What comes next?

>>32445849
Lasers really aren't shit over long ranges and have routinely shown to have more energy at target still than any projectile weapon but these are laser systems the size of cars and can only be mountes on vehicles and planes.

I don't know why you're so eager to replace chemical weapons but speaking in most realistic terms coil or rail assisted chemical projectile weapons are the next step. Imagine if your m4 quad rail had 4 rails right underneath it and the stock had batteries or capacitors. As long as someone could make it not 20lb's then all of a sudden you have an m4 that shoots just like a regular m4 but has muzzle velocities in excess of 1km/s.

>>32445849
Rail guns mounted to vehicles/ships/air frames.

Outside that maybe caseless .

>>32445849
>Lasers are shit over long range
You are aware that light will travel forever unless something blocks it...right?

Cassless Amunition
Recoil-less systems (where there are 2 actions going in oppisite directions)

>>32445969
> lasers arent affected by atmosphere

Ask me how I know youre a retard

>>32445969
Atmosphere scatters light.
>>32445938
I doubt you'd be able to fit enough batteries/capacitors in a stock. not to mention, if you git water on it then RIP gun.
>>32445952
>mounted to vehicles/ships/air frames
I meant man-portable.
>>32445977
>Caseless
I want a G11 space gun so bad, man

>>32445849
Advancements in energy storage would open up some possibilities. Other than that, caseless or telescoping ammo, if dine right.

>>32445849
I think that we may see a return to larger cartridges in semi-auto rifles to counter body armour.

>>32445969
Literally everything will travel forever unless something blocks it.

>>32445849
Well, as far as bullets with linear flightpaths go. We've pretty much reached the top. Even with hyper burst, SALVO and flechettes we fail to reach that magical 100% increase in hit probability in combat situations (quoting ACR study) Basically, I have come to the same conclusion as the Army. We need bullets that are guided, as in the correct their own path in flight, explode in proximity to their target either air bursting to defeat cover or just exploding close to a target to increase hit probability.

All the other magic we tried, caseless ammo, hyperburst and so on really didn't make too statistically significant of a difference.

We need people seeking bullets that may or may not explode to really change shit.

Even lasers are still subject to human error in aiming. We've found that having a super accurate weapons isn't even necessarily that good. You want a weapon that support or enhances your ability to snapshoot a target which is likely moving and may only be exposed for a couple of seconds. You want something that corrects for your human deficiency in aiming something like a long range shotgun which, is essentially why machine guns are so effective now. Volume of fire corrects for the human errors in aiming, in having an ultra-accurate weapon would hinder this effect. In advanced weapon design this inherent variation in order to produce statically predictably patterns of projectiles is known as nutation.

>>32448271
Literally nothing in practice.

>>32448271
In this situation the shit in the atmosphere is the "something"

>>32445849
Other than a few small improvements like caseless ammo, I think the next wave of innovations and improvements in small arms will be to keep up with changes in armor.

Small arms are about as good as they can get for the current situation. I think they'll stay the same until armor gets better or more plentiful, and then they'll have to adapt to the new armor.

We're lucky right now in that we're mostly fighting enemies that don't have much armor. If there's ever another conventional war, I think both sides will find the whole more smaller lighter faster bullets philosophy doesn't work so well when both sides have access to body armor. Lots of completely ineffectual shooting will occur, and everyone will scramble for bigger guns again.

>tl;dr: Small arms innovation will pause until armor gets better or more plentiful, then it'll adapt to more armor-piercing capability

>>32448369
That kind of thinking is why we're 20 trillion dollars in debt.

Yes, guided bullets work, but they're cost-prohibitive.

Caseless ammo isn't magic because it's actually better in a firefight. It's magic because of logistics: It'll be cheaper once mass-produced, and it'll be lighter so it can be transported more easily in larger amounts.

>>32445993
>>32446035
Atmosphere contains particles. Particles block light. I said if nothing blocks it.

Ask me how I know that you failed reading comprehension.

>>32449378
Then your original argument is invalid. Just own up to it, faggot.

>>32449293
5.56x45 APFSDS when?

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>>32449567
Google answered my question

A few things off the top of my head:

>powered rails (need only 1 battery housed in pistol grip for the entire gun)
>piezoelectric primers
>polymer-cased/aluminum walled ammo (would reduce barrel fatigue in machine guns)

Optics.

Imagine having an optic the size of an aimpoint but it packs in thermal and infrared imaging.

>>32449378
Didn't realize we were fighting wars in a vacuum, but thanks for your meaningless input since we aren't.

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The uselessness of man-portable laser weapons has nothing to do with diffraction or reflection from the atmosphere. The problem is that they require asstons of energy and are not effective at long range because they just turn into flashlights.

>>32450198
>thermal and infrared
>and

>>32449316
This
Caseless ammo (in a contemporary sense) won't give you some extreme edge in firepower
Just lighter ammo

>>32445849
Well ford said if i sked them what they wanted they would have asked for faster horses so yesh the general public such as ypur self is ignorant and dumb

Like

>>32448369

says, I want a smaller version of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM25_CDTE

I could also imagine a world with search-and-destroy drone swarms, maybe human piloted to some degree, carrying some sort of high explosive / fragmentation device.

Hard for ISIS fighters to hold out in an apartment building when the drone flies in the window and blows up in their face. Cheaper than [the logistics behind] an airstrike.

>>32446035
> doubt you'd be able to fit enough batteries/capacitors in a stock. not to mention, if you git water on it then RIP gun.
Maybe, but a lot of people have made pretty high powered coilguns with DSLR capacitors and off the shelf Duracell 9V batteries in their garage so it's not out of the question. General Atomics is working on lightweight graphine capacitors anyways, power densities range from tens of thousands to millions that of current capacitors.

The point is just to give the bullet a little more "oomph" to it. In fact all but the most ridiculously powerful railguns work without an "assist"; a chemical charge to get the projectile moving.

>>32451992
Lensing helps alleviate this. Your focal point of your lens is the black dot in that case, and anything past that will follow the inverse square law (Imagine the focal point as the new source of radiation, since all the radiation is focused on that point anyways).

The problem with lasers is they're incredibly fucking easy to counter. Literally reflective coatings or heat shielding makes even fusion reactor tier lasers completely useless.

CASELESS, CASELESS, CASELESS. It is a joke, a meme, a tragedy that persists every day. It will inevitably come to be, only being suppressed for completely selfish and/or wrong-headed reasons. this state has continued to long that the 'obvious' next step of molded propellant style conventional firearms may be completely skipped in favor of compressed air or electromagnetic propulsion.

Less Lethal - longer range and more reliable electric muscle disruption, either next-gen 'XREP' taser-projectiles or wireless. next-generation 'dazzler' disorientation weapons, possibly adding with 'sound laser' technology to deafen as well as blind the target. spooky MK shit that acts directly on the brain.

>>32445849
RAILGUNS
Maybe coilguns too.
Also I feel like gyrojets might be doable well with modern technology. Would a Warhammer-style assisting conventional firing actually work alongside self-propelled projectiles?

>>32452242
No reason it wouldn't. It would just be a bitch for manufacture. Altough with conventional charge merely as a "booster" to get the shell moving and from there on, rocket takes the job, you could get around the problem of gyrojet system, namely, having to have a good follow-through (due to) quite low velocity in the few moments after firing. Kinda makes me think of good ol' RPG.

>>32448378
earth and gravity block bullets but if you shoot a gun in space the bullet will travel forever unless something blocks it

>>32451992
While laser beam diameter increases with distance, inverse square 'rule' only applies to omnidirectional point sources

Bullets containing quickly dissipating nerve agents.

>bunch of baddies in building
>no hostages
>load bullets containing nerve gas
>bullets release gas in 1m radius around impact
>neutralizes humans in less than a second
>cloud dissipates harmlessly in because of extremely short half-life of 2 seconds.

>>32452283
This.

In application the only thing really hurting effectiveness of lasers at long range is atmospheric diffraction and scattering as well as transfer of energy from the beam to possible plasma created close to source.

Also that lasers can be easily defeated like
>>32452218
said.

>>32452158
>smaller
It's already too small

>>32452158
> I want a smaller version of this

Why the fuck for? It's plenty small already. Stop piping off about things you know nothing about

If you could somehow broadcast the rantings and rambling of a tumblrina sjw into the heads of every hostile in an arbitrarily large radius, it'd be fucking devastating. The enemy morale would evaporate and most would turn their guns on themselves, taking psychological warfare to a whole new level.

>>32452280
Wrong. That's an elementary understanding of outer space. Space is not a true vacuum.
There are particles floating in space that would slow the projectile.
>inb4 particles are something that blocks it
Literally never happens in practice, outer space or not. There is no true natural vacuum, except maybe black holes. I admittedly don't fully understand those.

>>32452283
congratulations, you're an idiot

>>32452285
>half-life
i like the idea, but you clearly don't understand what half life is and does

>>32445849
Caseless is the answer. Not because of firepower, but because of logistics

>>32452218
Fair, but batteries are still heavy, and what are you to do if it starts raining, or if it dies?

>>32445849
Aimbots and flying drones filled with explosives and guns (hi ATF).

>>32451992
>>32445969
>>32445849
Lasers are shit because thermal energy is utterly ineffective for destroying things comparing to kinetic energy.
1600 joules of kinetic energy - 5.56 bullet. Can blow up someones head like watermelon.
1600 joules of thermal energy - 5 grams of boiling water. Literally nothing.

>>32445849
The catch with the next great inovation is that the majority can't see or predict it. Only the truly visionary can even glimpse it.

For now we will most likely see small progressions in powder, bullet design, optics, barrel material, rifling design and the like.

>>32454637
Lasers may become effective in space combat, where it becomes difficult to radiate excess thermal energy.

But as terrestrial weapons go, yeah they suck.

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>>32448369
exploding bullets?

>>32454749
>glimpse
from what i've seen most people can make surprisingly accurate predictions of the future, they just can't go into any actual detail, can't predict dates, and think they're just engaging in fantasy.

see, for example, the communicator in star trek. or the numerous books prior to ww1 that had what basically amounted to skype calls in them, or the internet. none of the people who predicted these things were right in any of their details, but they pinned the core idea down.

>>32454788
>lasers don't make waste heat
>you can't cool regular firearms in space
>compared to lasers, regular firearms somehow can't take more heat

lasers are good in space but honestly the reasons why have nothing to do with your post

Infantry-level coilguns are a bit of a meme. The amount of power required for a practical coilgun is about 1.5 kilowatts- the amount of power that a hairdryer requires. This is pretty difficult for anything man-portable to generate.

Assisted coilguns are kind of a possibility, but they would need to fire ferrous-core ammo (and don't tell me the copper jacket would be enough, that shit SUCKS as coilgun ammo). I suspect an iron or magnetic metal glass discarding sabot that protects a tungsten carbide or amorphous boron finned long-rod penetrator.

And to be honest, I doubt that a coilgun would add much velocity to a conventional round in the first place. It would probably end up just adding a shitload of complexity to the weapons system.

>>32445849
>have we reached the pinnacle
no.
>I, personally cant think of
there's your problem. Advancement in materials and manufacturing capabilities will always lead to innovation of design. You couldn't possibly imagine what hasn't been invented yet, or how it could be applied to the next generation of small arms technology.

>>32445849
Higher-energy propellants allow smaller cartridges, allowing soldiers to carry more ammo. I remember seeing a proposal for one which basically de-necked a 5.56 NATO so it was a lot skinnier.

>>32452395
no one fully undertands black holes.

>>32445849
Lighter ammo, powered rails with integrated batteries, more negative rails, electronic firing mechanisms, electronic primers, maybe a rocketball comeback (if I can figure it out before railguns get lighter).

>>32454848
You are using hindsight bias. Yes Nichelle Nichols made some good predictions.

But let's look at the series itself. We have bypassed the controls and computing power of the Enterprise already. Heck the smart phone I am posting on already out computes Data from TNG. Many of the technology predictions of the series are off (thankfully we are advancing faster in general) and the series was written by some real smart guys.

It is easy to find people who are right in the past, not so easy right now. You don't know who is chasing a dead end and who is on the cusp of a big discovery.

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>>32455197
very good point actually, i hadn't considered that.

how are we not extinct as a species yet anyway?

>>32454568
>flying drones filled with explosives and guns
The military already has this, also I was wondering about man-portable small arms.

>>32455232
>how are we not extinct as a species yet anyway?
Dumb luck?
Sex with women is fun?
We are all in the matrix?

>>32455232
Outbreeding the dangers is usually a good way to stay unextinct

>>32445938
Nigga I hate to break it to you but 1 km/s is only 3280, which 5.56 can hit...

>>32455353
Can that be achieved via the M4 with its short barrel? Seriously wondering.

>>32455243
>The military already has this
I know.

>also I was wondering about man-portable small arms.
When these things don't fall under definition of small arms they intersect in similar role. Role of portable arms. Like swords and guns.

>>32445977
Recoil mitigation like the Ak107? Because that's already a thing.

>>32455431
I was looking at a 5.56 velocity sheet the other day and it hits that out of like a 20-24 inch barrel if i remember right

>>32445969
as will a bullet

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>>32445849

>>32445849
>I, personally cant think of anything better than an assault/battle rifle that is actually practical.
Coil acceleration as a 2nd propulsor on super dense rounds for Anti material work, 20mm AM rifles with this

>>32445969
you mean like millions of atoms of oxygen, H20 C02, ots called atmospheric dissapation