Firearms in space?

[Isamu]

inside a space habitat. The walls are extremely thin, they have to be.

did they never hear of micro-meteoroids?

and Radiation? So the Walls suppose to be very thick, but still the service pipes must be somewhere at or in the walls. Would you like to hit the live support system? 

Since everything is very hot, detection is no problem, even with to days sensors, only the space to cover is the problem. So any heat seeking Missile should do. They have to have a very sophisticated maneuver system, which may react automatically.

This is no concept at all, only some thoughts to revise. 

[Plynkes]

I would have thought the walls would be thick, too. But they had some "scientific" explanation to the contrary that was actually to do with radiation (and cost, perhaps) that explained why they had to be thin. Sounded convincing at the time, but I don't remember the details. I suspect the real reason was that it's fun for the game to have the chance of piercing the habitat walls if characters decide to go having shootouts with their big guns in space.


Not my fluff, the Cyberpunk people's. Ask them. I may be able to find the book at some point to tell you what they said, but probably not today.

[Hauptgefreiter]

yes, the problem is to get things into space. the heavier the payload, the more difficult it is to lift it out of the atmosphere. You have to find a compromise between required materials for a space station or satellite and the lifting power of the rocket you are using. And the price for that rocket, of course 

[Plynkes]

Found the relevant paragraphs:

"It takes a certain amount of damage to violate a pressure seal. This is based on the stopping power of the hull itself, but walls and structures in space are not very thick. Materials are expensive and hard to come by; torque and thrust factors require a delicate balance between mass and acceleration. An orbital transfer vehicle hull is only a milimeter or so of metal and a few centimetres of foam - just enough to hold in the air and shrug off whatever minute particles strike it.

There's good reason why spacecraft hulls are so thin. When cosmic radiation (such as an alpha particle) hits metal and passes on through, the radiation damage is fairly negligible; but if the radiation hits and only partially passes through, it breaks up into nastier secondary radiation. In short, you want to stop all radiation (such as in a rad shelter), or let the harmless stuff pass through easily.

Luckily space is pretty empty. The chances of a micrometeor hit are about one in a thousand, while the chances of a serious encounter are even slimmer. The greatest danger in space is from man himself. Every year, more junk is thrown into orbit, where it waits for a possible collision."

Whenever characters were outside of larger habitats (in small craft or during EVA) they would take a small random amount of rads from cosmic rays (characters had to keep track of their RADS, but cosmic ray exposure was just in millirads). Solar flares and storms could cause enough radiation damage to kill relatively quickly. In the Cyberpunk universe large space facilities and large space ships had rad shelters in which to sit them out.


So, they at least seem to have thought it through, the rules were pretty comphrensive. Whether any of it is true to life or not I have no idea. I'm not a scientist and don't know hardly anything about this stuff. Anyway, there you are. You can now pick it apart at your leisure. 

[leadfool]

The Gyrojet pistol mentioned by SCURV is a definate possibility.  It was a pistol of basic semi-auto design, but with rocket rounds.  The pistol had almost no recoil and was amazingly light.  The guns now are available to collecters very cheap. the ammo costs about twice what a weapon goes for. 
The problem with the weapon on earth was that the round was only effective after it had traveled about 30 feet (10 meters).  Otherwise it would not have picked up enough velocity to peirce anything, ie cloths, skin etc.  The other problem was the rounds dropped off in speed after a fairly short range, maybe 100 yards.  So you cold only use it in a fight if your oppponent cooperated and stayed between 10 and 100 yards.

Now in space, assuming you want a weapon that you shoot at range, the Gyrojet projectile would go for thousands of miles without loseing velocity.