Humanity Is Using The Stupidest Weapon I've Ever Seen | A Short Sci-Fi Story | HFY Stories 

This is a terribly gullible view of alien thoughts on defense and offense.

Was this written by some hippie that never left safety?

So you believe that on many planets many species would evolve but defense from predators is some novel complex? You suck at this.

This is the dumbest alien I’ve ever heard.

@@sketchtherapy1218 I mean, maybe. But it also seems to be written from the point of view of a somewhat ignorant alien, so it makes sense either way.

Well humans started out throwing rocks and are still throwing stuff just something bigger.

That's the equivalent of the _"alright, just hear me out"_ guy. Like _"really really fast"_

@@linkbond08When you throw rock at a percentage of C, it doesn't matter its just a rock.

Anything is a weapon with enough velocity!

That's really been our strategy from the getgo. Humans be good at throwing stuff... Like really really good.

Somewhere out there is a species with 7 thumbs on each hand due to a very long period of evolution that involved firearms.

lol... I see what you did there....

They did say "relatively".

that round was Bubba´d to insane levels, i still get goosebumps watching that video especially when the rounds leading up to it leave a huge muzzle flash and are way louder

Maybe bullets are their greek fire, something they stopped using so far in the past that no one remembers how it works

@@seivernoname-tz9uh : We may not know exactly what the recipe for Greek fire was, but I have one word for you: napalm. Conceptually we don’t have a problem understanding things from the past. It’s just that the specifics of how they were accomplished are sometimes lost to us. In order for this analogy to be apt, it would be as though we couldn’t grasp the concept that a burning liquid could be shot out of a hose a hundred feet. That would be just as silly as not understanding that bullets can fly fast.

Yeah, simple concept really: move something fast enough to have sufficient kinetic energy to pierce the intended target. There is zero reason an intelligent species capable of FTL (haha) would fail to understand this simple concept. There is zero reason an intelligent species would doubt that an object could be propelled to such high speeds; they have FTL travel after all, right? I strongly doubt any space-faring species would have skipped the developmental step of moving vehicles through space at high speed to escape gravity wells. Orbital velocity for the earth is far, FAR in excess of the speed of a bullet fired from a handgun. The speed of Earth in its orbit about the sun is even greater still. Propelling a tiny object to speeds in excess that of sound through earth's atmosphere is trivial. Speaking of the speed of sound: this speed varies depending on the medium through which the pressure waves travel. The author of this story didn't take this into consideration. Speaking of weaponry on spacecraft: if your massive craft is oriented such that your primary armament can't be brought to bear against an attacker, just send out a few puffs from your main thruster; the output of an interstellar ship's main drive will DWARF anything a stupid rifle or Phalanx-style point defense weapon might emit. Also note that, in the absence of atmosphere, projectile-based kinematic "point defense" systems would have INCREDIBLE range. Evasion at very long distance would be easy; close in, however... well... in space, there's no medium through which a craft can easily redirect momentum, which means maneuverability is likely to be very limited, so that hail storm of DU is going to riddle a landing craft like a tin can in rather quick order. SMH.

@@warpedweirdo Agree, the concepts here are as if FTL was discovered tomorrow and the aliens never had solid rocket boosters in their pre-FTL days (People, If I have to explain that relationship of SRB to Projectile Guns you wont get it anyway I am sure the person I am responding to GETS IT COMPLETELY) I have found the Sci-fi stories that have human's using "projectile weapons" for niche things (like grapeshot to penetrate shields due to the lower velocity) and then follow up with futuristic weapons much easier to keep the "reality of the moment" set aside

Think of halo. The aliens were given plasma weapons before they stopped using swords and bows. So naturally they would only have bows to compare kinetic weapons to.

One HFY classic has multiple kinds of FTL, including hyperspace teleportation to FTL comms beacons. One of the uses of a miniaturized beacon is as a breaching charge. On-mission, each beacon is keyed to the Naval shipyards at Norfolk. The beacon basically has the classic claymore "This Side Towards Enemy" logo, but instead of exploding, it opens a wormhole to the barrel of a large artillery canon microseconds after it was remotely fired. I _think_ the plan was to use explosive rounds until such time as hypervelocity railguns can be completed and tied into the system.

​@@bearnaff9387 behold humanity has every time of gun and travel as well. they have bullets that have ftl engines built into them(C+ rounds), they have bullets that phase out of this reality just long enough to bypass enemy shields and armor and detonate inside the core of the ship. they have slipstream, warp gates, wormhole travel, rewind drives, ftl, hyperspace bands (like 100 different levels of that, some of which are deadly to certain species), there is deadspace, hellspace, red space, mat trans, and others i cant remember right now... its the best story I have ever read. you just have to get passed the goofy first chapter and the very odd way he starts the story. its like a collection of interesting stories that begins to becomes something amazing

Such a good series. I have literally shown it to all my friends...what cracked me up is how each of us had favorite parts based on our respective fandoms. Me with the mechs and bolo tanks, them with the horror, Star Trek, Star Wars...etc!!!

@@shawnadams1460 i loved everything about it. the fact that its a divine inspiration from god, delivered by lightning, through the prophet Ralts Bloodthorne, is beside the point im buying every book as they come out even though Ive read it twice over already.

@@oldnotweak Totally fine with sci-fi having weird bits in it. Deathworlders is a great series and the fact that the transhuman space marines are all these gung-ho meta-alpha guys who tend to flop over each other when watch TV like a pile of puppies can't really take away from that. Hell, I can read Heinlein being Heinlein and only have to shake my head ruefully and smirk at the book. Sci-fi is full of things that would probably have been better not committed to verse.

The Indianapolis was a Heavy Cruiser, crew of about 1200 if I recall. Torpedoed by the sub, she sank with minimal loss of life. Then the sharks came.

A WWII battleship will be named after a state.

"because they werent supposed to be out there in the first place no one in the fleet knee where they were" Nope. The ship's exact position was not known and she was not known to be missing until she was overdue. The ship was maintaining radio silence due to the secrecy of the mission. Most of the sailors were lost due to exposure (hypothermia) and dehydration.

Ever looked into a sharks eyes?

"Luckily for them this was after they had delivered the payload" It really was. Because of Little Boy's design, if it had been flooded with seawater, it could have acted as a moderator causing a criticality event. It wouldn't have been a nuclear detonation, more like the incidents with the so called "Demon Core", but with no way to stop it.

Maxim 42: "They'll never expect this" means "I want to try something stupid" Maxim 43: If its stupid but it works, its still stupid and you are lucky.

"What works isn't stupid, at worst it's inefficient."

Cum

The Navy will periodically reassign names, that said I would MUCH rather meet the US military aboard a ship named USS Indianapolis, rather than aboard one named USS Wisconsin.

Or USS New Jersey, Missouri, Texas, any of the old battlewagons. I damn well would not want to meet one on the IJN Yamato, IJN Musashi, KMS Bismarck, KMS Tirpitz. If I did and knew something of their history, I would run.

uss liberty would have been more accurate.

@@FirstIsathe uss Wisconsin is a Iowa class battle ship and it has harder hitting cannons than the Yamato

@@karal_the_crazy thank you but I'm well aware of what Big Whiskey was/is.

What if.... Their attempts at kinetic weapons used plastics or ceramics because metal was rare on their planet, forcing the use of polymers? This would have limited how much of an explosion could be used so their projectiles never reached enough velocity to be lethal. And instead of thrust, engines were designed for gravity manipulation or spatial displacement? If battery technology was developed heavily first, the species may not have ever invented the internal combustion engine. It's an amazingly complex piece of engineering in its own right that can be made 100% mechanically that runs on what was once considered a waste product.

IF using our industrial revolution as an example I agree there are gaps but our path via the industrial revolution thru to vehicles, weaponry all the way to space travel is very specific to raw materials available on earth, scientific discovery and other impacts like our gravity that shape our choices etc. Other species may be older, have less or more raw materials, have a different evolutionary path, gravity considerations. Exciting to think of the possibilities that are only limited by our ability to imagine.

It's definitely contrived for the HFY element, but there's a lot of reasons you could think up for a species to completely avoid certain technological paths we followed or figure out how to advance paths we reached a dead end in. Earth is quite unique in having both fossil fuels and an atmosphere that supports the steady chemical reaction of fire. A civilization working without those will be biased against advancing in the direction of derivative technologies like controlled combustion and metal smelting. In the opposite direction, it's hard to imagine technologies we might be skipping over because we have no real world references for completely alternate tech trees, but if you assume the more fanciful tech used in the story (FTL travel, gravity manipulation, etc.) is actually possible and something we could achieve in the next couple centuries, a species bypassing chemical propulsion entirely becomes more believable. The story hints at this by mentioning that ships having a front end (and thus an exhaust end) is strange, and that planets with 1G are on the extreme end for space-faring species, so less violent technologies for ascending out of gravity wells would be more viable.

It's easy to think our solutions to weapons design are obvious, but that's not the case at all. Gunpowder existed for hundreds of years, used in fireworks and rockets, before someone had the idea of packing into a barrel and using it to propel a projectile out of said barrel rather than use the gunpowder as fuel in a rocket. I'm sure the first time someone tried to sell a cannon that there were a lot of people who said it could never work. Obviously the only way to use gunpowder is in a rocket. Blowing it up behind the rocket was clearly a waste and would achieve nothing. The fact we have literally millenia of hindsight makes certain things seem obvious to us, but its just not the case. Every time a new simple invention or product comes along, like a pet rock or a Ring doorbell, someone will always say "That was so easy I could have done that!" But heres the catch- you didn't. It seems obvious in hindsight because it's simple and someone else already did it. Its easy to look at a finished puzzle and see the big picture when you aren't the one that had to put it together.

"only" lol, lmao even

The aliens live on a lower gravity world that, from the descriptions, never aparently devoloped high explosives. That is why projectile weapons made no sense, nor did thrown grinades. Human devolopment, adn warfair would have gone very differenty today if we never devoloped gunpowder, or it happened much later. Alfred Nobel was so horrified at the carnage the dynamite and other explosives he invented did that he left the foundation that hands out the Nobel Peace Prizes.

Not sure that is Valid, lots of people are VERY stupid but they still work, that does not make them "not stupid" :)

@@Realitygetreal concepts and people are two very different things. And I would add to the saying : "If it's stupid but it works -repeatedly and reliable-, it isn't stupid." say like an AK47.

right or it could work like 1 time or a million times before breaking

and dude this is like an AI story or somevthing. idk if ur comment has taken that into account but if aything at all seems right in this story it has come from an artificial source which doesnt understand what makes a good story in the real world. thats why everyrthing is weird

@danieldunlap4077 this is the whole series, read by a human ru-vid.com/group/PLeGEGF1MrdbRJ9MVLtpzFp20VxNGTVNto

agro squerrile has the whole series done as far as i know

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-QHPr-KhtTSU.htmlsi=MVYXPacNAmRPBpC1

@@skullcrsher4946Cheers

This was a series off reddit. Its pretty good.

Because The Conductor says so. 🤣

The other option for tanks to be called tanks is to call them "boilers".

Well, 'secrecy'. 'Russian' font labels on first tanks during transportation (used by combining and reversing engish one) was actually pretty readable and only a bit off.

In Russian period paper about new English weapon it was translated as "лохань' (" lokhan' " ) ie 'tub'.

@@chyronrus here I was laughing at China and its “Tanks did nothing wrong” attitude and you drop some nifty info. Thanks mate I might look that up sounds interesting

Read John Scalzi's "Year Zero". The universe is full of races that are better than humans at everything, until they hear human music. Aliens are so bad at music that when they heard human music they were so overwhelmed that large populations died in ecstasy of brain hemorrhages. That was just from the Welcome Back Kotter tv show theme music.

See this one actually makes sense as by and large throwing is a VERY rare skill in nature.

@@KingZolem The most notable exception being an irritated primate with a handful of poo.

... and the "rods from God" (Kinetic weapon of tungsten dropped from space becomes supersonic and has the energy to destroy entire cities. If I'm not mistaken, they can be more powerful than nukes, especially if you drop several of them in a wider area (to not overlap) and/or if they're very large. (If I'm not mistaken they're so massive that each one has to be launched into space individually to be installed into the satellite weapons platform).

​@@deucedeuce1572meh not so much they have about the power of a moab enough to take out a block or so not nearly enough for a city the energy is just to focused and a larger one is less efficient than standard explosives the only advantage they have is rapid deploy time in out of the way locations

@@bryantaylor948 Rods From God are poor mans orbital strikes if you already have rail guns you can just use the same tungsten rods as ammo you would just need a ferrous Sabot to accelerate it

@@bryantaylor948 ...so they spend Billions of dollars to launch each weapons into orbit... just to be able to take out the area of about a city block? I do wonder what would happen if it hit a skyscraper though (straight down from the top). Would it become more destructive like a nuke when exploded above ground or would it become less powerful, because the building would cushion the blow? (I think it would less powerful). Also... a city is made up of nothing more than "city blocks" is it not? So several/many of these could or would take out a city at the very least.

Wait until he finds out about booze...and cigarettes...and ...PornHub 😆

either that or it's AI generated, wich is the worse...

I've seen it all too often, people that have never served or perhaps never saw combat try to write detailed combat and it's just off, sometimes I swear some of them don't even know anything about firearms 🤦😮‍💨 And dear God I can't stand reading attempts at writing modern close air support and air strikes. I was an Airforce JTAC so those stories make me want to bonk my head on my desk repeatedly 😂

And who has no idea or vision about anthing. It reads like an USA military handbook and included a simpleton asking questions after each paragraph.

that's what infuriated me the most, even an extraterastial whould know about armored vehicles, and not act like it's the newest big thing. . .@@KiithNaabal

Yeah... From arming everyone onboard a ship all the time, to the space-fairing alien having little/no familiarity with high speed kinetic systems and propellants, to armored fighting vehicles being unfamiliar - it was all weird. I mean, I have read a story where that was OK - but anti-grav and FTL were sister developments like magnets and electricity. In fact, they were easier to master, but went down a development pathway that all-but precluded electromagnetism as a field of study. Electromagnetism apparently did a good job of leading us away from FTL anyway. Either way, most species inclined to go exploring and exploiting were reasonably capable at roughly the tech-level of the late 15th century in Europe. The median tech-level of the galaxy is, by our standards, pre Age-of-Sail. As one would expect, exposing sailors with unrifled muskets who expected that any species not in space was early iron age to a small National Guard force was horrifyingly educational. For them.

Exactly.

The path not taken. Necessity is the mother of invention. No necessity, no invention.

You assume too much. What if humans had never needed to build fires? Do you really think they would have ever invented projectile weapons? Different planet, different evolutionary path.

"Can I take a look at your weapon?" "Sure ... bang!"

@edhenderson1655 this is the whole series read by a human ru-vid.com/group/PLeGEGF1MrdbRJ9MVLtpzFp20VxNGTVNto

@@skullcrsher4946 Thank you very much!

What if the average alien foot is 12 inches?

@@PavewayJDAM they still won't be using inches as a measurement.

Is it text to speech? Thought I heard a "stumble" in the read back, so there might be an actual reader there. I'd like to know for sure since I too don't want to support bot channels.

Sounds pretty good to me! But now you have me listening for errors. LOL!

@@Logajam.- There have been amazing advances in text to speech engines. You have to listen carefully for words like lives pronounced Liv’s. 😊 Edit: The AI pronounced VIP as vip not V.I.P. An an unship instead of U.N. Ship. 🤓

Yeah I'm tired of the AI. I would love for more channels to cover this but I won't support AI channels unless they are reading their own original content. For now I'm sticking with Net Narrator and Agro.

@@Erin-Thor It was probably spelled vip or VIP and not V.I.P.

Well, I mean we still use a heavy machine gun created in WW1 these days. And it's still one of the most effective out there.

Just slap a nuclear reactor on that thing and boom, you have the perpetank, it just won't die.

@@1337penguinman Not quite; the M2 Browning was developed in the interwar years. It's even more crazy that we still use a late 1890s cartridge as the standard handgun cartridge for most of the world

That tank went through 3 world wars, WW3 WW4 and WW5. Its good kit.

Just means we need an FTL Abrams.

Okay, scratch my first sentence. Later on the author covers pretty much the same thing I did.

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-QHPr-KhtTSU.htmlsi=MVYXPacNAmRPBpC1 there is a play list with the rest of the story

Smokeless powder is still called gunpowder by anyone who actually buys it and reloads ammo, such as myself. Stop with the semantics. Powder makes guns go boom. Hence gunpowder.

Still have to lead the target, just don't have to account for windage and drop. And momentum is maintained out to infinity. Plus, even one hole in a space ship has potential for serious detrimental effects. Yeah, missiles and bullets will always work. I'm not so sure about all these fancy pew-pew plasma/laser/particle weapons; the energy used would be better applied to accelerating a projectile with a payload.

Plasma is ionized gas so I am unsure how this would work as a weapon unless packaged in container until impact.@@PocketBrain

"Sir, the humans fired their.. uh.. 'primitive' weapons and.. uh.." "Out with it, ensign" "Turns out the energy fields we developed to fight the (species) don't stop projectiles." "How are projectiles an issue? This ship is (half-a-mile) long?" "Their projectiles also explode." "My ship is going to be destroyed by cavemen?"

​@@PocketBrainif your using a kinetic weapon in space then a payload would be undesirable. With the velocities you'd need to get them to to be useful you'd be better off just making them solid, the extra mass will more than make up for no payload with extra kinetic energy.

​@@PocketBrainyep...I remember when watching the Expanse and the use of rail guns, all those rounds that didn't hit anything are still out there moving at lethal speeds. Somewhere down the line a ship is gonna intersect that path and ffffft! 😂

Banana mags aren't that uncommon.

@@zacheryeckard3051 Fine. SO how long would that single 45 round banana clip be then?

@@chadrowin2956 About 50% longer than a traditional double stack magazine, assuming otherwise traditional manufacture. There's also casket-type magazines which are thicker below, which wouldn't necessarily be any longer at all.