Will a Space Gun Always Hit Something? (w/ THE EXPANSE)

Oye beratna! Thanks for watching. Huge thanks to Ty Franck for taking the time. If you want to see our full hour-long discussion featuring even more math (!), it drops tomorrow at [THE FACILITY]: www.patreon.com/kylehill

I remember a random encounter you can get in Stellaris, wherein one of your science ships can receive a glancing blow from an old mass driver round out of nowhere. Seeing no shooter, the ship scans and dates the shell and concludes that it is millions of years old and was likely a missed shot, fired from a ship in a different galaxy. I thought it was really cool

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” ― Douglas Adams

Counterpoint to this: Kessler syndrome. Also, consider the birthday paradox: It might be incredibly unlikely for any specific thing to hit something. However, with enough objects it is much more likely for something to hit something else. Most of these will be debris hitting other debris of course.

Reminds me of a Stellaris random event where your ship takes a few glancing blows from random projectiles fired from another galaxy. A funny, serious, and practical issue

So basically if humanity is firing enough shots to be worried about the space stray projectiles, then we should probably worry waaay more about the reason of all this shooting.

We totally need guns in space. No guns = no Cowboy Bebop. This would be totally unacceptable.

Something else to consider is this: in the codex in Mass Effect, there is mention of a common strategy in warfare where an occupying force of ships at a conquered planet will defend it from being liberated by putting the planet at their backs, meaning that any prospective liberators will be running the risk of hitting their own planet when trying to attack the occupiers. That sort of thing is much more likely to cause harm than randomly firing into deep space.

Cixin Lou covers this very thing in The Three Body Problem. The assassin in question even uses handmade ice rounds so the bullet will thaw and make it look like an micro meteor impact during autopsy.

I can imagine this could spawn a level of space tourism. “Come see the bullets the rebellion fired against the empire in the battle of Jupiter, 200 years ago! They will be in our sky for one week only!” (I haven’t seen The Expanse, so I can’t use examples from the show). A whole ship of people who reenact space battles on a board, while visiting the bullets that missed.

I always figured that the guy in Mass Effect is applying the same logic that we do to firearms we're shooting here on Earth. "Always be aware of your target and what's beyond it". If you recklessly fire off a gun and the bullet goes through a wall and hits someone, you are liable for that. It might not hit anyone or do any damage to anything of consequence, but for safety's sake you always have to maintain the mindset that it could do so if you discharge the weapon negligently. So the sergeant is saying that if there's any doubt that this massive slug is not going to hit what it's supposed to, assume it's negligent to shoot; even if it's not literally true that it will hit something, maintain the mindset that it will.

I remember where I worked years ago, a guest got hit by a falling bullet on new years. Apparently they had just stepped out from under the trajectory and their trailing leg got hit. We had to call the ambulance and shut down that area until the police figured out what happened.

The Kessler Syndrome - this is a great subject for a deep probe by Kyle. Especially Kessler type effects after a space battle with kinetic weapons.

Title: "Should Guns Be Illegal in Space?" Me: "Isaac Netwon speech from Mass Effect?" Kyle, 3:04 : "I could go through all of the physics..." Me: "Isaac Newton speech from Mass Effect."

The Expanse is proof that a sci-fi show/movie can make action scenes based on reality and more intense and breath taking than other that are less reality based. Love this show!

A key point you have to know from the game lecture you played: The Chief was talking to soldiers. You have to keep things very simple, particularly in combat.

Sad story: "In 1961, my grand father was a soldier during the Algerian independance war. One day, him and his buddies went out in the desert to "test" some of the weapons they took from the insurgents, shooting at sand dunes, and one of the guys shot an M1 Garand in the air "for fun". The bullet ended up killing a 6 years old girl that was herding goats with her father 1 kilometer (~0.6 miles) away." The Mass effect NPC speech is not about the theorical chance of hitting something in a thousand years, it's about shit happens and you never know what you are going to hit if you miss your target.

A good rule of thumb when firing projectiles in space would be to assume that if you miss, you ARE going to hit someone and probably kill them. I would count that as the same level of gun safety as "Always treat every gun you ever handle as loaded. Even when you know for sure there is no ammunition in the gun and the magazine is in your hand."

Hah, as the opening monologue was running, I pulled up the "Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space" quote from Mass Effect. Then it pops up in the video itself.

there's a couple hard scifi books I've read where they brought up the concept, usually the issue regarding it hitting someone someday is because there's traffic somewhere in their path, especially in the settings where railguns are more walls of dense projectiles instead of the big heavy shot flying at a fraction of C