UFO Fanfiction Discussion

[Alitorious]

Now that I think about it... exactly whose idea was it in the first place to use a stream of antimatter in the guns? I defended it, but I didn't come up with it.

And I really wonder why we didn't instead just use a pulsing laser in the first place?

But on the matter of the fog stopping the particles: If we just say that they use a wavelength equivalent to infrared light, then the fog becomes no barrier at all.

[Zager]

Now that I think about it... exactly whose idea was it in the first place to use a stream of antimatter in the guns? I defended it, but I didn't come up with it.

 

I suggested it as a possible explanation to the functioning of the laser guns.

[Hankosha]

DefRev has obtained the original "white paper" proposal that was submitted to the U.S. Army for the Stavatti TIS-1 (Tactical Infantry System-1) Gasdynamic Laser Weapon. The TIS-1 is a laser rifle that utilizes a hypersonic jet of gas to create photonic energy in the form a very powerful laser. Thus the term "gasdynamic". The Stavatti TIS-1 was submitted as a possible technology for the U.S. Army's LFLAN requirement. "LFLAN" stands for "Light Fighter Lethality After Next". LFLAN involves small arms technology proposals that would not be implemented until 15-25 years down the road. In other words, truly futuristic technology.

 

Before a weapon like the TIS-1 could be adopted, a number of technichal hurdles would have to be successfully negotiated, such as...

 

a viable power source that could provide long-term and adequate power, heat containment/shielding, and forward recoil mitigation.

This could work as another form of laser weapon, and could replace our current ones.... Google works well for finding suitable ideas for weapons.

Here's the Link

[Snikers]

Furthermore - from what I've heard, even infrared won't beat fog. Or at the very least, it won't be an effective laser anymore.

 

Personally, I was always irked by X-COM's "single be-all-end-all best weapon" thing. Can't we keep a role for the projectile, laser, *and* plasma weapons? Different roles, different areas of expertise.

[FullAuto]

Hmm. It is the alien's biggest advantage, so if we reduce it's importance, it makes most of them look like idiots. I mean, how scary would a Floater be if it was armed with a normal rifle? They cry when you take their teddy bear away as it is.

The alien's technological superiority is quite important, really. When X-Com gets the plasma guns, it should be a big step towards establishing parity between the two forces.

Can't we just have the fog reduce the range of the lasers?

[Bomb Bloke]

I reckon we can make the fog do whatever we like. This is the first field test of the things; 'bugs' can be ironed out later if need be.

[Snikers]

Never in real life has there been one single best weapon. I know that in the game there's no need for anything else once you got the heavy plasma, but I'd feel goofy writing that in the 'fic.

 

Well, it doesn't much matter I guess.

[FullAuto]

No, fair point, mate. I imagine some troopers will hold on to their normal sidearm, if only as a back-up weapon. I'm sure some of the laser weapons will remain, too, even if it's just the heavy lasers (to snipe with) as the trajectory of a beam of light will be a fair bit straighter than the average bullet.

[Alitorious]

Plus, a beam of light tends to go a wee bit faster than a blob of plasma or a bullet...

And good point on infrared - it wouldn't be as effective, then, right.

 

Thinking about plasma... AFAIK plasma is superheated matter that's stripped of its electrons, right? If it has such a high positive charge, then won't electrostatic forces make the 'blob' (or whatever) of plasma actually expand and dissapate, effectively making its range really short?

 

On the subject of the fog... I'm not quite sure how fog works, but does it just diffuse/diffract light instead of absorbing it? I think that's why it's white/grey coloured instead of black... and why a foggy day isn't also a too-dark-to-see-anything day.

If fog does just diffract, then it means that the laser will have a shorter range, but then can we say that the people don't get lethal doses of radiation (thermal + gamma) from the fog interacting with the laser...? (laser antiphotons hit a wide area of ground and most eventually find their way to the sky?)

 

Oh! Oh! I just thought of something else! Can we throw in some handwavium and say that an antiphoton-matter reaction produces less alpha, beta, and gamma radiation than an equivalent antimatter-matter reaction, due to it being an antiphoton?

 

Or am I just talking out of the wrong side of my anatomy again?

 

 

(On another note... I'm feeling really guilty about not posting in the fic . I'll get one up once we solve these laser issues)

 

Edit:

This could work as another form of laser weapon, and could replace our current ones.... Google works well for finding suitable ideas for weapons. tongue.gif

Here's the Link

 

Oooh... now if only we discovered that before trying these other ideas

 

Oh, I should add now: I actually have no preference on what kind of laser is actually used, although I do tend more towards the antiphoton idea because that has the most references in the fic (and I think antiparticle/antiphoton is a unique way to go about it.). But if it's decided that an alternate method of laser generation is what we'll use, then I'll go back and fix.

But I'm not wishy-washy! I'm just "open-minded"

[FullAuto]

Plus, a beam of light tends to go a wee bit faster than a blob of plasma or a bullet

 

Aye, makes shooting a moving target at long range a bit easier.

 

Thinking about plasma... AFAIK plasma is superheated matter that's stripped of its electrons, right? If it has such a high positive charge, then won't electrostatic forces make the 'blob' (or whatever) of plasma actually expand and dissapate, effectively making its range really short?

 

Good point. But I think we're having enough trouble getting the lasers to work at the moment.

 

Can we throw in some handwavium and say that an antiphoton-matter reaction produces less alpha, beta, and gamma radiation than an equivalent antimatter-matter reaction, due to it being an antiphoton?

 

Sounds good.

I agree with Ali, we should stick with the antiphoton idea unless we hit a snag that's too big of a problem to sort out. Not that we can't magic it away....

*wiggles fingers*

[Snikers]

It all sounds good to me. And I'm not saying that the plasma won't cut it in the fog - just the lasers.

 

Come to think of it, all of these "ultra-elite soldiers" have been using bullet rifles for all of their careers - it may even be possible that some get better accuracy results out of their terran tech than with (I'd guess) wildly different alien technology?

 

And I'd always thought plasma was just super-duper-heated matter, like even above gaseous state. But perhaps that's an ultrasimplified version. Either way, I'd always assumed plasma weapons would shoot a solid self-contained capsule, and that when it hit something it would break, allowing the plasma inside to expand and do incredible damage.

[FullAuto]

Come to think of it, all of these "ultra-elite soldiers" have been using bullet rifles for all of their careers - it may even be possible that some get better accuracy results out of their terran tech than with (I'd guess) wildly different alien technology?

 

A big chunk of shooting is learning to cope with & compensate for things like recoil and bullet trajectory, and laser & plasma weapons have neither. The laser and plasma weapons would make shooting simpler and easier, but if someone's used a gun for long enough, they do get attached to it, even when better are available.

[Bomb Bloke]

There are four states of matter, solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. The plasma stage is indeed when the electrons get to go wondering, and that's why we don't use them in real life. We can't fire a magnetic field with the plasma.

 

I figured the solution would be to say that elerium burns slow but really, really hot. That works, more or less - it's an imagenary element, so we can give it whatever properties we wish.

[Hankosha]

Elerium makes good armour too....

[Alitorious]

Yep, as Bomb Bloke said, plasma is regarded as the fourth state of matter. Technically, it's different only from gases in that there aren't many (if any) electrons orbiting the nuclei of plasma. Solids and liquids are only solids and liquids because of electrons, really.

Technically, plasma doesn't have to be hot (they're looking into stuff called 'cold plasma'). The thing is, superheated matter gets stripped of its electrons more easily. (I think electrons getting taken away is a side-effect of getting superheated, actually.)

 

What I picture plasma guns, actually, is having two kinds of 'ammo' in the clips. One would be little pellets of elerium, and the other would be little bits of regular matter (anything works, really, as long as it's really cheap.) Inside the gun, the elerium is reacted to get a whole bunch of energy (as we know elerium is really good at ). This energy superheats the matter, which turns it into plasma. We can then use magnetic fields to accelerate the plasma out of the gun, and into the target human.. er, I mean floater. Yes, floater.

 

Oh, one thing: Can we decide what type of radiation it is that makes Elerium do that thing it does? Alpha, Beta, er... 'antimatter' Beta (positron radiation), a certain frequency of x-ray?

[Bomb Bloke]

I always figured gravity waves.

 

I gather cold plasmas are already in use, in fiberoptics, for eg. I also pointed out a fair while back that they also have some uses in motion sensor tech.

[Hankosha]

Plasma Weapons

In short, a typical subsonic or marginally supersonic sci-fi moving-blob plasma blast would require a magical self-contained containment field, and it would float up into the air even if it did hold together.

 

Well, since we have alien tech, we could get around having that problem. Or We could just have it firing the plasma itself. I like the idea of having a small layer of metal around an elerium slug, that way, there's two layers of damage - one from the plasma, and the other from te impact of the slug.

[Alitorious]

Well, it's not much, but I guess it's something?

 

Here's a bit of notes, if anyone's interested:

Rick Chez "Ping" R

Jack Thomas "Warlord" LP/R

Tamara Hillard "Tammy" R/M

Tim Day sil-mp5

Ed Dodge R

Martin Terrick "Strike" LP/P

Bob Jennings "Stump" R

Greg Conner "Ghost" R

Ki-tat Chung "Kitty" R

Jack Howitz "Bomber" G/M/P

 

T1: Red: Jennings ("Stump")

Rick ("Ping")

Ki-Tat Chung ("Kitty")

Greg Conner ("Ghost")

 

T2: Gold: Jack Thomas ("Warlord")

Tamara Hillard ("Tammy")

Tim Day

 

T3:Green: Ed Dodge

Martin Terrick ("Strike")

Jack Howitz

 

It'll be a little while before I can shake off this writer's block, though.

 

 

And on the idea of plasma weapons: Elerium also does a bunch of gravity-stuff, right? Maybe have a teeny bit of elerium ejected with the plasma blob, which generates a gravitic and magnetic field that contain the plasma. In addition, the gravitic field generated may counteract the buoyant forces of the plasma and force the blob to fly straight?

 

But at any rate... *fires guilt-o-matic at everyone who reads this post, so that they start posting again* Mua ha ha!

[The Veteran]

For crying out loud guys! Whenever I get a chance to look at these forums I cross my fingers that there's been some movement in the fics but all this thread is ever used for is the discussion of the practical application of physics to otherwise nonexistant weapons and technologies! And before anyone points it out I'm well aware that both lasers and to some small extent plasmas have already been toyed with by our scientific bigwigs somewhere in the world...

 

The point is, this is a game guys. If there's ground fog then what do we do? We carry on regardless but we can't see as much! It doesn't mean that as soon as we fire our gun we're going to vaporise ourselves! It's not real, it's meant to be fun and too often it happens that people aen't posting becasue they're too busy in here discussing technical problems with the lasers and motion scanners. If we hit a problem, we blag it! It's as simple as that...

 

If anyones confused as to what I'm saying, please go and take a look at a few of the entries in the data canister thread. I think you'll agree they're less than theoretically correct.

 

And please guys, keep up the good work! Let's get this fanfic moving again! The UFO fic has become the daddy on this site, Apoc hasn't moved for months now! Forget about the Aftermath fics for a while and write in these first. This game is the reason we're all here in the first place and we've discussed time and time again how it's such a shame that more people don't give it the time to get to love it. If we start going and abandonning it ourselves just because a few new forums have turned up and we have a few new games to play with... What kind of fans are we?

[FullAuto]

The worst kind. Opportunists. Guess it's time for a mission post then, eh? S'pose I could do one...let me see...

[The Veteran]

Well UFO is already on a mission post but a revival in he Apocalypse fic would be beyond awesome. It's amazing how little development we've had in either recently. Look at the dates next time you're browsing!

 

I'm posting in UFO now but it'll take me a while, I'm not at my best in mission posts!

[FullAuto]

Well, leave me some and lo, I shall redeem thee!

[The Veteran]

Good good my brain's stopped working :S There's a post for you and no mistake! Hope noone had any specific ideas on the development of that mission! Still at least we're moving again Let me know what you think, I don't like writing for other people's characters!

[JellyfishGreen]

Good stuff... I like how it's often hard to tell who's writing, it always seems more natural when several different soldiers get action in the same post, so thanks for the effort.

 

On the whole realism-of-plasma-weapon topic, which really deserves a topic of its own, may I suggest googling on "Strongly Coupled Plasmas" aka "Warm Dense Matter".

 

https://www.aip.org/pnu/2005/726.html

https://www.physics.ubc.ca/~nga/focus.html

https://laserplasma.physics.ox.ac.uk/r_dense.shtml

 

I don't understand half of it, but certain terms relevant to our discussion leap out:

 

"10% density of a solid" "akin to liquid" - these plasma blobs have mass.

"Coulomb force stronger than thermal kinetic energy" - the blobs have some reason to stick together without a containment field.

"Quark-Gluon" - you don't need alpha particles (helium nucleus) and gamma rays (photons) anymore.

 

So yeah. Still lots to be learned about possible plasma effects.

[Bomb Bloke]

...

 

I think it might be simpler for me to try an experiment I heard involving a fishbowl, a match, and a microwave...