Shipmaster Sane
You have been weighed
I would not boil down what it takes to kill a person or damage a tank into a number of Joules, there are loads of variables.
What if a Man Portable Laser Rifle
- Thread starter Sailor.X
- Start date
Doomsought
Well-known member
Lasers are generally worse than kinetics for killing someone because what actually kills people is either fluid shock or bleeding.
And apparently more than one, wealthy American and Latin American crime lord has tried to obtain even that.
Some kind of plasmic, or pulse weapon would probably be safer and more desirable for this reason..and the fact that a beam based weapon would mean a metric fuckton of collateral damage. Any soldier who rakes his piece is gonna become a war criminal right quick.
Friendly fire deaths would become about as common as they were in the early days of Cannon as well I'd wager.
Heating up the armor and cooking the people inside, what's sufficient to melt wiring or fuck up the sealing or the treads..etc
edit- you want something that would "slam" into an enemy and burst so that is burns, tears and smashes..more than to "cut".
Shipmaster Sane
You have been weighed
The worst part is with high intensity lasers even an indirect glance, or seeing a reflection, or a reflection of a reflection, even seeing the dot on a non reflective surface, can instantly blind you.
Doomsought
Well-known member
We could also just not use visible light. It should be possible to tune the weapon to some frequency of UV or infrared that doesn't like getting reflected.
Shipmaster Sane
You have been weighed
Awesome just so long as we never fight within ten miles of a civilian ever again we only have to worry about the occasional permanent blinding of our personnel if they ever have their goggles off for any reason. Think about a world where every ND can blind half a company. You'd basically have to wear goggles 24/7 for your entire tour of duty.Ahem!!!
Can we not act like these don't exist in large numbers.
Ahem!!!
Can we not act like these don't exist in large numbers.
Could I have a set in which the visor part is completely opaque, with a screen inside? So what I'd be seeing would be an image from the little cameras on the front, with zero direct light?
That way, no matter how bright the laser is, my eyes don't get anything brighter than what the screen itself can do.
Now what we need there, is medical advances such that there's no longer any such thing as permanent blinding.
ShieldWife
Marchioness
I wonder if there would be humanitarian objections to using laser weapons on humans. Of course, we can already blow people up and maim them in various ways, but certain things are prohibited and I could see lasers being considered for that. The wounds that a laser inflicts might be horrific burns, or wounds caused by superheated flesh exploding. It sounds really nasty, especially for people who aren't killed instantly.
One of my first thoughts regarding effective laser weapons did involve the Navy. What I imagined was a number of defensive lasers which had highly accurate computer targeting systems that could protect a ship from incoming missiles. Since laser beams travel at light speed, missiles are just about standing still in comparison and so it seems like a powerful enough laser combined with accurate targeting and radar would make ships nearly immune to missiles.
If shooting someone with a 50 or a mark 19 isn't a war crime why would lasers be?
What do you know about those weapons that I don't?
A mark 19 is a grenade launcher....
Which kills people in a horrible, slow, agonizing way like burns from a laser would?
I mean we use white phosphorus so...
ShieldWife
Marchioness
It can be weird what gets banned and what doesn’t, but I guess they have to draw the line somewhere.
Exploding or flattening bullets are banned, along with certain applications of incendiaries, chemical weapons, non-metallic shrapnel, and even blinding lasers.
I could imagine that banning lasers that are powerful enough to kill would be banned too.
Exploding or flattening bullets are banned, along with certain applications of incendiaries, chemical weapons, non-metallic shrapnel, and even blinding lasers.
I could imagine that banning lasers that are powerful enough to kill would be banned too.
Shipmaster Sane
You have been weighed
I cant imagine there is an accurate way to measure the difference between getting your arm blown off and dying slowly of bloodloss and shock and getting your arm burned off in the same time frame and dying slowly of more or less the same thing.
ShieldWife
Marchioness
I’m not really sure what happens to a human body or object hit by a laser this powerful. Would human flesh explode into a cloud of superheated flesh that horribly burns everybody around? Would objects hit by the laser become so hot that they glow brightly enough to blind people? Is melted body armor or equipment going to stick to people’s flesh? I can imagine a lot of gruesome possibilities, I’m not sure if those concerns are valid or not. It’s not as though plenty of soldiers don’t get horribly maimed or burned as it is.
Aaron Fox
Well-known member
It's not that slow, really. Even at an output of, oh, 5kJ per pulse or second (depending on if it is a pulse laser or a continuous wave laser), you'll explode than burn. Hollywood really screwed up on the entire 'lasers causes burns only' thing.
ShieldWife
Marchioness
I guess an issue isn’t the just people who die from the laser relatively soon after being hit, but those who survive being hit. We know the possible effects of surviving a rifle bullet to the leg, but what happens when you survive a laser blast to the leg?