Your laser pointer puts out something like 1mW in power. Certainly less than 5mW. That’s 5/1000 of a watt. The types of lasers we’re talking about here are in the megawatt range. Better bring a few truckloads of watch batteries…
Battery technology doesn’t cut it for these kinds of lasers, because the power has to be available instantly, and the internal resistance of batteries limits how much current they can provide. So you’d have to charge up a big mother of a capacitor or something to make that power available.
If you could pack that much energy into a pack that a person could carry around, you’d revolutionize the auto industry, for one thing. And your laptop could run for a few decades on a charge.
D-cells are worthwhile to power a flashlight, not to burn through three inches of skin and kevlar in less than a second (and that’s just for a direct burn to the heart, not for going through an arm-side-lung which a .223 round can). Regardless of the total energy they pack, they can’t deliver it quickly enough to be useful for this kind of laser, and that speed is a pretty fundamental limit on batteries. You could move to capacitors (which can discharge quickly), but they’re very dangerous to you if they break and after your shot you’d have to wait for batteries to recharge them before your next shot instead of firing as often as you pull the trigger. Also, IIRC, capacitors tend to be pretty bulky, and the ones that would work for this application are not all that field-durable.
So, in addition to developing the laser rifle, you need to develop a very impressive power source for it, hence the comment about not being able to use D-cells. There’s no real point in working on that sort of laser until power storage technology is better, and there’s plenty of research on that for both commercial and military ventures. Also, to be competitive with a rifle you’ve really got to get the power storage so that storing ammunition for your laser is only about as had as storing ammunition for an M-16; a laser that takes a backback to power it isn’t a good rifle replacement.
Also, when it comes down to it, what’s the benefit of the laser rifle going to be? Even if you were able to make a laser rifle that solved all of these problems and was as good as an M-16, without a compelling advantage the army would have no reason to switch over to it.
Okay, first lets take a look of the chance of hitting somebody’s head or some vital organ. It is really not very high. Besides, if you can shoot like that, what is the point of using a laser rifle instead of using a slug-thrower?
Another thing why a slug thrower is better is because bullets cause more damage. When a bullet hit a person, it may bounce around inside. Even if it doesn’t, it still makes a bigger exit hole than the entry hole. A bullet doesn’t cauterise bleeding, so that causes further damage to a person.
Your laser rifle punches a neat hole in somebody’s arm whilst his bullet causes massive bleeding in your stomach.
Okay, people have shown that we cant use the laser part of the thingie to kill enemy soldiers but why cant we use the tracking part. Why cant we get guns that auto aim themselves onto any living thing thats within a 10 degree cone of where its pointing?
For the same reason that mines are a no-no these days. If you can’t distinguish between bad guys and a group of local nuns taking the orphans to an air raid shelter, forget about it.
A friend and I once designed a system that combined a pop-up machine gun, motion sensors, camera, and some other stuff during a call for “replacement for mines” ideas. It would let a single soldier sit in a friendly area a couple miles away and be able to visually cover a large area to distinguish between combatants and non (a requirement). There was quite a bit of interest, but since you still had a guy dedicated to that, and the cost of the system, maintenance, training, spare parts and such, the bean counters reasoned that you could have the same results with a guy holding a machine gun and a radio to call in mortars. Privates are expendable and cheap.
I’m sorry ** Urban Ranger ** Maybe I wasn’t very clear in my last response to your comment. You responded with…
The point I thought I made was that having your body otherwise rearranged by some external force, be that a laser, a rifle or a pit bull is not going to be any picnic. The question was not, which is better, guns or lasers - the question was - why not hand held lasers? Now I know why not,
we don’t have sufficient technology at this point to make a powerful enough battery system that is portable, in a nut shell. I am (as you) of the belief that a rifle would be a far better choice at this point. What I had in mind was something that would literally cut things up,
Instantly burn a good size hole right through the brush, tank shell and soldier all at one time -POOF-!(yes, yes, I know, my wife thinks I watch to much science fiction too) Well, I also see It ain’t gonna happen any time soon - bummer.
From ** jonnyb **
Believe it or not, I actually thought of this, as well as smoke on the battle field, seems it would kill the whole party, and we all would be back to mechanical weapons, like ** Urban Ranger ** says, why bother.
I don’t think mirrors would do much good - the mirror would also make the ‘protected’ target all shiny and very easy to pick out for other weapons. Also, any laser rifle would be releasing so much energy so quickly that it would probably just burn through any mirror you could use like that - minor imperfections in the mirror would absorb enough energy to burn through it, and any dirt on the mirror wouldn’t be reflective and so would heat up the reflective parts. And this doesn’t even hit the difficulty of keeping some kind of mirrored armor shiny while crawling through mud etc.
Although this seems like a valid point, I am going to have to disagree and say that the hypothetical laser rifle could do far more damage than a bullet.
I think the fault is in assuming that it is a pulse weapon rather than one that can emit a constant beam. If the beam is powerful to punch a hole in somebody within a fraction of a second, then it is powerful enough to slice somebody in half. The hypothetical weapon would be more akin to blade weapons than balistic ones - just with a lot longer range. The idea would not be to hit your opponent directly when you pulled the trigger, but to sweep the beam across him and carve him like a turkey. Sure the wounds are cauterized by the intense heat, but that doesn’t help him much when he is in two or more pieces.
There are plenty of other drawbacks of course, I just don’t think the “neat, cauterized hole” is one of them.
A point, by the way: If this laser beam is just causing thin cauterized holes, a head shot probably wouldn’t be too serious. Completely destroying a small portion of the brain has much less effect than does shaking the whole thing up a bit.
And no matter how powerful your laser is, it does need some nonzero dwell time, which makes it difficult to slice through targets. If I have a millimeter-wide beam which only requires a tenth of a second of dwell time, then my target might not react in time to avoid getting a millimeter-sized hole in him. But after a full second, that beam has only cut across a single centimeter: Hardly a deadly injury.
I wasn’t talking about automated sentry gun things. I was aying why can we get RIFLES which have auto aiming thingies on them. the human is still in chare of te aiming and firing, the rifle just does the fine tuning.
This is exactly what I was talking about above, when I was describing how the hypothetical weapon could “cut things”. I (obviously) couldn’t have put it any better myself.
::Janx hands president Beebelbrox a Pan Galactic::
Janx
Whole different ball of wax. The lasers used in redirecting the beam are specially designed to reflect the light of that particular laser optimally, are inside of some kind of sealed chamber or otherwise protected from the elements, are inside of a casing or otherwise protected from impacts, and don’t have to flex and move the way mirrors on body armor would need to. Trying to make some kind of body armor, shield, or vehicle armor has a completely different set of requirements than mirrors internal to the laser weapon.
And for the cutting people in half bit, have you looked at the power requirements for that sort of weapon? Gonna be just a little difficult to feed that kind of energy to a weapon with a building available, much less something man-portable.