Okay so basically reverse lightning. You're firing the particle directly opposite lightning. Not to mention that the shot will spread wider as it travels. It will works wonders against any elertical systems on a ship.
Kinda...except it's not a lighting bolt, it's like an elliptical spheroid that glows blueish-white. Now, of course, the Union also uses LASER, and GRASER weapons for stealth killing and for psychological use. As someone earlier in this thread put it- "seeing your guys explode because the blood in thier body is heated to the point of evaporation would play hell with your mind...like a future version of shell shock".
Not my guys because there not of flesh and blood. Robots and look to be in real use real soon in situations such as you seem to be imageing. I get the feeling your unfairly ignoring my link, favoring instead to rant aimlessly about pointless blood-letting. But still, thats your call. Heres the link again just in case you missed it. http://www.foster-miller.com/lemming.htm
I've seen that before. On history channel. Now, a laser will still affect a robot. A cutting-laser type of weapon charged up to high power, like steel-cutting power. Oh, yeah. Now, of course, the Union army is mostly fighting alien infantry, in battle-armor. They primarily stick with what is simple and easy to use, manufacture, and train with: Projectile weapons. In the 6320s, they begin mass-use of this weapon: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Designed to replace the AC-150, and be used by the main infantry, whilst the M28C gauss rifle is being issued to special operations forces. They call this weapon the ICARUS, or Individual Combat Assault Rifle Universal-purpose System. It fires a smaller, 9mmx45mm HEAP caseless projectile, and can hold up to 80 rounds in the magazine.
If you have the power sources for rail guns, you would also have power sources for good laser weapons. A powerful laser rifle would be a very useful weapon for infantry - you could use short, high-energy pulses to blow things up, set it to fire a wide, dispersed beam and use it like a flame thrower, or use it as a cutting tool. There would be a lot more functionality than with a rail gun.
yo hapsburg a new weapon? flying laser guns that act like one gun being controlled via a remote computer. I drew it in the picture's thread. http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=54661&page=11&pp=20 The laser guns fly using an electromagnetic force
What, like, mobile drones? The CGU has them, they just don't use them as much as they should. Just like, they have really effective battle-droids, but don't use them as the standard-issue line infantry. It would sort-of nullify the whole point of "human supremacy" they use to keep humanity united under them. But the CGU's drones are definitely bigger, mounting two double 10mm pulse lasers under manuevering wings, and use an antigravity booster to stay in the air, and small ion thrusters to move about, which are powered by a miniature fusion reactor. They call it the Mosquito-class Aerodrone. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Side View ^
How are you comparing them? Do you mean better per unit of energy expended per shot? Per power output of the weapon's power source? The AK-47 fires a 8 gram projectile down a 0.4m barrel at 710 meters/second. This means that the projectile leaves the barrel in just 0.0011 seconds and has a kinetic energy of about 2000 joules, so if you wanted to make a rail gun that was equivalent to an AK-47 you would need a 1.8 megawatt power source. A 1.8 megawatt laser would be a very formidable weapon. For comparison, a typical heavy industrial laser used to cut steel is around 2 kilowatts. It would almost surely be instantly fatal to anyone it hit - far more damaging than an AK-47 bullet.
A quick followup on my last post - a 1.8 megawatt laser would put out enough energy to vaporize a hole 1 cm across through a 30 cm thick iron block in one second - that's pretty good armor penetration! Or, it could vaporize about 60 cubic cm of body tissue in one-tenth of a second, which is pretty good wounding ability. Or you could set it to a wide beam and use it like a flame thrower, or use it to cut up a building, etc. Note that the above calculations are all for a railgun that was equivalent to an AK-47; if you do it with a laser that has the same wattage as most SF railguns that hit a lot harder than an AK-47, you get a substantially better laser.
Yeah, but with lasers, smoke, fog, dew, and polished surfaces make them practically useless. If the world switched to lasers overnight two days later tanks would have a mirror polish. Not saying it is a bad idea, but you want to mix and match your troops. Laser, Plasma flamers, Partical beams, rockets, gyrocs, and Guass weaponry.
versus a Laser = light? A decent quality mirror can deflect the most powerful lasers we got at the moment. Refractive polishes would also be effective. Smoke renders it near useless. Godd forbid an enemy finds a way to suspend microscopic pieces of refractive material in the air. A laser is wonderful, but too easily mitigated. On a side not it is the perfect sniper weapon one laser and a few high quality optic mirors and you can shot around corners, zig zagging, or even fro clear across town.
Mirrors don't protect you against powerful lasers - even the best mirrors will still absorb a small fraction of the laser's energy, which will almost instantaneously vaporize a thin layer of the mirror's surface and cause it to lose its reflective qualities. A “decent quality mirror” will instantly explode if hit by the most powerful lasers we have at the moment. Even if you could somehow make a mirror that was 100% reflective you would still be vulnerable to lasers because any dust or dirt on the surface of the material would explode upon contact with the beam, which would scuff the surface slightly and allow the laser a foothold to start vaporizing the surface of the mirror. Like kunax said, the best defense against a laser would probably be a material with very good thermal resistance and dissipation, perhaps combined with materials that are meant to vaporize into particles that scatter the beam.
first of all I was saying put a mirror polish on what we have. Imagine chobham armor with a refractive surface. Sure your laser will burn through but not before I put at least one shell through you. A laser is a great weapon to be sure but it is no more effective than a high powered conventional weapon. Even 100% efficent a 60 kw laser is only producing 60 kj per second. Can you hold a laser on one specific square centimeter for one second under fire.
We were talking about comparing the damage done by rail guns to the damage done by lasers with a similar power output. An "AK-47 railgun" would require a 1.8 mega watt power source. And no, even a 1.8 megawatt laser probably couldn't take out a tank, but I imagine that if you did the calculations for the railgun-equivilant of a tank cannon you would end up with something in the right ballpark. My point was that on a watt-for-watt basis, lasers are easily competitive with railguns. It also depends a lot on how the laser delivers its energy. If you dump a few hundred kilojoules into a target in a microsecond, the effect would be a powerful explosion on the surface of the target and the thermal properties of the material won't really matter.
True, very true on that case though you're still into material strength. though a 60,000 joules is les that 15 grams of TNT. 1.8 megawats is a lttle better but still pathetic.
A 1.8 megawatt laser puts out enough energy to vaporize about 60 cm^3 of body tissue in 1/10 of a second. Remember, we're talking about small arms here. No, a 1.8 megawatt laser wouldn't do too much to a tank, but then neither would an AK-47. Edit: I agree that conventional weapons are still generally better than laser weapons. My only point was that on a watt-for-watt basis, lasers are generally very competitive with rail guns. If you want to compare a tank-destroying laser to a tank-destroying rail gun, figure out what kind of wattage you would need to power a railgun like the 120cm main gun on an M1 tank, then figure out how much metal you could flash-vaporize with an equivalently powered laser. In both cases it would still probably be cheaper and easier to just build a regular cannon.
A mirror is no defence against a pulse laser. It's only a little better against a continuous wave laser. --- On another note, the real determinant in how effective a laser is is the power density per unit area at the target. Effective laser weapon seek to focus the beam down to an area a few square millimetres in area so it can punch through with little difficulty. (The higher the power density at target, the less energy that actually has to be sent to do the job.) In general, the best way to achieve that high density at target is to boost the emitter radius. This combats beam diffraction and so helps maintain the focus of the beam over a greater distance. (Now is a good time to look back and laugh at all of those laser weapons in space opera that have puny emitter radius' simply because the props guys wanted them to look butt-standard projectile weapons.) One could also try boosting the raw wattage of the weapon, but compared to the above, is far from being the ideal method. After running some numbers (using a bunch of assumptions, of course), it is very possible that one will have the situation where a laser weapon will be superior to a projectile weapon at 'close' range, but inferior at 'long' range. This would be especially true if projectiles become ramjet/rocket sustained, which would go a long way in combating one of the basic problems found with bullets today. It's also possible that, at least in a sci-fi/space opera setting, a projectile weapon would be superior (or at least, give more consistent performance) in a wider range of environments, mostly within atmospheres. Different atmospheres will be more or less opaque to certain frequencies of light depending on what it's composed of. This, of course, directly impacts on a laser weapon. (For example, a laser maybe designed to lase in the x-ray part of the spectrum, but an atmosphere may only allow it to lase in the UV which would take a big bite out of the weapon's effectiveness.)
Well, on that note, the basic armor of the CGU infantry, vehicles, and ships is a material called Titacrete. Titacrete is a weave of steel, titanium, tungsten, and boron-carbide fibers. Coated over this is a layer of depleted uranium, then a layer of duracrete (a type of strong, durable armor-grade synthetic concrete), and then a layer of synthetic diamond, which will help relect and refract lasers. Not completely, but help stave off at least some energy and heat not absorbed by the energy shields. The only differences between Infantry-grade, Vehicle-grade (Titanium-V), and Ship-grade (Titanium-S), is the amount of DU and the amount of tungsten. Ships are going to experience a lot more heat exposure, not just from the environment, but also from enemy beam weapons which would normally cause heat damage, so thus the armor has more Tungsten, which has high capablitity for absorbing heat. They also have a significantly thick layer of DU, which would help tremendously against enemy projectile weapons, like railguns. Add to this, of course, the energy shield. The CGN's shielding doctrine runs of the principle that a ship's energy shield should be able to survive an alpha strike (all weapons fired at once) from it's own weapons. This means, for a Dreadnought-class Battleship, in addition to the three meters of Titanium-S armor, plus one meter of duracrete and DU coated in synthetic diamond, there's an energy shield that can withstand an immediate firepower yield of 5508 gigatons.
