Warp-Field Bullets

[Timo]

Fast should do it as well. There simply wouldn't be time for any damage to be created or energy laterally transferred before the bullet were gone already. (It probably wouldn't be a "bullet" as such, just a particle stream, as it couldn't hold together at that speed unless traveling in vacuum, but still.) Some of this can already be seen happening with impacts on low Earth orbit: the physics of a dust particle punching through aluminum or ceramics are quite different at a few hundred kilometers per second.

No, a hit to the thigh would turn the target's brain to goo.

That doesn't happen with rifle hits yet. It wouldn't happen with near-lightspeed hits any more. Perhaps there would be a sweet zone in between, but perhaps not.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[publiusr]

Those Eraser looking turrets the Vengeance had made me think of a warp coil gauss gun.

 

[Maxillius]

Why bother with a physical projectile? Creating a tiny warp bubble would take as much energy with or without anything inside it and a physical projectile would keep going for hundreds of miles inside an atmosphere assuming there wasn't some sort of warp sustainer inside the projectile. How much range do you really need? No, just have the gun shoot tiny warp bubbles. They'd last a fraction of a second once they left the gun, but in that tiny span of time much damage could be done with a negligible trace, if any at all. Remember, organic matter interaction with a warp field boundary is massively destructive to the organic matter.

 

[Timo]

...Although while it probably ought to be, this is never quite stated. Small craft can zip in and out of the warp fields of larger ships without much difficulty, for one. The issue ought to arise in the one instance of spacewalking at warp, in ENT "Divergence", but it's not mentioned at all. The worst that seems to be facing Tucker during his tightrope act is his rope snapping.

I'm sure warp fields and their gradients and boundaries can be made deadly if the need arises, but perhaps this isn't an inherent property? Perhaps a person hitting a boundary will go through it in such short time (or very briefly obtain a warp bubble of his own, soap bubble style) that there won't be any stretching or maiming there?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Maxillius]

I don't know. I suspect even a bubble of air at super-relativistic velocity could kill.

 

[Timo]

I guess the word is "overkill". But magical fields might be good weapons if one wants to deliver immense energies from gun A to victim B without having to mind the space or obstacles in between; generally, "delivering immense energies" would be a messy business, but by invoking "subspace" or "phasing", the mess might be avoided, or confined to the target.

Also, bullets with lots of kinetic energy are inconvenient, because there would supposedly be recoil of some sort, basically meaning two victims: one at each end of the trajectory. But warp field energy need not be kinetic and certainly isn't Newtonian, perhaps justifying the otherwise silly-sounding effort of building a warp gun.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Maxillius]

Indeed. A warp gun seems silly when you can just beam your target to an altitude of 10,000 feet or 12 feet below the surface of the ground.

I suspect there's something wrong with us for imagining awful uses of transportation tech!

 

[Ithekro]

Maybe such bullets are listed with the other banned subspace weaponry.

 

[JES]

Indeed. A warp gun seems silly when you can just beam your target to an altitude of 10,000 feet or 12 feet below the surface of the ground.

I suspect there's something wrong with us for imagining awful uses of transportation tech!

Oh, I'm sure that in the Terran Empire, this is done all the time, by sick, sadistic captains who make up it's ranks.

Beaming a pro-democracy dissident onto the surface of the sun
Beaming a Klingon prisoner who has outlived his usefulness 10,000 feet under an ocean
Beaming a Romulan spy (once he has been interrogated and tortured of course) into the mouth of an active volcano Beaming a Tholian onto the surface of a planet with a cold climate
Beaming a traitorous second-in-command who tried to assassinate the commanding officer into the mouth of the Bajoran Wormhole,
Or his mistress and former captain's women into the event horizon of a black hole.

And there are probably a total of a thousand, sick, sadistic ways to use the transporter, such as making it intentionally "malfunction", and having the victims come back twisted from the inside out. Remember that transporter accident from TMP? Now imagine that being done intentionally.

 

[Maxillius]

Wow... Although, I think the Prophets would save the guy that's beamed into the Bajoran wormhole sans ship. Besides, wouldn't the wormhole activate and suck the ship in if it got close enough to beam someone in? Maybe not, I remember something in DS9's pilot about the station's final position as 15km from the mouth of the wormhole, which seems awfully damned close and well within transporter range. But also visually inaccurate because at a range of 15km a Dominion battleship would appear as large as DS9 coming through the wormhole!