Firefight Y2K

by Dean Ing

  Once upon a time it would’ve been a bit hifalutin to talk about small arms as “systems.” No more! To begin with, we have to expand our notions of what becomes part of a small arm. Is an infantryman’s fighting suit a small arms system? If in doubt, we said “yes.” We began by accepting an advanced combat rifle with caseless cartridges as a fact, no longer of special concern. Some of tomorrow’s small arms will have innards as complicated as, say, today’s cruise missile. A lot of that complication will be backup emergency subsystems; the armed services can’t afford battle gear that works only part of the time. They also know that a man can only lug so much hardware around, and that’s why the U.S. ability to miniaturize its systems gives us a big advantage over the Eastern Bloc. Would you believe jet engines fired as rounds from a combat rifle? I’ll get to those presently.

  Our goal was to thrash out advanced concepts for the Army’s Joint Services Small Arms Program (JSSAP). Battelle chose men from a variety of fields: its own labs, Army R & D centers, Texas University’s railgun program, Los Alamos, Aberdeen, several other centers, and a few science fiction authors. Why science fiction? Because we spend lots of time peering at high-tech horizons. Some of us began as engineers and physicists; in my case, in preliminary design of rocket systems.

  The steering committee wisely avoided holding a checkrein on our thinking. Once the ground rules were clear, they sprinkled us into three groups and hauled us back into plenary sessions for awhile every day to compare notes. By the end of this three-day skull-bump we had zeroed in on some small arms weapon systems that looked very likely-one in particular that embodied several subsystems proposed by each group. Just for fun, I’ll tag some of those subsystems after first mentioning them, with “TAKE NOTE,” and outline the full system last.

  Each concept group focused on one of three broad fields: Target Acquisition, Energy Transmission/Storage, and Effects. By the end of the first day, each group was pumping out concepts that were hard to swallow on first bite. And yet, recent researches in very unlikely areas made some of the oddest notions seem more palatable. The Target Acquisition group was typical, beginning straightforwardly and adding some very advanced ideas.

  How can targets-enemy troops and their assets-be identified quickly and differentiated from your own so that you know what to zap? Well, we can force the enemy’s characteristics to give him away. We already use infrared (IR) and image enhancement scopes. We already have radar. How long before we combine IR, radar, and visual light into images that are displayed on a combat infantryman’s helmet visor? The Air Force is already well on the way with its “Heads-Up Display” for fire control and navigation. We adapted the HUD to the battlefield. If it’s stifling, we can air-condition it. If our man wants a zoom display, he can bloody well ask for it because his helmet computer will understand his spoken commands. TAKE NOTE.

  Among our biggest problems in Vietnam were the mazes of tunnels dug by the enemy. With luck, skill, and deep-penetration bombs we cleared out some of those tunnels at great expense. Surely there must be some way to develop a more subtle weapon that will find the tunnels and then go inside after live targets. What, then; a robot?

  Someone put previous researches together. After the work of Von Frisch with bees, scientists learned how to “talk” to them by using a dummy bee. Evidently, a worker bee’s “language” is literally built in to its nervous system. In other labs, gene-splicing and restructured DNA show promise of modifying a bee’s nervous system. Insects already have the best chemical detectors in the world, for mating and food-gathering. And bees have made hives in caves for a long, long time. Well?

  The panel proposed an insect like a killer bee, bred for lethal sting and aggressiveness, and programmed to seek certain chemicals common to the enemy, but not to our own troops. It might avoid the smell of U.S. fatigues, while zeroing in on someone who smells of enemy rations. The bee would have a life span of a couple of weeks, perhaps less (workers have short life spans as it is). Drop a few packages of those sterile workers into a region honeycombed with enemy tunnels, and wait for your little live weapons to acquire targets in the tunnels. If you have pheromone sensors to track the bees from a distance, you can even locate the tunnel entrances-a great advantage in itself.

  This “tailored hornet” concept seems less and less weird, the more we study it. We’re not really making the insects do anything that they don’t already do. We’re just nudging them to do it exclusively against the enemy.

  A firefight can overwhelm the footsoldier with too much sound, light, odor, and touch. But if we encase him in full body armor (TAKE NOTE), he will need some way to use information he gets through his various sensors. For some years now, experimenters have been improving gadgetry that translates images into patterns across an area, like finger-taps. Sightless people wearing this equipment can walk down a street as if sighted, feeling painless taps in special patterns across their backs to warn of cars, curbs, and other people. It should be possible to improve this equipment so that a soldier could wear it as part of his battle dress. Will the information it adds be worth the trouble? It’s still too early to tell.

  Energy Transmission and Storage concepts ranged all the way from tiny rotary engines to beamed microwave power. Early in the next century, men may have to fight on the surface of the moon. They will need electrical power to run some of their systems. If our man is in deep shadow, he can’t use solar power. Could he actually use an oxygen-breathing Wankel rotary engine to power a tiny generator on an airless planet? Sure he could; engine-driven torpedoes have carried their own oxygen supplies for many years, and Lord knows there’s less back-pressure in a vacuum!

  Other energy storage candidates include batteries, ultracapacitors, and even very small particle-bed nuclear power generators. The main problem is to devise a safe power of very high energy density and reasonable cost. Whatever you use, you don’t want an enemy bullet to turn it into a bomb. A particle-bed reactor won’t need refueling for a long time-but if it fails catastrophically, you won’t care. A capacitor delivers a wallop of power, but must then be recharged. Small flywheels can store tremendous amounts of energy inside three-axis gimbaled mounts-but when that flywheel reaches the limit of its tensile strength, it is a frag grenade on your back. Superfilament materials are under development so that we can spin those flywheels a lot faster with safety, using them to run generators.

  Smokeless powder and explosives are old-fashioned energy storage systems, though we seem to have reached a plateau there. But we may reach higher plateaus. The wizards of propellant chemistry say there are ways to make very dense propellant molecules. If we can cram twice as much energy into a small bazooka round, we might penetrate thicker armor or carry more rounds. We could also power very compact turbines capable of running small high-output generators, or of lifting heavy loads. TAKE NOTE.

  The far-out chemical storage systems include metastable helium and antimatter. Metastable helium is a material that only exists in theory, proposed by Zmuidzinas of CalTech. If it can be processed and safely kept, we’ll have an energy source that can be squirted into a chamber in very small amounts, yielding tremendous amounts of heat. It could power turbines, rockets, or projectile launchers, though nowhere near as powerful as antimatter.

  Antimatter is the ultimate energy source. The stuff is out of the science-fiction bag and into the lab. Switzerland’s CERN facility has kept antiprotons circulating in a huge storage ring for over three days. That’s the first step toward creating and storing antihydrogen. The energy of antimatter, when it touches “normal” matter, is simply staggering. It doesn’t just give up some tiny fraction of its mass of energy; it is totally converted to energy. Ounce for ounce it is thousands of times more powerful than an atomic weapon, but we should be able to control it like a tiny reactor. No, it won’t be available within the next few years. Yes, they’re working on it at Fermilab near Chicago. The soldier who carried an antimatter-powered beam weapon might have only a tenth of a gram of the stuff in
its magnetic bottle, but if struck by an enemy bullet, that bottle would blow a very large crater. Solution: keep it inside your armor. That’s the drawback of very high energy density: if your energy source fails catastrophically, you might not survive.

  Power can be transmitted by laser or microwave; in fact, a small helicopter has already flown using electrical power beamed from a ground-based microwave source. TAKE NOTE. If we carry this concept to the infantryman, we must design very compact receiving equipment and see that each man gets power on demand.

  We studied too many devices to detail here: the turbine-driven “compulsator” which would power futuristic rail guns; devices that would literally burn battlefield trash (cut powder charges would make high-energy fuel!) to generate power; and fuel cells. We even studied a cold-gas launch system, in which compressed gas could mix with a small initial propellant charge. The result might have no IR emission, no flash, little dust signature and no net recoil. The projectile would contain a bazooka-like second stage, firing after the projectile was well on its way to the target. This launch system wouldn’t be as compact as a big powder charge, but it might not give away the launcher position.

  COLDGAS LAUNCHER, 40mm RECOILLESS, AUTOMATIC FIRE.

  (Note ambidextrous sights set for lefthand user.)

  The Effects people focused on what small weapons can do to an enemy. A rifle-fired projectile carrying a bundle of tungsten wire can penetrate light armor to increase the lethality of a combat rifle round. The strobed vertigo munition, on the other hand, might not kill anyone. It wouldn’t have to; it would emit a series of dazzling flashes pulsed at a frequency that is known to create temporary chaos in the human nervous system. We’re talking about flashes of light so intense that, with eyes closed and hands across his face, the enemy would clearly see the bones of his fingers. Vertigo was our weasel-word for something like a grand mal seizure, and this weapon’s effects might recur spontaneously in a victim. It’s obvious that we would need to protect our own troops from its effects. TAKE NOTE.

  The ramjet round is a simpler matter. A ramjet is a tube that gulps air and burns fuel like a blowtorch, exhausting it as other jet engines do. It has no moving parts, but it must be moving nearly as fast as a .45 slug before it develops much thrust. Its shape is very important. Now, instead of spraying kerosene into that tube, we can line part of the tube with solid fuel. The liner fuel needs very little oxidizer because air provides oxygen. Some sort of tiny sabot will probably be needed to force the ramjet tube down the rifled barrel. We might build ramjets of, say, .35 caliber or less. Its sabot would fall away as the round left the muzzle, allowing the tube to swallow air, burning the liner fuel which might be ignited by the air itself. The ramjet round boasts two advantages: it lets us use oxygen from the air instead of carrying all of it in the propellant; and it gives a flatter trajectory, maintaining high velocity to the target.

  The lump gun would carry its own processor, slicing metal trash into needles to be fired. Turbine powered, it could fire clouds of flechettes by pressurized gas. This is a way to become almost independent of your fuel and ammo supplies!

  Fire coordination sounds simple, but it will require that several dispersed weapons be coordinated to converge on a given target. TAKE NOTE. For this, we may have to develop very reliable burst-transmissions by laser or microwave during a firefight.

  RAMJET ROUND, 8mm

  Personnel seekers include the “gnat” concept, a tiny guided missile no bigger than a hornet which seeks a source of motion, heat, or noise. The gnat might fly no faster than a sparrowhawk, but could carry and fire a slug at point of contact. The gnat would probably be a submunition, carried by the hundreds in a mortar round for dispersion by air. They’d also play hell with enemy helicopter blades. . . .

  Finally, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a field of study that might help us detect any given substance, such as Russian gun-oil. Or NMR just might let us destroy very specific molecules using a maser beam. Hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in the blood, is a specific chemical. The maser might even be tuneable so that the victim develops mild cyanosis without lethal effects. Sometimes we want casualties, not kills. Think of a hostage situation. Enough said.

  After chewing on schemes for acquisition, energy transmission, and effects for a few days, we put them together in various ways. A favorite systems concept from all this was the fighting pod, an outgrowth of today’s experimental flying platform. It might be scarcely larger than a motorcycle sidecar. Our podman learns where the enemy is on his heads-up display from sensors, perhaps the laser IFF we mentioned. From the safety of this flyable, molded carbon-filament-and-kapton fighting pod that doubles as battle armor and is powered by a turbine or laser beam, he guides unmanned munition pods to picked spots by voice command and uses his heads-up display to find targets. He can range across and above the battlefield, calling for more munitions as necessary and serving as fire coordinator of several dedicated munition pods as he chooses, then turn to fresh targets.

  This may seem like heresy to anyone who thinks of today’s combat rifleman as a romantic figure, but a dozen men in fighting pods, controlling two hundred dispersed munition pods, could stand off a regiment of ordinary troops. If wounded, our podman could be carried to safety on an emergency zigzag course by his pod’s automatic pilot.

  The pod might be the ultimate fighting suit. The podman can move miles in minutes; he can remain invulnerable to strobe munitions or other sensory overloads by using outside sensors; his armor should stop most small-arms fire and nerve gas as well; and the pod can take him out of the zone fast. We can envision seafaring and spacefaring versions of the pod, which could just as easily be called a life-support system.

  I left Battelle with some heady visions of future small arms systems, not knowing which ones will see a production line. But one panelist kept us from feeling too cocky. He reminded us that writer Robert Heinlein described many of those concepts years ago in Starship Troopers-but then, Heinlein himself is an Annapolis trained engineer. That’s fitting.

  MILLENNIAL

  POSTSCRIPT

  At the turn of the millennium we’re still trying to develop a helmet display that gives a warrior enough information without bewildering him. I’ve seen some of the recent experimental displays for military pilots, some designed by onetime military pilots. Though the displays are improved, they still aren’t quite ready for prime time. Maximum data isn’t always optimum; the problem is still information overload.

  Antimatter weapons are finally on our horizon since antimatter itself is now an acceptable topic in scholarly journals. Propulsion physicist Dr. Robert Forward, also a highly respected SF novelist, prefers the phrase “mirror matter.” He produced the Mirror Matter Newsletter from 1986 until 1990 to provide news on the applications of stored antimatter. He ceased its publication when standard channels of physicists began to supplant his newsletter adequately. That’s one way of saying that particular future isn’t just now; it was yesterday.

  Anyone recall a novel a decade ago featuring a stealth aircraft with a pixel skin as a cloaking device? Maybe I got that one right; something like it is now under study for infantry battle dress. I see no reason why it couldn’t work for a fighting pod, whether it rolls, floats, or flies.

  MANASPILL

  “Keep your head down, Oroles,” Thyssa muttered, her face hidden by a fall of chestnut hair. Cross-legged on the moored raft, his lap full of fishnet, little Oroles had forgot his mending in favor of the nearby commotion.

  Though the lake was a day’s ride end-to-end, it was narrow and shallow. Fisher folk of Lyris traversed it with poled rafts and exchanged rude jokes over the canoe, hewn from an enormous beech, which brought the Moessian dignitary to Lyrian shores. The boy did not answer his sister until the great dugout bumped into place at the nearby wharf, made fast by many hands. “Poo,” said Oroles, “foreigners are more fun than mending old Panon’s nets. Anyhow, King Bardel doesn’t mind me looking.”

  Thyssa k
new that this was so; Lyrians had always regarded their kings with more warmth than awe. Nor would Boerab, the staunch old war minister who stood at the king’s left, mind a boy’s curiosity. The canoe was very fast, but skittish enough to pitch dignity overboard when dignitaries tried to stand. And what lad could fail to take joy in the sight? Not Oroles!

  Yet Thyssa knew also that Minister Dirrach, the shaman standing alert at the young king’s right elbow, would interpret a commoner’s grin as dumb insolence. “The shaman minds,” she hissed. “Do you want to lose favor at the castle?”

  Grumbling, six-year-old Oroles did as he was told. Thus the boy missed the glance of feral hunger that Dirrach flicked toward the nubile Thyssa before attending to his perquisites as minister to King Bardel of Lyris.

  Dirrach seemed barely to sway nearer as he spoke behind young Bardel’s ear: “The outlander must not hear you chuckling at his clumsiness, sire,” he suggested in a well-oiled baritone.

  Bardel, without moving: “But when I can’t laugh, it seems funnier.”

  “Averae of Moess is devious,” the shaman replied easily, while others rushed to help the outlander. “If you think him clumsy, you may falsely think yourself secure.”

  Bardel gave a grunt of irritation, a sound more mature than his speaking voice. “Dirrach, don’t you trust anybody?”

  “I have seen duplicity in that one before,” Dirrach murmured, and swayed back to prevent further interchange. Truly enough, he had known Averae before, and had been uneasy when he recognized the Moessian. Dirrach breathed more easily now that he had slandered the man in advance. Who knew what crimes the outlander might recall? Then Averae stood on the wharf, and Bardel stepped forward.