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[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

So I've had a few ideas of scifi weapons to use in my games and stories. I was wondering if any of them would be effective, not so much practical as scifi weapons usually aren't very practical but if they would be possible.

If they are in the realm of possibility I would also like to hear how difficult (money, manufacturing, international legality of a nation making/using it, resources, etc) it would be to produce.


That being said others are welcome to ask questions about ideas they have had and people who have the knowledge to provide this information please provide feedback.


So let's start with a simple one, an incendiary grenade who's main purpose is to burn up the oxygen in a room rather than burn those inside. It would be like a canister full of gas that would release into the room and after a few moments a mechanism in the canister would spark an ignition of sorts to burn the gas 

[~Neri]

The incendiary grenade sounds like it would be of more use in space during boarding actions. Limited air after all. Ideally it would ignite the contents of the room rather then using its own fuel. More air drain that way.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Well I was guessing you could preasurixe the gas and have it timed for the amount of gas inside of the canister or size of room for when it would be best to ignite.

And yeah it was meant for enclosed areas with limited air like closed buildings, space stations, bunkers, those sorta things

[Egan_BW]

Isn't that just a fuel-air bomb? Don't think they make them as grenades, but it's possible. Of course, it kills people in ways other than suffocation, if that's the point just use poisonous gas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Yes it is! but on a smaller scale

Another purpose (or design) would be igniting surroundings. A thermoberric is better at using preasure to destroy it's surroundings than igniting them but I also want to avoid using something like napalm as that would be more incendiary than needed and less portable (I would think but I am probably wrong) than a preasurized flammable gas

[Egan_BW]

Well, I'm not sure I see the use in a weapon like this other than "Kill all the people in this room", which is pretty much what frag grenades do anyway.

[~Neri]

The point of a weapon that kills via suffocation or toxins rather then explosions or fire is it prevents the items in the room from being significantly damaged. This is especially important in space (Hull breaches are bad and electrical shorts can doom the whole vessel) or when breaching a room with fragile Items of Interest (Computers, books, logs, all sorts of stuff).

[Egan_BW]

Using a thermobaric weapon while trying to avoid damaging equipment on a spaceship seems like a bad idea.

[My Name is Immaterial]

I think the biggest problem for you would be the material of the weapon. If the average size of a room is 10'x11', and is at room temperature, there's about 1098 moles of air, 21% of which is oxygen (230.6 moles). You get serious altitude sickness at 10% and can die at 6%, so 6% is our goal. That means we need to turn 164.7 moles of Oxygen into anything, but probably CO₂.
The thing is, burning oxygen leads to burning, and if you want to do it faster, you need an explosion.
Methane has a great Oxygen/Reaction Mass ratio (2/1), but it likes to explode. I'd recommend a molten potassium reaction mass for a weapon of this type. It converts well it Potassium superoxide at a 1/1 rate. However, I can't speak to whether or not it explodes.
It should be noted that this weapon's easily 3-6 kg, or 6.5-13 lbs. That's ignoring the casing and the material that melts the potassium. It's not something you have four of on your belt.

[quekwoambojish]

Air is mostly nitrogen, and nitrogen is not flammable (in our air). So unless you are using this weapon in an environment with a much higher volume of oxygen than typical places on earth, it will not work if you are trying to burn people to death.

Obviously though it's entirely possible to suffocate people in a room via some 'device'.
There's a literally hundreds of ways you can do this. Vacuums, chem reactions, ignition etc.

People mentioned before that just using a grenade or a grenade with a toxic gas would be much easier to use, but who cares, he wants a science fiction weapon, so just go with it!

I think maybe a cool scifi idea would be stealing a ton of air with a relativistic grenade. Have the space inside chamber of the grenade 'somehow' move extremely close to the speed of light and with an extremely low pressure. That way you can suck in near-infinite amounts of gas, and compress it's volume as much as you'd like via length contraction (not sure how you can get it to work on a whole volume though since contractions occur in the direction of motion) in the chamber so the pressure will remain low. Then I guess when you're done using it, bring it back, slow down the chamber and open it up, and you've got a lot of air (and probably a dangerously high pressure differential)!



Again, idk if this would work, and it certainly wouldn't with our modern technology, but it's fun to talk about!

[Cheesecake]

PTW all the science people do math

[Insanegame27]

What if instead of decreasing oxygen, it did something to change nitrogen and oxygen to NO2 (I dont do chemistry, so what do I know)

[H4zardZ1]

I think maybe a cool scifi idea would be stealing a ton of air with a relativistic grenade. Have the space inside chamber of the grenade 'somehow' move extremely close to the speed of light and with an extremely low pressure. That way you can suck in near-infinite amounts of gas, and compress it's volume as much as you'd like via length contraction (not sure how you can get it to work on a whole volume though since contractions occur in the direction of motion) in the chamber so the pressure will remain low. Then I guess when you're done using it, bring it back, slow down the chamber and open it up, and you've got a lot of air (and probably a dangerously high pressure differential)!



Again, idk if this would work, and it certainly wouldn't with our modern technology, but it's fun to talk about!

It is possible if we could invent really tiny vaccums(like, a quarter of a pipe size) that sucks air really fast.

Also, i have some ideas. Will this work on current technology, and if not, plausible in a hard-scifi?
-Railshotgun, a magnetic gun(railgun) that spreads its projectiles(shotgun)
-Hot bullet that explodes upon contact by spilling the flammable contents(Magnesium powder?)
-A flamethrower that is able to accelerate the flame(well, depending on what kind of flame do you want) into a straight line and is able to cut things (such as wood) by the ignition byproduct velocity alone(not including the heat)

Edit: fixed spelling?

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

I think the problem with a rail shotgun is that on a railgun you want a single projectile to be shot from the rails (not sure how you could fire multiple projectiles with just the single gun) so you would need a projectile that would stay as one when fired but upon leaving the barrel it would split into multiple (flechetes, rods, cubes, spheres, what have you). Though my knowledge on this is very limited and I don't know what I'm talking about so what I'm trying to say is I don't know and don't believe me XD

[Antioch]

You would kill people from carbon monoxide poisoning way before you would make them suffocate.

It is well known effect from using flamethrowers in bunkers.

Technically that's probably classified as chemical warfare, then again you are trying to suffocate people to death.