003523Tech priest here, stubber is fine, literally the only thing that needs to be updated is the targeting system and the ammo, the weapon itself is a marvel of the omnissiah and needs no further tinkering.
>>65003725>basically two magazines but one is internal and you dont really remove it in combatArguably 3, if you include power. But that's on the tungsten block side of the spectrum where you carry a backup just in case the sky falls, and you swap it out back on the Normandy between missions.
>>65003290>AR15 with AI target resolution scope >Holding down trigger just suggestion to allow gun to fire itself
>>65003297It doesn’t sound like doomed to me. In the grand scheme of things, going back to where we were only a couple of thousands of years ago is a pretty minor setback. 99.9% of recorded history (2000 BC to today) is from the last ~0.11% of our existence (3.4 million years since social hominids started using tools). As long as a couple thousand of us keep kicking, the stars will be ours again someday.
>>65003297>Kinetic bombardment of Lunar base Huawei 7 done with a 20 ton improvised projectile>Still just a thrown rock.
Guns that induce psychological ailments, want to quell a protest? you can make the target sluggish, depressed, fearful. Want to disable enemy combatants? Inflict psychosis, audio-visual hallucinations and suicidal thoughts. Want to increase the likelyhood of regime change? Fly some drones over a crowd and make them agitated, violent, sadistic.
>>65008804The answer will always be rock, and if that don't work, just use more rock.
>>65008820Have we ever evolved past rock? Are guns not just the latest of rock-throwing devices?
>>65008826We will never stop Gruggmaxxxing.
>>65003290The future of firearms is steered by 6 factors. The civilian market, military/law enforcement market, the costs of manufacturing, effectiveness, legislative restrictions and AI. It's very likely that future firearms are mostly energy based because they can be limited in power and can therefore access greater civilian markets as nearly deadly weapons. The candidates for this are miniature railguns/coilguns and electronic laser weapons(shoots electricity through vapor caused by laser). Both of these are currently held back by battery technology and are currently far more cumbersome than in the future. Military adoption will be lagging behind and stick with more traditional kinetic weapons(bullet hits target, bullet penetrates and causes wounds) with caseless and telescoping ammo. This is because of production costs of both weapons and the ammunition, and because traditional man-vs-man wars are going out of trend. The currently known designs for this can be streamlined further to enable inertia driven automatic designs comparable in simplicity to mass driven open bolt SMGs. This will dramatically decrease the cost of production. Firearm appearance with larger weapons is likely going to become more tubular and abstract. Think of Megaman's cannon meets P90. This is because personal rifle sized weapons are likely to be embedded with aimbots and the machinery required to move the end of barrel in XYZ axis will need to be protected from interference. Ammunition doesn't get smart, the gun does.
>>65009014>This is because personal rifle sized weapons are likely to be embedded with aimbots and the machinery required to move the end of barrel in XYZ axis will need to be protected from interference. Ammunition doesn't get smart, the gun doesThis tends to get called Aim Assist. I don't think it'll be militarily relevant because you're likely to see Personal ECM rise to counter it. Soldiers may just shut the system off rather than figure out the Electronic Warfare state. That being said, it has a lot of Law Enforcement potential. Criminals aren't likely to have ECM and police have a lot more to deal with than just marksmanship. Aim assist could also reduce collateral damage which is far more important to patrol officers than frontline soldiers.
>>65008826Lasers will be. But no, we are currently just throwing hunks of minerals really hard at each other.
A weapon is just something that delivers energy to a target. What will do that better than guns?
>>65012071energy beams?
>>65012183beams are easily disrupted and don't penetrate
Semi-automatic captive-piston silent pocket pistol that shoots a fiber-optic-cable-guided AI targeting self-navigating incapacitating poison dart projectiles around corners?
>>65003290It'll all be robots and drones, so the firearms will probably be some kind of RF shit to fuck them up, like a bunch of focused antennas and spark coils and shit.
>>65004800>wont do muchWhat. Actual militarized pulse lasers would be fucking busted, unlike continuous beam lasers pulse lasers deal mechanical (shock waves) rather than thermal damage, and due to the pulsed nature can go through particulates and layered defenses easier.
>>65012255not if you use more beam
>>65012437you would need a lot of power to do that. Maybe rock is better than beam
Caseless. Some day someone will figure out make it viable.
>>65005237>needs to be updated is the targeting system and the ammoWhy? Standard Ball kills space marines just fine.
>>65012437If need more beam then why not throw more rock? grug know lots of how to throw rock, not so much of how to make more beam.
>>65012659Problem exists between grips and ground.
>>65003290I can't remember what it's called... Maybe ECP for electro chemical propulsion.... Something like that.Anyway they're already looking into it heavily for tank guns, it's pretty neat anon.
>>65014338I heard about that. Basically, you're using an electrical arc to set off the propellant. This lets you use more kinds of propellant and ignite them more effectively. Not really revolutionary but definitely useful.
