Are there long range tranquilizer guns with a telescopic scope? If so, how long range are they?

I ask because:
(1) The characer (Abillus) wishes to assassinate his brother-in-law.
(2) Abillus cannot use his "magic" abilities, it would be like lighting a match in a dark room for a thousand miles around.
(3) Abillus wants to leave no evidence. If he used a normal long-range firearm, it would be a mess to clean up, and thus leave evidence.
(4) Abillus cannot sneak up on his brother-in-law.

Projectiles exist on a spectrum. At one extreme you have a rock--you throw the rock at something, it travels in a noticeable arc into the air and down to the target. At the other extreme is a high-powered rifle. The bullet from the rifle travels in a 'flat line' from the muzzle to the target. (Techincally, both the rock and the rifle bullet travel in parabolic arcs. Both the rock and the bullet experience the same downward pull of gravity, and both fall at the same rate. But the rock has much less horizontal velocity than the bullet. The net result is that the bullet's flight path looks flat, while the rock arcs).

A tranquilizer dart will be closer to a rock than a bullet. Giving your technology all of the benefit of the doubt, I would guess you have an effective range of maybe 100 yards, give or take. And at that distance, your shooter has to be a heck of a shot and will be aiming a couple of inches over the head of the target to account for the drop.

Is noise a factor? Whether your tranquilizer gun is pneumatic or a firearm will factor into its range. An air-powered gun is quieter, and can provide significant power. You could also use a lighter (and hence flatter-flying and easier to aim) dart in an airgun. But your range would be 40-70 yards at most. If the target was wearing any kind of armor or leather, there would be a signifiicant chance of deflection.

A gunpowder-thrown dart would have greater range, but would make much more noise, require a heavier dart, and have more of a softball-like arc. Harder to aim, but a better chance of penetration on impact.

Your character could hire a couple of thugs to kill his brother, then shoot the thugs at close range with a tranq pistol (none of the worries of deflection or velocity there) and hack into their unconscious bodies a little with his brother's sword. Put the sword back into brother's hand, and voila! No murder investigation.

There is a house in the middle of acres and acres of woods. It's private Preatorian grounds (a secret society), three are guarding it, one of which is his brother in law.

He waits in hiding until the other two leave the grounds, and then makes his move.

<Is noise a factor?>
Since the others have left, and he counts on that happening, it's not a factor. No armor.

<Your character could hire a couple of thugs to kill his brother>

The BB would leave a tiny entrance wound and no exit wound. The brother-in-law would probably think he had been stung by a wasp.

(I once long ago shot someone in the leg at that range with a BB gun. He thought he had been stung by a bee).

If not, you could use a Macbeth approach. Victim trusts his killer and therefore lets him approach, unconcerned. Killer takes advantage and...

No sneaking required

You might also consider a crossbow or compound bow. It's been a while since I was involved in archery circles so I'm not sure of the distances you could reach, but I think they might work for your situation. They are silent and accurate in the right hands. You could use a fiber-optic sighting system (trés chic!). Also, far less messy than a rifle.

Once the brother-in-law is down, or dead, bring along an indiginous, carnivorous animal to make it look like a mauling. When the body is found it would look like a terrible accident.

Or, make sure that there are plenty of small gravel pieces with sharp edges in the mix (flint or chert). Soak them in poison first, and smack him with the poisoned-gravel filled iceball. Or mix the poison into the water before you freeze it. If you're lucky he'll get scratched by the flint as the iceball disintegrates upon impact, and then the poison enters the wound as ice shards and melts there. You'd have to hit him on exposed skin that is not soft. That means the head. I'd aim for the ear.

Better be a good shot, though. I don't care what people's claims are, I wouldn't believe a shot from more than about 50 yards, if that much, even for an expert marksman.

Anyway, you don't seem to really need a tranquilizer gun at all, since the main objective is to kill. You simply don't want a big mess.

So use a normal 5.56 long range sniper rifle with special ammunition. A tungsten bullet with your non-organic poison of choice.

Indeed, he wants to assassintate the man's character as well, by spreading back-channel gossip that his brother-in-law abondoned his post and went rogue.

<Are the Praetorian grounds partly graveled?>
There's a worn path where a automobile can access the house. But it's mostly woods.

Then when the other two guards leave, b-i-l wanders over to the edge of the woods to relieve himself. That brings him close enough to Abillus to be assasinated without leaving a trace.

Actually, if it's a laxative he will be less likely to just turn and face the wall to do his business; it would force him to seek a more discreet location.

Or specially trained spiders (or bees)that follow the guy's scent and attack en masse?

quote:

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<It calls for a trap.>

The problem with the trap scenerio is that it could kill the other two, whom he does not want dead. Just his brother-in-law.

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Well then, how about poisoned sherbet in his favorite flavor?

quote:

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The problem with the trap scenerio is that it could kill the other two, whom he does not want dead. Just his brother-in-law.

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But you said Abillus had a tranquilizer. I wasn't suggesting a trap to kill the victim, I was suggesting a trap to administer the tranquilizer. The worst that could happen is the wrong person gets tranquilized once or twice before the right person gets caught. While a competent Abillus ought to be able to avoid that situation, if he is incompetent (or unlucky) it could give you a funny scene.

If you don't mind reducing your effective range a bit, you could use something more like a .22 rifle (or even the new .177), those have reasonable ranges. And the pellet gun angle isn't to be overlooked, a pellet fired from a hand pumped air rifle can have a muzzle velocity of over 900 fps, which is plenty for delivering toxin to an unarmored target at a hundred yards. The problem is that you said that this guy couldn't just sneak up on the target, so I thought getting inside of a hundred yards might be difficult for him.

Depending on the level of non-magical technology you have available, your guy could use an auto-stabilizing micro-rocket with any of several toxin vector warheads. But at that level of technology, I doubt he could beat the forensics team.

If you use a smaller military round (5.56 or 7.62), you solve one problem--the mess. These rounds are far more likely to splinter in the body. The chance of a gaping exit wound is still significant, but not certain. I get the impression that a 50/50 chance of leaving a lot of evidence isn't acceptable for your character. Another problem, as mentioned above, is that there is no room for error with the shot.

On the other hand, if you use a non-deforming bullet (tungsten), your assassin stands a pretty significant chance of wounding, but not killing, b-i-l. The tungsten bullet will make a hole right through him, but it won't cause the same degree of trauma to his insides on the way through as other bullets. A tungsten bullet presents some evidentiary advantages, but at the cost of even less certainty of killing the target.

You could, as Survivor suggested, poison the tungsten slug. This still leaves you with two problems. 1) Rifles aren't easily suppressed. You'll make some noise firing.
2) B-I-L will have at least one, and probably 2 holes in his body. These holes will bleed. If B-I-L falls down (say because of the poison) and just lays there, blood will pool pretty quickly. 3) Poison delivery. The bullet will pass through the target so quickly that there won't be much time for the poison to rub off. I've seen much slower slugs than the ones we're discussing here pass through a deer without getting bloody.
If you use a hollow-point tungsten to hold the poison (maybe covering the hollow with wax), you solve the delivery problem. But at the cost of significantly raising the probability of a gaping exit wound.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that your first instinct--that you wouldn't be able to use a firearm to get the job done--was probably right.

[This message has been edited by J (edited December 08, 2004).]

Silencing the round is probably a concern as well. A 5.56 doesn't silence all that easily, so perhaps .177 is your best bet. Better range and accuracy than a .22, but easier to silence. Also, you could use a hollow point deformable round and not have too great a risk of producing an exit wound, particularly if you went for a chest shot. That still might bleed a bit more than you'd want, so a special super deformable toxin delivery dart might be the better approach.

At some point, though, you do begin to run into the "invisible internet monitors" problem. Researching and aquiring highly specialized weapons can be a rather conspicuous activity, not the sort of thing that jibes well with having a high profile close relative simply disappear. I think that I concurr with J that this can't be easily done with off-the-shelf equipment. And if it could, then that would be the first thing investigators would suspect, eh? Heck, if you could do it off-the-shelf, the security arrangements should probably be designed to protect against it.

I think that you'll need to look more at something "dual use" in nature, which isn't terribly exotic to your chosen setting. A tranquilizer/toxin gun doesn't cut it, I don't think. A recreational drug (legal or not), on the other hand, might work well.

He is supposed to be in Italy at the time, so he has that covered. If nobody suspects foul play, nobody would search for CSI like accuracy at the scene. I hope by him putting few shovel fulls into a bag would eliminate most of the evidence.

Here's a fragment, I know the writing needs to be clean up, but does this sound credible?

“Go ahead, yuppy, open it.” The primitive pointed to the ebony case that rested on the table. Abillus snapped it open, and lifted the lid. “A beaut, ain’t it?”

“Perhaps...” Abillus examined the telescopic scope, its long sleek barrel. “If it performs to my liking.”

1) Consider a different poison. Cyanide is an asphyxant; it works by crowding oxygen out of your red blood cells. It kills you by suffocating you on a cellular level. This takes more time than you probably want. Also, even though he'll be technically suffocating, b-i-l will have plenty of air to scream about the hole you put in him. I agree with Survivor that a nerve toxin is probably your best choice.

2) If you're getting super-custom gear, consider a hollow bullet filled with poison and sealed with wax, designed to fragment after impact. Delivering more poison will help it act faster, and this will make the 'no exit wound' claim more credible

3) If you want your rifle to sound super-custom, there are a few gadgets you can give it.
a) thick, heavy barrel for better control.
b) Jewell trigger. This is a trigger than can be adusted to fire with less than three pounds of pull ("hair trigger")
c) Set-off trigger. This is a second trigger. When you pull it, it doesn't fire the gun. Instead, it reduces the pull on the firing trigger down to a soft breath.
d) Bipod

Here are a couple of pictures of custom (or customizable) rifles:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/1318/WA2000.html

http://world.guns.ru/sniper/sn10-e.htm

http://world.guns.ru/sniper/sn05-e.htm

Wow. I guess this is why some stick to swords, they're simple enough.

What kind of nerve toxin?

<Would it help if the bees were actually Juvenile Mutant Ninja Robot Killer Bees?>
Only if they come from the Delta Quadrant.

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If you're going with a gun, could he make his own bullets? I'm thinking of a CSI episode, this guy made bullets out of frozen ground beef. There was an entrance wound but no exit wound and no bullet...but Grisham finally figured it out

The beef could be poisoned and you could also use the hollow point poison delivery system.

Ordinarily. But we are dealing with a secret society. They wouldn't call in outside investigators. Too, it's a period of great disruption. They have many things to investigate.

It would be preferable if you gave a more detailed account of exactly what the character is attempting to achieve and why something as clumsy as killing the other character is neccesary. Also if there is known animosity between them, the character disappearing may actually cause more problems than it eliminates.

What sort of magic could be used mundanely without attracting undue attention?

Could you use magic to freeze water extra hard, maybe making it heat resistant, temporarilly, without garnering too much attention? The good old ice bullet is very effect and you can use a large calibre.

If a broken window is not a problem then using a 20mm grenade launcher loaded with some sort of a sleep agent or some such would be just as effective. Your going to be breaking a window anyway and a gas grenade is far less discriminating on where it is placed.

All of those approaches are very brute force and as a reader I would not find them very interesting. It would be far more interesting if you could come up with a way to do it using the magic of the world in a way that did not attract attention OR a VERY simple method, like the poisoned needle in the shoe.

Well, the whole purpose of this secret society is to prevent unauthorized use of this so-called "magic". Whenever it is used, it sends emanations along the continuum. It would be like lighting a match in a dark room. Abillus could, but would not want to bring that kind of attention.

Senus is acting as one of these monitors [monitors also act as guard to portals to another plane]. The other two assist, but go to investigate just such a distirbance. It leaves Senus by himself. There is no material but air between Abillus and him. Its wooded, but not that thickly wooded.

I believe there is "magic" enough elsewhere, to offset a killing by mundane means.

If you fire it on a parabolic arc as an indirect fire weapon it has an effective range of around 350-400 meters.

I think that if Abillus isn't going to use magic and is going to involve a third party for things like aquiring the weapon and so forth, then a hired killer is his best bet.

The biggest problem will be figuring out how to make it a clean kill, since any investigation will most likely immediately target him. It is very difficult to kill someone that you have a known motive for killing and getting away with it. How you perform the assassination is important, but making sure that the character get away with it is equally important. That is assuming you want the character to get away with it.

Poison, in gas form or otherwise, is going to be the easiest, so long as the body is disposed of afterwords. The problem being that most poison that will kill quickly (under a minute) are not very hardy when subjected to heat, cold, etc. The poison that do survive well are generally heavilly regulated.

Yep. Doing so would lessen the impact of having him do it himself. Also a paid assassin adds another character, and it would have to be outside thier secret society, and jepordize thier secrets.

Or how about a two part poison? Slip him the first part beforehand, but it is harmless until a second ingredient is introduced into the body.

If you do the homework, you will find that most “quiet” killings take place with suppressed 22 caliber pistols at short range. Think of innovative ways to get rid of the evidence trail. The most effective being an iron-clad alibi! Even if you manage to kill him from a distance, you still have to approach the body to dispose of it. Luring him away from his post is probably the most effective tactic for that.

If not, here is another idea.

If you turn on a flashlight in a dark room, the source is obvious. Turn on a flashlight in a lighted room and it will probably go unnoticed.

They can differentiate different phenomena and the power of it, depending of the frequency and overtones of the wave. But they can't tell who the individual is.

They have multiple monitors, scattered every five hundred miles or so. Therefore they can triangulate the position of the disturbance also.

The problem is, this is near a portal, which leads to the Plane of Preatoria. They are very touchy about the portals for fear of a rogue intrusion. To locate even a small emanation that close to a portal site would invoke a knee jerk reaction.