An excerpt from War Among the Stars: Firearms and Ordinance of the Space Forces.
Small Arms Development Through the 22nd Century
Handcannons first appeared on the battlefield in the Yuan dynasty of the late 13th Century. This technology rapidly spread to Europe where early artillery pieces such bombards were being used during the Late Medieval Period. The Ottoman Empire was the first military to field small arms in any quantity, arming Janissaries with matchlocks in the mid 15th Century. During this era, Europe, the matchlock or Arquebus, was still used only by specialized troops, with many soldiers still being armed with pikes and other classically Medieval weapons.
It was not until the development of the Flintlock in the mid 17th Century were firearms reliable enough to be the primary issued weapons of large armies. However, it was more than just the development of the flintlock that made arming troops with firearms possible, but improvements in metallurgy, machining, metrology, chemistry, and the infrastructure of mass manufacture that contributed militaries being able to issue a standard firearm to troops.
Over the next few hundred years, every major change in the standard-issue military rifle to the armies of the great world powers was associated with major changes in firearms technology and associated manufacturing technologies.
The move from the flintlock musket to the muzzle loading rifle or rifled musket came with the improvement in the fire control mechanism from flintlock to percussion cap, and the bullet from the round ball to the conical bullet or Minie ball. From this point, significant design changes occurred quickly. The introduction of the self-contained cartridge led to the repeating rifle. The introduction of smokeless powder and the pointed or spitzer bullet, the development of chromium-molybdenum steel alloys, heat treating, and machining let to the creation of the great firearms of the 20th Century that caused so many casualties in two world wars and countless regional conflicts around the globe.
However, by the early 21st Century, firearms technology had stalled, showing only minor incremental improvements over firearms developed shortly after World War Two in the mid 20th Century. The use of aluminum and polymer shed weight, but the firearms and ammunition were fundamentally unchanged in functionality for two generations. A solider deployed to Afganistan or Syria was carrying the same model rifle as his father in Iraq and Kuwait and his grandfather in Vietnam.
Several different avenues of small arms improvements were tried in the early 21st Century, most never being adopted by any military in large numbers due to several adverse factors.
It would take major changes in technology to improve the standard-issue military small arm to adequately equip the late 21st and early 22nd Century soldiers engaged in deep space conflicts.
One technology tried and abandoned was caseless ammunition. First tested in the 1990’s the technical limitations of making a propellent that would produce reliable ignition that was simultaneously durable enough to contain the bullet and primer as well be resistant to the elements proved far too great. The properties of the binder countered the properties of the propellant. A durable binder that allowed caseless ammunition to withstand rough handling and exposure to adverse conditions inhibited the reliable complete combustion of the propellant.
The supposed benefits that caseless ammunition had in the functionality of firearm – the lack of an extraction cycle in the weapon – did not make up for the problems of chambering easily damaged caseless rounds.
The introduction of hybrid polymer cased ammunition ultimately ended the development of caseless ammunition, having the durability of traditional metal cased ammo but at significant cost and weight reductions.
Another failed technology in general-issue small arms was electronically fired ammunition. Though useful in automatic cannons in large powered vehicles or aircraft, requiring the solider to carry both ammunition and a power cell for the fire control mechanism proved to be unnecessarily complicated for any minor increase in performance, except in very limited circumstances such as precision rifles used by highly trained designated marksmen.
The greatest change in small arms technology in the mid 20th Century was the development of chemically initiated decomposing propellants. Smokeless propellants remained inherently unchanged from the creation of Poudre B and Cordite in the 1880s, based on mixtures of nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine.
The energy density of these propellants was limited and attempts at increasing the performance of the propellant increased the brisance risking damage to the firearm.
Chemically initiated decomposing propellants, commonly known as gun gel or wet propellant, were developed from satellite and rocket thruster technology, these propellents did not burn. The propellant contained a meta-stable fuel of very high energy density and a non-metallic catalyst in gel form. The firing pin would strike a pyrotechnic primer that forcefully ejected an initiator chemical into the gel causing the immediate decomposition of the fuel. These gels were able to create substantially higher bullet velocities while totally eliminating solid (carbon) fouling.
These propellents drove rapid improvements in the development of both bullets and firearms.
The performance of the propellants exceeded the capabilities of traditional copper jacketed-lead core bullets that were introduced along with smokeless propellants at the end of the 19th Century. In addition, advancements in body armor sounded the death knell for the jacketed bullet.
Transition metal/metalloid-ceramic composites, second-generation MAX phase cermets, proved to be key in improving terminal ballistics against troop armor. Bullets were engineered to have favorable sheer properties, allowing the bullets to be self-sharpening on impact with hard targets but hydrodynamically unstable in compliant media. These bullets were capable of penetrating the most advanced wearable composite armors but would yaw rapidly causing severe soft tissue damage. Cermet bullets were also able to withstand the extreme forces generated by gun gel propellants.
The machine gun would not have been possible in the 20th Century without the development of chromium-molybdenum steel alloys. Chromium and molybdenum allow the steel to retain strength and toughness at higher temperatures. Without this metallurgical advancement, any sustained rate of above that of a manually operated firearm would cause the barrel of the weapon to overheat and rupture.
Much like the propellents, current generation firearms borrow heavily from the materials and manufacturing techniques used in the production of spacecraft and rocket systems. The development of chemically initiated decomposing propellants and MAX phase cermet bullets required the creation of new barrel and bolt materials to bring this technology to fruition. Chromium lined carbon steel alloy barrels were replaced with refractory lined composite barrels. The refractory lining had existed as far back as the 20th century but was limited largely due to the extreme cost and difficulty in machining the material. The high concentration of refractory materials present in M-type asteroids has made these materials more common with the increase in asteroid mining, and additive manufacturing techniques had simplified the process of producing firearm components from them.
In the latter part of the 21st century, two competing technologies sought to unseat the firearm as the primary small arm of military forces. The electromagnetic projector, commonly known as the railgun, and directed energy weapons, such as lasers. Despite significant expenditures in financial investment and research time, no practical technology has yet been developed that can chemical propellant powered ammunition in firearms.
The railgun, and to a significantly lesser degree, direct energy weapons did find common adoption as offensive and defensive weapons aboard larger spacecraft and ground combat vehicles in the arsenals of the major Sol system armies and navies (the subject of a different chapter of this book), these technologies did not readily scale down to man-portable size.
The power consumption to performance of these weapons was the primary limitation. Aboard a vehicle, an electromagnetic gun is powered by the vehicle’s nuclear powerplant. The size and weight of a vehicle helped mitigate the recoil effect of the relativistic velocity of an electromagnetically launched projectile. The velocity of a projectile from a shoulder-fired electromagnetic weapon must be limited so the recoil does injure the shooter to such a point that the bullet velocity is well within the range capable of being produced by a chemical propellant, roughly 1,000 to 2,000 meters per second, giving the electromagnetic weapon no significant advantage. Moreover, a significant amount of shielding was necessary to mask the electromagnetic field of a charged weapon to prevent the weapon from giving away a soldier’s position or interfering with other electronic devices.
Direct energy weapons proved to be even less useful as small arms. Generation of ultra-short wavelength lasers in the X-ray or Gamma-ray spectrum, which produce the most aggressive ablation of solid targets, requires the use of a femto-pulsed free-electron laser and undulator several meters long. This limited handheld laser system to being solid-state or chemical lasers producing energy in the visible, near-infrared, or infrared spectrum. While such lasers can produce intense burns, such weapons do not produce the same soft tissue trauma as kinetic energy projectiles except at very high intensities, outside the capability of handheld devices to generate.
Solid materials are generally very poor absorbers of photon energy. Most of the energy of a laser at or near the visible wavelengths of light is scattered or reflected. Thin-film thermal barrier coatings and reflectors commonly used in solar reflectors and heat shielding on spacecraft efficiently mitigate the majority of the energy of the laser, making these weapons easy to defend against.
The laser small arm ultimately proved to be more dangerous to the user than the target. A laser of significant intensity fired in an atmosphere produces a substantial amount of scattered laser energy. Without proper eye protection, the shooter was more likely to damage their own vision than harm the enemy, especially at longer ranges.
Technology has advanced considerably in the last few hundred years, but the human body has not. The damage caused by being hit by a high-velocity projectile has proven over and over again to be extremely lethal. Given the constraints of weight, recoil, and even the range that soldiers are willing to engage the enemy at with direct fire weapons, small caliber firearms using chemical propellent ammunition still provides the optimal balance of weapon system simplicity, man-portability, and lethality for the individual soldier.
In the future, newer technology may effectively supplant the firearm, but after nearly 700 years, it seems that the gun is here to stay.
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