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Originally posted by Mark:
...replaced by a type of Solenoid that uses an EM pulse to throw the bullet. Although it would still require a whole bunch of those high precision components... Although maybe less than a laser.

This is one model of gun that would be of no use in Vacuum or in explosive atmospheres... I am very surprised we haven't seen more use of non-lethal weapons by the Alliance... At the moment such research is going strong, so how come the big "A" has decided to stick with guns? Why aren't we seeing more bowel-relaxer guns, or stick-foam sprays, fast acting tranquilliser darts or trained bacteria?

Oh, by the way Hobbes... If you've read 1633 (And I presume 1632) Have you read any of David Weber's Honor Harrington series? If not then you absolutely MUST!!!! Think of it as Firefly with a budget of millions and a lot more warships.

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Originally posted by EricBall:
My $0.02

Personal energy weapons are impossible simply because there is no way to pack sufficient energy into a small enough space without a matter/anti-matter reaction. (For the only reasonable SF alternative see David Drake's Hammer's Slammers.) A gun has the benefit that a single well-aimed bullet is just as lethal as an entire 30 round magazine.

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Although the original VO referred to moons, that would cause signficant barriers to trade due to different orbital periods. Can you imagine trade in an environment where the travel time changes continuously? Inter-stellar travel means the intra-stellar distances are insignificant.

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Originally posted by Thegn:

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Originally posted by Mark:
I saw it on a rerun of Tomorrows World a few years ago... It was a rerun of stuff that had happened in the past century and we're only talking small rocks being shattered here, but still. They had one of the presenters standing in the desert in the US taking pot-shots at pebbles on the gound and there were little puffs of smole going up as the things fractured.

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Oh, that makes more sense. Yeah, you can do that with a laser. The sudden increase in temperature causes water in porous rocks to expand rapidly and crack the rock, especially if that laser is tuned to the resonance frequencies of water. I'm sure it appeared much more powerful then it really was, but it doesn’t take a particularly powerful laser to do that.

There are some pretty powerful lasers which will come into use pretty soon as military weapons. But they won't do the kinds of things that people seem to think they will. An example of a lasers use on the battlefield is targeting income artillery shells and exploding them before they impact. This, as you can imagine, is particularly useful. But also you see that it doesn't require the kinds of destructive power that sci-fi has come to associate with lasers. All it must do is punch through the skin of the artillery shell and excite the explosive. We always assume that lasers are more destructive then they really are, which is why there seems to be so many pro-laser weapon people in the sci-fi realm, but the reality is that lasers simply are not that destructive. That's not to say that a laser can't deliver a extraordinary amount of power, but when that energy is localized in a thin beam it's destructive power is diminished. When it comes to killing people or destroying buildings, it's far more efficient to drop a bomb on the target then to surgically slice it into little pieces. A laser principle advantage over a missile or bullet is when surgical accuracy is paramount over destructiveness, as in targeting incoming artillery shells.

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Originally posted by xenobob:
I'm pretty certain that weapon (and the blue-hands angents' weapons) are sonic based. It certainly seems that way.

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Agree about lasers too. People were seriously predicting through much of the 20th century that one day we would all have flying cars. Today the idea is laughable. Despite the fact that the military has been investigating the technology since at least the 1960s, a hand-held laser type personal weapon will surely prove to be just as impractical, if not impossible. Furthermore, even if they did finally come up with one someday, it will be NOTHING like what we've seen in science fiction. For one thing, bright beams of light or pulses of energy shooting out of your weapon toward your target may look way cool on a TV show or in a video game, but on a real battlefield it would be an EXTREME LIABILITY. Soldiers generally tend not to want to give away their position to the enemy.

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Originally posted by Mark:

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Agree about lasers too. People were seriously predicting through much of the 20th century that one day we would all have flying cars. Today the idea is laughable. Despite the fact that the military has been investigating the technology since at least the 1960s, a hand-held laser type personal weapon will surely prove to be just as impractical, if not impossible. Furthermore, even if they did finally come up with one someday, it will be NOTHING like what we've seen in science fiction. For one thing, bright beams of light or pulses of energy shooting out of your weapon toward your target may look way cool on a TV show or in a video game, but on a real battlefield it would be an EXTREME LIABILITY. Soldiers generally tend not to want to give away their position to the enemy.

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You would never have beams of light or pulses coming out of the weapon to give your position away to the enemy... You only get a visible beam if the beam scatters and that is precisely what you design a laser NOT to do. In actual fact, guns give away your position (With muzzle flash and report) more than a laser would, but then we're getting back to the whole thing I said before about anti-laser aerosol vapour and pulse ionisation tazers. Such a tazer, which seems to be what was used in arial, wouldn't need more than a fraction of the power used by a killing laser, as it doesn't have to even burn a person, just ionise the air.

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Exactly. a real laser wouldn't be anything like like they're usually depicted in sci-fi TV/movies. (For that matter, the way convential guns are depicted by Hollywood is highly unrealistic as well.) Regardless, even a realistic laser is unlikely ever to become a hand weapon, even in the future, which I think we're all agreed on? I haven't read everything on this thread.

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Sonic guns or tazers? Well honestly I'm really in over my head here, so maybe I should just shut up and let the experts talk about this stuff.

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Originally posted by xenobob:
I personally think railguns show a lot of promise.This means that reallistically, a hand-held laser weapon would look more like a big flashlight.

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They can dump enough energy into an object to make it actually explode.

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Originally posted by Enderspawn:
Wrong! In aliens they used a modified M16 or something modern (not the thompson). That's why the magazine is wide enough to look like it holds rifle bullets.

Otherwise your comments are totally supported here, the case made the gun look so much cooler and futuristic.

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Originally posted by xenobob:
Here's some more info about lasers for ya:
Weather gets in their way. All lasers have limited ranges in an atmosphere.
Smoke and fog will block them, and rain or snow will degrade them.

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Some frequencies of light cannot penetrate atmospheres at all.

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Originally posted by Enderspawn:
WHoops! I meant the OTHER movie with pulse rifles...looks like I dropped the ball there.

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Originally posted by whatnow:
You speak about a power system being necessary for light or optic weapons. If you took a magnifying lens and placed it between the sun and your hand what happens?

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Originally posted by Mark:
There is one possibility... Perhaps... that might explain how to have a multiple shot laser in a portable unit.

Flash-bulbs. Ultra powerful ones... In the early days of lasers, when they were being developed, rather than using electricity to excite the emitter element, they used the sequenced detonation of flash-bulbs.

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Originally posted by Mark:
I think the guy who wrote those stories (David Drake) was in Vietman but maybe he encountered flash-bulb lasers later in life?

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As for "flash bulb" lasers, the idea has been around for years. Problem is, the flash bulb is a nuclear explosion.

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Originally posted by Mark:
[BI'm talking about miniaturising the elements of an old flash-initiated laser. this certainly does not require a nuke!

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I suspect the energy would better be used to launch a projectile, rather than initiate a laser pulse. The interface would eat up much of the energy.

Jeff
Who suspects kinetic energy weapons will be around a long time.

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