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On 2002-09-08 15:17, Conrad wrote:
"A million rounds per minute ..."
I should explain a bit further, or at least what I know. The "gun" consists of a series of tubes held in a square frame, each tube holding one bullet. There are several frames arranged one behind the other. When the bullets in one frame are fired, they all go at once, followed by those in the next frame within a fraction of a second. The effect has been described as a "death ray of lead".
So, if you had a frame 1000 tubes wide by 1000 tubes tall and discharged them all simultaneously then you'd have an rpm of something like 1,000,000 rounds per second ... at least.
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I believe that rounds per minute is judged simply on how many bullets would be fired in one minute at the guns rate of fire. A million rounds a minute would allow for 1666 rounds in one second. The ammount of bullets actually fired doesn't matter, and neither does the reload time. Machineguns typically don't carry enough ammo for a minute of constant firing, but are still rated in rounds per minute.
Then again I might be wrong.
From your description now it sounds less like a gattling gun, or a machine gun, but a lot more like one of the weapons you'll often find at civil war reenactments, or at the start of an exhibit on automatic weapons. four small cannons all on the same carraige, all with the same wick. The strategy of simply filling the air with lead is also a rather 19th century concept.
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Another weapon might be hungry little microbots. If it were possible to make them -tropic to materials used in spaceship design (ferro-tropic? Aluminotropic? Micatropic?) then a cloud of them could be deployed along an approach trajectory. Spaceship travels through cloud, picks up miniature hitch-hikers, gets corroded to bits.
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Typical problems with micromachines would apply, mainly targeting, they don't descriminate, and if they're self replicating how do you stop them from spreading?
In any sensible sci-fi universe, such weapons would be as illigal as biological weapons are today.
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Then there's micro-filaments. Say spun sapphire, kept in a web a thousand kilometres wide by - ooh, I dunno, electrostatic forces? (complete guess there, folks)- hard to spot, liable to slice and dice anything travelling into it.
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People are constantly trying to ban landmines, but haven't yet succeeded. So I suppose this one is actually somewhat believable. How would it be kept in place though? Wouldn't something like that act like a solar sail and constantly drift away from where you wanted it?
Though it might make a good missile based weapon, fire a missile, it splits in two, and between the two is a better than razor sharp blade traveling at hypersonic speeds? Cheaper than a beam weapon, if a little slower.
Would one of these fibers be strong enough to cut through a spaceship?