Conventional and Unconventional Weapons

My title comes at least partly from some exciting (to me) news, for which I am going to link to another blog:

http://www.mychemicalromance.com/news/

Still, it was always going to be something about weapons.

Part of the action-packed post-apocalyptic dystopian future is that there is a lot of shooting going on. In the music videos, they appear to be operating more as laser guns, with flashes of light from the muzzles and probably something like grenades coming out of the launcher. My problem was that I am not exactly sure how a laser gun would work.

This is in no way a criticism, but the videos are not particularly gory. People get shot and they go down, but I can only think of two instances where you even see burn marks on the shirt. With one of those, it is a dark shirt and he keeps moving around until he gets shot, so I can’t even swear that it wasn’t there before. Initially I thought I saw scorch marks on Frank’s stomach, but those were his tattoos, and I thought I saw a flash of red when Gerard was shot, but that was his hair.

I found a really interesting forum with people discussing the issue, and part of the problem is that a laser cuts, so you could slice through a person but you would need to keep moving the path and if it’s not impractical enough that way, it’s also that you require an enormous power source, causing big portability issues. Also, I needed the weapons to be something where you could have people building them in a basement.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/forums/reference-desk/threads/4282

The forum had some interesting thoughts on Gauss guns, but what I found most interesting was this part:

“The lasers that the various militaries are currently investigating, for use as hand-held infantry weapons do not use the actual laser beam as the weapon. Rather they use the laser to ionise a pathway through the air from the weapon to the target, then send a strong electrical current down that pathway - essentially like a wireless taser.”

We had just had an electrical storm, and I was suddenly thinking about a lightning gun where you would have a powerful surge of electricity that would split the air, hit the target, and then have a crash of thunder. Still, it’s an intriguing idea for something else, maybe, but it didn’t really seem to fit here.

I had also thought about something that I was thinking of as “pulse” technology, inspired by the solar flares that set up the catastrophic chain of events. They would function as just a pulse of energy that would temporarily disrupt the functioning of the target, but probably what works on people would not be the same as what works as vehicles, and it didn’t feel right either.

I ended up going with traditional guns and bullets, because I pretty much get how they work, especially in terms of how the injuries work, and that was very important, because there are times when I need people to be hit and live.

I also tried to be realistic about recovery times and the impact of injury. Movies and television tend to be really overly optimistic on that. I probably still have people recovering too quickly, but no one is taking two bullets, continuing to fight, and getting back on the force in time to wrap up the case. Remember, for the violence to not be gratuitous, there has to be a cost, and that goes for both physical and mental.

This is actually the first time I have had to do any weapons research since my first screenplay, and I finished that in June 2008, so clearly it’s been a while. Even then, I was just trying to figure out how soon someone would run out of bullets so that he would not be able to shoot Cristi, and the answer was not soon enough. Apparently the days of “Did he fire six shots, or only five?” are long past. It’s way too easy to be deadly now.

The other thing that was interesting though, and it goes into how you can pick up on the characters’ emotions, and I was surprised to feel their excitement about weaponry. Of course, that was not in a life and death situation, so maybe that’s why it has never felt that way before. Here it was just about getting the weapons, taking on new identities, and target shooting, and it felt pretty cool. Yeah, I don’t know where that came from.