Sci-fi terrorist weapons

[Tyburn]

I'm going through planning for my sequel and have a small tactical issue to deal with.

The heroes have an army of ragtag locals using improvised weaponry and have to draw a battalion of enemies into an ambush in the forest. Using only materials found on a crashed starship they have to create the equivalent of Claymore mines for their trap.

I considered siphoning off antimatter from the ship's fuel tank, then realised that I'd need such a tiny amount to create an explosion small enough to not flatten the forest that it would be impossible to do.

I also considered linking power packs to make them explode, but they can't be reliably timed.

Can anyone think of a good idea for improvised anti-personnel mines? The crashed ship was essentially a sort of prison ship and carries no offensive weaponry.

 

[Boneman]

What about using the forest itself? Along the lines of the type of trap favoured in Robin Hood stories, only nastier - a branch bent back enourmously that when tripped (rope of otherwise) hurls hundreds of sharpened metal spikes that have been fashioned from the ship? Or they tread on a plate buried just below the surface and the same type of thing falls on them. Could always seal a kettle/pot/rounded object with shrapnel and then boil it over a fire - the bad guys come a-looking and the kettle explodes. Or leave a super-heated kettle in the path, with a release pull-string that causes a superheat reaction to make it properly explode. Could fill it with fuel with a detonator in it, artfully constructed just from electrical things that ignites when someone moves the kettle. Or hide it alongside the path and trip it manually form a distance by pulling a rope/wire.

 

[Moonbat]

If it was a prison ship did it have cells? If it did what kind of doors did they have, were they just plain old Iron bars, or something more fancy. They could always use the force field generators from the cell doors to electrocute/shock/fry/stun the person who steps on the generator pack that they removed from the ship and hid on the forest floor.

 

[Abernovo]

No weapons on board, but kitchen ingredients and cleaning stuff perhaps? Chemical reactions can be nasty things. Coolant fluids from the ship's climate control system?

Boneman's correct about using the forest itself, as well. Sap burns and explodes. It also sticks, especially conifer sap. Caltrops are easy to make, and could be as effective as the shrapnel suggested, if released at speed. They'd also be a menace to the next wave.

 

[Tywin]

Ammonium Nitrate (common fertilizer... it's a white powder) or other common chemical with explosive properties placed inside metal containers (any old sealed metal container from your space ship. Oxygen cannisters are ideal). The containers themselves will just blow apart into one or two pieces, so fill them up with nails and things. Keep the shrapnel metallic to stay within the Hague conventions (glass and wood can't be detected in a body via x-ray). The only real tricky part is making trigger mechanisms. Possibly something with a small blasting cap, like inflatable life preservers that explode into action based on a trigger charge.

This wiki lays out a few options: Improvised explosive device - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Also, they're walking into a forest? You could manufacture a way to get the enemy trapped in the forest (stuck in a bog, misdirected, etc), and then burn the forest down while your own people exfil out safely.

 

[Mark R]

The escape pods on the ship could use explosive charges to eject from it, those could be easily re-rigged.

 

[ratsy]

What about using the forest itself? Along the lines of the type of trap favoured in Robin Hood stories, only nastier - a branch bent back enourmously that when tripped (rope of otherwise) hurls hundreds of sharpened metal spikes that have been fashioned from the ship? Or they tread on a plate buried just below the surface and the same type of thing falls on them. Could always seal a kettle/pot/rounded object with shrapnel and then boil it over a fire - the bad guys come a-looking and the kettle explodes. Or leave a super-heated kettle in the path, with a release pull-string that causes a superheat reaction to make it properly explode. Could fill it with fuel with a detonator in it, artfully constructed just from electrical things that ignites when someone moves the kettle. Or hide it alongside the path and trip it manually form a distance by pulling a rope/wire.

I am picturing Ewoks dancing around while they destroy Stormtroopers with rocks and logs.

 

[Tyburn]

Some good ideas coming through, I'm leaning toward Abernovo's idea of cleaning material-based explosives.

I say 'Prison Ship'; it's more of a sort of exile cruiser, taking 'undesirables' away from Earth under the pretence of giving them a new life on a new planet. There are no escape pods, except for the crew compartment up front which has already detatched.

The 'cells', as they are, are not actually secured - it's more of a sealed-off city block built into the ship with a couple of community centres in the middle which had been staffed by holographic drones (which are repurposed for a different part of the attack) - the rest of the ship was just propulsion, navigation and life support with a minimal crew who had, as mentioned already escaped.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Have you considered another option; the ship has been sealed off, but rather than allowing it to crash land on a planet, the spaceship has been rigged with explosives to destroy both ship and prisoners. The explosives only partially went off, making the ship crash, and leaving still unexploded devices on board.

Or perhaps there were armed patrol guards, and they were attacked and their weapons acquired by the inmates; it was only at that stage that the remainder of the crew jettisoned.

Another option is the use of punji sticks; areas of ground booby-trapped with concealed holes that contain sharpened stakes/bamboo (perhaps there are trees with poisonous sap which could be smeared on the stakes?). The enemies are drawn or lured into the area and then their rear cut off (perhaps by releasing some wild jungle beasties) meaning that the enemy troops have to either risk being impaled or be eaten.

 

[Tyburn]

Well, the inmates ran riot as soon as the ship crashed, turning a once-peaceful colony into a scared city of twitching net curtains. They were the original invaders - the colony has since become over-run by a bigger, more powerful, better-trained force - the surviving crew of the Deutsche Galactische Kriegsmarine battleship Bismarck, which the hero destroyed in the previous book.

As the hero has already by this point met up with some Mutants who were experimenting with genetic engineering, I suppose I could always have some explosive lemmings in there - a couple of dozen lemming-bombs running around who all detonate at a specific trigger.

Would anyone get it if I had lemming bombs who exploded when someone shouts 'Oh no!' at them?

(Yes, this does get silly - I'm not even going to go into the part where the hero's sidekick gets tired of being tortured inefficiently so decides to finish the job himself)

 

[Grinnel]

Plastics and glass make very good sharpened stakes and shrapnel, and there is likely to be a lot of it about. As mentioned, chemical cleaners, possibly mixed with local ingredients could make effective explosives using small sparks from batteries to ignite them (cell phones and pagers make effective triggers in modern explosives).

Natural ingredients available could include methane gas from swamps and other possibly more explosive or corrosive chemicals more common on this world than our own.

Keep in mind that traps that wound can be more effective than those that kill. Each wounded person effectively takes 3 people out of combat. In addition, troops entering a forest where they see others of their ranks being carried out missing legs and arms tend to be a little less motivated...

 

[chrispenycate]

I have a certain weakness for the flame fougasse, and there is bound to be something inflammable in the food preparation area, probably cooking oil or the like (better to mix it with jam so it will stick to the skin of anyone it hits – having your comrades rushing past you screaming and beating at their flaming skin has proved quite discouraging in the past.

But what do we use as an explosive to project this incendiary mix, lacking the means to produce black powder (and even Jeremy Clarkson's hair spray)? The majority of explosives (like, for instance, nitrocellulose) require ingredients we're not likely to have available, like fuming nitric acid, so the easiest way to produce an explosion is with a sealed vessel holding water, heated until the water turns to steam and the pressure ruptures the vessel. Unfortunately a bit difficult to adjust the timing.

Alternatively, with a polyphase electrical generator, some coils and a plastic drainpipe (sorry, a "rigid, non-conducting tube") we could put together a linear accelerator – hmm, I wonder what the conductivity of hot jam is? I could project a stream of slightly salty water at slightly over mach 2 with the one I built at uni. It could also project lumps of metallic scrap at the same speed, in a continuous stream rather than a burst. If you want to put it any distance from the generator, you're going to need room temperature superconductors, and localising the device once it's started operating would be quite simple, so it's basically a one use weapon against any kind of military opposition.

 

[Tyburn]

Jam cannon? I'm liking this. It has a very British feel to it.

Although it might cause deja vu in a later book when they improvise rail guns to fire tins of bully beef at genetically-modified Space Nazi sparkly vampire soldiers.

Steak through the heart anyone?

[Edit: I've got several books planned out for this series, each one parodying a different aspect of sci-fi and fantasy culture. It's a quite comprehensive parody series.]

 

[Tyburn]

To avoid having to make a new thread, I'm just going to tag my next question on here.

As I understand it, being hit with a weapons-powered laser beam would be a bit more than just a simple burn injury. The light superheating the tissue would cause cells to explode due to the water in them being vapourised and a simple gutshot could turn out quite messy.

Given that I'm using an equivalent to laser weapons, would a direct hit on someone's temple with a high-powered energy shot be enough to cause the targets skull to explode due to buildup of steam pressure from all the brain matter being vapourised?

It's supposed to be a significant event in the book, one which causes another character to go on a murderous rampage.

 

[chrispenycate]

Grumbles gently about the reception of his jam cannon – you asked me to improvise, but didn't give me an exhaustive list of what ingredients I had available, nor how much time to build things. Yes, a 'rail gun is a Laithewaite linear accelerator, so if you're intending to bully beef with it, you don't want to spoil the impact by squirting jam. Even transonic jam.

So, to the present question; are we talking about a pulse laser (maser) or continuous beam? With a pulse, you put a few megawatt hours into a microsecond or so, then there's a tenth of a second while the molecules are re-excited, and that will definitely vaporise anything in its path, with the possibility of producing enough steam to make an explosion – maybe just drill right through, as a human body doesn't give much resistance (a maser more likely to cause heating than an optical laser, not sure for a CO2 infrared laser)

A continuous beam would be more like a white-hot cheese wire, neatly cauterising as it cuts, depth of cut dependent on the power in the beam, and inversely on speed of transit.

A laser isn't really a very good anti-personel weapon.

 

[Tywin]

A laser fired in a "burst" is an exceptionally bad antipersonnel weapon. I think there's a good chance that the cells/flesh of the human body won't vaporize fast enough for the laser (traveling at the speed of light) to pass through into deeper layers. So, no matter how hot and how much power, I think that wound will only be topical.

Now a continuous beam laser is another story of course.

Still, I don't think an explosion is likely. We use lasers on bodies all the time (surgery for instance), and nothing "explodes".

If you want a good head explosion, in my experience you need a projectile. A nice 5.56mm round for instance (fired by an AR-15, I think you brits call them ARMAGs) makes a tiny little hole on the way in and then tumbles inside the body and comes out the back side of the head tumbling... so it removes large sections of skull on the way out.

Overpressure (like from a bomb going off nearby) also can make for some grody scenes. When a human body comes apart in an explosion (from the pressure, not from the shrapnel), it breaks apart at joints, which makes far worse scenes than if just random bits of flesh splattered around.

 

[Tyburn]

Thanks for the responses, because of the nature of the work (a combination of vaguely hard sci-fi and retro-style gung-ho) I think I'll have to go with Chrispenycate's concept - a high-energy maser-type beam (micro pulses which seem to come out as a beam) because I really want to go with the exploding head thing.

The weapons are not exactly lasers - they're lazers. Light Amplified by Zionic Enhanced Radiation. The power of the beam is intensified to a massive degree with the side effect of Visible Unilateral Photon Emission - in other words, the beam can be seen in action. I know this creates all sorts of tactical issues, but Space Captain Flight doesn't seem to mind.

Basically I'm trying to make it look like badly-written 50's sci-fi, but coming up with plausible reasoning behind the bad science, hence having a reason to have Lazers with a 'Z'.

 

[Tyburn]

I think you misunderstood what I was saying, chrispenycate - 'Bully Beef' is canned beef rations given to allied troops in WWII. I like the idea of the jam cannon, but I'm thinking it might be easier to make it some sort of jam-based claymore - a tripwire-triggered cannon that sprays scalding hot jam over the intruders.

As the crashed ship (as stated before) has a sort of community centre thing in it, I'll simply have massive stockpiles of jam-making materials so Space Captain Flight can teach the locals to make anti-personnel jam - maybe with nails in it.

Though this does mean I'll have to figure out how long it would take to teach a couple of hundred illiterate yobs how to make jam.

 

[Tyburn]

Okay, 'anti-personnel jam' is a go. It's got sand and ground glass in it to make wounds even nastier when it's scraped off. Thanks Chrispenycate for the idea. Even managed to figure out how to work it into the whole 'getting ready to repel invaders' scene - Lieutenant Church (U.S. Space Navy) teaches the Asbosians to shoot, S.A.S. officer Beresford teaches them a few simple hand-to-hand combat rules, Kitty the Librarian teaches them to set traps and Space Captain Flight gets them all making deadly jam.

The jam mines will have a tripwire connected to a small blowtorch-burner type thing which heats the (now canned) jam until the can explodes over the invaders, forcing their retreat with many wounded. The first man in formation sets off the tripwire, so by the time the main body of the squad has passed the can will explode. Either that or they use self-heating cans of an older model which can be activated without removing the lid.

 

[jastius]

Have you considered another option; the ship has been sealed off, but rather than allowing it to crash land on a planet, the spaceship has been rigged with explosives to destroy both ship and prisoners. The explosives only partially went off, making the ship crash, and leaving still unexploded devices on board.

Or perhaps there were armed patrol guards, and they were attacked and their weapons acquired by the inmates; it was only at that stage that the remainder of the crew jettisoned.

Another option is the use of punji sticks; areas of ground booby-trapped with concealed holes that contain sharpened stakes/bamboo (perhaps there are trees with poisonous sap which could be smeared on the stakes?). The enemies are drawn or lured into the area and then their rear cut off (perhaps by releasing some wild jungle beasties) meaning that the enemy troops have to either risk being impaled or be eaten.

mango swamps are like this naturally.. and have leeches.. is it a jungleley type place or perhaps rainforest? you have all kinds of interesting slimy poisonous things in areas like those.. if it is a rainforesty place then you can have the giant snakes and piranha type fish.. poisonous sap and immobilizing plant gel from the venus fly trap thingies.. oh room for lots of fun there...