you know it almost sounds like drake's powerguns. hellish if it hits a person but as likely to expend its energy on a pane of glass in the way.

-If the weapon is rifled, the round might disintegrate midair. 10000 fps is fast, and it would have a correspondingly high rpm. Dial down the rifling to 1 in 20 or 40? -Sonic disruption could be minimized with a silencer and a properly designed round to limit or negate sonic boom. -Recoil probably wouldn't be too bad, since KE goes up by the sqare but momentum is linear, a 10000 fps round would have about 3x the kick of an M16, which is minimal. Since the round is buring a liquid propellant, perhaps the acceleration would be more even and the recoil distributed over a longer time than with a conventional powder charge.

the silencer thing won't work. first off the silencer that can cope with that kind of velocity probably needs a wheelbarrow to lug it around. more importantly silencers work by slowing the bullet below the speed of sound which defeats the purpose of all that velocity in the first place. perhaps you meant suppressor instead?

Piper's exact wording was (as best as I can remember) "a small pistol, rather heavier than it looked, firing .20 caliber bullets at ten thousand foot-seconds. The effect of such a bulet hitting a person was usually instataneously fatal, even with a hit on an arm or leg." I'm assuming that he meant that the shock-trauma caused by the bullet's impact/fragmentation effect was great enough to cause the cardiovascular system to fail, or even cause the CNS to shut down. I concur with andyf on the limited range, which actualy would be a good thing in a sidearm, especially for CTW work. As an addendum, in Col. Jeff Cooper's seminal work "Cooper on Handguns", in commenting on the prevalence of body armor, he stated, quote, "in the future, gas-operation might allow us to have a sidearm which would fire a very small, very hard, and very sharp-nosed bullet at three times the sped of sound or more. This would be able to burn through any level of body armor an opponent would be able to carry and move in, and yet deliver decisive stopping power by means of hydrostatic shock. Such a development seems a long way off at this time." (1973, that is.) Even though we now know that hydrostatic shock per se. doesn't really exist, it still seems that Cooper was thinking along lines similar to Piper. One modern weapon that could (in time) develop along these lines is the FN Five-SeveN pistol in 5.6 x 33mm- but it needs more MV to get there..

The M40A1 Pulse Rife from Aliens would be the most realistic in my opinion, being operationally similar to the German G-11, and the grenade launcher (in the movie it worked like any other but if it were made in real life it would probebly be like the OICW's grenade launcher).

>>easy. m41-a pulse rifle, from Aliens. hell the us military are trying to build and field it now << Life imitating art, or art imitating life?

it seems you can make a bullet to penetrate armour well but doesn't do that much to the person wearing the armour or a bullet that will shred the person but cannot penetrate the armour. off hand the best kind of round i can think of would be a hardnosed explosive round. bullet is really too small to carry enough of an explosive load to do much to a person but if you used the little bang to flip out forward facing fins on the back of the bullet. do the fins right and it spins aggressively turning a one inch diameter chunk of a person into ground meat. should allow much more efficient transfer of KE to the victim than existing bullets.

>>off hand the best kind of round i can think of would be a hardnosed explosive round. bullet is really too small to carry enough of an explosive load to do much to a person but if you used the little bang to flip out forward facing fins on the back of the bullet. do the fins right and it spins aggressively turning a one inch diameter chunk of a person into ground meat. should allow much more efficient transfer of KE to the victim than existing bullets. << Just use your HE to ensure bullet fragmentation. No need to mess around with fins and corkscrewing, just have the thing catastrophically fail as soon as it penetrates armor. Alternately design the front half to penetrate armor and the rear to fail by, say, putting longitudinal fault lines down the length of the bullet or something, so that the back end flies apart as soon as the bullet yaws much. Deliberately enhancing the cannelure weakness along the same lines as the M193 5.56mm round would work well also. Most anything the serves to tumble the bullet and scatter fragments is good.

Why not make a bullet have a small shaped charge blast through the armor. After the explosive has detonated and created a passage into the armor, the round wouold effectivly become a hollow point.

the effectiveness of a shaped charge is proportionate to the diameter of the charge. bullets are pretty tiny for a useful charge.