On Fictitious Equipage

So I was thinking about the gear in SF books, and how monumentally lame a lot of it is. Why don't people do more work on that? Firefly's an egregious offender, in that every single property either looks like something from the 1880s, or from the late 1990s—though I'd expect the guns to look more like the Kalashnikov, wouldn't you, given their social structure?

Anyway.

• So remember when I said the assault rifles in my setting might use the "blowback-shifted pulse" system of the AN-94? Turns out, no, they probably wouldn't; the AN-94 is only issued to the elite of the elite, because it's a monster to maintain and clean. That's pretty much anathema to the Kalashnikov design philosophy ("a gun even a semi-illiterate, oft-brutalized conscript can use, even if his monstrously incompetent, irretrievably corrupt superiors skimp on his training").
  
  But there's hope: the Balanced Automatic Recoil System of the AK-107. Basically it has a second gas piston, that goes forward when the other goes back, and balances out the recoil and muzzle jump. It was developed by a guy named Alexandrov (whose name is the A in AK-107, instead of Avtomat), but originally conceived by a gent named Tkachev (a Georgian, I think, since even Slavs don't think T and K can go together like that).
  
  Maybe the Marines in my setting will use Blowback-Shifted Pulse in their Stoner-type rifles. It's a bit more in line with the AR-series philosophy ("even if you are a conscript, like in Nam, you're a citizen, and you damn well better know what you're doing").


• I might have to rewrite something. Before, the humans in my book sometimes used bullets made of crystallized tranquilizer, à la the "mercy bullets" in Niven; the aliens used what were essentially paintballs full of contact-vector tranquilizer. So, yeah, you had to load differently depending on whether you were fighting an alien, or your own species.
  
  But that was before I found out about Leyden balls. Basically, it's a little spherical Leyden bottle shot out of a gun by compressed air (a system like this). So I think now, both species are going to use special electric-stunner rounds; the two species are roughly the same size, so one wouldn't need drastically different loads.
  
  Incidentally, isn't Verne awesome? Tiny round Leyden bottles fired from a Girandoni air rifle: that's what I want in science fiction, dammit! It's probably easy to read too much into the fact that hard science fiction was invented by a French Catholic, and soft science fiction by a British atheist—who was also a eugenicist socialist—but it's still fun to point out.


• So leaving to one side that everything Transhuman SF is based on is logically impossible—between "Post-Scarcity" and AI, they live in a fantasy world—they seem to be unacquainted with people. More-so than usual for SF fans/writers, I mean, and that's already a hole with no bottom.
  
  Do they really think, for instance, that it's more likely that people will get phones and computers surgically implanted, than that everyone will simply carry around handhelds? I mean, sure, a 24th-century Pacemaker is probably going to be a nanomachine injection, but absent need, will people really get surgical implants? Put aside your fetishes—yeah, I've seen Sorayama's "Gynoid" pinups too, thanks—and answer honestly. The answer of course is no, not when they could get all the same functionality from a cheaper, more convenient, and more replaceable cell phone.


• So is it weird, that one of the Japanese spies in my book, being a woman, carries around several lipstick-weapons? One is the KGB lipstick-gun from Metal Gear Solid 3 (which I believe is real); another is the polymer-lipstick from Kiddy Grade, though she only uses it for garrotes, not a full-length whip. It's cute and girly, without being bizarre, and it makes sense for a spy.
  
  Actually the gunrunner's wife (who's also a gunrunner, actually) carries one of those lipstick guns...and a belt-buckle gun...and maybe guns in her heels, like Bayonetta (and Ray, from GunXSword). Because, you know, why not? She also has a shotgun taped to the underside of her kitchen table, but loaded with 10-gauge grenades. It's really just not a good idea to mess with gunrunners.


• Thought of 10-gauge grenades reminds me, the Hague Convention is going to go by the wayside in the future. Its ban on hollow-points was stupid anyway—the stats say hollow-points are less lethal, not more, since they only leave entry wounds, and the main way you die from a gunshot is bleeding out. Besides, low-caliber spitzer bullets are better against body armor, and if they tumble in tissue, like 5.56 NATO does, they're actually more traumatic than the average hollow-point.
  
  That to one side, though, that ban on explosives under 400 grams—which actually was in the older St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868, but it's usually discussed under the heading of the Hague Convention—is just not going to cut it, against the kind of armor we're going to be fielding pretty soon. Also, do things like the 40 mm grenades we use in grenade launchers violate it? 'Cause apparently those weigh 230 grams. Maybe the grenade launcher counts as one of those cannons that was exempted? And, of course, it's stupid to distinguish between grenades thrown by hand and grenades launched from firearms.


• Which is not to say, as Germans have historically been fond of saying, that "treaties are just pieces of paper". It is to say that treaties really ought to be realistic. I can see trying to limit things that make wounds untreatable, like poisoned bullets or those things that explode when medics start treating their victims, but if we're allowing big bombs, we should allow small ones. High-explosive rounds will be expensive enough that they'll still mainly be used against armor, rather than infantry, just as they are now (HESH and HEAT rounds are, apparently, in a legally questionable area, though).
  
  Besides, when the Germans introduced mustard gas to the battlefields of World War I, do you know what their rationale was (since it violated a treaty)? "Oh, well, since bullets are propelled by expanding gas, everyone already uses gas to kill people." But the Allies were just as bad as the Germans, because...we need that to be true, so we don't feel bad about Wilson and the Brits trying to let them off the hook after the war (and thereby causing the second one).


• So one thing I have in my book that I'm quit proud of is, all the prepackaged drinks come in bottles with recloseable straws. Why? Because the story takes place in space colonies (most of them on planets, though), and that's what drink containers are, on spaceships. Even with artificial gravity, probably; it's probably a bad idea to risk screwing something up with a spill.


• I forgot, so I apologize to those who read this during the, what, half-hour or so that it was up, but I came up with a little difference for how my aliens carry their long guns. Remember how I said their "rifle" resembles a Henry 1860? Yeah, well, the Henry rifle is almost exactly the same length as the M1840 cavalry saber. So, why not have them carry their "rifles" in scabbards? There is such a thing as a rifle scabbard, after all.
  
  An interesting side-effect is, even riflemen can cultivate a quick-draw art; anyone heard of iaido?