Subject: How to murder someone in space?
Author:
Posted on: 2019-07-11 06:37:00 UTC

Since there was just a long discussion of this in the chat for some reason, I thought I'd port it over to a thread here.

Points that have been raised include:
- Guns are pretty impractical in space for various reasons, including recoil and heat dissipation
- If you're on a space station instead, you have the problem of breaking the station, which leads to a lot more murder than intended. (This led to Maslab pointing out that air marshals are some of the best handgun marksmen in the world, since they don't want to shoot a hole in the plane.)
- Missiles don't have most of the problems of guns and are good space weaponry
- Lasers can be useful for some things, like (and this is actually being proposed and might work) clearing trash out of orbit
- On space stations that actually exist these days, you do need to deal with the problem that launches have extremely strict weight limits and are very itemized, so guns are out even if you wanted to try that, and you'll want to use something that plausibly needs to be on a space station
- Therefore (even in the sci-fi future), knives are a very good option
- Even plastic ones, which can be sharpened quite well apparently (thanks Maslab, again)
- Strangling someone with some rope-like thing is also a good choice
- A ceramic toothbrush that's also a shiv got proposed at some point to dodge inspection's awkward questions
- There's also various forms of "tragic accident" - holes in spacesuits or such - that someone could probably arrange

I probably missed some important points, but I thought I'd summarize the talk onto here, so people could speculate more about orbital murder because it's a fun topic (apparently).

- Tomash

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