Bingo. Any laser that would have enough energy to, say, burn a hole straight through someone would dump that energy into tissue in a small fraction of a second. Superheated steam from the fluids would expand quite rapidly (probably producing more bang for your volume of solid than standard gunpowder) making a real mess. Cleanup in an enclosed space like a building or ship would probably involve more firehose and wet-dry vac than stretcher and shovel.
For Star Wars tech, the Technical Commentaries probably feature way more detail than you’d ever want to know.
Sorry for the double post, but after looking for a while, I finally found a site that I saw long ago that had a metric tonne of information and theories about lightsabers, Robert Brown’s now defunct web page.
So apparently a plasma weapon would essentially be similar in concept to a plasma arc welder with much longer range. The trick being to project the hot ionized gas some distance.
IIRC the “blasters” from Star Wars and weapons from shows like Farscape would technically be plasma weapons not lasers. They shoot some kind of charged gas held in place by some kind of force field, not a steady beam or photons (laser) or particles (particle beam).
Not sure what the watts/cc’s of boiled water ratio is but theres gotta be a doper that can pull that out off the top of their head. I do know the expansion ratio of water to steam is something like 1400:1 at atmospheric pressure. Flashboil a couple CC’s of water in someones tissues…its gonna leave a mark.
See my post #5 above… there’s considerable doubt that the one test of the idea even produced any lasing at all, much less something with the capacity to be a weapon. It’s an idea that is a theorhetical possibility that an X-ray laser could be produced. We don’t really have any evidence that the idea works at this point.
I’m totally with you on sci-fi authors adjusting the size of weaponry to make it convenient, though.
I had not previously heard of this work. Off the top of my head, I’d say that the most likely explanation is some sort of electromagnetic interference, not a gravitational effect: EM is so much stronger than gravity, that even a very small electromagnetic effect could easily mask a very large gravitational effect (that is, small compared to typical EM effects, and large compared to typical gravitational effects). The effect described in the article also bears a striking resemblence to the thouroughly discredited “lifter” ideas. But I’ll have to look a bit closer at this.
I’ve always though James Cameron got it right with his very reality derived projectile-based (i.e. bullets) weapons in Aliens. They weren’t just a fanboy kitbash, but based on a lot of solid concepts, primarily the advantages of caseless ammo such as:
[ul]
[li]extremely high rate of fire with less heat buildup[/li][li]much lighter ammunition[/li][li]semi-sealed breeches to improve reliability[/li][li]electronic detonation vs. mechanical (fewer moving parts)[/li][/ul]
One of the most awesome aspects of the new Battlestar Galactica is that their fighters aren’t armed with goofy orange lasers but nuke-tipped guided missles and, even better, good old fashioned machine guns!
Because if you think about it, barring the existance of any kind of force fields (which are still highly improbable) there’s no real reason advanced projectile weapons wouldn’t be just as effective as energy based ones.
Sort of makes me think of the movies of the British and their single shot carbines trying to fight off the natives and their mass spear/arrow volleys…
Well there is the fact that an energy weapons beam travels many orders of magnitude faster than any projectile. This would be important considering the speeds and distances at whcih space based warships or fighters would engage each other.
has a muzzle velocity of just under 1km per second. Even with no drag in space, two ships engageing each other from 10-20 km apart, it would take 10-20 seconds for the bullets to reach their target. A particle beam armed ship could theoretically vaporize the bullets before they even reach their target.
Energy weapons would have the advantage of not needing ammo. Ammo is heavy and takes up space and you can run out of it. If you had some reliable power source (ala a fusion reactor [if they existed]) on board your ship that will run for years then you can fire you energy weapons pretty much as much as you’d like. No need for reloads, no wear and tear on the weapon, no worry about a lucky shot detonating your ammo magazine, all that storage space freed for other uses…energy weapons could be handy.
Plasma weapons … hmm. SF critic and former weapons physicist David Langford mentioned charged particle beams …
(This is from Langford’s convention talk “Fun With Senseless Violence”, reprinted in The Silence of the Langford. He discusses a wide range of SF weapons, and, incidentally, provides full instructions for building a lethal cold ray.)
Wouldn’t the ideal weapon depend on the circumstances involved and the kind of defenses likely to be in use? There doesn’t have to be one single uberweapon for all situations.
But speaking of defenses, what are some conceivable ways of defending against laser weapons? Would mirrors provide any protection, or at least reflect/deflect enough of the beam to make the weapon a hazard for the shooter as well? I’m imagining a future battlefield where infantry carry handheld laser rifles and wear suits covered with miniprisms… a glancing beam gets diffused and reflected; nobody dies, but a dozen soldiers get permanently blinded, heh.
On the other hand, I imagine lasers would be great for assassinations on unarmored/unshielded targets, no? If the beam is not in the visible frequency, the shooter would get an instant, invisible shot and leave no evidence 'cept a burning hole in the victim or a bloody mess. Would there be a smoke trail of any sort where the air got vaporized? Would there be a thunder-like sound?
Imagine UAVs with good cameras and powerful laser weapons… they could hover around silently overhead, and the moment they identify a human target, it dies. Or, in the (further, hopefully) future, the gov could keep tabs on the whereabouts of every citizen and instantly de-citizenize any offender with a nice overhead laser blast from orbiting satellites – and the guy next to him won’t notice anything 'cept a strangely familiar charred smell.
What I’ve heard about anti-missle lasers is that they don’t work very well. Air isn’t completely transparent, and in particular moisture and pollution can suck energy out of the laser beam. On a ship, surrounded by constant ocean spray, a laser is pretty much useless. Even under ideal conditions (like in a desert) the “window” to destroy an incoming missle is very small. Much less than a minute.
Also, in regards to lasers, are there currently portable units powerful enough to blind people? If human eyes are sensitive enough, maybe the power requirement wouldn’t be so great?
That’d be a very interesting incapacitation weapon… maybe for politically-driven attacks? Hmm. Press conferences and other political events could become dangerous if cameramen could bring modified laser-videocameras with them and attack the speaker’s eyesight. The camera would be the perfect disguise for a weapon – it could still work as a camera, only firing the laser when a hidden trigger is activated. They’d get a built-in viewfinder/scope, an excuse to aim directly at the target, an excuse to have a big power source (either a battery or a wall/van connection)… one bright flash of invisible light and the victim might never see again and the authorities may never find the one responsible cameraman out of 20 or 30. Blinding someone wouldn’t kill them, obviously, but it could do a lot to hurt their effectiveness and morale, to say the least. Or, hell, they could blackmail celebrities – who make a living by appearing on camera – with the threat of blindness unless they pay up before the next premiere/conference/party/whatever. Imagine a whole new kind of paparazzi. Scary.
Let us not forget the “sun ray” dreamed up by E. E. Smith. Using a set of specially build “asteriods”–orbiting energy units–he channels the entire output of the sun into a particle beam. Great for repelling those attacking space fleets.
In the Hymn Before Battle series they talk about projectile weapons that can accelerate ‘bullets’ to relativistic speeds (.5c). How would (or could) you accelerate a projectile to those kinds of speeds (I think they were using some kind of antimatter accelerant, or perhaps it was magnetic…don’t recall now)…and what would it do to the projectile if you did that in the atmosphere?
