Washington D.C.

Earth #345-B-98081

October 5^th, 2012

President Baldwin surveyed the Whitehouse underground war bunker.  The greatest minds in the country were gathered here, appropriate for their greatest time of crisis.  It had only been two days since a hole had been torn between worlds, but already all of Europe and half of Asia had been conquered and consumed by the slimy purple bastards.

The Secretary of Defense stood at the front of the room, giving the most important PowerPoint presentation in human history.  SecDef had even worn his nicest eye patch.  It was the black one with the embroidered USMC bulldog on it.  The fate of all mankind rested on the decisions that would be made in this room in the next few minutes. So of course, Powerpoint wasn’t working.  They’d wasted ten minutes trying to get it running.

“Piece of ****! ****-knuckle **** pot!” the SecDef shouted as he kicked the projector. “What’s the deal, Ed?”

“It says it suffered a fatal error,” the Secretary of Education said as he poked ineffectually at the keys.

“Fatal error?” SecDef drew his .45.  SecEd was smart enough to get the hell out of the way. “I’ll show you a fatal error!” POTUS covered his ears just in time as the computer exploded in a very satisfactory manner. The Secret Service detail was used to these kinds of outbursts, and barely raised their collective eyebrows.

Tom Stranger had a seat just behind POTUS.  He leaned forward to whisper, “It doesn’t really matter which dimension you’re in, Windows still does that.  There’s even one Earth where Bill Gate’s cyborg head is god-emperor, and they’re still forced to use Vista.”

POTUS shuddered at the thought.

“**** squat **** son of a ****monkey!” SecDef grumbled.  “I’ll do this the old fashioned way!” He snapped his fingers and two generals and an admiral brought in a dry-erase board.  “Dismissed **** stains!” SecDef bellowed as he drew a dry-erase marker from his dry-erase marker holster. He popped the cap and started drawing stick figure versions of the alien invaders.

“They call themselves the Horde of Righteous Purification, but they don’t talk much, because they’re usually too busy eating babies!” SecDef deftly drew a frowny face on one of the blobs.  Then he thought better of it and drew a bunch of sharp teeth as well.  “They travel from planet to planet. They face-**** the ever livin’ **** outta that planet, eat everything, steal all the resources, and then stick a black hole in the core before they leave, just to be dicks about it!”

“Have we tried negotiating with them?” the Secretary of Health and Human Services asked.

POTUS groaned. He didn’t really know what Health and Human Services did.  “Duh. You think I’m stupid, Tina? Of course we did. But they ate the ambassador. And then they ate the Secretary of State. Then they ate his dog. We even tried playing the keyboard, like in that one movie with the mash potato mountain, but they ate John Tesh too. John Tesh and his keyboard! I’ve depopulated half the state department. It was like an all-you-can-eat bureaucrat buffet,” POTUS sighed.

“But what if we were nice to the—“

SecDef hurled his dry-erase marker at the SecHeHum. “Shut your pie hole, hippie!” Sadly, because he only had one eye, he lacked depth perception and struck the Press Secretary in the nose. But SecHeHum hid under the table just in case. Victorious, SecDef drew another marker from his holster, purple this time, and continued his briefing.  “The Horde lives for war. They’ve been biologically augmented for the last million years to be perfect killing machines. They don’t have tanks. They are tanks!” He colored the many tentacles and murder sparklers and eye ball cannons purple.  “Their air power is made up of giant purple pterodactyls, with scramjets for buttholes. They fart themselves to mach 4 and sexually assault F-22s!”  He switched to red to draw flames as little stick figure human soldiers were crushed mercilessly beneath the tentacles. “Their vats grow a fully combat effective Death-Mauler in ten minutes!” SecDef made explodey noises as he drew.

POTUS spoke up. “And you don’t even want to know about their Harvesters!”

“What do they Harvest?” the Secretary of Agriculture asked suspiciously. He knew a thing or two about harvesting.

“SCROTUMS!” SecDef shouted.

Every man in the room cringed and crossed their legs protectively. “Nuke ‘em!” screamed SecEd as he pounded the conference table. “Nuke the **** out of them!”

The room began to chant “NUKE! NUKE! NUKE!”

“That’s the spirit!” SecDef answered. “Too bad we’ve been nuking them left and right since breakfast. France is now a glass parking lot with permanent nuclear winter so the Horde went ice skating on it!  They are immune to radiation, bullets, electricity, disease, lava, and personal insults. We’ve tried everything. They sweat nitro and sneeze acid, and when they’re not killing, they’re practicing killing, or sharpening things so they can do some stab-killing! They exist only to blow **** up…” he trailed off, a single tear forming in his good eye. “My God, they’re beautiful.”

The greatest minds available began to panic. Which was understandable, since half the world’s population had died in the last twenty-four hours, but it was an election year,  POTUS knew he needed to get this situation under control, right the hell now, so he stood and flung his chair across the room. He went through a lot of chairs that way, but it got the point across. He’d risen to fame and popularity by playing a decisive man of action during the five seasons of the #1 most successful Libertarian Space Cowboy show to ever air on TV, so everyone knew not to screw with him. The room grew quiet. “Ahem… That’ll be all R. Lee.”

SecDef didn’t hear. He was drawing a bunch of little stick figure army men and saying “No. Not my scrotum!” in a very high pitched voice. Sadly, the purple blob thing got them. “AAHHHHH! NOOOO!”  Deep voice; “This will look good on my trophy necklace.” Then more exploding noises.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” POTUS spoke calmly. “This situation is under control. All is not lost. Allow me to introduce Tom Stranger.”

“Your reality took out a policy with my company back when John Wayne was president,” Tom walked to the front of the room, passing out business cards the entire way.

TOM STRANGER

INTERDIMENSIONAL INSURANCE AGENT

“Interdimensional insurance?” the Treasury Secretary asked. “What’s that”

“It’s just like home owners insurance, but for events relating to rifts between realities,” Tom answered.

“Are you the guys with the cute little gecko?” SecHeHum squeaked from beneath the table.

“No,” Tom said.  “That’s Geico.”

“What about the duck?” a Secret Service Agent asked.

“No. That would be AFLAC.”

“What about that weirdly attractive red headed woman with all the makeup who lives in that somehow Orwellian white room?”  the other Secret Service Agent asked.

“Flo?” POTUS asked. “Damn, yeah, she is hot.”

“No,” Tom answered as he adjusted his bowtie.

SecDef looked up from his dry-erase massacre. “Cartoon secret agent chick that fights robots?”

Tom shook his head sadly. “ I’m afraid my firm does not have any sort of attractive, ironic, or humorous mascots. What we do, however, offer is a full line of interdimensional insurance services. Since this Horde incident originated on Earth #789-Alpha-12567, they fall under your extended Space Marauder Protection. We’ll just need to fill out some paperwork, and by paperwork, I mean blowing up a bunch of aliens, but we’ll get this all wrapped up in no time.” The room breathed a collective sigh of relief. Tom had been voted number one in customer service for three years running.

“So there are other Earths?” SecAg asked.

“Every time a Planck event warps the geodeosynergy matrix, a Thorne Conundrum will cause an alteration in Hawking space,” Tom said happily. When SecAg looked at him blankly, Tom realized he needed to tone it down for this universe’s Cow Lord. “Yes, a whole bunch of Earths. A different one for every decision ever made.”

POTUS whistled. That was a lot of Earths. There was an Earth where he’d had oatmeal for breakfast, and he didn’t even like oatmeal. “So what happened to 789 whatever?”

“Sadly, that version of America hadn’t kept current on their policy and they were harvested. It was a strange planet. You see, they spent all their budget on odd things, like tarps, or buying perfectly good cars so they could destroy them so they could buy new cars, or acorns, or Canadian style healthcare.”

“What’s a Canadian?” Secret Service Agent #1 whispered to #2. #2 shrugged. Whatever it was, it sounded silly.

“I wonder how they could possibly have gotten in such bad shape?” POTUS asked. “We were doing awesome until that whole invasion thing.”

“In that horrible reality, Firefly was cancelled after just one season your Excellency,” Tom Stranger explained.   Everyone present recoiled in horror.  Tom was used to the shocking variations between alternative worlds, but because of his extensive travels, he was extremely knowledgeable. “There was never a Libertarian Space Cowboy revolution. You were never elected. Instead the Republicans ran a senile version of Colonel Tigh and the Democrats won, with, what I believe was Steve Urkel.”

“Impossible!” SecDef shouted. “Lies!”

“You have a show on their History Channel where you shoot watermelons with machineguns. Only you didn’t have the eye patch.”

SecDef put on his war face. “OooRah! ****in’-A. Now that would be sweet!”

Tom Stranger nodded. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do. Thank you for picking Tom Stranger for all your interdimensional insurance needs.” He clapped his hands twice and his giant robot battle suit crashed through the bunker wall. The twenty-foot tall velociraptor-shaped monstrosity of plasma weapons and bio-armor had a single bumper sticker between its death ray and the napalm sprayer. It read; You’re in Strange Hands with Tom Stranger.

“Thank you, Tom Stranger!” POTUS shouted, climbing on the conference table and lifting one fist heroically into the air. “America! **** yeah! Coming again to save the mother-****ing day, yeah!” he quoted from the National Anthem.

Tom leapt into the cockpit of his battle suit just as his cybernetic implants kicked in. “It’s time to kick some ass and adjust some claims.”

TO BE CONTINUED…  EDIT – Here in fact:  A message from Stranger & Stranger http://MonsterHunterNation.com/2010/05/24/a-message-from-stranger-stranger/

Looks like we’ve started a tradition. In the last On Writing post I was asked this:

A New Writing Question:

Hi Larry. Here is a new writing question. What would be the best approach for writing about futuristic weapons (say 200-300 years in the future)? How does one figure out what those weapons would look like, act like, sound like, etc.? I look at authors like David Weber and can only shake my head at how they figure out weapon calibers, etc.

Are there certain limitations and factors to consider that would hold no matter when a weapon is designed?

Let’s limit it to “average” army weapons (e.g. pistols, assualt rifles, sniper rifles etc.).

Thanks,

Scott

That’s an awesome question, but I’m no expert. I’m not really a sci-fi writer (yet), but I do know a bunch about guns. And as the philosopher Ron Perlman warns us in Fallout, “and war never changes.”  (because war has always consisted of hitting giant radioactive scorpions with sledgehammers), regardless of tech, some small arm’s features are universal.

There were already some very smart responses in the comments.  From Tim P:

The last 200-300 years have seen major changes to firearms, it would be very hard to work out what the next 200-300 years will hold. It’s possible we’ll just have fancier versions of what’s used Today, or we might have entirely switched to something completely new. Probably the most important part is to make sure the ergonomics of the weapon make sense. Some of the Star Trek phasers (I think NG) are examples of doing this wrong. They where shaped in such a way that it would have been almost impossible to point them with any precision. Obviously more relevant to TV and movies that books though, but it still applies if you’re going to describe the usage of the weapon in detail.

I totally agree on the phasers.  Really, space marines will never go into combat with dust busters. I don’t care if your pistol can be set with power levels from tickle to disintegrate to hand grenade (as the plot requires), you still need to aim the damn things. And since I didn’t see any sort of targeting system built into their comfy looking space-jammies, I’m guessing they did a lot of point shooting instruction at Star Fleet Academy.

There are a few universals. You need to aim it somehow. Hitting stuff is helpful. Ergonomics are nice too. I love sci-fi where guns in the future will have no stocks but are really large.  If the show is really forward thinking, they’ll put lots of glowing lights on the weapon, because A. it looks cool. and B. you never have to wait for the enemy to spot you.

Another potential fault would be to make the limitations of your sci-fi super weapon such that modern weapons would be better. Sure your super-laser will vaporise people with a single shot, but it’s super fragile, only has one shot before it needs to sit for five minutes to recharge, and costs a fortune; why not just give your soldiers AK-47s? Obviously this is a hard mistake to make, but I have seen it occasionally

Once again, Tim nails it. I remember one series I read as a kid where they were using small arms (some sort of plasma weapon, if I recall correctly) but the barrels would get super hot and melt, and needed to be ejected and replaced every few shots… Okay, I don’t care if your pistol makes the other dude explode, if he’s got a couple of friends with rocks, you’re screwed. That is not a step up.  Realistically, if there was  a weapon system like that, and it was super powerful and line of sight capable of smoking a tank, then you would run one in a squad, with several other guys shooting guns that didn’t need significant parts replaced every few seconds.

You all may know him as the opening quote guy from Monster Hunter International, but Dillis Freeman is also a smart gun guy and writer. He also gave some great advice:

Beyond physics and the tradeoffs inherent in any man portable system, there are two questions I’ve found helpful when “designing” weapons: 1) what is the purpose of the weapon and 2) what kind of society/character designed it? In some circumstances, they are related. Is the society one where function, cost and simplicity the main goal? In that case, you might end up with something like an AK: cheap, shoddy to some, yet very reliable. The weapon’s purpose is to be sufficiently cheap to arm mass numbers, yet effective enough that it will do its job. Is the society one where harming another “excessively” or “unnecessarily” frowned upon? You could have a 22nd Century Hague convention which limited the nature of ammuniton. Or perhaps all weapons will require safety interlocks to insure only certain people could use them. Such a society would also lean heavily towards less than lethal weapons (which shows how purpose and societal background are related).

You see that now in the modern world. Many nations are currently trying to develop alternative “less-lethal” methods of fighting. The main reason being societal, because you know, killing your enemies is messy and gets on the news. I’ve seen glue sprayers, all manner of OC, sound wave thingies, paralysis agents, or even really bad music at loud volumes. Meanwhile non-cuddly countries are trying to figure out how to modernize AKs or plastic AR-18s with air bursting grenades.

As with everything, research is key. The one thing you don’t want to do is to violate physics and common sense without very good reason. Anything projectile launcher will have recoil commensurate with the physics involved unless it’s a self-propelled round or has some handwavium going on (nothing like reading about recoilless rail guns or small arms throwing objects at relativistic speeds without ill effect on the shooter to reveal that the author either misunderstood what was happening or left out a step like “inertial dampening” when describing the scene. If the rest of the technology doesn’t reflect that such things exist, then the former answer is more likely than the latter).

Way over my little accountant brain. (but I learned my accounting on the street!).  Just remember, the mack-daddy of all sci-fi said There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Energy isn’t free, recoil sucks, and somebody has to carry the damn thing.

In all honesty, it’s important to remember that the more things change, the more they remain the same. As others have stated, we’ve reached a certain pinnacle of small arms. Most development now is evolutionary rather revolutionary, and the really revolutionary stuff (i.e. directed energy weapons) has some significant drawbacks. If Han Solo hadn’t had a very compact power source and highly effective energy projection and heat dispersal capabilities, along with some mechanism for handling considerable recoil (even energy weaons will display recoil), then he would have been carrying something a lot closer to a Glock than a blaster.

Star Wars is the ultimate example of Rule of Cool. None of the technology in Star Wars makes a lick of sense, but we love it anyway, because it is awesome. Hell, the ultimate force in the universe is a space monk with a lightning sword who fights dudes wearing bulky armor that doesn’t actually do anything, shooting guns from the hip that fire beams of energy at sixty miles an hour. That’s a neat trick, blocking blaster shots.  But if you were trying to write something realistic, let me introduce you to the FN M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon, Mr. Jedi. BRRRRAAAAAPPPPP.

Ultimately, though, it’s your story. It can be interesting to start with what you want your character to have (a Smith & Glock 2.5mm coil gun firing lexan slugs with dial a yield anti-matter cores) and then say “why is this guy carrying that weapon and what kind of society and tech will support it”? By the way, here is an excellent site that goes into some of the issues surrounding sci fi weapons. http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3l.html

Dillis gives some excellent advice there. Remember when I talked about regular guns, the characters are still more important.  Though everyone knows the S&G 2.5mm is inferior to the 3mm CorreiaTech Combat Wombat.

Right now we’re using projectile weapons because they work and we haven’t found anything better. At different points in time, something new and exciting has come along,  like flechettes in the ‘70s, or caseless ammo in the ‘80s, but those inventions had drawbacks so they didn’t replace our regular projectiles.  Once something new comes along that works better, and is affordable, then we’ll switch. If you can figure out what that is and you’ve got the engineering degree to make it happen, you’ll make a lot more money selling the design to ATK than you will writing novels.

One thing that I’ve talked with length about with Nightcrawler (because he’s really way more of a sci-fi guy than I am) is the effects of armor. Armor tech for individual soldiers is advancing at a much faster pace than small arms. Really, if you were armed with WW2 small arms, you’re not lagging that far behind. (I’d even go so far to say that our modern primary advantage over a group of 1945 GIs would be Aimpoints). Heck, today we’re battling enemies using a gun from 1947 with our design from 1963, and they’re hanging in there okay. But look at the difference armor has made. Materials science has come a long way in recent years, and we’re now routinely surviving hits that would have killed our ancestors.

I expect this to continue. I think armor will get better, faster, than the small arms for the near future. There is some stuff out there right now that people are working on that will blow your minds.  So when we get to the point that it gets too difficult to drop somebody wearing head to toe, mechanically augmented, squishy, light weight, nearly magical armor, then we’re going to see some changes to small arms.  Nightcrawler’s personal feeling is that means bigger, deeper penetrating bullets, which would be an ironic reversal of firearm’s evolution over the last century.

So I suppose if I were writing sci-fi, and I wanted to invent a weapon to go along with my world, I’d just make sure it fit.  It needs to be manageable. Now if your characters are genetic mutants or wearing power armor, make it huge and stick a chainsaw on it. But if they’re still human, it needs to be manageable by a human. It isn’t going to be big, unwieldy, and stupid looking.

I do know one thing. If you set a book a couple hundred years in the future, even if it takes place on another planet, and you gave somebody a Kalashnikov, I wouldn’t bat an eye.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSXb809jVSs  From last weekend’s pistol class. For a 300 pounder, that’s as close as I’ll ever get to ballet. Only mine is a ballet of BULLETS.  Or Danger! Or something. I don’t know.  Okay, I’m not graceful, but most ballet dancers won’t shoot you 42 times either. (and out of 275 rounds, I only missed a handful of shots all day, so at least my accuracy was good).

Looking at that video though, I’ve really gotten rusty over the last year. Lack of practice has made me slow and clumsy.  And it is a mark of shame for an experienced shooter to have to look at his holster to put his gun away, but in my defense, all my good range equipment was accidently buried in storage for the move, so I was using a nylon POS Uncle Mike’s. Making it through the day with that floppy hunk of junk without shooting myself in the left = WIN.

http://www.amazon.com/Citizens-John-Ringo/dp/1439133476

Citizens is a new sci-fi anthology just out from Baen.  Do you ever read Mil SF and say to yourself, this author has obviously never been in the military? Yeah, bugs me too.  I’m a cake eating civillian but I’ve spent enough time in the world of guns & military contracting that somebody pontificating about a life that they obviously don’t understand gets really annoying. That won’t be an issue here. Each story is military SF, and every author is a veteran.

I’m plugging the heck out of this anthology because some of the authors are friends of mine, and they’re a talented bunch.  Here is the list of stories that I stole from a review on Amazon.

– Field Test (Analog, 1976) by Keith Laumer relates the first use of a Bolo Mark XX Model B.

– Allamagoosa (Astounding, 1955) by Eric Frank Russell tells of the trials of a navy ship returning after a long voyage to find that the Inspector General will soon be visiting them.

– Exploration Team (Astounding, 1956) Murray Leinster concerns an illegal colony on a planet that receives an unexpected visit from a Colonial Survey officer.

– Superiority (F&SF, 1951) by Arthur C. Clarke considers the risks of new technology. This seems to be a recurring theme in military and naval SF.

– The Horars of War (Nova 1, 1970) by Gene Wolfe illustrates the comradery of war.

– Fireproof (Astounding, 1949) by Hal Clement shows the strange effects of a weightless environment.

– Peace with Honor (Analog, 1971) by Jerry Pournelle relates an incident in the history of the CoDominium.

– Under the Hammer (Galaxy, 1974) by David Drake presents an untrained recruit with a situation.

– Time Piece (If, 1970) by Joe W. Haldeman talks of Heaven and Hells in the Forever War.

– Neither Sleet, Nor Snow, Nor Alien Invasion… (first publication) by Dave Freer reveals the power of Political Incorrectness.

– Light (first publication) by Kacey Grannis recounts a mysterious intervention within Iraq.

– The Question (first publication) by Patrick A. Vanner gives the response to an innocent question.

– The Price (first publication) by Michael Z. Williamson examines the thoughts of a small group of dedicated warriors.

– Earth’s First Improved Chimp Gets a Job as a Janitor (Cosmic Tales, 2004) by John Ringo introduces a genetically modified human to another — but older — genetic mod.

– The Long Watch (American Legion, 1949) by Robert A. Heinlein presents a serviceman with a conflict of loyalties.

Here are some samples and the intro by John Ringo. http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1439133476/1439133476.htm