On Energy Weapons and being Cheaper, Shields are also something for being cheaper. You don't have to damage your Filming Models and can have someone talking about how badly the ship is being attacked.
17:13 it's funny that you say "good guy green, bad guy red" while showing Star Wars because it's actually the other way around. It's based on the USA using red tracer rounds, and the Soviets using green tracer rounds. Another important reason why beam/laser/energy weapons are used is because it makes either a faction or the entire setting seem futuristic. For storytelling, it works.
This reminds me of the Expanse's use of tracers on the PDCs. There is no need for tracers, the computers can track the rounds without any issues, but it makes the shots readable.
Tracers are not necessarily used for tracking. Ie, in the Pacific part of WW2, US AA guns had tracers because of the psychological effect it had on enemy piolets, essentially telling them that they need to dodge instead of attacking. Where I live, I was told that tracers are mostly used to put towards to the last few rounds in a magazine as to be an additional warning that you are about to run dry.
@@cp1cupcakeThat is how magazines are usually loaded today, as well. Every few (usually 5) lets you have a rough idea how many you have left, and the last 5 are your warning it's time to start digging in your pouches
I do have something I'd like to say about in-atmosphere particle/plasma weapons. Before I start, I would like to draw your attention to one particular natural phenomenon: lightning. Lightning quite evidently does not bleed off and certainly can strike the ground after travelling through a large amount of atmosphere, and strike the ground in a highly contained fashion. So, the way to make a particle/plasma weapon viable would be to use a 'guide laser', whose job is to create an ionised channel, along which the weapons package is delivered. Direct fire lightning.
IIRC, that's how Plasma weapons into the Terminator universe works. A laser burns a channel through the air to enables a column of plasma to travel within it to drastically increase effective range, enabling the plasma channel to travel with almost no atmospheric dispersion issues as long as plasma beam dispersion does not exit the laser generated vacumn column.
A unique type of plasma gun that appears in mass effect would be the geth plasma shotgun, though "shotgun" is a bit misleading. It's a three barreled cannon that fires balls of superconductive material at a target. On impact, the balls shatter and release a burst of energy, instantly superheating the air around it into plasma. Then there are also weapons like the arc projector, which first ionise their target, to turn them into an electricity magnet before discharging it's capacitors and hitting the target with what is essentially a lightning bold.
First, thanks for featuring Eve Online! So many forget about it. Also, the eve guys had a nice solution for plasma weapons. Putting it in a magnetic containment shell, and yeeting it with a railgun at your enemies.
Plasma canisters could probably be adjusted for space combat by rigging them with proximity fuses so moments before impact they adjust their magnetic containment field to expel all of the plasma towards to target at near contact distance. This would probably still be woefully ineffective compared to even something as simple as a HEAT warhead though.
@@andrewreynolds912 I only really know of these things from Space docks & this channel & others like it. what kinda things does he get wrong about radiators in particular as my knowledge of them is basically what he said.
Remember that the corona of a star is lasing material meaning with a set of reflectors you have a stellaser. Also the energy of a supernova can be lased for those time when you need to kill a galaxy.
Yeah, putting something in enviroment a million degrees hot with no way of radiating light sounds like a solid idea inb4 Solar parker probe it dips into corona, not stays there for years
The stowage space also plays into energy weapons on tanks. How much ammo a tank can carry is a limiting factor for historic tanks. Plus the need to ship unreal amounts of artillery rounds. Check out how many shells were shot on an average day in WWI.
@@MikhaelHausgeistwhat type of ammo does an energy weapons need? Plasma guns only need to heat the air up a bit and lasers only need to point and fire.
Other planet may not have same air composition or not have it at all. Also plasma not just heated gas - it is ionised gas in first and foremost, but it can be achieved by heating(fire basically are plasma). Also air may be not efficient source of weaponized plasma. For lasers they also need "ammo", because emitting body degrade each use. It is why laser engraving machines need to changed thier lumps time to time. Higher laser output mean higher degrade of emitting body. Those lasers which now tested in USA are chemical lasers where emitting body are liquid which pumped through it. For particle cannons it is also viable. It can have higher count of shots per volume, but anyway You need to take those particles from somewhere to accelerate. And if count that human who been hit by particle beam in parussia THROUGH HEAD live to tell about it need ridiculous amount of particles accelerated to be viable as weapon. It is not impossible, but just need a lot of energy and a lot of donor material for each shoot. So eah! Energy weapons need ammo also.
16:48 It makes sense that high power energy weapons would make all materials explode, due to the instantaneous vaporization of said material. Just like actual conventional explosives, tat are coverted from solid/liquid to extremelly hot gases almost instantaneouslly. Fireballs are not realistic, but neither are the conventional explosons in most media.
In the Honor Verse books, they take an interesting approach. They use missiles for long-range, and for "short" range, they use xasers, grasers, and masers. It is a fairly unique mix.
On the topic of plasma weapons, you can over come thearmol bloom via the zeta pinch effect. Which is the confinment of plasma via electical currents, and while there would be an upper limmit to range due to the charge needed, they would be able to be used at signifigant range. And plasma can be genertated via radio frequency breakdown, which is not power intensive compared to thermol radiation. And the range issue involved with partical weapons can be overcome through velocity alone. When electons are accelerated to ultra-reletivistic velocities, by there perspective they are expanding exponentialy as they should, but by our perspective they are being directed in a thin beam out to extreme range.
There’s a conversation between Natasha Kerensky and Phelan Kell about pulse lasers in one of the Blood of Kerensky books where she explains what these weird lasers are. Good to know someone did their homework writing that, even if BT lasers are still on the fantastical side.
@@brandonchase1533 A PPC is basically a particle accelerator. You need charged particles for that. The problem with putting particles with the same charge in a small space is, that they repel each other. So you need to neutralize the charge to prevent the particles scattering, when they leave the magnetic confinement of your "gun".
The difference between a plasma weapon and a particle beam is cohesive and funneling. Essentially the difference between a lightbulb and a Laser. Just more deadly by design.
Instead of a _Vorton Projector_ what aboot a _Vogon Projector_ - the later would fit more into the "why missles" video as it is a torpedo or whatnot that hurtles Vogons at enemies. Arguably there are two versions of the _Vogon Projector_ one of which is the missile form and the other of which fits more in the _why guns_ video as instead of the Vogon being in a missile tube and emerging alive it just hurls Vogons as blobs of flesh at enemies, the Vogon exploding into boney messy goo all over whatever it hits and drenching targets in the Vogon's internal acids (targets are effected like that dood in _Robocop_ who gets slimed with toxic waste).
Theoretically, missiles and other smart projectiles could outrange lasers even when being slower. When you start thinking about the lag you would get from target acquisition, aiming, and time to target vs target's size and manoeuvrability (ie, what would determine max range with weapons without bullet drop or having to deal with the curve of the Earth), a smart projectile, while slower, could have a longer range because it is constantly updating where it should be. I don't know how well David Weber did this in practice, but I was under the impression that its why his Honorverse series has missiles outranging energy weapons, along with basically being able to show massive missile salvos vs what is essentially the wall of flak. This doesn't even go into stuff which can make maximum range fairly irrelevant, like cloaking and ecm.
You see the reason why lasers in scifi cause everything to explode, is because they are just so comically high energy that the material they vaporize just explodes because its being seperated by heat so quickly.
Quick note about your critique about silly explosions when lasers hit something, this is actually partially realistic. When an energy beam stronger enough to slice through material instantly makes contact with a reactive substance or material, it will explode and continue to explode as the beam travels across anything containing liquid and flammable materials. Metal would just become sliced if thin enough, leaving molten edges, and synthetic materials would evaporate or disintegrate into molten goo or hot gas. People would get sliced as well, but not before the fluids in their body would violently expand into a burst. It would be extremely messy. That's why light sabers are hilarious to me. If they were accurate to physics, they would be WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more deadly than they are portrayed in the story. Holy Jesus they would be. So, cutting corners and suspending a sense of disbelief is understandable.
Plasma weapons: you might want to look into the casaba howitzer which is basically a nuclear blast concentrated into a narrow cone towards the enemy. Lasers: There is a thing called the Nicoll-Dyson beam where you use a dyson swarm to turn the sun into the galaxies biggest laser. Particle beams. Particle beams can be neutralized and or fired through a laser beam to help focussing. Also there is the concept of the UREB where an electron beam is so close to the speed of light, that time dilation takes care of the problem of all those charged particles trying to scatter. That thing can outrange most lasers.
Shedding heat in a vacuum is the elephant in the room. Any DEW, or even guns for that matter (a lesser degree if they eject spend cartridges into space) generate a lot of heat the hull has to deal with. Missiles can be soft lauched with compressed gas then ignited giving no heat problems to the firing ship.
Was in a really intense discussion about "realism" in scifi space battles. We wound up, after drinking a bit, agreeing that the way tech would develop is not in shields and energy weapons, but in developing as thick and resilient armor as possible and as powerful explosive devices as possible. Craft would have to be built in zero-g shipyards and not get close to gravity wells due to mass constraints. Fights would essentially boil down to "exhaust your supply of missiles/nukes, then proceed to ramming velocity. Breach then board."
One theory to get plasma to not disperse in an atmosphere is put it in a magnetic "sheath", basically just give it it's own temporary magnetic field like Earth except this is to keep it condensed into a ball and hold it's shape instead of expanding out and dissipating. Then you throw it really fast really hard with magnets before it wears off and losses it's shape. There's also the U.S. Air Force's prototype Plasma Railgun called Marauder which shot doughnut shaped plasma projectiles. Yes, it was a real weapon. It's current status is unkown cause they quickly withdrew it from public eye after it's first test fire. But it's projectiles had the power of 5 pounds of TNT.
A lot of why energy weapons are so used is stowage space. Even if you can lift off/on planet and push unlimited mass through super light speed, you still have a finite amount of space on a ship to stow ammo. And in most settings you do have mass limits on how much a ship can haul otherwise they wouldn't be made out of weight saving material. With energy weapons the mass of your ship remains fairly constant (reducing computing needs) and unless you burn out your systems you'll never run out of ammo.
There is a channel I watch which did a series about taking the 40k vehicles and looking at them from a realistic performance perspective. One of the things that was mentioned a lot is the energy weapon variants of vehicles are a lot better just because they never have to worry about running low on ammunition.
One game I've played that addressed the plasma dispersion was... UFO Alien Invasion, an XCOM-like. They used Space Magic Polymers to make a Plasma Bubble that gradually broke down over distance and by the time it hit the target it would pop and splash the superhot material all over the impact site.
It should be mentioned that there actually are ways that plasma weapons could be practically applied in the real world. Due to plasma's unique physical properties (low adhesion, high cohesion, and high temperature superconductance), it makes for an ideal medium in railguns. With a relatively small amount of energy, a railgun could accelerate a relatively low mass of plasma up to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. While the resulting projectile would lose energy in the form of radiation (and convection and conduction in an atmosphere), it could travel huge distances in the time it takes for it to lose enough energy to matter. This is not to mention that at those speeds, sheer inertia would help keep it from scattering, and most of the energy it would deliver to the target would be kinetic.
16:50 I watched a video of someone using a crt tv screen to focus sunlight on a rock, and it blew up due to the insanely fast heat increase. Lasers exploding things does make sense depending on the laser, but the MASSIVE explosions I've seen in some places don't make sense
Note, that while lasers have much longer range, it's debatable how effective that range is. Heat is one of the worst damage vectors to begin with, and there are a lot of strategies to counter lasers. A lot of this will come down to how powerful the lasers are and what kind of material science you have to defend against that. Definitely worth considering why they are or aren't used in any specific setting though.
@@emilsinclair4190 How so? Radiating heat away is actually more effective in vacuum. You can't use conduction or convection, which can be an issue. But any heat issues you face, the laser generating ship must also face (as lasers generate a lot of waste heat).
@philipfahy9658 depends on the efficency of the laser. The more efficent the laser the more it gets a you and not me problem. However even our current lasers with a lowish efficency can do a lot of damage. Especially since they don't create their heat that focused. You can build a a system spreading and storing the heat while building such a system for every meter of armor is impossibility
@@emilsinclair4190 You'd likely already have a way to cool the entire hull of your ship if you want it to function in space. Lasers also have to deal with angled armor, keeping on focus, needing insane power levels to actually do rapid damage and various countermeasures. It's not a useless tool, but there are a lot of drawbacks that aren't commonly brought up in sci fi.
@philipfahy9658 to a certain degree yes. The problem is that this would be equipment to provide small level of heat reduction for the entire outside. A laser only heats a small part of it. Such a system would be overwhelmed nearly imminently. Similarly small kinetics would also be useless since space already has countless small fragments. And power requirements and countermeasures exist for every weapon. Lasers have the advantage of speed.
A gamma weapon can be a "laser", but only if the gamma radiation is organized by a lasing medium. Fallout's "Gamma Gun" is neither a laser, nor a gun (A "gun" fires a solid projectile down a barrel). It is a hand-held directed energy weapon. But Gamma Gun sounds cooler. On a side note: One of my favorite sci-fi book series is Star Corps. Their weapons are pulsed lasers, which have backpack power packs and are described as emitting a "snapping" noise, no visible light, and cause explosions when they hit an enemy by vaporizing chunks of flesh or armor when they super-heat it. Pretty accurate, so long as you suspend belief about the energy density that would be actually required to be in those power packs. They also have kinetic gauss guns, and short-range plasma heavy weapons that make a roar and flash and look like they are firing lightning, which is also kinda' what a plasma weapon would do, also vaporizing things via super-heating, and my absolute favorite weapon of the series: To defeat the ultimate big bad evil alien civilization, the humans accelerate a shit-ton of SAND to near-relativistic speeds using a nuclear rocket, over many years, towards the enemy planet, then detonate a bomb spreading the sand out into a planet-sized cloud. This cloud then impacts the planet moving so fast that it results in billions of fusion detonations, turning the atmosphere into a sun-hot plasma, and melting the entire planet's surface to slag. A very scary weapon, because it would probably actually work, and we could theoretically build one of these planet-killers with our current technology.
9:00 minutes in. The principle of plasma being electromagnetically conductive is applied well in Star Wars. The Magna Guard droids and the "traitor!" Trooper use small plasma fields genersted by sheer electricity to make magnetically repellant weapons against lightsabers. In theory the UNSC from Halo could create plasma shields through giant magnetic field conductors across their hull that flash to life in order to make the plasma richochet from the ship. Fuck Im already enjoying your channel man
Also LASERs and other photon weapons are also kind short ranged because of how the photons also spread out. In a more realistic setting this makes LASERs very niche.
@scienceinsanity6927 not all pulse lasers actually wait for the gas to disperse. in fact the first pulse lasers kept at it till the gas turned to plasma and drastically reduced their effectiveness. the solution militaries across the world came up with was to weaponize the plasma that a pulse laser created. in short they found a way to use the pulse laser to tell the plasma to go boom. an it’s even adjustable, so you can use a pulse laser as a flash bang, as a frag/rocket, and… an recently we found a way to use a laser to transmit sound through this plasma. so if you have line of sight you can communicate with not just pulses beams of light but actual sound. so technically pulse lasers can also be plasma weapon hybrids. we also even designed a laser to plasmafiy the surrounding air to protect vics and infantry from blast waves.
A few fun things about lasers: 1 frequency. In some settings you can change the frequenxy of your laser so that more gets absorbed by the armor of your enemy. And sometimes this armor can also be changed to refelcy certain frequencies better. Also laser are not a long range weapon. Sounds strange at first but since they are unguided it is very rasy ro be at a distance where the only chance of hitting you is with a lucky shot
On plasma weapons... It depends on how fast the plasma is moving. If it takes (say) one second for the plasma to expand from effective to useless, but the plasma is moving at relitivistic speed, then you get to hit targets on the moon from Earth orbit. Of course if the plasma is moving at relivistic speed, it doesn't matter too much if it expands. A 'warm puff of air' moving at 0.9C is going to do terrible things to any ship it hits. Possibly even more damage than a solid round of equal mass and speed, because it's far more likely to avoid blow-through effects. Inside an atmosphere, you can (theoretically) create a vacuum tunnel using a sufficiently powerful laser(TM) which will in theory channel the plasma to the target. But the (theoretical) effect is brief, and the plasma has to be moving pretty damn fast to take advantage of it.
Some of the most original energy weapons I've seen have to be the Atzkhav and Yubarev in Star Citizen. One is a bolt action sniper rifle, the other a semi auto pistol, both are electron beam weapons, and their beams will arc into nearby secondary targets. They're basically chain lightning guns.
I imagine plasma canisters would work great in space if it was a shaped charge of sorts. Or even better, a hybrid plasma canister rail gun, with the plasma canister hurried deep within an AP round. And to be fair, a lot of sci fi has some sort of magnetic vortex or bubble which seems to be conducted/centered around the plasma itself (likely short lived, but all it needs to be), so (especially given the sun’s weird magnetism stuff) isn’t as big of a leap as it appears.
The reason why things might blow up from a laser hitting it is because it might have water trapped in it and is being flash boiled. Like a porous rock that absorbed moisture from the air on a hot humid day or rain water.
Hell, not even just weapons. Romulans use captured singularities as their ships reactors and the TG’s quest Hive Queen Quest (cool universe, and hilarious story once it gets going) use a lot of them to power ships and (intentionally or malfunction) making artificial ones with their gravity drives and hover tech.
So, I'd like to point out that Lasers are technically invisible to the human eye unless it's passing through particles. Like when you use a laser pointer at night and through mist or fog. Only reason lasers in sci-fi are visible is to show the audience where the laser was fired from and to indicate which side they are fired from. Good or bad guys.
I would add that energy weapons can be given different properties by saying it is using this particle, so it is more effective against it. Like in Star Trek, disruptors are good against armor but weak against shields, polaron beams are great against shields but weak against armor, and phasers are average in all areas. Not stronger than a type, but not weaker Though I maintain it is better if a setting uses missiles, kinetic weapons, and energy weapons for combined arms, allows for combat in multiple different ranges, and it looks pleasing overall.
Fun fact a laser beam can't actually go forever they diffuse over distance you shine a little laser from earth to the moon and by the time it gets to the moon it's way bigger then it was when it was here. Less focused means less heat which means less effect.
I dream of the ultimate weapon. A weapon shot at the enemy via a gauss cannon, that consists of a missile, tipped with a shaped fusion bomb that spears my enemies with the power of the sun!
IN the Battletech universe, lasers have no ammunition, but generate a lot of heat. Not a bad trade off, and they do good damage for weight. But the heat, my god the heat. 🤣
When you get into doomsday weapons, don't forget the C+cannons from Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series. Its a torpedo that pops in and out of light speed and strikes the target at near light speed. It weighs several tons. If you even think about the math you'll see the amount of energy released is unreal. I don't know if its as crazy as the black hole launcher, but, I'd say its in the running. Even wilder, they had screens against them. I'm guessing something that decelerates the round.
There is much newer piece of sci fi I read which had something similar. Basically, space fighter piolets realized that their chaff is really deadly at the speeds they are moving at so they start using them as weapons.
Ever since I started actually thinking about the kinds of weapons that would be used in a practical setting, I started liking energy weapons less and less... not to the point of completely disregarding any media that uses them... just not finding them particularly believable and not something I would use, were I writing a science fiction story. The main reasons I started disliking them being: 1. The amount of energy required to make them even remotely useful as weapons is ridiculously impractical - both in terms of the kind of power generation you would need to operate the projector and the size of the device itself. 2. Assuming you could get over or avoid point 1, you probably wouldn't even see a laser being fired unless there was a lot of particulate matter between the ship firing the laser and the target, so the largest benefit of lasers in visual media would, in a practical setting, be rendered obsolete. The only way you would be able to detect you were being fired upon would be by detecting an increase in hull temperature in small areas. Not exactly thrilling, visually. The only things that would really work for space combat, in a practical sense, would be missiles, railguns, or mass drivers, with the latter two being preferable, as you wouldn't need to resupply as often as long as there were asteroids around... and space is full of rocks.
1. To be honest, once you get to space weapons, a lot of what is considered practical in terms of planetary power generation go out the window. Ie, power generation is the primary reason why railguns haven't really made it out of the testing phase into actual use. 2. It really depends on the sensors you have. I wouldn't be surprised if there are not various ways to detect lasers even now. Regardless, from a realistic perspective, that would make lasers even better; since information is one of the best things to have. There is a thing in Mass Effect where the lasers on geth ships (lasers in this universe are mostly for point defense) use waves which are already invisible to the human eye.
@@cp1cupcake Re #2: Lasers travel at very nearly the speed of light. To detect something traveling at the speed of light, you would need a sensor that could detect and respond faster than light, if we're talking pre-contact detection. That's not even taking into account experiments that seem to demonstrate lasers being able to faster than light under specific conditions.
@@OuroborosChoked Even assuming that there is no possible way for lasers to be detected, like if a laser needs enough time in contact with an enemy to have any significant results, that just makes it a better weapon to have since the enemy can't detect it.
I just had a wild idea. A very powerful coil gun firing....bbs. In space it would be almost undetectable. Especially by radar/lidar/optical. But, with powerful magnets, you could get that bb to unreal velocities. You could launch them rapid fire, and because of the low mass being launched the recoil would be more manageable than heavy rail slugs.
There is another reason they pop up; generally speaking, they don't need ammo. Most other weapons are limited by ammo. Energy weapons generally don't. This is exactly why I went with energy weapons for my sci-fi universe. I wanted a world where weapons had developed past the need for ammo. Only energy weapons would fill that role. And if you think about it, if you can remove the need for ammo storage, that can be a massive amount of storage you no longer need. Just think about how much space ammo took up in WWII battleships. Now you may have energy packs for hand-held weapons, but generally speaking such weapons just need, well, energy. As long as your sci-fi power generator can provide it, you'll have weapons. A person creating a world may want that specifically like I did. For whatever reason.
Also lasers won’t keep going forever they will have diffraction which make them much less concentrated over time, the average laser beam won’t last more then a few days before becoming effectively useless as a projectile
Wait, you think that sci fi authors have any idea of how far away stuff should be while fighting in space when lasers are a thing?!?! Horror of horrors!!!
@@cp1cupcakedepends on the level of realism. There are military sci fi stories that even consider how different laser frequencies get absorbed better/worse by different armors
@@emilsinclair4190 I know, its just that sci-fi authors not understanding scale is a really common trope. Especially the ones where they basically are just writing fantasy.....in space!
On charged particle weapons... Modern (real) ion engines work the same way, and deliberately emit oposite-charge particles into the rocket exhaust. If they didn't, then the ship would accumulate an oposite charge equivolent to all energy they hasd dumped into the particle beam for its entire duration of fire. For a scifi ship firing big guns, this would probably cause problems during docking. A better approach might be to fire two beams of diametric oposite charge. If your space-plumbing is very good, you might try to merge them together so they become a neutral particle beam. Though if your space-plumbing is that good, you probably don't need to bother with electromagnetic charge to accelerate your particles.
So, not a weapon covered here, but I'd like your take on this. A player of mine in an RPG managed to combine a bit of science and a bit of magic into a cannon that summoned and launched geese at the enemy. What would that be classified as? A ballistic weapon?
Plasma weapons are still possible its just their hard and challenging to make use of but it can be done like instead of a plasma bolt you have to have it in the shape a toroidal or a donut shape in order for it to be stable once that is done you have to sent it down the magnetic barrel as fast as possible can while being densly packed as possible and that adds complexity, you most likely fire it in a beam like a particle weapon but instead its a plasma beam being shot at your enemies like a particle beams
@@Wastelandman7000 Yes, that's true, but plasma weapons have their pros and cons, just like lasers or particle beams. Tho, I would definitely say that particle and laser beams would be more common than plasma for the alien race, but that really depends on who or what has what weapon. They mostly would have been using energy weapons for multiple reasons. Instead of kinetic now, they would still use missiles, torpedoes, or such that are guided or dumb weapons like rockets for short ranges.
In a book series I like (the authur is dead) to honor you call us, the plasma weapons fire a supercooled super magnet through a rail gun into the ball of plasma.
Don't tell Battle teck that Chem lazers can be stronger than lazers. Never figured out why they exist in most game when the basic and bountiful lazer is available.
The interesting thing about real combat laser as being test by the US Airforce since the 60s and being tested by the US Navy on ships now. They are very boring to watch in action. No flash, no lights in the sky, even in fog or mist. Nothing a human can see because they aren't using the visible light part of the spectrum. The weapons mount makes more noise putting it on target than the weapon makes when firing. One version makes a clicking sound as a protective cover opens and the closes again to protect the lense of the emitter, similar to the shutter of a camera lense. Less than a second later the target has a hole in it, depending upon the target and the part of it hit this might result in an explosion, the sound of vaporized metal might make a bang or pop sound but not much compared to the impact of a kinetic round. Real world highest tech weapons are less fun to watch than a century old gun throwing a one ton projectile 30km over the horizon.
babylon 5 weapons aren't laser, but plasma based weapons, basicly lasers are nothing more than focused radiation beams, they seem very good, to create holes on ships, but they do this by heating the target, simple ablative armour, our refreactive armour, their main issue is they reaquire time, a slug thrower on the other hand just needs speed, also a laser sould dissipate over distance and time becouming inifective, a slug on the other hand must hit something to stop being a problem.
@@emilsinclair4190 a slug can only be stopped if it it's something, if you fire a slug and calculate were it will be in a thousand years, you get there and you will see the slug pass not losing speed a laser on the other hand will be impossible to detect due to dissipation. Yes I know that during battle the distance is insignificant, but like I mentioned a laser is much easier to defend compared to a slug 3
@JoaoSoares-rs6ec yes but slugs "long range" only gets relevant when attacking targets very far away. Those targets can not move on their own our you would miss. I would say slugs are easier to defend against lasers. Lasers can not get intercepted. Slugs can.
@@emilsinclair4190 not really, a slug may be intersepted, but unless it's explosive shell you just slightly deflect it, the only way to stop a slug is for it to it something bigger, whit more mass. A laser on the other hand very easy to defend against, refractive materials are good enough, ablative armour is good, hell even a cloud of metal particles can deal with it, sorry but the slug wins every single time
@JoaoSoares-rs6ec no. See considering the distances in space even changing the angle of the shell by 0.1 degree means that your slug will miss by multiple kilometers. If your slug is fast enough even a small interceptor will just smash your slug into countless pieces. Slugs are also vulnerable to strong em or gravitational fiels.
Ironically Lasers are probably more realistic for near future space combat than guns or railguns, since you'll already have a nuclear powerplant and can blast someone regardless of orbital position due to infinite delta V.
Not necessarily. Theoretically, if you have light speed sensors and are shooting at something 1 light minute away. You have to aim at something based on where it was a minute ago with a weapon which takes a minute to travel to target. It might be better to have a slower weapon which can auto-correct itself in flight.
@@cp1cupcake If it's a realistic setting then dodging is probably not worth doing when faced with high speed death missiles anyway. More of a waste of fuel and effort vs trying, in vain, to shoot the missiles down or shooting your own missiles back.
@@igncom1 True, but you probably want the option of dodging anyways, because it can have really unfortunate consequences if you assume what system the enemy is using and you get it wrong. Ie, depending on how fast the missile can turn at such speeds, dodging might work. Or you could run into someone just using something where it works better.
Ok, ypu could doge a laser but only at long ranges of course, if your idk maybe 6 or 12 million miles or 20 million something kms you actually would have a few seconds to actually take evasive action tho you wont know until your suddenly being shinned on with a laser and immediately instandly after that you see it will hit you and you will need to move around and do rolling to reduce its effect and damage on the ship so you can only try to doge it as soon as it hits or you see it being fired at you.
Do nuclear bombs qualify as Plasma weapons in real life? Last I checked, they convert the matter of fissile material into pure energy(radiation). The radiation converts the surrounding air into a ball of plasma, and the resulting expansion of air due to heat creates a blastwave. Or am I missing something?
Lighting is a plasma. Does lighting have a problem traveling through Earths atmosphere? Yeah is does dissipate eventually. It does do quite a bit of damage before it vanishes. Goes a long ways to relatively.
Why laser weapons always have recoil? Weapon like that Emits laser. It doesn't even shoot anything. It is more akin to Light. Also it should hit where it is pointed. There should not be any misses with it.
Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more. -George Bernard Shaw I like this quote because it is true. We will always find something new to challenge what we currently know.
How a hard Sci fi laser kills you: “Hey did it get warm all of a sudd-…..”. Dead In all fairness, when the DEW vs KEW debate comes up as to what weapon a realistic sci-fi warship should be armed with, the answer is unfortunately Yes.
Things shot with an energy beam explode, because... 1: its cool. 2: because lots of things have liquids in them that when in aerosol form BURN RAPIDLY and look like an explosion to people who have never seen the shocking SPEED of a real explosion. 3: because PHSYICS, duh. Rapidly heating one part of a thing, while other parts are still cold in comparison DOES tend to cause those things to want to separate very quickly & suddenly. Now mix all those 3 effects togethers and you will get more "burning fuel events" that ignorant people call "explosions".
On Energy Weapons and being Cheaper, Shields are also something for being cheaper. You don't have to damage your Filming Models and can have someone talking about how badly the ship is being attacked.
17:13 it's funny that you say "good guy green, bad guy red" while showing Star Wars because it's actually the other way around. It's based on the USA using red tracer rounds, and the Soviets using green tracer rounds.
Another important reason why beam/laser/energy weapons are used is because it makes either a faction or the entire setting seem futuristic. For storytelling, it works.
This reminds me of the Expanse's use of tracers on the PDCs. There is no need for tracers, the computers can track the rounds without any issues, but it makes the shots readable.
Tracers are not necessarily used for tracking. Ie, in the Pacific part of WW2, US AA guns had tracers because of the psychological effect it had on enemy piolets, essentially telling them that they need to dodge instead of attacking.
Where I live, I was told that tracers are mostly used to put towards to the last few rounds in a magazine as to be an additional warning that you are about to run dry.
@@cp1cupcakeThat is how magazines are usually loaded today, as well. Every few (usually 5) lets you have a rough idea how many you have left, and the last 5 are your warning it's time to start digging in your pouches
What you don't think there are optical systems, maybe back up, that are used for back up tracking of incoming rounds in a heavy ECM environment?
I do have something I'd like to say about in-atmosphere particle/plasma weapons. Before I start, I would like to draw your attention to one particular natural phenomenon: lightning. Lightning quite evidently does not bleed off and certainly can strike the ground after travelling through a large amount of atmosphere, and strike the ground in a highly contained fashion.
So, the way to make a particle/plasma weapon viable would be to use a 'guide laser', whose job is to create an ionised channel, along which the weapons package is delivered.
Direct fire lightning.
Like the main gun on the M577 APC from Aliens.
Laer's
Ah yes Electrolaser
IIRC, that's how Plasma weapons into the Terminator universe works. A laser burns a channel through the air to enables a column of plasma to travel within it to drastically increase effective range, enabling the plasma channel to travel with almost no atmospheric dispersion issues as long as plasma beam dispersion does not exit the laser generated vacumn column.
A unique type of plasma gun that appears in mass effect would be the geth plasma shotgun, though "shotgun" is a bit misleading. It's a three barreled cannon that fires balls of superconductive material at a target. On impact, the balls shatter and release a burst of energy, instantly superheating the air around it into plasma.
Then there are also weapons like the arc projector, which first ionise their target, to turn them into an electricity magnet before discharging it's capacitors and hitting the target with what is essentially a lightning bold.
One could also just ionise the air between the gun and the target to make the air itself conductive
Plasma blunderbuss?
@@ElishaFollet
More like a plasma grenade launcher
@@rhodes3983 oh hell yeah 😎
First, thanks for featuring Eve Online! So many forget about it.
Also, the eve guys had a nice solution for plasma weapons. Putting it in a magnetic containment shell, and yeeting it with a railgun at your enemies.
Yes! Railguns in EVE lob what are basically magnetic barrels full of charged plasma that detonate on impact.
Plasma canisters could probably be adjusted for space combat by rigging them with proximity fuses so moments before impact they adjust their magnetic containment field to expel all of the plasma towards to target at near contact distance.
This would probably still be woefully ineffective compared to even something as simple as a HEAT warhead though.
Make surr you talk about armor, radiators, etc etc etc i suggest you cover those before space dock has the chance.
Space docks has done a video on radiators. But I don't think he's done the armour one.
@@cillianennis9921 yes your right. I'm aware that the fact is that space dock gets things incorrect, and it ticks me off here and their dude
@@andrewreynolds912 I only really know of these things from Space docks & this channel & others like it. what kinda things does he get wrong about radiators in particular as my knowledge of them is basically what he said.
Remember that the corona of a star is lasing material meaning with a set of reflectors you have a stellaser. Also the energy of a supernova can be lased for those time when you need to kill a galaxy.
this is a Nicoll-Dyson beam
Yeah, putting something in enviroment a million degrees hot with no way of radiating light sounds like a solid idea
inb4 Solar parker probe
it dips into corona, not stays there for years
The stowage space also plays into energy weapons on tanks. How much ammo a tank can carry is a limiting factor for historic tanks. Plus the need to ship unreal amounts of artillery rounds. Check out how many shells were shot on an average day in WWI.
Energy weapon also need ammo... But almost none one bother themselves about and just fuck any realism. Which is a shame IMHO.
@@MikhaelHausgeistwhat type of ammo does an energy weapons need? Plasma guns only need to heat the air up a bit and lasers only need to point and fire.
Other planet may not have same air composition or not have it at all. Also plasma not just heated gas - it is ionised gas in first and foremost, but it can be achieved by heating(fire basically are plasma). Also air may be not efficient source of weaponized plasma.
For lasers they also need "ammo", because emitting body degrade each use. It is why laser engraving machines need to changed thier lumps time to time. Higher laser output mean higher degrade of emitting body. Those lasers which now tested in USA are chemical lasers where emitting body are liquid which pumped through it.
For particle cannons it is also viable. It can have higher count of shots per volume, but anyway You need to take those particles from somewhere to accelerate. And if count that human who been hit by particle beam in parussia THROUGH HEAD live to tell about it need ridiculous amount of particles accelerated to be viable as weapon. It is not impossible, but just need a lot of energy and a lot of donor material for each shoot.
So eah! Energy weapons need ammo also.
@@ElishaFollet Energy. Energy weapons need an immense amount of power just to compete with a bb gun.
16:48 It makes sense that high power energy weapons would make all materials explode, due to the instantaneous vaporization of said material.
Just like actual conventional explosives, tat are coverted from solid/liquid to extremelly hot gases almost instantaneouslly.
Fireballs are not realistic, but neither are the conventional explosons in most media.
In the Honor Verse books, they take an interesting approach. They use missiles for long-range, and for "short" range, they use xasers, grasers, and masers. It is a fairly unique mix.
On the topic of plasma weapons, you can over come thearmol bloom via the zeta pinch effect. Which is the confinment of plasma via electical currents, and while there would be an upper limmit to range due to the charge needed, they would be able to be used at signifigant range. And plasma can be genertated via radio frequency breakdown, which is not power intensive compared to thermol radiation.
And the range issue involved with partical weapons can be overcome through velocity alone. When electons are accelerated to ultra-reletivistic velocities, by there perspective they are expanding exponentialy as they should, but by our perspective they are being directed in a thin beam out to extreme range.
There’s a conversation between Natasha Kerensky and Phelan Kell about pulse lasers in one of the Blood of Kerensky books where she explains what these weird lasers are. Good to know someone did their homework writing that, even if BT lasers are still on the fantastical side.
The trick for PPCs is, that you neutralize the particles, when they leave the "muzzle". Thus reducing the scattering from the particle charge.
Can you explain this further.
@@brandonchase1533 A PPC is basically a particle accelerator. You need charged particles for that. The problem with putting particles with the same charge in a small space is, that they repel each other. So you need to neutralize the charge to prevent the particles scattering, when they leave the magnetic confinement of your "gun".
The difference between a plasma weapon and a particle beam is cohesive and funneling. Essentially the difference between a lightbulb and a Laser. Just more deadly by design.
Except...no. They're not the same thing at all, not even close
Instead of a _Vorton Projector_ what aboot a _Vogon Projector_ - the later would fit more into the "why missles" video as it is a torpedo or whatnot that hurtles Vogons at enemies.
Arguably there are two versions of the _Vogon Projector_ one of which is the missile form and the other of which fits more in the _why guns_ video as instead of the Vogon being in a missile tube and emerging alive it just hurls Vogons as blobs of flesh at enemies, the Vogon exploding into boney messy goo all over whatever it hits and drenching targets in the Vogon's internal acids (targets are effected like that dood in _Robocop_ who gets slimed with toxic waste).
Theoretically, missiles and other smart projectiles could outrange lasers even when being slower. When you start thinking about the lag you would get from target acquisition, aiming, and time to target vs target's size and manoeuvrability (ie, what would determine max range with weapons without bullet drop or having to deal with the curve of the Earth), a smart projectile, while slower, could have a longer range because it is constantly updating where it should be.
I don't know how well David Weber did this in practice, but I was under the impression that its why his Honorverse series has missiles outranging energy weapons, along with basically being able to show massive missile salvos vs what is essentially the wall of flak.
This doesn't even go into stuff which can make maximum range fairly irrelevant, like cloaking and ecm.
You see the reason why lasers in scifi cause everything to explode, is because they are just so comically high energy that the material they vaporize just explodes because its being seperated by heat so quickly.
Quick note about your critique about silly explosions when lasers hit something, this is actually partially realistic. When an energy beam stronger enough to slice through material instantly makes contact with a reactive substance or material, it will explode and continue to explode as the beam travels across anything containing liquid and flammable materials. Metal would just become sliced if thin enough, leaving molten edges, and synthetic materials would evaporate or disintegrate into molten goo or hot gas. People would get sliced as well, but not before the fluids in their body would violently expand into a burst. It would be extremely messy. That's why light sabers are hilarious to me. If they were accurate to physics, they would be WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more deadly than they are portrayed in the story. Holy Jesus they would be. So, cutting corners and suspending a sense of disbelief is understandable.
Plasma weapons: you might want to look into the casaba howitzer which is basically a nuclear blast concentrated into a narrow cone towards the enemy.
Lasers: There is a thing called the Nicoll-Dyson beam where you use a dyson swarm to turn the sun into the galaxies biggest laser.
Particle beams. Particle beams can be neutralized and or fired through a laser beam to help focussing. Also there is the concept of the UREB where an electron beam is so close to the speed of light, that time dilation takes care of the problem of all those charged particles trying to scatter. That thing can outrange most lasers.
Countless smaller lasers are a better defense if you use a dyson swarm
Shedding heat in a vacuum is the elephant in the room. Any DEW, or even guns for that matter (a lesser degree if they eject spend cartridges into space) generate a lot of heat the hull has to deal with. Missiles can be soft lauched with compressed gas then ignited giving no heat problems to the firing ship.
Was in a really intense discussion about "realism" in scifi space battles. We wound up, after drinking a bit, agreeing that the way tech would develop is not in shields and energy weapons, but in developing as thick and resilient armor as possible and as powerful explosive devices as possible. Craft would have to be built in zero-g shipyards and not get close to gravity wells due to mass constraints. Fights would essentially boil down to "exhaust your supply of missiles/nukes, then proceed to ramming velocity. Breach then board."
One theory to get plasma to not disperse in an atmosphere is put it in a magnetic "sheath", basically just give it it's own temporary magnetic field like Earth except this is to keep it condensed into a ball and hold it's shape instead of expanding out and dissipating. Then you throw it really fast really hard with magnets before it wears off and losses it's shape. There's also the U.S. Air Force's prototype Plasma Railgun called Marauder which shot doughnut shaped plasma projectiles. Yes, it was a real weapon. It's current status is unkown cause they quickly withdrew it from public eye after it's first test fire. But it's projectiles had the power of 5 pounds of TNT.
A lot of why energy weapons are so used is stowage space. Even if you can lift off/on planet and push unlimited mass through super light speed, you still have a finite amount of space on a ship to stow ammo. And in most settings you do have mass limits on how much a ship can haul otherwise they wouldn't be made out of weight saving material. With energy weapons the mass of your ship remains fairly constant (reducing computing needs) and unless you burn out your systems you'll never run out of ammo.
There is a channel I watch which did a series about taking the 40k vehicles and looking at them from a realistic performance perspective. One of the things that was mentioned a lot is the energy weapon variants of vehicles are a lot better just because they never have to worry about running low on ammunition.
One game I've played that addressed the plasma dispersion was... UFO Alien Invasion, an XCOM-like. They used Space Magic Polymers to make a Plasma Bubble that gradually broke down over distance and by the time it hit the target it would pop and splash the superhot material all over the impact site.
It should be mentioned that there actually are ways that plasma weapons could be practically applied in the real world. Due to plasma's unique physical properties (low adhesion, high cohesion, and high temperature superconductance), it makes for an ideal medium in railguns. With a relatively small amount of energy, a railgun could accelerate a relatively low mass of plasma up to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.
While the resulting projectile would lose energy in the form of radiation (and convection and conduction in an atmosphere), it could travel huge distances in the time it takes for it to lose enough energy to matter. This is not to mention that at those speeds, sheer inertia would help keep it from scattering, and most of the energy it would deliver to the target would be kinetic.
16:50 I watched a video of someone using a crt tv screen to focus sunlight on a rock, and it blew up due to the insanely fast heat increase. Lasers exploding things does make sense depending on the laser, but the MASSIVE explosions I've seen in some places don't make sense
9:44
Yeah thats a good point too.
Using plasma as a weapon in atmosphere is like using steam as a weapon underwater.
Note, that while lasers have much longer range, it's debatable how effective that range is. Heat is one of the worst damage vectors to begin with, and there are a lot of strategies to counter lasers. A lot of this will come down to how powerful the lasers are and what kind of material science you have to defend against that. Definitely worth considering why they are or aren't used in any specific setting though.
I have to disagree with you that heat is one of the least effective attacks. Space is an insulator.
@@emilsinclair4190 How so? Radiating heat away is actually more effective in vacuum. You can't use conduction or convection, which can be an issue. But any heat issues you face, the laser generating ship must also face (as lasers generate a lot of waste heat).
@philipfahy9658 depends on the efficency of the laser. The more efficent the laser the more it gets a you and not me problem.
However even our current lasers with a lowish efficency can do a lot of damage. Especially since they don't create their heat that focused. You can build a a system spreading and storing the heat while building such a system for every meter of armor is impossibility
@@emilsinclair4190 You'd likely already have a way to cool the entire hull of your ship if you want it to function in space. Lasers also have to deal with angled armor, keeping on focus, needing insane power levels to actually do rapid damage and various countermeasures. It's not a useless tool, but there are a lot of drawbacks that aren't commonly brought up in sci fi.
@philipfahy9658 to a certain degree yes. The problem is that this would be equipment to provide small level of heat reduction for the entire outside.
A laser only heats a small part of it. Such a system would be overwhelmed nearly imminently.
Similarly small kinetics would also be useless since space already has countless small fragments.
And power requirements and countermeasures exist for every weapon.
Lasers have the advantage of speed.
A gamma weapon can be a "laser", but only if the gamma radiation is organized by a lasing medium. Fallout's "Gamma Gun" is neither a laser, nor a gun (A "gun" fires a solid projectile down a barrel). It is a hand-held directed energy weapon. But Gamma Gun sounds cooler.
On a side note: One of my favorite sci-fi book series is Star Corps. Their weapons are pulsed lasers, which have backpack power packs and are described as emitting a "snapping" noise, no visible light, and cause explosions when they hit an enemy by vaporizing chunks of flesh or armor when they super-heat it. Pretty accurate, so long as you suspend belief about the energy density that would be actually required to be in those power packs. They also have kinetic gauss guns, and short-range plasma heavy weapons that make a roar and flash and look like they are firing lightning, which is also kinda' what a plasma weapon would do, also vaporizing things via super-heating, and my absolute favorite weapon of the series: To defeat the ultimate big bad evil alien civilization, the humans accelerate a shit-ton of SAND to near-relativistic speeds using a nuclear rocket, over many years, towards the enemy planet, then detonate a bomb spreading the sand out into a planet-sized cloud. This cloud then impacts the planet moving so fast that it results in billions of fusion detonations, turning the atmosphere into a sun-hot plasma, and melting the entire planet's surface to slag. A very scary weapon, because it would probably actually work, and we could theoretically build one of these planet-killers with our current technology.
9:00 minutes in.
The principle of plasma being electromagnetically conductive is applied well in Star Wars.
The Magna Guard droids and the "traitor!" Trooper use small plasma fields genersted by sheer electricity to make magnetically repellant weapons against lightsabers.
In theory the UNSC from Halo could create plasma shields through giant magnetic field conductors across their hull that flash to life in order to make the plasma richochet from the ship.
Fuck Im already enjoying your channel man
Also LASERs and other photon weapons are also kind short ranged because of how the photons also spread out. In a more realistic setting this makes LASERs very niche.
Neutrally charged partical beams.
They don't spread out that quickly, you can still destroy things a good few light seconds away.
Not in trek phasers are extremely long distance 300000km
You can neutralised ions once you have accelerated them. So particle beams dont have to be short ranged bc of that.
@scienceinsanity6927 not all pulse lasers actually wait for the gas to disperse. in fact the first pulse lasers kept at it till the gas turned to plasma and drastically reduced their effectiveness.
the solution militaries across the world came up with was to weaponize the plasma that a pulse laser created.
in short they found a way to use the pulse laser to tell the plasma to go boom.
an it’s even adjustable, so you can use a pulse laser as a flash bang, as a frag/rocket, and…
an recently we found a way to use a laser to transmit sound through this plasma. so if you have line of sight you can communicate with not just pulses beams of light but actual sound.
so technically pulse lasers can also be plasma weapon hybrids.
we also even designed a laser to plasmafiy the surrounding air to protect vics and infantry from blast waves.
A few fun things about lasers: 1 frequency. In some settings you can change the frequenxy of your laser so that more gets absorbed by the armor of your enemy.
And sometimes this armor can also be changed to refelcy certain frequencies better.
Also laser are not a long range weapon. Sounds strange at first but since they are unguided it is very rasy ro be at a distance where the only chance of hitting you is with a lucky shot
On plasma weapons... It depends on how fast the plasma is moving. If it takes (say) one second for the plasma to expand from effective to useless, but the plasma is moving at relitivistic speed, then you get to hit targets on the moon from Earth orbit. Of course if the plasma is moving at relivistic speed, it doesn't matter too much if it expands. A 'warm puff of air' moving at 0.9C is going to do terrible things to any ship it hits. Possibly even more damage than a solid round of equal mass and speed, because it's far more likely to avoid blow-through effects.
Inside an atmosphere, you can (theoretically) create a vacuum tunnel using a sufficiently powerful laser(TM) which will in theory channel the plasma to the target. But the (theoretical) effect is brief, and the plasma has to be moving pretty damn fast to take advantage of it.
When you get to discussing superweapons, could you look into Gundam's colony lasers/kinetic bombardment via colony drop? Thanks
Ah, the absurdity that is the Gryps colony laser.
The MARAUDER weapon I mentioned in my other post: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARAUDER
As someone who wasn’t diagnosed with autism until age 32 this show makes me feel seen.
Some of the most original energy weapons I've seen have to be the Atzkhav and Yubarev in Star Citizen. One is a bolt action sniper rifle, the other a semi auto pistol, both are electron beam weapons, and their beams will arc into nearby secondary targets. They're basically chain lightning guns.
Wasn't expecting to bring budget into the reasons, but I do like a Meta context for understanding
New favorite science channel. Just subbed.
So what ya mean:
- Lemsers are even cooler when you have science balls and can load AP
- Plaz beam would not work, but PLAZ BOMB would
12:07 that is correct, however, gamma ray guns are more energetic than lasers
I imagine plasma canisters would work great in space if it was a shaped charge of sorts. Or even better, a hybrid plasma canister rail gun, with the plasma canister hurried deep within an AP round.
And to be fair, a lot of sci fi has some sort of magnetic vortex or bubble which seems to be conducted/centered around the plasma itself (likely short lived, but all it needs to be), so (especially given the sun’s weird magnetism stuff) isn’t as big of a leap as it appears.
There's also neutral particle beams you could have the particle charged when you're accelerating it in the neutralize it when it comes out
The reason why things might blow up from a laser hitting it is because it might have water trapped in it and is being flash boiled. Like a porous rock that absorbed moisture from the air on a hot humid day or rain water.
Hell, not even just weapons. Romulans use captured singularities as their ships reactors and the TG’s quest Hive Queen Quest (cool universe, and hilarious story once it gets going) use a lot of them to power ships and (intentionally or malfunction) making artificial ones with their gravity drives and hover tech.
another bonus energy weapons have is logistics if the universe cares about it
So, I'd like to point out that Lasers are technically invisible to the human eye unless it's passing through particles. Like when you use a laser pointer at night and through mist or fog. Only reason lasers in sci-fi are visible is to show the audience where the laser was fired from and to indicate which side they are fired from. Good or bad guys.
I would add that energy weapons can be given different properties by saying it is using this particle, so it is more effective against it. Like in Star Trek, disruptors are good against armor but weak against shields, polaron beams are great against shields but weak against armor, and phasers are average in all areas. Not stronger than a type, but not weaker
Though I maintain it is better if a setting uses missiles, kinetic weapons, and energy weapons for combined arms, allows for combat in multiple different ranges, and it looks pleasing overall.
Plasma would only work as an explosive like a bomb or grenade with the only thing required being a violent dispersion of energy.
Fun fact a laser beam can't actually go forever they diffuse over distance you shine a little laser from earth to the moon and by the time it gets to the moon it's way bigger then it was when it was here. Less focused means less heat which means less effect.
I dream of the ultimate weapon.
A weapon shot at the enemy via a gauss cannon, that consists of a missile, tipped with a shaped fusion bomb that spears my enemies with the power of the sun!
IN the Battletech universe, lasers have no ammunition, but generate a lot of heat. Not a bad trade off, and they do good damage for weight.
But the heat, my god the heat. 🤣
Fighting on an ice planet: Easy!
Fighting in the vacuum of space: NOT EASY.
@@igncom1easier in space
Energy weapons is Lasers lighting Plasma Ion Positron Gavitrons with Pulse fire mode Blaster Fire mode Beam fire mode and etc
When you get into doomsday weapons, don't forget the C+cannons from Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series. Its a torpedo that pops in and out of light speed and strikes the target at near light speed. It weighs several tons. If you even think about the math you'll see the amount of energy released is unreal. I don't know if its as crazy as the black hole launcher, but, I'd say its in the running.
Even wilder, they had screens against them. I'm guessing something that decelerates the round.
There is much newer piece of sci fi I read which had something similar. Basically, space fighter piolets realized that their chaff is really deadly at the speeds they are moving at so they start using them as weapons.
Ever since I started actually thinking about the kinds of weapons that would be used in a practical setting, I started liking energy weapons less and less... not to the point of completely disregarding any media that uses them... just not finding them particularly believable and not something I would use, were I writing a science fiction story. The main reasons I started disliking them being:
1. The amount of energy required to make them even remotely useful as weapons is ridiculously impractical - both in terms of the kind of power generation you would need to operate the projector and the size of the device itself.
2. Assuming you could get over or avoid point 1, you probably wouldn't even see a laser being fired unless there was a lot of particulate matter between the ship firing the laser and the target, so the largest benefit of lasers in visual media would, in a practical setting, be rendered obsolete. The only way you would be able to detect you were being fired upon would be by detecting an increase in hull temperature in small areas. Not exactly thrilling, visually.
The only things that would really work for space combat, in a practical sense, would be missiles, railguns, or mass drivers, with the latter two being preferable, as you wouldn't need to resupply as often as long as there were asteroids around... and space is full of rocks.
1. To be honest, once you get to space weapons, a lot of what is considered practical in terms of planetary power generation go out the window. Ie, power generation is the primary reason why railguns haven't really made it out of the testing phase into actual use.
2. It really depends on the sensors you have. I wouldn't be surprised if there are not various ways to detect lasers even now. Regardless, from a realistic perspective, that would make lasers even better; since information is one of the best things to have.
There is a thing in Mass Effect where the lasers on geth ships (lasers in this universe are mostly for point defense) use waves which are already invisible to the human eye.
@@cp1cupcake Re #2: Lasers travel at very nearly the speed of light. To detect something traveling at the speed of light, you would need a sensor that could detect and respond faster than light, if we're talking pre-contact detection. That's not even taking into account experiments that seem to demonstrate lasers being able to faster than light under specific conditions.
@@OuroborosChoked Even assuming that there is no possible way for lasers to be detected, like if a laser needs enough time in contact with an enemy to have any significant results, that just makes it a better weapon to have since the enemy can't detect it.
I just had a wild idea. A very powerful coil gun firing....bbs. In space it would be almost undetectable. Especially by radar/lidar/optical. But, with powerful magnets, you could get that bb to unreal velocities. You could launch them rapid fire, and because of the low mass being launched the recoil would be more manageable than heavy rail slugs.
look up macron launchers... you'll enjoy it
Sorry, macron accelerators/dust guns. It's a video by spacedock
There is another reason they pop up; generally speaking, they don't need ammo.
Most other weapons are limited by ammo. Energy weapons generally don't. This is exactly why I went with energy weapons for my sci-fi universe. I wanted a world where weapons had developed past the need for ammo. Only energy weapons would fill that role. And if you think about it, if you can remove the need for ammo storage, that can be a massive amount of storage you no longer need. Just think about how much space ammo took up in WWII battleships. Now you may have energy packs for hand-held weapons, but generally speaking such weapons just need, well, energy. As long as your sci-fi power generator can provide it, you'll have weapons. A person creating a world may want that specifically like I did. For whatever reason.
Also lasers won’t keep going forever they will have diffraction which make them much less concentrated over time, the average laser beam won’t last more then a few days before becoming effectively useless as a projectile
Lasers are actually quite easy to dodge at only a few light seconds of distance away
Wait, you think that sci fi authors have any idea of how far away stuff should be while fighting in space when lasers are a thing?!?! Horror of horrors!!!
@@cp1cupcakedepends on the level of realism. There are military sci fi stories that even consider how different laser frequencies get absorbed better/worse by different armors
@@emilsinclair4190 I know, its just that sci-fi authors not understanding scale is a really common trope.
Especially the ones where they basically are just writing fantasy.....in space!
The only ways I see a plasma weapon being used in the future is either a sort of flamethroweror a shotgun/anti tank gun hybrid
Of if they have ranged magnetic projectors 😂
Plasma weapons in Battletech are basically advanced flamethrowers.
On charged particle weapons... Modern (real) ion engines work the same way, and deliberately emit oposite-charge particles into the rocket exhaust. If they didn't, then the ship would accumulate an oposite charge equivolent to all energy they hasd dumped into the particle beam for its entire duration of fire. For a scifi ship firing big guns, this would probably cause problems during docking. A better approach might be to fire two beams of diametric oposite charge. If your space-plumbing is very good, you might try to merge them together so they become a neutral particle beam.
Though if your space-plumbing is that good, you probably don't need to bother with electromagnetic charge to accelerate your particles.
So, not a weapon covered here, but I'd like your take on this. A player of mine in an RPG managed to combine a bit of science and a bit of magic into a cannon that summoned and launched geese at the enemy. What would that be classified as? A ballistic weapon?
Isaac Arthur has a lot of videos if you want to see some wacky scale constructions
Oh and a video on lasers and energy weapons
Plasma weapons are still possible its just their hard and challenging to make use of but it can be done like instead of a plasma bolt you have to have it in the shape a toroidal or a donut shape in order for it to be stable once that is done you have to sent it down the magnetic barrel as fast as possible can while being densly packed as possible and that adds complexity, you most likely fire it in a beam like a particle weapon but instead its a plasma beam being shot at your enemies like a particle beams
True, though you have to wonder at that point if a "simple" laser wouldn't be a better bang for your credits.
@@Wastelandman7000 Yes, that's true, but plasma weapons have their pros and cons, just like lasers or particle beams. Tho, I would definitely say that particle and laser beams would be more common than plasma for the alien race, but that really depends on who or what has what weapon. They mostly would have been using energy weapons for multiple reasons. Instead of kinetic now, they would still use missiles, torpedoes, or such that are guided or dumb weapons like rockets for short ranges.
@@andrewreynolds912what if u used plasma like a flamethrower? I think there's a weapon like that in wh40k.
@@ElishaFollet well I don't think that's possible I mean maybe but likely no
@@andrewreynolds912 how about plasma grenades?
Particle cannon, aka weaponized CRT(old-school thick screens).
Could you EMP/short circuit a ship with enough ion blasts of one charge then dumping a lot of the opposite on them?
My favorite SCIFI weapon OC is the U.R.D.E.D.:
Ultra-Relativistic Directed Energy Device.
And if someone points one at you... well... lol
In a book series I like (the authur is dead) to honor you call us, the plasma weapons fire a supercooled super magnet through a rail gun into the ball of plasma.
Don't tell Battle teck that Chem lazers can be stronger than lazers. Never figured out why they exist in most game when the basic and bountiful lazer is available.
2:49 Which is bs if you are at, like, sun to earth distances from your opponent, then you have minutes to dodge.
Hammer's Slammers gets around the plasma generation by using a reaction noted in volcanoes to create plasma from small cartridges.
On Star Trek phaser they're actually phased masers(Microwave LASER). Gene Roddenberry says so.
The hyperconductivity of plasma explains the star trek concept of EPS conduits.
The interesting thing about real combat laser as being test by the US Airforce since the 60s and being tested by the US Navy on ships now.
They are very boring to watch in action. No flash, no lights in the sky, even in fog or mist. Nothing a human can see because they aren't using the visible light part of the spectrum. The weapons mount makes more noise putting it on target than the weapon makes when firing. One version makes a clicking sound as a protective cover opens and the closes again to protect the lense of the emitter, similar to the shutter of a camera lense.
Less than a second later the target has a hole in it, depending upon the target and the part of it hit this might result in an explosion, the sound of vaporized metal might make a bang or pop sound but not much compared to the impact of a kinetic round.
Real world highest tech weapons are less fun to watch than a century old gun throwing a one ton projectile 30km over the horizon.
I just remember when the MSM pretended a nightime US gun show was actually some war overseas.
You should look up project Marauder
Great content
17:10 "Good guy - green, bad man - red" Shows TIE-Fighters shooting green and Rebels shooting red. Hmmmmmmmmm🤔
babylon 5 weapons aren't laser, but plasma based weapons, basicly lasers are nothing more than focused radiation beams, they seem very good, to create holes on ships, but they do this by heating the target, simple ablative armour, our refreactive armour, their main issue is they reaquire time, a slug thrower on the other hand just needs speed, also a laser sould dissipate over distance and time becouming inifective, a slug on the other hand must hit something to stop being a problem.
Outside of atmosphere the focus of lasers stays intact for long enough to outrage projectiles for every attack against a target that is able to move.
@@emilsinclair4190 a slug can only be stopped if it it's something, if you fire a slug and calculate were it will be in a thousand years, you get there and you will see the slug pass not losing speed a laser on the other hand will be impossible to detect due to dissipation. Yes I know that during battle the distance is insignificant, but like I mentioned a laser is much easier to defend compared to a slug 3
@JoaoSoares-rs6ec yes but slugs "long range" only gets relevant when attacking targets very far away. Those targets can not move on their own our you would miss.
I would say slugs are easier to defend against lasers. Lasers can not get intercepted. Slugs can.
@@emilsinclair4190 not really, a slug may be intersepted, but unless it's explosive shell you just slightly deflect it, the only way to stop a slug is for it to it something bigger, whit more mass. A laser on the other hand very easy to defend against, refractive materials are good enough, ablative armour is good, hell even a cloud of metal particles can deal with it, sorry but the slug wins every single time
@JoaoSoares-rs6ec no. See considering the distances in space even changing the angle of the shell by 0.1 degree means that your slug will miss by multiple kilometers. If your slug is fast enough even a small interceptor will just smash your slug into countless pieces.
Slugs are also vulnerable to strong em or gravitational fiels.
Ironically Lasers are probably more realistic for near future space combat than guns or railguns, since you'll already have a nuclear powerplant and can blast someone regardless of orbital position due to infinite delta V.
Not necessarily. Theoretically, if you have light speed sensors and are shooting at something 1 light minute away. You have to aim at something based on where it was a minute ago with a weapon which takes a minute to travel to target. It might be better to have a slower weapon which can auto-correct itself in flight.
@@cp1cupcake If it's a realistic setting then dodging is probably not worth doing when faced with high speed death missiles anyway. More of a waste of fuel and effort vs trying, in vain, to shoot the missiles down or shooting your own missiles back.
@@igncom1 True, but you probably want the option of dodging anyways, because it can have really unfortunate consequences if you assume what system the enemy is using and you get it wrong.
Ie, depending on how fast the missile can turn at such speeds, dodging might work. Or you could run into someone just using something where it works better.
Lasers would cut through the target. Particle beams such as proton / neutron beams will make the target exploded. Questions?
7:33 don't you mean Turbolasers/Blasters? Proton Torpedoes are a missile weapons...?
Dust guns need more representation
SFIA with Isaac Arthur is a huge mine for the topic too
Trek phasers are extreme long distance
phased array Lazers are possible also my favorite Lazer are the nuclear pumped Lazers witch are also possible in real life
Ok, ypu could doge a laser but only at long ranges of course, if your idk maybe 6 or 12 million miles or 20 million something kms you actually would have a few seconds to actually take evasive action tho you wont know until your suddenly being shinned on with a laser and immediately instandly after that you see it will hit you and you will need to move around and do rolling to reduce its effect and damage on the ship so you can only try to doge it as soon as it hits or you see it being fired at you.
The solution to plasma btw is a torpedo that flies behikd it to keep the shape...
Do nuclear bombs qualify as Plasma weapons in real life?
Last I checked, they convert the matter of fissile material into pure energy(radiation). The radiation converts the surrounding air into a ball of plasma, and the resulting expansion of air due to heat creates a blastwave.
Or am I missing something?
Chemical lasers haven't been more powerful better than electric lasers for a while now. Fiber lasers is where it's at now.
Lighting is a plasma. Does lighting have a problem traveling through Earths atmosphere? Yeah is does dissipate eventually. It does do quite a bit of damage before it vanishes. Goes a long ways to relatively.
Why laser weapons always have recoil?
Weapon like that Emits laser. It doesn't even shoot anything. It is more akin to Light. Also it should hit where it is pointed. There should not be any misses with it.
Particle beams do not have to use charged particles
Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more. -George Bernard Shaw
I like this quote because it is true. We will always find something new to challenge what we currently know.
sword of the stars emitters is like eve
How a hard Sci fi laser kills you: “Hey did it get warm all of a sudd-…..”. Dead In all fairness, when the DEW vs KEW debate comes up as to what weapon a realistic sci-fi warship should be armed with, the answer is unfortunately Yes.
Things shot with an energy beam explode, because...
1: its cool.
2: because lots of things have liquids in them that when in aerosol form BURN RAPIDLY and look like an explosion to people who have never seen the shocking SPEED of a real explosion.
3: because PHSYICS, duh. Rapidly heating one part of a thing, while other parts are still cold in comparison DOES tend to cause those things to want to separate very quickly & suddenly. Now mix all those 3 effects togethers and you will get more "burning fuel events" that ignorant people call "explosions".
Good guys green bad guys red 🤔... I see you too are an Empire man🧐