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[Tack]

AFAIK the Mass Effect guns are... whilst unconventional, basically like any other small arms.

I dunno. First ones I think were loaded with a big-ass block of matter at construction and never needed reloading 'cos the gun removes tiny little flakes before flinging them at the aforementioned Sub-light speeds or whatever.
Meaning the only issue with the gun became heat management. "Unfortunately" the later guns in ME2 and ME3 had "too much heat dissipation issues" and had to be "phased out" by guns with removable heat-sinks.

... Anyway. So, Ballistic weapons.
I feel like they could either end up functioning much in the same way as Fallout/Gal Civ, etc:
X armor is good against X weapon whilst Y armor is good against Y weapon - and then it's a big game of scissors, papers, rocks.

Or one way will be found to be irrevocably better against everything (or cheaper) and all militaries will adapt and use it- be it oldschool weapons or newschool ones.

-argument-

-argument-

shoo~

[Tack]

Uh... I think it's Lasers < Fields, Missiles < Chaff, Ballistics < Armor.

[Amperzand]

Also RKKVs > everything not fast enough to get out the way.

[GiglameshDespair]

-argument-

-argument-

shoo~

Argument? It was nothing of the sort. He made a point, I made a counterpoint.

X armor is good against X weapon whilst Y armor is good against Y weapon

Isn't this Railgun vs Plate and Lasers/plasma vs ceramics?

Can someone tell me why missiles are good at penetrating armor?

With a missile, you can use a shaped charge. Shaped charges are very good at penetrating armour. Also with modern missiles, some shoulder-launched missiles are programmed to fly up and strike the top of a tank, etc, where the armour is weaker. For obvious reasons you can't do this with a bullet.

To quote wikipedia:

A typical modern shaped charge, with a metal liner on the charge cavity, can penetrate armor steel to a depth of 7 or more times the diameter of the charge (charge diameters, CD), though greater depths of 10 CD and above have been achieved.

A shaped charge focuses a huge amount of energy and pressure with a jet of copper or similar metal on a small area, so it's good at cutting through.
Counters mainly focus on disrupting the jet before it has the chance to form properly - i.e slat armour - or interrupting the jet before it can penetrate - i.e explosive reactive armour.

[Sheb]

Also RKKVs > everything not fast enough to get out the way.

Well, if you can stop a given amount of laser energy, you can stop a given amount of kinetic energy. Sure, RKKV carry a great amount of energy per unit of projectile, which make the projectile hard to detect, but apart from that there is nothing special about them. It's a way to direct energy to a target.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that your RKKV boner is starting to get tiring.

[i2amroy]

Well, if you can stop a given amount of laser energy, you can stop a given amount of kinetic energy.

Not arguing for or against RKKV's, but I just wanted to say that this is not true, since lasers are using thermal energy. There's plenty of materials out there that are very strong, but have horrible heat dispersion abilities, or vice versa. Reflectivity of the material (and of the melted pool when it starts to melt) also play a huge effect against laser defenses. Aluminum, for example, is remarkably good at resisting lasers due to it's high thermal conductivity and the fact that it's very shiny (and becomes even more so when it melts). However aluminum is also incredibly weak compared to many materials, and as such would be able to defend against vastly more thermal laser energy than it could kinetic energy. Similarly you could just as easily have a material that functioned the other way; dull and with low thermal conductivity, but very strong, that would be able to defend against a much larger amount of kinetic energy than thermal laser energy.

This, of course, isn't to say that you can't build defenses against both, or possibly engineer/pick materials that defend against both (or maybe coat one material in another), but there's no guarantee that equal amounts can be stopped of each, or that the upper limits on our abilities to stop the respective types are the same.

[i2amroy]

Psst. Tungstene. (Tungsten with '-ene')

Psst. Searching google for "Tungstene" only returns a card manufacturer and a bunch of results in french (for which it seems to be the french word for "tungsten"). Do you have an english name for me?

Though I'll note again that just because some materials are good at both doesn't mean that the overall caps are the same, since they are two different types of forces.

[Sheb]

Yeah good point. I guess another advantage of RKKV compared to lasers is that you don't have dispersion, so potentially bigger range. On the downside, they're not lightspeed, so it is at least theoretically possible to detect them and have active countermeasure or dodge them.

[Amperzand]

Also RKKVs > everything not fast enough to get out the way.

Well, if you can stop a given amount of laser energy, you can stop a given amount of kinetic energy. Sure, RKKV carry a great amount of energy per unit of projectile, which make the projectile hard to detect, but apart from that there is nothing special about them. It's a way to direct energy to a target.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that your RKKV boner is starting to get tiring.

I apologize.

-WMDsnip-

Weapons of mass destruction make any other form of weaponry pretty much obsolete, so there's not a huge amount of point bringing them into it, to be honest. You could say the same if they tried using anything that they could nuke them to death.

Honestly, I'd say this is incorrect. WMDs in no way render other weapons obsolete, since they're usually fairly far to the side of overkill, making other things, like people with guns or precision missile strikes, far more practical in the majority of situations.

On the other hand, they can render most other conflicts irrelevant, which is a different discussion. I would, however, say that any thorough discussion of warfare in the future is badly flawed if it fails to consider WMDs. A large-scale future war, especially one taking place interplanetary or interstellar, is almost guaranteed to make use of them, and their presence must be taken into account.

[Fniff]

Here's something rather specific:

In a universe I'm working on, technology is advanced. We're talking Star Trek, holodecks and replicators included. Due to a complicated situation, however, there is a deprived underclass of people* who adapt this technology for murdering people.

What sort of weapons would make sense for tech-savvy ghetto-rats living in a close-to-singularity world? Creativity is appreciated - the weapons are designed towards destroying morale rather than people.
_{*How do they exist in a Star Trek-style utopia? As I said, complicated situation.}

[Sheb]

How about some kind of projectile that is designed to create a lot of radiation. Enough radiation that the spot it was used in become unsafe for a loooooooong time afterward, making it a constant reminder that someone was murdered there. Depending on the level of murders in the area, some parts of the city might be dotted by localized radiation hotspots.

[Amperzand]

The problem, I think, is having that work without both rendering large areas uninhabitable, because radiation that intense keeps going for a while, and doing it without ticking off the authorities to the point they just send in the army.

[Fniff]

I think it could work in the universe. The majority of the population is in holodecks and the only occupants of 'reality' are either the gangsters or robots. Unless the gangsters did something stupid like irradiate a block of holodeck-people, the authorities wouldn't respond.

It could be a type of radiation that's noticeable but is only dangerous in large quantities. Are there any radiations like that?

[Amperzand]

I mean... Neutrinos? They can be detected with sufficiently large and precise equipment, and are only really dangerous in the quantities produced by exploding stars.

Or perhaps microwaves? Quite noticeable, definitely harmful, but not the kind of dangerous that, say, gamma rays are.

You could also use an alpha radiation emitter. The stuff is extremely easy to detect, and very harmful in the event of unshielded exposure. On the other hand, things like your dead outer skin layer and a single sheet of paper act as adequate shielding.

[GiglameshDespair]

Well, if the majority population is happy in their technologically-caused wonderland, wouldn't it be much worse for them to be cut off from it? Rather than killing people, making them unable to interface with technology by whatever means?

As terrorism goes, it'd probably be a lot more effective in spreading fear than mere death - the victims are reduced.