By “lasers used in movies”, I mean the kind in Star Wars and all those other sci-fi movies, tv shows and games that go “pew pew”, are bright colors and move faster than most vehicles but still several orders of magnitude slower than light.
I do not mean this question to restrict itself to what is being done now but rather to the much broader category of what might be possible.
Could heating gas until it turns into plasma and shooting that resemble movie-style lasers if used in a vacuum so that it doesn’t disperse?
Keep in mind that while the term “laser” is occasionally used in Star Wars material, this is an inexact term, as they are usually referred to as “blaster” weapons. They might be some kind of particle beam, or something else entirely, but this solves the “slower than light” and “arbitrary maximum range” problem.
Oddly enough, blaster beams’ speed scales with their amplitude, so you will always see them traverse your field of view in about half a second, whether it’s in a room or in the depths of space.
Some things to note (with respect to the handgun blasters) :
Those beams travel fairly slowly, much slower than a rifle bullet (perhaps with approximately the same speed as an ordinary pistol bullet, say 500 m/s).
Apart from killing / stunning people, they seem to do no damage to materials (this is, indeed, a somewhat desirable trait for a weapon to be used inside a spaceship).
The beams emit light in all directions.
I don’t see how a heated gas could be prevented from dispersing when blown through an atmosphere. This would require some kind of force to keep the beam together.
What would most resemble those beams might be a short burst of some rather viscous, heavy, luminiscent fluid, pumped out through a nozzle at high pressure.
Unfortunately, we never see the weapons realoded. That might have given further clues!
There isn’t anything, really.
Lasers themselves are reaching the point of being effective portable weapons, but even the best of them is still relatively inefficient, and would have to dispose of a lot of waste heat rapidly. A hand-held laser weapon would have to be limited to short bursts, and might still get pretty hot. And I shudder to think of the large amounts of power that would be stored in its tiny battery/supercapacitor/power plant/what have you. Those old episodes of Star Trek where they set the phasers to self-destruct look like the most likely thing about them.
Nikola Tesla’s “death ray” was really a “particle” weapon, in which the particles weren’t ions or subatomic particles, but tiny blobs of molten metal that he proposed accelerating through large electromagnetic fields to very high speeds and shooting at his targets. That might be the closest thing to your scenario. Arthur C. Clarke used something similar in his novel Earthlight, and has a character remark about how much it looks like depictions of ray guns. But I don’t know how feasible the idea is, and suspect it wouldn’t work very well in atmosphere (Clarke’s story had it being used on the Moon). What we today call “particle beams” tend to spread out because of the identical charges of the particles pushing them apart. Neutral particle beams are hard to focus, they’re all slowed by atmosphere, and they also tend to be large and requiring high energy inputs and cooling water.
Back in the 20s and 30s about three dozen people claimed to have invented “death rays” of some sort or other. I suspect most of them were never even built. A lot of them only produced sparks or fire, and might have been directed microwaves or ultrasound or something. I suspect that even the ones that did something still didn’t look or act like lasers or “ray guns”
Various flavors of projectiles at massive velocities will create visible atmospheric effects. Having sufficient power to drive something to that kind of velocity is the challenge.
Effective for blinding, maybe, but to be an effective general-purpose weapon, you need to deposit more energy in your target than in the shooter. Is there any laser which can even come close to that?
It seems to me that a particle beam weapon might resemble the Star Wars blaster. DARPA has been working on this kind of thing for decades and they haven’t solved the engineering challenges yet to make it useful and/or cost effective. But if all you want is to build something that goes pew pew and puts a smoking hole in the wall and you don’t mind spending billions of dollars to do it, then a particle beam is your best bet.
But then again, if you’re willing to spend billions of dollars, why not (1) shoot the person with an ordinary bullet, (2) capture the event on video tape (3) use special effects magic to retroactively put in the pew pew light beam stuff, then (4) bribe and/or brainwash all the witnesses to swear that what’s shown on the video is the way it actually happened, and (5) have any uncooperative witnesses suffer an unfortunate “accident”. I bet you could pull all that off for less than a billion dollars if there’s fewer than a dozen witnesses.
Refinement on my question: I should have added that I mean in the atmosphere or outside it. In my question, it’s quite fine if the Star Wars blaster-like weapon is only useable in space, even if it doesn’t go “pew pew”.
DARPA is working on a real world version named MAHEM (and I wonder how long it took for them to come up with that acronym). It uses explosives to power the magnetic fields that launches the molten metal though, not the reusable fixed accelerator in the novel.
Answered in number #6. Tracer rounds. Look at some WWII air combat footage. Tracers were required to facilitate aiming in air combat and came in a rainbow of colours. The Millennium Falcon turrets were directly inspired by (Bofors?) AA cannon.
They would work as well in space (or better) than almost anything else depicted in Star Wars
While we’re talking about tech that may come off in the near future, in aeronautics, there are a number of teams, including at DARPA, that are using surface plasmas as a means to decrease drag and turbulence. Not only could it lead to faster, more efficient planes, but finally they’ll start to look 21st century-ish.
My zero knowledge of ballistics or physics in general, tells me that if you could have a plasma layer ahead of a bullet, it could go faster and/or further, and would leave a flash of light in its wake.
Actually, I built a completely practical working blaster just a few years ago, but it was, unfortunately, completely noiseless.
Trying to add field-reliable speakers (and the extra power) to make it go “pew pew pew” when fired killed the whole project. But whaddaya gonna do? Nobody would believe (or buy) a SILENT blaster.
railgun type weaponry? The current that blasts the projectile out also heats it up. In Quake 3 or Half Life 2 or something there was a gun like this, and they portrayed it projectile as a red-hot rod that gets shot out
No, but potentially a projectile that’s constantly shooting out air in front of it and around it may reduce the drag of the atmosphere. They do this with torpedos*, but that’s to move the water out of the way, which is much denser. I dunno if the same concept would also apply to solid-in-air travel, and if it did I’d bet it’s a much weaker force
*or at least tried. Supposedly if you do this you can get the torpedo to go like 100 mph, which is amazing for anything travelling through water
to keep the beam together.