Weapons for humans

Alright, my novel has no aliens, but, I can't think of any really advanced weaponry that stays ballistic. I don't want to go into plasma weapons, or anything that can really be asociated with aliens. Also, I need a better title than The School, seeing as how the school is only a background thing for most of the story.

It's always railguns if you need something like that. Make bullets go fast enough and they're advanced. Make sure you add a lot of tungsten into what they're made of, too. Helps with spectacular overpenetration.

Railguns.

Coilguns if you're feeling like soft sci-fi.

Might I suggest a Sand Gun? Similar in principle to a rail/coil gun, but it accelerates tiny sand grain-sized pellets of tungsten alloy to one percent of the speed of light. That may not sound much, but the pellet will still hit the target at 1860 miles per second, enough to (in all probability) obliterate the target. I don't know the mathematics involved, but I'm quite sure the impact force would be something else.

if your world is particularly unpleasent then disk launchers and chopper packs, disk launchers firing spining disks from something like a rail gun, designed to maim and traumatise as much as kill (seeing your mates arm chopped off and having them barely even notice until their brain catches up and then having to rescue them and pull them out of the action) a lot like land mines and their being designed to blow bits off more than kill. Chopper packs fire packs of fine wire towards an opponent contained in something grenade like. The idea of them is to make a proper mess, shreading people (classically the wire is mono filament of course.) Both are as much psychological weapons as they are devices to kill. A railgun is a pretty sure kill, but sometimes you don't want the enemy dead, you want them screaming and slowing the rest of the enemies down.

Beyond that modern developments such as plastic telescopic rounds and caseless rounds (which would allow the common grunt to carry around a light machine gun as if it was an everyday assault rifle.)

Railguns would be heavy, require a lot of power, be extremely high-maintenance and probably destroy all nearby electronics. Railguns tear themselves apart with their own magnetic force as they're used, and you need a long barrel and a lot of juice to do anything with them. They're pointless as weapons, especially hand weapons. Stick to explosive propulsion.

@Tyburn: Do the words 'ridiculous overpenetration' mean anything to you? Sandgrains are fine for leaving sandgrain-sized holes. Bullets are fine for leaving bullet holes. The problem is, the former is kind of less dangerous. On the other side, sandgrains are also fine for going very far - if you fire one of those 'sand guns' at a robber on a street, chances are you'll also hit the 10-20 civilians behind the robber. Whether it's good or bad is up to you, but generally, people don't approve of hitting things other than your target - like things behind your target.

@Jack: We're in the future precisely to make our railguns work well. We can hold the rails together with something, make them compact enough to be a rifle, as well as develop incredibly miniaturized high-yield power sources and coolant systems. Explosive propulsion is outdated. With future content, we can do such ridiculous things!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i-nMWgBUp0

@Legion: Nice ideas! I'd also consider some kind of bolas - two pieces of metal with monofilament wire strung across them. Shoot at a high enough speed, pieces of metal spread out, wire hits people and cuts them like cheese, or, at worst, just wraps around them, what's still restraining.

Rail guns are hardly Soft Sci-Fi. High power magnets and a dense ferrous metal is how we have been moving junk cars for over 50 years.

Explosive bullets filled with super reactive chemicals / acids. Basically they would consume the target on impact.

High explosive bullets based on some futuristic highly compact explosive. Each bullet can explode like a kT of TNT.

Missile bullets that have their own compact propellant source and stabilisers, each can track and locate targets individually. You paint the enemies first, empty your clip and they all get toasted.

Thanks guys. I'm gonna incorperate all of these into the story. Elijah is pretty handy with making weapons that no one else would ever be able think of. I'll make some big combo of a couple of them later on, but for now, I've got to be writing. I've got some catching up to do.

Even more advanced: a gun that determines target range and fires copper plate discs that become armor piercing slugs (lethal for armored vehicles). Such shaped charges have a problem in real life in that the target must be within a specific range. Inside the charge range and the disc does not form into the charge and penetrate the target. Outside the range and it may not have enough velocity, heat or optimal shape to penetrate. This can be lethal if you can adjust the explosive force of the charge on the fly.

Why has no one suggested a simple laser? We know the technology works, we just don't have the ability to make it small enough to be useful as a man-portable weapon. Thing is, I'm not sure if a laser large enough to injure/kill a humanoid would cut, burn, or vaporize the surface of its target.

I went with: Electrical whips, heat seeking explosive throwing daggars, warglaives that have the blades as pure energy, then a bow with the heat seeking explosive arrows again.

Are we talking a private security force here? Or criminals? A black ops government unit?

Even in the future or on some distant plant, really powerful ballistic weaponry like railguns and the like are NOT going to be in the hands of hunting enthusiasts or sold as home defense weapons. I can't go buy a stinger missile to go deer hunting. Common mooks won't be going down to the gun store to pick up a muffled gauss sniper rifle (with computer assisted targeting of course) that produces no flash, or a laser/blaster that can disentegrate a target's head from ten miles away. No sane government would permit that, and the manufacturers of the parts would be heavily regulated. If this is just some outfit run by a crooked politician/CEO/cop/whatever, then they will be whatever weapons can be purchased legally on the civilian market and then heavily modified after the fact. Basic slug-throwers for the most part.

Personally, I just have to wonder why humans of the future are limited to ballistic weapons. I mean, it's not like aliens invented lasers, for that matter. Scifi of all sorts has depicted perfectly ordinary humans wielding all sorts of things. Why would anything but a ballistic weapon be "associated with aliens"?

Well, Awesomeo, it's actually students who have hand-made these weapons. And Keolah, I just don't like lasers that much as a weapon. For one, they don't have a range, and two, they can't really be stopped, so the beam would keep going as long as the source is going.

One lovely thing about Macross was that the humans get their hands on alien technology, and while they do incorporate lasers into their mechs, their heavy hitter is called the GAU-13, and is listed in the source material as firing U-238 armour-piercing rounds-- basically, the A-10 Thunderbolt's bigger brother, and the reason they do this is because there is _nothing_ a fighter can carry that does as much damage as the GAU-13 until about eleven years of crash development later-- basically, they realise that they are short of time, and come to the conclusion that their best bet is still human technology that they are familiar with, with twe centuries of development behind it.

My offering: terminal guidance using GPS, and multiple-configuration fused hyperkinetic, self-forging rounds-- you select the type of deamage you want (flechette or penetration spike), and then fire. The terminal guidance brings the round in, and then the exposive behind the copper warhead explodes with enough force to make the copper flow into the shape you want.

One technology that is current (!) is the Metal Storm concept: electrically fused bullets that enable you to get a firing rate well in excess of even the fastest Gatling guns.