Pulsar Ballistics

tlb wrote:

Daryl wrote:The interesting point for me is that having a rapid firing hand gun with similar muzzle energy to a 50 cal, would indicate yet some more tricky Honorverse physics to handle the recoil. A heavy semi auto Barret is a shoulder buster, how would you control a light pistol?

cthia wrote:I don't think that would be tricky physics at all. Just physics.

It is called a fuzzler. Here in the Sol system we have silencers which we can install on our weapons. Some tongues refer to it as a muzzler.

To deal with the incessant kick of a gun in the Honorverse, an equal and opposite force is sent along the outside of the gun, thus cancelling each other out. A force muzzler. Hence, fuzzler. The opposite force hits a plate which disperses the energy. It is an ingenious mechanism perfectly "synchronizing" Newton's third law.

If it hits a plate to stop, then all that momentum of stopping is transmitted to the shooter. The way to avoid that is to stop the counterweight slowly, so the momentum transfer occurs over a longer, more manageable level; eliminating the peak by spreading it. However, we do have things in the Honorverse that violate Newton's Laws, the most well known is the compensator (that somehow catches momentum changes and discharges them into a wedge or grav wave). Another is the mass driver that is used in missile pod, since if it behaved in a Newtonian way it would be moving backwards faster than the velocity it could impart to that last missile.

PS. It is called a "silencer" because that is what Maxim called his invention (the son of the machine gun inventor). He developed it as a result of developing the auto muffler. It does not completely silence a gunshot, but it does suppress the sound by eliminating some and spreading the rest of the muzzle blast. So a word that is preferred in some circles is "suppressor".

The plates are simply there as a courtesy to disperse any residuals. The cancellation effect is "almost" perfect. Some people even remove the plates. Only woosie little girls keep them.

P.S. In the ghetto, silencers are called "doggie bags."
They muffle a gun's "bark."

cthia wrote:The plates are simply there as a courtesy to disperse any residuals. The cancellation effect is "almost" perfect. Some people even remove the plates. Only woosie little girls keep them.

P.S. In the ghetto, silencers are called "doggie bags."
To muffle a gun's bark.

I cannot visualize what you are describing, particularly the removing of the plates (which I assume will then impart the full recoil).

A suppressor will not be effective in the Honorverse, since most of the sound of a pulser is the hyper-sonic crack of the projectile.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:The plates are simply there as a courtesy to disperse any residuals. The cancellation effect is "almost" perfect. Some people even remove the plates. Only woosie little girls keep them.

P.S. In the ghetto, silencers are called "doggie bags."
To muffle a gun's bark.

I cannot visualize what you are describing, particularly the removing of the plates (which I assume will then impart the full recoil).

A suppressor will not be effective in the Honorverse, since most of the sound of a pulser is the hyper-sonic crack of the projectile.

A fuzzler does not suppress sound, it suppresses the kickback by applying an equal force in the opposite direction. The plates simply stop residual, but harmless, air currents.

For instance, if you fire a shotgun, it is going to kick against your shoulder, but if you apply an equal countering force in the opposite direction the two forces will cancel each other out. Resulting in a net kick of zero. There may be a little air displacement which the woosie plates "disperse."

Perfectly synchronizing Newton's third law.

See rigid body dynamics and it's various applications to stabilize automobiles and other engineering designs.

cthia wrote:A fuzzler does not suppress sound, it suppresses the kickback by applying an equal force in the opposite direction. The plates simply stop residual, but harmless, air currents.

For instance, if you fire a shotgun, it is going to kick against your shoulder, but if you apply an equal countering force in the opposite direction the two forces will cancel each other out. Resulting in a net kick of zero. There may be a little air displacement which the woosie plates "disperse."

Perfectly synchronizing Newton's third law.

The suppressor remark was more of an aside; I realize that was not what you were describing.

What puzzles me is what you are calling "woosie plates", since the main ways to reduce recoil with which I am familiar involve recoil pads or muzzle brakes. Then there is a video in the Forgotten Firearms series that shows a shotgun that fires while the heavy bolt is still traveling forward to reduce recoil (something like the mechanism of the Oerlikon 20mm cannon).

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:A fuzzler does not suppress sound, it suppresses the kickback by applying an equal force in the opposite direction. The plates simply stop residual, but harmless, air currents.

For instance, if you fire a shotgun, it is going to kick against your shoulder, but if you apply an equal countering force in the opposite direction the two forces will cancel each other out. Resulting in a net kick of zero. There may be a little air displacement which the woosie plates "disperse."

Perfectly synchronizing Newton's third law.

The suppressor remark was more of an aside; I realize that was not what you were describing.

What puzzles me is what you are calling "woosie plates", since the main ways to reduce recoil with which I am familiar involve recoil pads or muzzle brakes. Then there is a video in the Forgotten Firearms series that shows a shotgun that fires while the heavy bolt is still traveling forward to reduce recoil (something like the mechanism of the Oerlikon 20mm cannon).

As far as I know, neither of those methods are "pure" solutions, they are more like Band-Aids. I'm suggesting using a counter force "fired" in the opposite direction of the kick. Akin to firing a blank in the opposite direction simultaneously while harvesting some of the excess force as well.

A shotgun kicks at 17.3 (ft. lbs). Simultaneously applying the same in the opposite direction should cancel itself.

I'm envisioning a chamber that discharges compressed air as a resultant in the fuzzler. How the fuzzler accomplishes it's magic is classified. Perhaps a high density metal which is launched in the opposite direction. The plates simply disperse the compressed air created in the fuzzler.

cthia wrote:As far as I know, neither of those methods are "pure" solutions, they are more like Band-Aids. I'm suggesting using a counter force "fired" in the opposite direction of the kick. Akin to firing a blank in the opposite direction simultaneously while harvesting some of the excess force as well.

A shotgun kicks at 17.3 (ft. lbs). Simultaneously applying the same in the opposite direction should cancel itself.

I'm envisioning a chamber that discharges compressed air as a resultant in the fuzzler. How the fuzzler accomplishes it's magic is classified. Perhaps a high density metal which is launched in the opposite direction. The plates simply disperse the compressed air created in the fuzzler.

Sure, you could fire a high density metal in the other direction - and in fact recoilless rifles kind of do that - shooting a countermass out the rear to cancel much or all the recoil of firing - but those are limited use weapons because you need to be sure there's nothing behind them that you mind possibly destroying with the countermass (or don't fire them in an enclosed space or the pressure caused by the countermass will injure or kill you).

You could do that with a hyper-velocity hand weapon, but you have to live with it basically firing the equivalent of a hyper speed bullet behind it (better not have your head behind the barrel to look down the sights) for every one of the large number of bullets fired out the front. If you were using compressed gas that'd basically be a rocket engine pointing behind the gun! (Plus of course now your ammo weighs about twice as much because each round needs a corresponding countermass to fire the other way)

Now if you fire that countermass into a plate or other stop within the gun, well then that was only a very complicated way of delaying the recoil because slamming into the stop creates a major impact force transmitted through the gun's frame to the shooter.

Now there are ways to spread out the recoil of firing over a longer time, making it easier to control. But I don't think those would work well with a weapon firing as often as the pulser is said to - if you can spread the recoil over 2 seconds but your firing 3 times a second only the first shot gets full benefit and after a few all the spread recoil events stack up to give you just as much recoil.


I suspect that either grav drivers cheat Newton and don't impart and equal and opposite reaction. or else pulsers use something like minaturized tractor beams to dynamically anchor the gun against its recoil so it feels like it's cheating Newton.

People are forgetting that the "kick" is momentum (mass * velocity), while the energy is mass * velocity * velocity. If the pellet of weapon B is 1/4 the mass of the pellet of weapon A, while the velocity for B is twice that of A, then the energy for B would be equal to that of A, but the "kick" would be half as much.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:People are forgetting that the "kick" is momentum (mass * velocity), while the energy is mass * velocity * velocity. If the pellet of weapon B is 1/4 the mass of the pellet of weapon A, while the velocity for B is twice that of A, then the energy for B would be equal to that of A, but the "kick" would be half as much.

I remember introductory physics pretty well (I was a physics major in college), so I do not know what led you to make this comment. When comparing a 10mm chemically driven bullet to the dart of a pulser, the dart is traveling about 8 times faster and we do not know how the masses differ (so the dart would have to have one sixty-fourth the mass to have the same energy and one eighth the momentum).

cthia wrote:To deal with the incessant kick of a gun in the Honorverse, an equal and opposite force is sent along the outside of the gun, thus cancelling each other out. A force muzzler. Hence, fuzzler. The opposite force hits a plate which disperses the energy. It is an ingenious mechanism perfectly "synchronizing" Newton's third law.

Which hits the shooter. You're not helping anything here. Honorverse tech is certainly capable of redirecting the force (assuming it could be made small enough), but I don't see any practical way to divert it in a harmless way.

tlb wrote:

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:People are forgetting that the "kick" is momentum (mass * velocity), while the energy is mass * velocity * velocity. If the pellet of weapon B is 1/4 the mass of the pellet of weapon A, while the velocity for B is twice that of A, then the energy for B would be equal to that of A, but the "kick" would be half as much.

I remember introductory physics pretty well (I was a physics major in college), so I do not know what led you to make this comment. When comparing a 10mm chemically driven bullet to the dart of a pulser, the dart is traveling about 8 times faster and we do not know how the masses differ (so the dart would have to have one sixty-fourth the mass to have the same energy and one eighth the momentum).

I did so because people were inventing possible momentum dumps and overlooking the reasons to believe that the pulser darts are much smaller than a 10mm bullet. I have also found a passage where a pulser was pushing the person that was firing it (probably because the rate of fire smoothed out all the little kicks).