This is America

Earlier this week I wrote about how excited I was to be picking up Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. So far I haven't been let down, but whenever I read science fiction I notice a lot of small things that bother me.

While all goofy Anime fans must have been pleased with chapter One's descriptions of the weaponry of the future, I couldn't help but roll my eyes. Supposedly this small, fashion designer gun fires its rounds at more than 5 times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane. First, you have to ask yourself, why are they still using the Blackbird?

Second, an SR-71 is designed to fly at mach 3.5. That's 3 and a half times the speed of sound, so 3.5 x 340.29 m/s = 1191.015 m/s. Now multiply that by five (about 6,000 meters per second) and you've got the speed of his tiny dart-like round.

The problem here is that it's an incredible waste of energy to make a bullet sized projectile move that fast. Consider that an M16 (not a perfect assault rifle, but the one you are most likely familiar with) fires it's round (.223 remington, or 5.56 mm depending on how you want to measure it) at about 950 meters per second. Most people would, I guess, be impressed by Stephenson's bullet moving at such a high speed.

However, the M16 was initially designed to fire at a relatively high velocity. The idea here was to make a smaller round move faster, in order to cause a substantial amount of damage down range while moving to a smaller caliber. The M16 round is small when compared to those of rifles like the AK47 (7.62 mm). So what happens when we make the round even smaller (Deliverator's tiny darts) and jack the speed up to an enormous degree?

Your weapon becomes, for the most part, useless. When moving that fast, a round wouldn't do much other than pierce a hole straight through the target. That works for extremely well placed shots- right in the brain, or the heart. However, most bullets do the majority of their damage when they funnel out (think about hollow points or dumdum rounds), or reflect around inside the target causing multiple wound channels (think about fragmenting rounds).

The baseball bat wouldn't have disintegrated, it would have had a perfect hole through it.


And as far as the samurai swords go? I can't imagine that's included for anything other than winning over Anime fanboy approval.



But anyway, that's how thoroughly I read the first two pages. Good book otherwise.