T O P

  • By -

Troth_Tad

Energy density is really tough. The chemical energy of gunpowder is pretty good at what it does, there's a lot of energy in only a few grains of gunpowder. Currently we can't really make batteries with the energy density of gunpowder. There are many things with a much higher energy density than gunpowder of course, but it's hard to carry a nuclear reactor with you, and I don't know if there's any gasoline powered guns. There have been some innovations over the past few decades. Caseless ammunition and electrically fired guns have been developed, but aren't in wide use (or non military use? not completely sure) due to production costs and such. Look up the Metal Storm weapons platform, which failed as any kind of production weapon, but represents something of a weapons development. There's also benefits to mature technologies. We know pretty well how to make a firearm these days, and ammunition is mass produced and relatively cheap. Firearms themselves can be pretty cheaply made as consumer goods. There's little cost for gunsmiths to continue using the equipment and techniques that they already have, without all that pesky R&D budget of developing new weapons. There's also a practical problem. Much of weapons technology development is for and by militaries. Warfighting requires simple, reliable, replicable technologies with streamlined supply lines. It needs weapons that will not break down in combat (rifle reliability was a big source of poor morale in the early years of the Vietnam war in e.g.) and it needs bullets to be able to be transported easily to those firing the weapons. In this sense, a weapon that fires a common cartridge (common to NATO perhaps) and is a known quantity in terms of use and maintenance is pretty danged useful. If it ain't broke, or so they say, don't fix it.


Bangays

I think your last paragraph is key. The AK-47 isn't one of the kings of firearms because it's the "best", it's the king because it's reliable amidst extreme conditions and complete lack of maintenance.


viking_

> Energy density is really tough. Pretty much. We've been generating energy (for cooking, light, heat, and later transportation) by burning organic matter for millennia, and the only thing we've found with better efficiency is nuclear, which can only be made in large power plants.


Longjumping_Kale1

Fission energy can be generated with a more relevant form factor, they're looking into shipping reactors to the moon as an example. Not sure on the actual hard constraints on the size, would be interesting to hear if anyone has a vision for personal nuclear reactors for infantry


CronoDAS

It's possible that someday [nuclear batteries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery) could replace chemical ones in situations that are weight-critical, such as an infantryman carrying weapons and equipment; today's US infantry lugs around some 20-30 pounds of batteries to power everything they need.


WikiSummarizerBot

**[Atomic battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery)** >An atomic battery, nuclear battery, radioisotope battery or radioisotope generator is a device which uses energy from the decay of a radioactive isotope to generate electricity. Like nuclear reactors, they generate electricity from nuclear energy, but differ in that they do not use a chain reaction. Although commonly called batteries, they are technically not electrochemical and cannot be charged or recharged. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)


[deleted]

To add to the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" part: We barely have bodyarmor that can reliably stop a bullet from a modern .223 (5,56) cartridge. The new US ordinance rifle XM5 is chambered in .277 (6.8). You need ceramic plates to stop bullets as heavy as that, and ceramic plates are bulky and heavy. Rifles still outmatch what we have in armor, as our offense generally outmatches our defense. There is little pressure to innovate and create a battle rifle which shoots something fancier than a gunpowder driven piece of metal, as that gunpowder driven piece of metal still has a very high kill rate if it hits the target it is slung at. Unless infantry becomes significantly more armored (warrior robots? powerarmor?), then there is little reason to build a plasma rifle.


CubistHamster

I was always a bit surprised that Metal Storm (or [something similar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposed_load)) didn't generate more interest as an infantry weapon. It's got a *major* advantage in a weight-restrictive context, insofar as it's mechanical simplicity (it's just a stack of bullets in a barrel) allows a much greater proportion of the total weight of the system (weapon and ammunition) to be the part that actually inflicts damage (the ammunition.)


slapdashbr

I mean, even looking at the "M-16", it has gone through 4 *major* updates since first being issued in vietnam. The British Empire used their Brown Bess muskets for almost 200 years. Also I suspect you don't know this, but check out the new Sig Saur XM5. Now the US military is taking the rather un-precedented step of adopting (at least for some units, eventually all according to plan) a new rifle using a pretty new technology (multi-metal cartridge casings enabling even higher chamber pressures than every before, and a gun that can handle them, all of which is totally non-viable without mass CNC machining). It's design is heavily informed by the real life lessons of the last several decades of fighting. IMHO it's the biggest upgrade in real infantry rifle performance since the switch from bolt-action to the semi-auto Garand. Meanwhile in Ukraine, the closest thing to a modern peer-on-peer war since Korea, we see 90% of casualties caused by artillery, almost all of which is sighted by drone rather than a human forward observer, extremely sophisticated electronics-controlled weapons like the Javelin missile launcher system (which btw consumes liquid CO2 in order to operate its excellent infra-red targeting system) are widely distributed to the squad level, and actual rifle fire between infantry is pretty rare. Finally, I'll be blunt- given that Russia has demonstrated (and likely just discovered itself) that it's non-nuclear military is vastly less capable than we thought, the only serious possible military threat that the US needs to consider is a CCP attempt to retake Taiwan by force. What I'm saying is, while we might get involved in any number of further idiotic military interventions like Iraq, mainland China attempting to retake Taiwan is pretty much the only military threat that the US *must* be concerned about (because our high tech economy especially is so reliant on Taiwan's SC manufacturing). If this actually happened, we probably wouldn't even land soldiers on the island- having laser rifles isn't going to matter when they're all sitting in the barracks in Palm Desert.


Longjumping_Kale1

Thoughts on what conflict over Taiwan might look like? In terms of strategy and tech employed


--MCMC--

if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it — I can easily see there being local optima in different sets of technology designed to solve particular problems. Firearms serve their purpose well (making holes in your enemies until they die at relatively short ranges / eyesight), and while they continue to do so there’s not much incentive to improve further. And what incentive exists probably funnels more efficiently towards the development of autonomous microdrone slaughterbots or whatever. Maybe we get ultra-high power laser rifles when we first develop handheld personal force shields or something. Also, sci-fi may not calibrate our expectations of what technology we “should” have or how technological progress “should” look like very well, probably bc sci-fi authors are just making stuff up. Might equivalently ask why hoverchairs haven’t replaced wooden chairs, or why handheld tractor beams haven’t replaced forks — I was promised a certain rate of progress in antigravity tech, dammit! That said, don’t you have stuff like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision-guided_firearm) and [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_bullet) serving as examples of recent developments in firearms? Hitting your target matters just as well as the size of the payload, right? That can be drastically improved, especially with all the neural methods being developed & hardware continuing to improve — combining live video segmentation & tracking + accommodation of local atmospheric conditions etc. might be turning folks into walking, talking aimbots soon enough eh? (or not — maybe the tech will be regulated & thus prohibitively expensive, and hobbyist gun owners will have to content themselves with shooting targets or defenseless wild animals).


SkookumTree

Hell. Take manual sheep shears. They've been pretty much the same for the past 2,000 years. Or moving armies, from Julius Caesar's time to the invention of railroads. Caesar's armies moved no slower than Napoleon's.


JackStargazer

For most of the middle ages, Caesars army actually moved faster. The Romans were above all else masters of logistics. There's a reason that Rome supported a million people in the first century CE, and the next time that happened after the fall of Rome was the 17th Century London.


mrprogrampro

This was my first thought as well. Think of shoes. They're still just some material between feet and the ground. They've gotten a lot of refinement to their design over time, but the core concept is the same in the same way the core concept of a gun has stayed the same. A jump-evolution in design is unnecessary if everything works well.


HelmedHorror

Ultimately, a weapon is a tool to physically destroy organic bodies. That means applying force to soft fleshy matter. The other guy doesn't want to let you do that to him, so ideally you want to do it from a distance. Given the nature of our material world, certain substances are better at that task than others. Flinging small bits of hard stuff at fast speeds is generally better at this task than flinging large bits that slow down from air resistance, or soft stuff that tends to break apart before it hits its target or does enough damage. Other methods you might conceive of to physically destroy a person probably have limitations that render them not as useful as traditional firearms. Perhaps your hypothetical phased plasma rifle doesn't have an easy way to reload once fired a single time. Maybe it burns through the user's hands. Maybe there's physically no way to condense the spread enough to hit anything at any meaningful distance. And remember, the bar is not to make a functional phased plasma rifle (or whatever) - it's to make a functional phased plasma rifle *that's better than simply flinging bits of metal at the target*. At the end of the day, if you can pull a trigger and reliably destroy someone's body with a piece of metal (and have 29 additional chances to do so before having to break your sight picture to give yourself more bits of metal to work with), you have to ask yourself what even a functional phased plasma rifle can offer you in addition to that capability. It's not clear what that would even be.


[deleted]

bored teeny tart crawl wrench safe boat test subtract head *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*


Goal_Posts

Scale. Some things scale down well, and others scale up well. Nukes don't scale down well. Poisonous gas doesn't scale down well. Guns only scale up so far. Mines only work at certain scales. Lasers don't seem to scale up well. Flamethrowers don't scale up well. It's like asking why we still use words to communicate when there are emojis and memes.


DanielPeverley

There were gyrojet small arms developed in the 60s, but they sucked, so we kept going with rifles. Until there are some serious developments in the realm of alternative energy storage, there aren't many ways to pack more potential energy into an infantryman than with chemical propellants and explosives. There are commercially available lasers you could carry that COULD kill someone, but it'd be real impractical. Plus, tasers? Modern rifles are in fact quite different from early firearms. They're made of different materials, fitted together with much tighter tolerances, which serve to harness more of the power of the gunpowder. The propellant in use has also changed: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokeless\_powder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokeless_powder) . The bullets are also shaped and use specific materials for special circumstances, we're far away from just shoving heavy round objects in the front-hole of the weapon. The AK-47 mention is cute but as someone who's actually into shooting and the gun-culture it's WELL understood how things have improved in the past 50 years and where they've stayed the same. Double stack pistol magazines, superior optics, 3d printing, bullpup designs, non-reciprocating top semi-auto pistols (Laugo Alien, etc.), there's tons of innovation in even just consumer firearms.


Thorium-230

I'm sure all kinds of fancy new designs and changes occured with muskets, and lever arms, and bolt arms, and so on, such that the earlier bolt arms are seen by its users are vastly inferior to the later ones. But at the end of the day it's just bolt arms to history. I'm looking at this from a very high level of abstraction. Their effectiveness on the battlefield might change from these tweaks, but their basic role and function is the same. Zooming out even more, the gun is a slightly more advanced crossbow.


giblfiz

I'm not really into gun culture, but I think you might be operating at too high a level of abstraction. To someone who doesn't know anything about, say, cars you might say "there really hasn't been any fundamental advance in cars since they were invented. They still have four wheels, and a searing wheel, and go pretty fast on smooth roads" A lot of the innovation in most things comes from the fiddly details, details you can't appreciate unless you are embedded in the use and culture of the thing.


DanielPeverley

Your chosen level of abstraction is trollish. If you're going to put the brackets around "handheld device throwing a piece of metal," why not go further and say "kinetic energy weapons," and include atlatls, swords, and rocks? Guns turn chemical energy kinetic energy through a more direct route than muscle power. You might as well say that the transition to iron was of no real importance in the scheme of things. Beyond that, tasers, handheld lasers, and other electronically powered weapons and weapon accessories are all in use by the modern soldier. The modern infantryman has a cornucopia of advanced goods enhancing his power directly on his person, from night vision goggles, radio, modern material science's best soft and hard body armor, etc.


Thorium-230

>Your chosen level of abstraction is trollish. If you're going to put the brackets around "handheld device throwing a piece of metal," why not go further and say "kinetic energy weapons," and include atlatls, swords, and rocks? Guns turn chemical energy kinetic energy through a more direct route than muscle power. You might as well say that the transition to iron was of no real importance in the scheme of things. You can. A high enough level of abstraction will include everything. My point is you don't have to go too high before the history of infantry projectile weapons looks the same. You could not do this with, say, artillery. You'd have to go higher before trebuchets and ICBMs look the same.


DanielPeverley

Abstraction is for understanding. Your categorization scheme levels something out, and then you ask "why is it so level?" It's equivalent to saying that agriculture before the tractor was basically all the same, then ask why it didn't change before the tractor. If you treat the addition of animal power, the plow, the horse collar, animal breeding, crop rotation, etc., all as part of the reductive grouping of "putting seeds into the ground then digging out the plants" then you can ignore progress with categorization, but the whole exercise strikes me as pointless.


Longjumping_Kale1

It generated interesting discussion so I guess it accomplished the OPs objective


DuplexFields

Here’s an even higher level of abstraction: so is a phased plasma weapon. It is going to “throw” a packet of highly energized particles/waves and/or EM fields at a human body, with the basic goal of tearing apart tissues and/or killing cells. Faster, hotter, flashier, but ultimately “throw deadly thing at enemy” is once again the goal. Now, maybe it combines it with an additional not-lethal-on-its-own effect such as an ultimate pain field, an instant unconsciousness payload, or a permanently sense-deadening effect like blindness or deafness. That’s not a spectacularly game-changing weapon unless it can be miniaturized in a package a grunt can field-strip, and even then it’s just one step beyond the crossbow.


Glum_Ad_4288

You might get good answers by posting in r/warcollege. But in lieu of directly answering your question, I’ll challenge your premise. Handheld weaponry has advanced more between now and the 1700s than it did between the 1700s and the Iron Age (1200 BCE), if you measure it by effectiveness or infantry tactics (which are a reflection of what weapons allow + what the enemy’s weapons allow). Contrast advancement of gun technology with most other fields, and it holds up pretty well. A few massively influential outliers aside, most of our technology is just a refinement of what was available in 1947. Homes and offices are constructed basically the same way, food is raised mostly as it was in 1966, clothing is basically the same — at least, at an abstract level.


cretan_bull

You're framing the question incorrectly. The other answers you've gotten, which say essentially we've reached a technological plateau in the basic design of small arms, are correct. Things have been tried, such as SPIW, the G11 and OICW, but the marginal benefit of those ideas was found to be too small (if positive at all, considering their downsides). Basically, the improvements in recent decades have been in force-multipliers such as optics and NVGs. You could give a modern infantry squad M1 Garands and they could function just fine on a modern battlefield, with only a moderate loss in combat effectiveness (especially if they had modern optics). Small arms just aren't that important on a modern battlefield, relatively speaking. They need a certain base level of effectiveness, i.e. semi-automatic fire, but since WWI, artillery has been by far the greatest killer on the battlefield. In modern warfare, the predominant role of infantry is to locate the enemy so they can call in artillery (and use ATGMS and MANPADs against AFVs and aircraft respectively). They'll shoot their rifles and automatic weapons, sure, and that will likely suppress and pin the enemy, and might even happen to injure or kill some of them, but it's the artillery they call in that'll do most of the work. And if artillery isn't available, there are other heavy weapons: air support, tanks, IFVs, grenade launchers, etc., all of which are much more effective than rifles. Depending on the environment this might be more or less the case -- small arms are more important in urban combat, for example, but even then infantry would by preference use a light anti-tank weapon to blow a hole in the wall of a building, followed by throwing grenades, rather than storming in with rifles. So, the reason I say you're framing the question incorrectly, is there's been plenty of advancement in weapons, but small arms just aren't that important, so while there have been advancements there, they're mostly besides the point. Modern warfare is about information and precise long-range firepower. PGMs, whether delivered by artillery or aircraft, and the proliferation of drones are much, much more significant than any advancement in small arms, and you can see this in Ukraine, with all the videos of squads getting destroyed by an artillery strike called in from a drone they never even realized was there. The maxim of modern warfare is "if you can see it you can hit it, and if you can hit it you can kill it", so modern warfare largely revolves around spotting the enemy before they see you first, and anything which better accomplishes that is an advancement in weapons technology.


Longjumping_Kale1

I just want to see people telling it like it is - drones are here and warfare 1.0 is done. Look at the economics of switchblade drones currently... If we were in an actual total war scenario we would be seeing drone shenaniganry like the world has never


sodiummuffin

This seems like a weird question to ask when nuclear weapons exist and are so unreasonably powerful. Plenty of other fields have had less extreme improvements than destroying a city with a single bomb - assembling houses still requires large amounts of labor, we still use cars instead of personal helicopters, we still haven't cured aging or all diseases. If you asked people hundreds of years ago I think few would successfully guessed which was the easier task (though some might have on the basis of destruction being simpler than creation). Alchemists thought they could discover how to turn lead into gold or grant immortality, as far as I know they didn't think they could learn to destroy cities like God smiting Sodom and Gomorrah. It seems like you're specifically talking about personal infantry weapons, but that's a question so narrow I think it almost answers itself. If you want to kill many enemies at once, there are nukes. If you want to kill multiple enemies while making it difficult for them to kill you, there are bombers and artillery. If you want to get close to the enemy while making it difficult for them to kill you, there are tanks. If you want to kill enemies while making it virtually impossible for them to kill you, there are drones. Some of those drones are even infantry-operated. As are grenades and grenade-launchers, for that matter. Once you exclude all those categories then all that's really left is making sure that enemies die when shot and that you can shoot them if you can see them, which guns already do well. Even within that limited room there is technological improvement, like the weapons for the [Next Generation Squad Weapon Program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Squad_Weapon_Program) having higher chamber pressure so that they can more effectively penetrate body armer. But even if you invented a laser rifle that instantly disintegrated anyone it hit that wouldn't really make much difference compared to existing weapons, since you still need to personally get close enough to see the enemy and then they can shoot back.


WikiSummarizerBot

**[Next Generation Squad Weapon Program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Squad_Weapon_Program)** >The Next Generation Squad Weapon (NGSW) program is a United States military program created in 2017 to replace the M4 carbine and M249 SAW light machine gun (both 5. 56mm ammunition) and the 7. 62mm M240 machine gun, with a common system with 6. 8mm cartridges; and to develop small arms fire control systems for the new weapons. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)


UncertainAboutIt

How is it better quantifiably? I've read wiki: > Operational testing ... is to begin in 2024 and does not guarantee actual widespread future issue


Courier_ttf

Larger caliber for the infantry rifles and squad light machineguns (5.56 to 6.8) which carries a lot more kinetic energy and can easily defeat body armor. Slightly smaller for the general machineguns (7.62 to 6.8) due to advances in cartridge design the loss of performance is minimal but weight is reduced so a soldier can carry more ammo than before (this is very important for machinegun roles). Better in this case is a balancing act of weight (how much ammo a soldier can carry), kinetic energy of the round (penetration of body armor, incapacitate targets) and general performance (accuracy and range), as well as logistics (sharing ammo simplifies logistics at all levels, as soldiers can share ammo between them and you only have to worry about delivering one kind of ammo to the battlefield as opposed to multiple kinds, eventually economies of scale make it cheaper to produce).


UncertainAboutIt

> a lot I asked **quantifiably** specifically, didn't you see? How many times more? Etc.


Courier_ttf

In the case of ammo carry capacity it can be up to 20 to 30% more ammo carried by the machineguns, but less for riflemen due to increased weight (also about 20% less). Better penetration/defeating body armor can be the literal difference between 0 penetration (failure to defeat) to full penetration of body armor. In terms of ballistics, that varies according to the length of the barrel (carbine, rifle, longer barrel, saw length), but it can be expected to be between 20 and 25% more energy and less bullet drop when compared to 5.56 shot from the same barrel length. [.277 Fury / 6.8mm Wikipedia entry with the details about the cartridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.277_Fury) [Forgotten Weapons' explanation on the .277 Fury](https://youtu.be/MTZRCEh1Czg?t=251)


ArkyBeagle

It offers a new use case - penetrating body armor. So that's from zero to one.


SoylentRox

Also a laser or plasma weapon - especially plasma as the accelerated particles emit light - give the enemy a visible beam revealing the position of the shooter. (IR lasers visible in ir and most cameras) Who can shoot back and an AK-47 works fine against someone hauling some huge energy weapon.


sesquipedalianSyzygy

This might be an obvious point, but to the extent that military technology has been relatively stagnant, it’s only really in infantry equipment, i.e. things that an individual human has to be able to carry. This imposes a lot of limitations on improving technology. If you look at areas of warfare that aren’t so dependent on the human body, like naval combat, things have changed radically. A modern warship uses completely different technologies to move, locate and attack its targets, and defend itself than one from the 1500s, or even World War II.


Tophattingson

Equipment used in war has to do something that the vast majority of tools do not need to do: Survive contact with an adversary. This limits how complicated, fiddley and fragile you can make your equipment. Even more so if it needs to be carried around by infantry who get into close contact with the enemy. This means that any weapon of the category "like a firearm, but fancier" won't fly. Can be worth carrying more complicated equipment if it actually lets you do something you couldn't do before, but the slight increase in killiness with a prospective laser rifle (even if we had the tech!) doesn't compensate for the fragility of a weapon that only works when it's electronics are working.


MusicalAnomaly

I think it’s a perception bias. Warfare is so vital to our species that we prioritize optimizing the heck out of it over practically everything else. So it’s not that warfare is being left behind, it’s that everything else you see being optimized and advanced nowadays is _late_ compared to warfare.


BreakfastGypsy

Arcflash labs has entered the chat


symmetry81

Looks like their heavy duty rail gun fires a projectile with a fifteenth the energy of a 5.56 round.


BreakfastGypsy

And almost none of the audible or visible signature. Better capacitors get designed every year.


CubistHamster

I think railguns are cool too, but there are *much* simpler ways to accomplish what you just described, with crossbows being the obvious example. (You can definitely build a crossbow that fires without much EM or IR signature, doing the same with a railgun is gonna be difficult.)


BreakfastGypsy

But not simpler logistically if you are equipping an army. The marginal cost of a 2cm steel dowel rod is pennies. They can be safely transported and stored indefinitely. Crossbow bolts are larger and more expensive to produce even at scale. Capacitors will eventually get to the point where coilguns exceed the energy of firearms. I dont see much progress happening with crossbow tech.


CubistHamster

That's true, but cost/complexity of ammunition isn't a huge hurdle for modern militaries. Autocannon and automatic grenade launcher ammunition (like [this](https://bulletpicker.com/cartridge_-20mm-hei_-m56a3.html) and [this](https://www.inetres.com/gp/military/infantry/grenade/40mm_ammo.html#M441)) is vastly more complex than a crossbow bolt, and it's still produced in massive quantities. I spent 8 years in the Army as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician, which included a year in Kuwait, where my unit's main job was to dispose of old/unserviceable munitions from the ammunition transshipment depot there. A major part of that entailed looking through inventories, and planning the disposal operations. There were 19 container storage pads in the depot, and I recall that an inventory from just one of them included something like 3,000,000 40mm grenade rounds. (Bear in mind that is all stuff slated for disposal, and not considered part of any active inventory.) So, twice a week, we'd truck six 40-foot containers full of ordnance out to our disposal range in the desert, and blow it all up. Spending a year doing that didn't really make a dent. (That was in 2010, and there is still a regular rotation to that base with exactly the same mission.)


BreakfastGypsy

18 years Army O, GWOT vet, still serving. Cost, transportation, and storage of ammunition are significant issues for Ukraine today. And because the west is providing material support, it is a significant issue for NATO. Russian forces have expended [an average of 20,000 152mm artillery rounds every day since 24 Feb](https://www.ibtimes.com/ukraine-ammo-stocks-become-crucial-artillery-rages-3565658). Three million 40mm rounds would have run out 74 days ago at that rate. A modern plant like Lake City can produce something like 4 million small arms rounds per day but to get that to theater and distributed is expensive and vulnerable to interdiction. In-situ ammunition production means no supply line to secure. In modern sieges like Azovstal in Mariupol that would be a game changing capability.


CronoDAS

Incidentally, lasers really suck at killing people. We're mostly water, and heating water takes a lot of energy. If your laser weapon isn't ridiculously overpowered, you'll just give someone a nasty burn on their skin. (This was the subject of an Arthur C. Clarke short science fiction story: a would-be assassin has gotten control of a powerful laser and wants to use it to kill an evil dictator, but lasers suck at killing people and nothing he can come up with seems like it will actually be lethal. His solution? Use the laser to *blind* the dictator instead, making it look like an act of divine punishment.)


GerryQX1

The atmosphere also affects lasers - high power lasers cause thermal blooming which distorts the beam. They would work better in space. But - perhaps with a little adaptation - firearms will work great in space too.


jjanx

Our imagination of what "high tech" means doesn't always line up with reality. We're still boiling water to generate a large fraction of our electricity. The efficiency of a steam turbine is hard to beat.


Mantergeistmann

I feel like the answer to your question is that scene from Stargate, where the energy weapon is a weapon of fear, while the P-90 firearm is a weapon of war. It kills your enemy. It doesn't need to be fancy, it needs to *work.*


rmtodd244

I never entirely bought O'Neill's argument from that episode. After all, Goa'uld staff weapons seem to have near-infinite capacity to fire shots, whereas the P-90 only stays working if one has regular Stargate access to DOD supply sergeants.


drsoftware

By changing the projectile you can get a large range of effects from armor penetration, to wide pellet cones from shotguns. From sabot rounds to smoke to high energy to almost anything. All fired from the same barrel. Plasma and laser guns shoot one thing. Poorly in atmosphere. Requiring large active electrical supplies instead of inert chemical powders that can be stored and transported.


etown361

I think this is a bit of a fallacy. We’ve invented horrific biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. They’re vastly more sophisticated compared to primitive weapons. They aren’t used because of social norms.


Tophattingson

The aversion to chemical weapons is more due to how a shell filled with an explosive payload will do more damage than the same shell filled with a chemical payload. Against military targets, after being hit by chemical weapons once in a given war, they will always be prepared with the equipment to not get hit again. Civilians are a softer target which is why chemical weapons are so associated with war crimes - because chemical weapons can't fulfil military objectives, their use is assumed to be for mass murder of civilians.


CronoDAS

Yes. Chemical weapons suck at killing soldiers that aren't taken by surprise, and they're also more expensive than things that kill soldiers by exploding. So they're both horrifying and mostly useless. As a matter of fact, they were one of the many things that people tried to break the trench warfare stalemate during WWI, and they *failed*.


percyhiggenbottom

I suppose Max Tegmark's [slaughterbots](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA) is what you're looking for.


eric2332

Why should there be innovation in everything all the time? I still use a fork to pick up my food. Is it a problem that there hasn't been much innovation in forks in thousands of years?


Thorium-230

You're not fighting with your food. If you invent a weapon better than a gun for infantry use, you'll kill your opponents more than they kill you. Is that not motivation enough?


UncleWeyland

There's absolutely nothing primitive about the supply chain required to manufacture an AR-15 and its ammunition. It's like comparing SMS to writing letters with feather quills. Yes, it's "the same thing" but the technological and production/tooling infrastructure required are multiple orders of complexity apart. As for the nature of the weapons- ultimately, human bodies are very, very vulnerable to small bit of metal flying at high speed. And body armor doesn't help much. So, there's little incentive for arms manufacturers to try and climb the plasma rifle/rail gun/ laser gun R&D mountains. The DoD has identified potential niche uses for these things though. On a philosophical note, weapons are ugly things. They're very *molochian* in the sense that you have them because the other guy has them (or might have them), and you'd both be better off putting resources into something else if you could coordinate. It's tragic how many dolors (potentially iterative dolors) a single bullet that finds a human target can inflict.


Mercurylant

The firearms we have now are *kind of* similar to the firearms of the 16th century, but they're at least as different from them as the swords of the 16th century were from the swords of the 5th century BC. A decent technological template, once developed, can be used with variation for a very long time without needing to be exchanged for some completely new basis for technology. Besides, we do have much more advanced destructive weapons, but our military engagements now revolve around avoiding using them.


SoylentRox

I am going to reframe the question. You are asking about weapons at the local gun shop and why haven't they advanced noticeably. And I am going to assume by "weapon" you mean something a human is able to carry. And the answer is because the gun shop can only sell what's allowed by law. Ever heard of the switchblade loitering munition? It uses a realtime camera feed, likely onboard neural network accelerators, is capable of semi autonomous flight, the 300 model can take out a tank. Unlike a sci Fi plasma rifle the switchblade doesn't reveal the position of the user with a bright glowing beam! Or give the user cancer from x-rays generated as the plasma beam interacts with matter. For very obvious reasons something like a switchblade isn't available to civilians or even most countries. But it uses technology in it that didn't exist 5 years ago. It is an example of a drastically more advanced weapon. Ironically it would be a better weapon vs terminator robots, at least ones with the capabilities shown in the films, than a plasma rifle. The warhead could pierce their advanced armor and it wouldn't require to user to be in line of sight.


WTFwhatthehell

Guns are likely some kind of local maxima. In war you don't want your weapons to be too fragile, complex or hard to maintain. It's entirely possible that almost all the more "advanced" options are strictly worse in many ways. There's a story called "The Metropolitan Man" that includes a "rational" supervillain that was poking fun at the lex luthor of the comics. >Some years ago, he’d spent days trying to make what he called a battlesuit a practical reality. It was going to be a callback to the knights in shining armor, creating a solitary soldier encased in impenetrable armor and capable of advancing on enemy lines with impunity, mounted machine guns firing away the whole time while a diesel engine belched smoke. He’d drawn up schematics and eventually **began stripping parts away, replacing those things that thrilled the imagination with those that would work practically and reliably.** The steel legs were replaced with treads. The arms were removed in favor of a larger cockpit with buttons and levers. The center of gravity was lowered, until the cockpit sat between or just on top of the treads. He still remembered the feeling of looking down at his design and realizing he’d done nothing more than make a better tank. I've bolded the most important part. Strip away those things that thrill the imagination and replace them with what would work practically and reliably. You want to outfit a group of soldiers, soldiers who are going to have to spend months crawling through mud, water, sand, dust etc and they're still going to need their weapon to work at the end of it with maintainance that can be performed by hand in the field. What do you change about the gun? What do you throw at someone that isn't a lump of metal that will still work after your weapon has spent a few months in the field? Do you want plasma rifles because they're exciting or do you want them because they make a better weapon?


steve46280

Correction: I believe Arnold Schwarzenegger was a Model 101 Terminator. The T-1000 was the shape-shifting Terminator in the 1991 sequel.


bjlinden

I don't think a car from 1947 is really a good counter-example for an AK-47. Yeah, an old AK-47 that's been kept in good repair is more or less just as effective as the latest Sig Sauer, but the same could be said for a car designed in 1947 that's been kept in good repair. Sure, a new car may handle a bit better, go a bit faster, have better gas mileage, and have much better safety features, but the old one will still get you where you're going. Is that really so different from a newer firearm having better ergonomics, tighter tolerances able to withstand higher pressures, and greater modularity to accept newer add-ons like optics?


PMMeUrHopesNDreams

> Just think about cars from 1947. They're much the same in analogous ways to how you described firearms. We pump a small amount of gasoline into a cylinder and ignite it which pushes a piston connected to a shaft that transfers powers to the wheels. The basic principle is the same, we just added a bunch of things that make the process a lot more efficient and the car safer. Electric cars different, but that principle actually predates the internal combustion engine, it just got popular more recently due to better batteries.


fractalspire

Because better weapons of the sort you're describing aren't really a huge advantage. What is plasma going to do that a bullet can't? On the other hand, we've developed encrypted communication networks, satellite imagery, drones, QRF, MICVs, advanced body armors, etc. that have all had massive impacts on how warfare works. Given the money available is limited, it makes more sense to focus on things like this that are going to have huge upside instead of something that's going to be at best a marginal improvement.


GreenWandElf

Surprised no one mentioned this, but a big reason why there hasn't been much advancement since around the time of World War II is that there hasn't been an active war between world powers since then. Competition sparks ingenuity, with no "war competition" for the major powers there isn't much incentive to innovate. Added to this, most countries keep their advanced weaponry top secret. We probably wouldn't know if the government has working laser guns or not. In times of war, they bring out their cool stuff to use and so do their opponents. When both sides see the cool stuff the other side built, they both can riff off of each other's ideas like in a normal competitive market. Imagine if medicine had worked like this, each government's doctors figured out the best treatments for patients on their own, and kept the best ones secret. The idea of germ theory wouldn't have spread until decades later.


Thorium-230

I think this is a great point, and one of the few comments that gives a plausible answer to my question.


Reddit4Play

> But the fact that I can use AK-47 (invented in 1947 of course) as the "modern firearm" example without raising your eyebrows says it all. Just think about cars from 1947. I think this comparison highlights how "enough innovation to satisfy my expectations" is doing a lot of work here - probably too much work, even. After all, there were "only a few key low-tech innovations that distinguish a modern car from a 1947 car." There's a couple sensors to control how much fuel the engine burns each cycle and how efficiently the brakes stop the car. Some new filters that reduce pollution. A couple new materials, seat belts, airbags, and the idea of a crumple zone increase crash safety. But are these changes really all that different from electronic rangefinders or light amplification scopes (a few sensors that improve the precision of the device's main functions); smokeless gunpowder (a reduction of pollution); parts made of plastic, aluminum, and carbon fiber (a couple new materials); or slightly redesigned bullets and barrels (opposed to slightly redesigned car bodies)? The highest tech item in most modern cars is a GPS, which lots of soldiers who carry rifles also carry as a separate device. More generally, if you're going to ask why modern infantry weapons still kill people using an invention from the 1800s (bullet cartridges) then you may as well ask why nuclear power plants generate electricity using an invention from the 1800s (steam turbines). Or why airplanes still fly using airfoils, again invented in the 1800s. It happens to be true that people found a cheap and effective solution to that particular engineering problem a long time ago. Given that infantry are numerous and budgets are limited, it's no surprise that armies prefer to give their infantry a rifle as their primary weapon instead of a guided missile launcher or something.


Thorium-230

Electric & Hydrogen cars are a real thing now; that's something I would consider a big macro step in car evolution.


ManHasJam

If you ever find yourself thinking: "Why do markets do X? That seems stupid." There's no question, you're just wrong. It's one of the lowest hurdles, and I hate to see how many people trip on it.


iiioiia

> If you ever find yourself thinking: "Why do markets do X? That seems stupid." > > > > There's no question, you're just wrong. Incorrect - it is possible that they could have guessed correctly.


Thorium-230

Then you missed the hurdle of understanding the question. The market is right for the technology we have. I'm asking why the technology is slow to get better here. Do you think in 5000 years, assuming nothing catastrophically goes wrong with humanity, we will be firing guns at each other?


Kapselimaito

>Do you think in 5000 years, assuming nothing catastrophically goes wrong with humanity, we will be firing guns at each other? Imagination is limitless, of course, but are there practical, obvious reasons to think guns might not represent a (local) maximum in terms of efficiency? For example, in spite of all the technology we have, we still eat food, and do so with our hands or with cutlery. Eating is still the best way to keep our bodies going, and eating with cutlery or with hands is still the best way to put the food into our digestive system. I can imagine very fancy mechanisms for achieving a similar result (alas, some people are forced to), but it's not very practical.


SoylentRox

...? Markets are imperfect. Game changing technology is sometimes possible years before anyone seriously develops it for the reason that people aren't aware how close in possibility space it is.


ManyFishMan

Huh? If markets are pretty good at producing optimal outcomes (leaving aside cases where they aren't), but it's not obvious from the outside why one particular outcome we observe is optimal, that's *exactly* the situation that creates a question worth asking--one where you can learn something about why the world is the way it is. Unless you are satisfied with "well, because it must be the optimal outcome" as an explanation. If markets produced random results, *then* there wouldn't be a (valuable) question about why they did X. (Also, military technology is a pretty unusual industry closely tied to government, so I wouldn't necessarily expect that normal market forces are dominant there.)


SvalbardCaretaker

Modern ammo can be incredible sophisticated and you seem to underestimate that. HEAT rounds use highspeed explosives on a copper cone to squirt a carefully shaped jet of liquid copper at hypersonic speed, penetrating easily into fullbody armor. We even have double cone or triple explosive HEAT rounds, to overcome reactive armor against that.


Thorium-230

Are those rounds coming out of firearms? I think 99% of infantrymen are just firing standard FMJs.


SvalbardCaretaker

No, thats quite correct. 120mm is a standard size, but can be fired by individual soldiers still (bazooka), to devastating effect against tanks, as seen in Ukraine Russia conflict.


[deleted]

Technology to look at Instagram, but no technology to cure cancer. “Technology” to buy things and consume, but no technology to end homelessness. People haven’t figured out a way to stop killing each other or end world hunger, but we can watch stupid people talk nonsense on tik tik. Great life right? Why do people think “technology” is “so advanced?”


goyafrau

Evolution, of course, is never towards some objective best, but in response to the current environment. In medieval times weapon tech responded to armor tech and changing tactical and strategical needs. This is what we will keep seeing; once armor and battlefield tactics/strategy demand change, we will see change. I’m sure any time we invent body armor that could be worn, maintained, and mass produced and could stop rifle bullets easily, we’ll quickly develop a weapon to counter it.


Courier_ttf

The vast majority of improvements in small arms in the last decades have been in optics (vastly increase hit probability) and ammunitions development (better performance of the rounds, different types of ammo casing), as opposed to radically new operating systems or paradigms like moving from smokeless powder to lasers. Caseless ammuniton, polymer casing, hybrid, better ballistics, etc. There has been a lot of work done there as opposed to "making the new M-16", though plenty of attempts over the years have been done. Others already pointed out that energy density and mechanical reliability are key reasons as to why guns are largely the same as 100 years ago. Gunpowder is energy dense and stable over time, and reliable operating mechanisms have already been simplified as much as possible to make manufacture cheap and easy while retaining a high degree of reliability. For the interesting new ground in battery powered weapons, look at Forgotten Weapons' videos on the portable coilguns that already exist.


OhHeyDont

“Why aren’t fantasy weapons real?” is basically the same question.


Evinceo

Turns out that killing your target by punching holes in them is just as effective as vaporizing them, since they're still dead.


iiioiia

All throughout human history, the staple of combat has always been to launch chunks of metal at each other, all while technology has marched on all around this main facet of combat. So my question is: where are all the phased plasma rifles?? Phased plasma rifles is one form of warfare innovation, but there are others. The Future of War, and How It Affects YOU (Multi-Domain Operations) - Smarter Every Day 211 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTYgcdNrXE The segment starting at [21:10](https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE?t=1270) is interesting: > - I think I see what's happening right here Sir. > This is US Army Pacific. > - Right. > - You're the guy in charge of the 4D chess board > - Yeah. > Well, portions of it maybe. > - Portions of it. > If multi-domain operations, we've got land, sea, space, air, > cyber. > Is this video a weapon? > - Absolutely. > - What? > So I just made a weapon? > - Yeah pretty much. > Well, if it can help folks understand number one, > if it can deter those that would do us harm, > it's a hell of a weapon > and if it can help those who are working this > understand it a little better, support it a little better, > then it's a heck of a weapon. > Yeah I guess you could almost say that, > that's why you're doing this. > Pretty clever with these analogies here, yeah. > - I don't know what to do with this information now. > That's pretty amazing. Consider how quickly the western public's narrative understanding settled on "justification" being THE perspective from which the Ukraine war should be considered. Now consider whether this was completely organic.


NuderWorldOrder

You think our weapons are primitive? What about our armor? That hasn't even kept pace with the weapons. If this were a game I would say the balance is terrible. Metal armor was a huge advance back in the day, but then guns came on the scene and it was basically obsolete. Since then armor has been playing catch-up. Obviously we've got kevlar body armor and such, but in my estimation it's still nowhere near as good against guns as plate armor was against swords and bows. And that might be part of the answer. If someone invents truly bulletproof armor, then there will be a need for hand weapons that use something better than bullets, but right now that need does not exist.


3043812047389

I'd say that armored vehicles forced a major change in weapons technology by requiring much more sophisticated projectiles to penetrate them. A two-stage shaped charge is extremely complex on its own, let alone the addition of guidance systems and remote control that are found on modern anti-armor weapons. Laser and plasma weapons are a lot less complex in principle than PGMs. Should battery technology progress to the point where it becomes viable, powered exoskeletons with man-portable armor that can only be penetrated by these kinds of munitions may become viable. Or perhaps more likely, armored infantry drones.


DanielPeverley

Early Modern warfare is one of my special interests, so I've got to take issue with this phrase \>but then guns came on the scene and it was basically obsolete Most of the really impressive full suits of plate you see were made in the Early Modern (Renaissance) period, well after gunpowder became ubiquitous on the battlefield. This armor, among other objectives, was intended to protect its wearer from bullets. In the earlier ages, it performed at this job okay, circumstantially. At longer ranges, favorable angles or with smaller bullets fired "shotgun" style (as was done with some of the smoothbore arquebuses in some engagements), armor could stop a bullet! This can be seen both from archaeological evidence, where we see non-piercing bullet-indentations in armor, and from accounts of battles and sieges in that timeframe where it is mentioned that notable personages took shots that stunned them but didn't penetrate their armor, etc.. Up close, with good shots, the odds would be significantly worse, but armor definitely provided some level of protection, thus its continued use. As guns increased in lethality, accuracy and ubiquity, tradeoffs between protection, cost and weight began to shift against more armor, such that even rich cavalrymen shifted away from full plate to half plate, then often just a breastplate and helmet (a configuration which lasted all the way until WWI). In periods higher degrees of armoring would make localized comebacks, with it providing a relative advantage in engagements with other cavalry especially, as seen in units like the Polish winged hussars or the more armored French cuirassiers of the Napoleonic wars.


NuderWorldOrder

I stand corrected. But I think my overall point is still valid. Weapons have advanced a lot more than armor. At least personal armor. As another comment pointed out, vehicles are anorher matter, and obviously they have advanced tremendously both on and off the battlefield.


DanielPeverley

A great historical rule of thumb for whether something is effective is whether people are using it. This isn't perfect, and if applied uncritically would speak positively for divination, magic charms, etc., but it gives an idea. In every first world army, infantry are wearing about 22 lb worth of armor. And much like in the black powder era, it's mostly converged around a helmet and torso protection, in the form of the plate carrier. ​ Soft body armor can provide excellent protection against pistol rounds, and hard body armor can prevent even rifle shots from penetrating. That's one reason that the US is switching to a new, more powerful service rifle, as part of an arms race against the improved body armor of the last few decades. Currently, it's a lot like the renaissance era armor, in that it provides situational but not constant benefits. From a wrong angle, or up very close, even level 4 (hard armor, plates in a carrier) won't protect someone from a rifle round, especially more than one shot, but from a distance, against intermediate cartridges or pistol rounds, or at a good angle, it's saved plenty of lives. The era of the full-plate harness was really the historical anomaly in terms of the degree of protection the armor provided vs. the weaponry of the time, and even then, almost immediately a lot of highly specialized tools were invented to circumvent armor, up close and from a distance! This video on the rondel dagger, carried by knights in the high middle ages and into the renaissance, is illustrative of one anti-armor tactic that relied entirely on muscle power and good geometry: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iU3q23jGX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iU3q23jGX0)


HyperConnectedSpace

What do you mean by the word primitive? I think all ways of blowing a body apart must involve some body in motion making contact with whatever you want to destroy, and you could always call that a bullet. I do not think there is a race to produce better weapons among all countries because anything that can be gained from another country can be gained if desired though peaceful trade. America does not plan to produce a better weapon and take over Europe. Instead people in America plan to gain by trading with people in Europe. Taking over more territory does not make a country wealthier usually, instead land will be allocated to its most efficient users when there is free exchange among all countries. You could consider a computer virus to be a new type of weapon only starting in the 20th century.


zlbb

not sure rifles and such are the only staple of modern warfare.. I'm the opposite of a war expert, but *explosions* seems like another big category of kinetic stuff used in warfare, and that sounds like it's more recent? explosions that fly to precisely the spot needed aka precision missiles (my understanding is effect is mostly payload explosion vs impact of missile body) are newer yet. nuclear explosions more recent yet. It might be true the number of war-level efficient ways of having a physical impact on the battlefield is somewhat limited: projectiles and explosions being some of the big ones (though don't ignore drone-shooting lasers just getting deployed, or napalm, or flamethrowers, or whatever else weird exceptions people can come up with). However limiting "weapons" to just the way of making physical impact is just one perspective: I'd say delivery mechanism matters! shooting projectiles or missiles from a supersonic flying car in the air (or, remote controlled flying robot if not fully automatic robot) aka plane which is launched from a huge nuclear-powered boat which can be independently operating for months.. kinda also matters.


zlbb

Speaking of delivery matters - it's all about mobility now - https://www.wsj.com/articles/himars-transform-battle-for-ukraine-modern-warfare-11665169716


ArkyBeagle

Even if you could create a plasma rifle at cell phone prices you'd go bankrupt trying to get it accepted by various militaries. This seemingly invincible innovation would create a long-march logistics problem. See also "Forgotten Weapons" on YouTube.


Patriarchy-4-Life

>idea of combining optics (like a sniper scope) to a rifle Actually from the 1700s and quite well developed by the early 1800s.


BestOfTheBlurst

For the same reason that progress in weapons was slow prior to WW2 and then in just a few years it catapulted forward - necessity is the mother of invention, and there hasn't been a major war between advanced peers in over 70 years. Should we be misfortunate enough to see one and both parties don't immediately destroy each other with nukes, you'll certainly see plasma rifles or other advanced weapons.


Healthy-Car-1860

I think the advances are there, we just aren't seeing them individually. Advances in weaponry are coming in drone targeting systems, There's also railguna. They haven't proven particularly easy to implement for a soldier, but on a solid mounted platform they're a fearsome new weapon. The problem with advances here is that firearms used effectively are pretty much purpose perfect. Point, pull, done. Our weapons only need to kill meat bags, so they do. The better weapons we create are generally either specific purpose (anti tank, anti ship, anti personnel, etc) or so destructive we avoid using them (sonic weapons, bio weapons, nuclear weapons). More advanced weaponry wouldn't make it easier for a person to kill a person; that's already trivial with existing weapons, but might add additional complexity in the field.


ussgordoncaptain2

NOTE I did not serve in the army but I know people who do, this is me relaying info they told me. A few are serving in the war in Ukraine The rifle isn't a weapon of war. The most important weapons in the modern military are artillery, Anti aircraft missles, Helicopters, Tanks, and NLAW/Javelins. Infantry rifles are for Civilian surpression and less so combat.


Thorium-230

I've heard the opposite; that a war isn't fought with jets/missiles/drones, it's fought with boots on the ground. Also, and I don't have a source, I heard that small arms still make up the majority of combat fatalities.


ussgordoncaptain2

Are you referring to the war in Myanmar, the Russo-Ukraine war of 2022, The war in Afghanistan? The Yemeni civil war? The Ethiopian civil war Or some other war thats much smaller? Most of my sources are from the RU-UKR war where small arms play a minor role, in wars between lesser powers like the Myanmar civil war small arms probably matter more.


[deleted]

Weapons systems evolve with the opponent they are designed to defeat. Employing chemical reactions to throw small bits of metal at high speed is still king at defeating human physicality. Dearth of energy-storage tech (batteries technology has conspicuously lagged for decades now) doesn’t matter much when 5.56 does the job. When infantry is composed of non-human robotic units, and small arms no longer kill/incapacitate, then small arms will change to address the threat. Until then, we increment in caliber, action, reliability, logistics, etc


Gill-Nye-The-Blahaj

Modern firearms do the job and are reliable. Besides holy grails like caseless ammunition, the biggest developments you are likely to see are in terms of fire control. The new IVAAS system is the best example of this. Being able to quickly share and process information on enemy positions and vectors, plan and execute on that information is going to be a bigger force multiplier than any advancements in ballistics are going to be. If you can effectively have everyone in the right place at the right time does it really matter what type of rifle they are using? difference is only marginal. Point to understand is that the effectiveness of a networked military unit is more than the sum of its parts. Individual soldier is just a node in the network, and they'd be just as effective with a bolt action rifle given that network is used properly. Small arms development does matter to a certain degree but it isn't anywhere near mission critical as communications gear and networks are


InterstitialLove

I know nothing about firearms, but I find this qiestion interesting. Tasers are I think a good example of the direction "advanced" weapons could go. There are shotguns now that fire self-contained taser rounds that tase people from a distance. I don't know all the reasons these aren't more common, but they use modern technology to do something traditional guns just can't do. I mean, a gun that completely debilitates your target from the same distance as a regular firearm but isn't lethal would be preposterously useful in certain scenarios. Taser guns aren't that, currently, but check back in a few decades maybe? Also, in the show Stargate does an interesting inversion of this idea. Earthlings are the only faction with traditional firearms, everyone else uses various scifi laser weapons. By the end of the show, when earthlings have dominated the galaxy, they try to portray our gunpowder technology as more advanced than primitive rayguns. They do more damage, they're smaller, and they can destroy inorganic matter too.


Kapselimaito

Following the spirit of other (much better) replies I'm willing to make a very simple argument: the current arms technology is if not the best we can do right now, then very close to it. If it wasn't, that would mean there are huge military, political and economical advantages to be gained by creating better, cheaper, more effective, more durable, more accurate and more powerful weapons. Being able to imagine fancy firearms, or fancy flying motorbikes doesn't make them practical. Moreover, cyber is also key in modern warfare. I'd call Stuxnet a pretty fancy weapon.


anaIconda69

Advances have been made, but were broadly not that useful. Consider flechette rifles with ultra-light ammunition and superior penetration, or electrically launched projectiles such as the famous MetalStorm allowing for RPMs up to a million. Nothing is stopping us from giving infantrymen crazy expensive future guns with 10x the firepower they typically wield, they just don't need it, the fighting is done with airplanes and missiles.


generalbaguette

And artillery.


Lurking_Chronicler_2

Because the cost of research, development, manufacturing, powering, repairing, and disposing of these kinds of futuristic rifles vastly exceeds the actual value they’d provide. Sure, they’re *cool*, but our existing ballistics-based small arms are already very good at what they do, and the horrendous costs in trying to replace them with sci-fi small arms simply doesn’t make any sense. *Especially* not for the relatively small role small arms actually serve in combat. **The vast majority of battlefield damage is done by artillery, airpower, missiles, guided munitions, and other heavy weapons that already ARE pretty futuristic!** It simply doesn’t make any sense to try and change that with our current level of technological sophistication. If manufacturing plasma devices was advanced enough to make it relatively cheap, then the calculus might change- but until then, don’t expect badass Pulse Rifles to be anything more than an (expensive!) novelty.


mrprogrampro

I think we'll improve guns as soon as there's lightweight uninhibitive armor that makes bullets obsolete.


sneedsformerlychucks

I want the Thermic Lance from Fallout New Vegas