Frickin Laser Beams - Television Tropes & Idioms

"You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague tells me that that can't be done. Are you forgetting what I pay you people for? Honestly, throw me a bone here."
— Dr. Evil, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

The most prominent type of Ray Gun these days.

When you turn on a Laser Sight, it immediately shows up on your target. This is because it's a laser and moves at the speed of light. So wouldn't you think a laser weapon would also (effectively) immediately hit the target? Logically, yes; but this is TV, where Hollywood Science rules. Thus, energy weapons move a lot slower than the speed of light (and a lot slower than bullets in the same show) and can be dodged after they are fired. Occasionally, it's explained by the dodger seeing the person aiming at them and going for the trigger, and moving in the split-second before they pull it. Also don't expect the lasers to do more than make victims stumble backwards a few feet, unless of course the targets are inhuman or just really not all that important.

Speaking of knockback, an Energy Weapon in fiction will always have recoil and knockback, in spite of the fact that energy (light, electricity, radio, etc.) has negligible momentum. Finally, regardless of a laser's frequency and the medium it's shooting through, it will make futuristic *zap* noises and be visible (and glowy.)

Most of the complaints about laser weapons not behaving like real lasers are because their primary function in TV are not to be realistic depictions of how real energy-based weapons would work. They are merely stand-ins for "real" guns to appease media watchdogs or to establish a show as being futuristic.

There actually are "real lasers" in weapons research and development — like the Airborne Laser

and THEL

. These lasers are supposed to burn through targets (like missiles) and cause their fuel/warhead to explode or their airframe to disintegrate when it hits, although this is also a continuous beam and requires some time to work. Solid-state pulsed lasers are also in development, which fire bursts of energy and are lighter than fluid-based lasers, but harder to cool. Not to mention that the heat from a powerful laser wouldn't just burn through clothing or make a neat, bloodless, pin-sized hole. There's a common misconception that laser beams cauterize wounds, but real laser wounds are every bit as bloody as knife wounds. It can also cause the water in the body to boil, expand and rip the surrounding tissues apart, much like a high velocity bullet impact. There are also electrolasers under development, which ionize the air so that electric current can be sent along the beam's path.

Incidentally, plasma weapons fire superheated gas; this is different from lasers, which are light beams. Necessarily, plasma weapons can't use light speed projectiles as, having mass, they would be susceptible to all sorts of physics that make approaching the speed of light arbitrarily difficult. Practically a trope in and of itself, plasma weapons are almost always depicted as producing ludicrous glowy puffballs (often green) that somehow avoid mixing into the air, sometimes Hand Waved as magically autogenerated magnetic containment. An actual plasma weapon would be as useful as a gun that shoots steam

Though, to be fair, guns (and even arrows unless you're in Bullet Time) might as well be instantaneous on a human scale, due to the speeds involved.

For those keeping score, the title of this trope comes from an otherwise unrelated line in the first Austin Powers movie. For really frickin big laser beams, see Wave Motion Gun. For real handguns bowdlerized into energy guns, see Where Did They Get Lasers? If it's Raygun Gothic, it's probably a Death Ray.

Occasionally misspelled "lazer" in fiction, commonly to differentiate from actual LASERs. Frequently mispelled "lazer" in real life, because people are dumb, or because it's easier to copyright names that aren't real words. In reality, the name "L.A.S.E.R." is an acronym of "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation".

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Examples

Anime and Manga

Beam weapons in Gundam, while fast, are frequently dodged after they are fired. This because the beam weapons aren't energy beams, but are made up of particles with a considerable amount of mass, called a "Mega-particle". See below, and also see Minovsky Particle. (The Wave Motion Gun-grade weapons like the Solar Ray are portrayed as travelling at the speed of light; fortunately, Psychic Powers are faster than light in Gundam.)
- Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino has commented, in later years, that he chose to use particle beam weapons over more realistic lasers for dramatic purposes, feeling that the invisibility and unerring accuracy of lasers would make for boring combat sequences.
Done right (according to real physics) in the anime Starship Operators. Beam weapons would hit the ship without warning, to the point the crew had to hide their vessel behind a large asteroid to avoid being destroyed by attacks they couldn't dodge.
Gan Deeva, Juna's bow in Earth Maiden Arjuna, is an energy bow.
Somewhat averted by Fate Stay Night: the weapon of Servant Saber is Excalibur (since she's, uh...). When its Sword Beam attacks get up to Wave Motion Gun-level, it is basically impossible to avoid (for humans) since it becomes a beam of destructive light.
- Played straight by Servant Caster. Although not one of her signature attacks, she jumps into the air, letting her cloak billow out, Instant Runes appear in the air, and Beam Spam rains down.
Wolf's Rain deserves a mention here. The laser-like weapons installed in the Nobles' airships fire beams that can actually ZIG-ZAG en route to their targets. (To quote another series, "don't ask me how it works or I'll start to whimper".)
Subverted in the manga Cannon God EXaXXion: energy weapons exist, but it turns out Artificial Gravity and Inertial Dampening make them useless, while Big Freaking Railguns and Humongous Mecha work just fine.
Cowboy Bebop. There are a few beam weapons, but they are mostly starship-based and rare (Spike's Swordfish fighter being an exception). Most firefights are conducted wholly with standard metal-shooting guns.
Completely averted in the anime version of Planetes - the laser beams used in space are not only instant and recoilless, but invisible beyond points of light on the target; this is accurate since there's no atmosphere for them to refract through. Note that the manga version of the same scene has visible lasers and sound effects.
Yu-Gi-Oh! features ancient Egyptian laser beams.
- Well, the ancient Egyptians did agree with the Greek idea that people saw things because their eyes shot beams of light out at them.
Crest Of The Stars features those and, though they fire visible beams, they still travel at the speed of light. Lafiel even remarks just before a dogfight that it's impossible to dodge them, so "this is a game of anticipation".
- Of course this doesn't stop them from animating them going WAY slower then light speed and being dodged constantly regardless...
  - Many of the "beams" in the series are in fact particle beams consisting of confined antimatter streams. The actual lasers in the series are portrayed as being far weaker in comparison to other types of weapons, as would likely be the case in reality, as they are used as high-speed point-defense weapons.
  - The science in the the series tends to seem good but has quirks. Second novel had lasers being dodged randomly, i.e. not seeing and dodging, but jinking around randomly to make it hard to hit at range. Good — but they could detect near misses. The third novel mentions laser pistol shots being invisble except for the damage they do, though, that was even in atmosphere. Novel and anime also had cartridges of said pistols being changed frequently, as you'd have to for chemical-powered lasers; cartridges double as small grenades.
You'd think that a series like One Piece would be void of any beams of the sort, but through the powers of one of The World Government's three Marine admirals, and technology 500 years ahead of the current time, even pirates can face off against Frickin Laser Beams.

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Films

The blasters of Star Wars are not actually lasers (Retconned into plasma-casters) and neither are the lightsabres, nor the ship-to-ship turbolasers, nor the Death Star's superlaser. That said, Attack of the Clones shows off some lasers that do act like lasers, a constant beam that appears just about instantly.
Goldfinger has the famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) "crotch-laser", which was an actual laser designed to cut gold. It was later used as part of the villain's scheme, however its initial use was far more memorable, hence the name.
- Interestingly, real lasers of that power level tend to be in the infrared spectrum. The red beam we see is a secondary guide laser similar to a laser gunsight, not the actual damage-causing bit.
The Black Hole actually consistently portrayed its laser guns firing a beam that traveled instantly.
Another film that you wouldn't expect consistency or realism from: the guns in Logan's Run are lasers, but they don't use a visible beam. The characters just point at something, fire, and a single point on whatever they're aiming at bursts violently into flame.
- ... which was a complete simplification of the Sandman's Gun in the book, which was (rather than anything to with lasers) was a heavy pistol with six selectable specialized shells in a revolver-like cylinder. The film retained the muzzle flash, though.
- There's no mention in the film that the flameguns were supposed to be lasers of any sort. The guns didn't even have a name. (The ill-fated Logan's Run TV series that followed called the guns "weapons" and gave them a stun setting, but still no mention was made of lasers.)
Short Circuit has military robots armed with shoulder-mounted "lasers" that are actually more of an explosive "pulse" than a typical Hollywood laser, needing to charge up and causing whatever it hits to blow up spectacularly immediately upon impact.
Diamonds Are Forever had a Kill Sat with a laser that could destroy a submarine deep underwater and a missile inside its silo.
The plot of Real Genius involves several college engineering geniuses working on a powerful chemical laser as a school-sponsored research project, not realizing that it is intended for use as an orbital assassination weapon.
Starship Troopers 2 featured strobe-light weapon props because they couldn't afford real guns. Incidentally, everyone complained that the guns dind't look like they were shooting "lasers".
Star Trek (2009) follows the "bullets of light" model: a handheld phaser shoots discrete pulses. The Enterprise itself shakes from recoil as its phasers fire.
Destroyah from the Godzilla franchise is able to emit a laser beam from his horn.
In Disney's Condorman, the hero's Cool Boat comes equipped with a small turret-mounted laser cannon. Oddly, the non-instantaneous beams it fires do indeed reflect off of water — choppy ocean water. In order to accept it, you pretty much need to be working on Rule Of Cool.
The plot of the film Eraser involves the bad guys using railguns to see through buildings and commit acts of terrorism. The movie is probably the origin of the current concept of rail guns in video games.
- Although railguns are kinetic weapons not lasers in any way.

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Literature

The Andalites in Animorphs have Shredders, which the Yeerks modified into Dracon beams, which dissolve the target more slowly -- and painfully.
Nita in the Young Wizards series has a spell that manifests as a hand-held terawatt linear particle accelerator. Yes, a frickin' magical particle beam rifle.
Notably averted in Dune, due to the the ubiquity of Deflector Shields that unpredictably explode with nuclear force when hit with frikkin' lasers (or make the energy feed back so the laser explodes, or explode everything in between them, or... well, you get the idea.)
- In case you're wondering why that discourages the use of lasers rather than shields: It's because lasgun-shield interaction is legally considered equivalent to a nuke.
In Robert Sheckley's short story "The Gun Without A Bang", an astronaut is sent to a distant jungle planet along with a new prototype laser gun he's supposed to test. Leaving his ship, he is promptly beset by a pack of dog-like predators. The gun works flawlessly, reducing dogs and wide swaths of jungle to dust, but because the gun doesn't make any noise and the beam is invisible, the "dogs" don't understand that the human is a threat and waves of them keep coming despite the fact that so many of them are being destroyed. (The man also has to worry about enormous severed tree-parts falling on him...) The man finally desperately, fights his way back to his ship, only to discover the gun's beam has thoroughly Swiss-cheesed the vessel, rendering it useless. A rescue crew arrives months later, and learns the man survived by scaring off the dogs with a home-made bow and arrow, and using the butt of the gun as a hammer to build a shelter.
There is a similar event in Asimov's Foundation and Earth: when the heroes land on a long-forgotten planet, a pack of dogs menaces them. Their microwave laser can kill the dogs, but since it gives no indication of cause, it doesn't drive them away; they end up using a different weapon, designed simply to induce pain, to turn the dogs around.
- And similarly but oppositely in The Day of the Triffids, although with flamethrowers: the reason they're such effective weapons is that while a gunshot will just draw all the triffids for miles to attack the gun, with a flamethrower they don't know what to retaliate against (and occasionally catch each other on fire besides). Different enemy, different response.
Alan Dean Foster seems to go to unreasonable lengths to avoid this trope. Despite sonic weapons, weapons that have explosions that make nukes look pitiful by comparison, and a planet mounted weapon connected directly to the core that creates localized black holes, these never show up.
- A planet-mounted weapon that is controlled by psychics. Although one could wonder if the reason that they don't have these lasers is just because they would be pathetic compared to what there actually is, as Rule of Cool puts everything listed above way beyond lasers.
- Lasers are in fact mentioned as merely one of the many and varied types of advanced weaponry in the stories. They behave much as one would expect a powerful beam weapon to in real life, with instantaneous (or at least speed-of-light) travel, cutting through things, etc., and there are lasers for everything from starships to hand weapons.
David Weber handles this particularly well, especially in the Honor Harrington series (Horatio Hornblower In Space, clearly acknowledged both by the author and in the series itself). There are multiple fights in the books where technologically inferior ship #1 sends out a radar pulse to try to find ship #2, which is received by ship #2 who then instantly triggers their laser weapon already targetted by their superior technology on ship #1, such that the return radar pulse is received by ship #1 immediately followed by the laser pulse which destroys them, because radar and lasers both travel at the same speed.
In Hyperion, laser weapons work at the speed of light. Unfortunately, space battles take place across such great distances that the enemy ships have to watch the beam crawl across space towards them. While the time it takes for lasers to hit is realistic, unless their sensors work considerably faster than light there's no way they could notice the attack until it hit, not to mention it raises questions about why they don't move out of the way.
Laser weapons in Artemis Fowl are considered obsolete — the Lower Elements Police long ago switched to the more powerful and flexible neutrino weapons (which can be used as a Stun Gun or to make precise cuts in a material)). As a result, it's been years since LEP suits were made laser-proof... which turns out very bad when a Chessmaster arms some disgruntled goblin triads with lasers and disables all neutrino weapons in Haven.
In Larry Niven's books, laser flashlights can be used as weapons, but more like ranged knives than guns. If you sweep the beam across the target quickly, it will make a shallow cut. Doing so slowly makes for a deep cut. And using it on someone wearing clothing the same color as the beam is difficult, as the clothing is that color because it reflects that color of light.
- Oh, and not to mention the fact that the Ringworld has the ability to cause it's sun to flare, and then turn that flare into a frickin SUPER laser.
- In one of the earlier Known Space stories, humans use giant solar-powered lasers on Mercury to provide thrust to ships clear across the solar system (think solar sails, but more concentrated). When the Kzinti invade, they basically run into a series of "industrial accidents".
- Kzinti are slow learners: their first encounter with humans involved them trying to slowly roast a human exploration ship that the Kzinti telepaths had determined was unarmed. They weren't concerned about the communications laser. The one big enough to punch through hundreds of A.U. of solar system space and be reliably detectable even when not precisely aimed. Yeah, that one....
The works of Dale Brown have featured anti-ballistic missile lasers on modified airliners, eventually followed by ground-based anti-satellite lasers that prove very capable of tearing spaceplanes a new one.

Close Literature

Live Action TV

Done half-properly in an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, where an enemy agent explains to the immobilized captain that an energy weapon's beam moves at the speed of light, and is therefore impossible to dodge. Of course, given that the weapon's effect is to leave him conscious but physically frozen in mid-dodge, it's hard to tell why they bothered.
Subverted in Firefly; Lasers do exist, but they're mostly shipboard weapons, due to power requirements. The few personal lasers that do appear are large, clunky, expensive, and unreliable (not to mention requiring maintainance and parts not available on the Rim Worlds). Most people just use guns.
- And in the one episode that does see major use of a hand-held laser in combat, it works more like a "proper" laser than a Star Wars blaster, producing a coherent beam that hits instantly and slices through buildings.
Traveller is similar; lasers are powerful but expensive, fragile and easy to defend against; plasma and fusion weapons are terrifying but even more expensive, heavy and often require the user to be wearing power armour. And they're almost universally illegal for civilians. It's a common belief that Firefly was to some extent inspired by Traveller; Word Of God says otherwise, that both simply draw on similar tropes.
Stargate SG-1 takes this over the top. The beam weapons of the Ori Motherships are so ridiculously slow that any ship can easily dodge them, while Humans railguns (and machine guns) are almost instant traveling, of course.
- Ironically, the Ori Mothership's beam weapon rarely misses while the railguns on the human battlecruisers are quite possibly the least accurate weapons in the entire show.
- Any other beam weapons (those of Mooks in particular) are slow as well. However, at least they avert having recoil.
Done relatively well in Star Trek. While they're called "Phasers" and they form a solid glowy line, they hit the target almost instantaneously. They are a bit slower then they should be, however, with a visible delay between firing and hitting the target.
- However, in the first season episode "Conspiracy", Riker and Picard are able to dodge a phaser beam after it's been fired.

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Tabletop Games

In Warhammer 40000, the Imperial Guards' standard "lasguns" are the weakest of all guns actively used by the series' factions, and even then they can blow body parts off.
- In previous editions, lasguns were actually described as firing a discrete "bullet" of laser energy, described in at least one novel (and portrayed in at least one video game) as a twinkling ball of light that moves at about the same speed as a bullet, if not slower. This has been rectified as of the third edition of the game, so that all laser weapons are now assumed to fire actual laser beams (and are portrayed doing so in Dawn Of War).
  - They still have muzzle flash, though. This troper has come up with a lengthy explanation why, involving oxygen igniting in the compressed space of the barrel, and the burning particles exiting the barrel creating the flash, to put things simply and without math. What I'm trying to say is Warhammer 40000 fans are scary.
  - What lasguns are and how they work vary depending on who is describing them. Abnett has a sniper having to compensate for wind and gravity, with a permanent bruise from the recoil. Others have had lasguns fire normal bullets.
  - If they're just firing normal bullets, they'll be autoguns — basically 41st Millenium versions of contemporary firearms, which exist alongside lasguns. The Guard mostly use lasguns for logistics reasons (their power cells can be recharged on the fly).
  - How accurate lasguns are portrayed depends on the write, but one mistake just about all of them do is have the shot cauterize the wound, while in real life lasers would do pretty much the same damage as normal firearms.
- Lascannons and other larger laser weaponry is generally portrayed more realistically, although the beam is usually visible (while in real life such weapons would probably have a wavelenght lower than visible light).
- Powerful long-range weaponry is the Tau's bread and butter, and the Hammerhead Tank in particular can sport a huge Frickin' Laser Beam, or more accurately a huge Frickin' Ion Cannon. Fire Warriors, the Tau's basic soldiers, carry pulse rifles, which are particle beams that break down into a plasma pulse as they leave the gun (they at least look like typical Hollywood lasers). Many of their tanks and battlesuits are outfitted with rapid-fire versions called Burst Cannons. Bonus points to these for looking like miniguns
- tau really use mini bullets that fire at high speed like in Mass Effect
In Paranoia, laser pistols are common, and so reflective armor is also common. The laser pistols also come in different colors (to match security clearance levels). In the first edition, higher-clearance reflec armor was multi-colored, to represent all the colors of laser that it protected against; the second edition switched to single-color reflec armor (which also protected against all lower clearances). The editors' explanation was basically "yes, we know physics does not work this way in real life, but this is simpler".
In one of the Splat Books for Car Wars, lasers were described as being too useless as energy weapons due to anti-laser armour in the military... which isn't as useful on a car. There were anti-laser types of armour, although those typically cost more at the least.

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Video Games

The Metroid Prime series has these, and Samus' standard beams are variations. The power beam seems to be a charged particle beam which is both electrically neutral and at thermal equilibrium with its surroundings, so it probably uses positive and negative ions. Evidence for this is that it 'inhales' surrounding particles, and that the other beams are specifically designed for thermal or electrical impacts-when fighting the Chozo ghosts for example, the scan visor mentions they're invulnerable to heat or electricity, so that just leaves kinetic effects-which could be why missiles also hurt them. The powered form of the wave beam, the wavebuster, acts a lot like an electrolaser, delivering such a visible arc of electrical current to a target.
- Metroid Prime: Hunters features the Imperialist, a laser sniper rifle, which strikes the target instantaneously, but creates a very visible red beam that lasts just long enough to give away the firer's position.
The Halo series has plasma weapons both handheld and vehicle-mounted versions, and the famous Spartan laser; the Covenant Scarab unleashes an lightning-like green beam at targets, possibly an electrolaser. The Forerunner's creations use actual hitscan weapons which fire glowy beams that land with a sizzling sound. The Spartan Laser, likewise, also reaches its target almost instantly, although it lands with more of a 'boom' sound and takes some time to charge.
- The earlier Marathon series also had all sorts of energy weapons which moved very slowly, and a number of typically near-hitscan bullet weapons. Since there were only one or two enemies with bullet weapons and one or two Awesome But Impractical energy weapons you could use, this typically added up to you dodging lots of enemy fire and them ending up as bullet-riddled heaps of steaming entrails (when you didn't trick them into starting a fight with the other guy that was standing behind you.)
In Descent, the various laser weapons travel approximately at twice your ship's velocity and can be dodged - however, the Vulcan cannon, effectively a machine gun that fires pieces of metal, travels instantly and can not be dodged. Once you get the afterburner powerup, you can travel at the same speed as the laser beams.
Unreal Tournament 2003 introduced the "Lightning Gun", a sniping weapon using the electrolaser concept as justification to blow up peoples heads with lightning bolts at long range. Note that it's rather less practical than the sniper rifle (included in the game as a mutator) because it gives away the shooter's position.
XCom has lasers, which are slower than light and pulse, but are impossible to dodge — on account of being in a Turn Based Strategy game.
MechCommander featured a bizarre spin on the matter: lasers move as visible projectiles towards the target (at the same speed as ballistic projectiles), but whether they hit or not is predetermined at the moment they are fired. This results in bizarre situations where firing at a fast-moving target will cause the laser to actually bend, change course, and follow the target until impact.
- Unreal Tournament's Shock Rifle does something similar, although the effect varies. The weapon is hitscan (another word for instant hit), but the beam is not. The result is that when you fire you see the target light up with the blast shockwave before the actual bolt reaches it.
  - Mechcommander 2 and at least Mechwarrior 3, however, have lasers travel instantaneously. Interestingly, however, the 'Pulse Lasers' behave like (continous beam) lasers, and the 'Lasers' behave like pulse lasers.
Two words: Solar Guns.
- Solar guns being, as the name implies, Frickin Laser Beams that fire pure sunlight (or fire, ice, earth, or wind).
The Brotherhood of Nod in Command And Conquer is in love with laser weapons, with everything from laser rifles and laser tanks or their iconic Obelisk of Light. GDI, on the other hand, just uses conventional cannons - very, very large conventional cannons.
- Then there's Red Alert. In Red Alert 2, the Allies were in love with laser weapons. Then in Red Alert 3, they introduced the Empire of the Rising Sun. EVERYTHING in the Empire of the Rising Sun has lasers. Even the resource gathering units have Frickin' Laser Beams!
The 1998 Activision game Battlezone has a weapon called a blast cannon, on which the manual says "The Blast Cannon delivers a short but powerful laser beam burst that does tremendous damage to enemy armour". This behaves like an actual pulsed LASER beam, with the atmosphere in its path being superheated to explosive temperatures and causing both its appearance of a blinding white line and its sound of a loud thunderclap.
- Except when you use it on Europa or Earth's moon, where there is no atmosphere.
Jedi Outcast has a particularly infuriating version of an actual instant-hit laser being dodgeable. The Disruptor Rifle is actually hitscan on normal enemies, but force-sensitive ones will dodge out of the way in a single frame not-an-animation if you try to zap them with it.
- Handwaved in the sequel Jedi Academy. They do it with Force Sense in the short time between you decide to pull the trigger and the actual pulling. But obviously it is to force you to fight with a lightsaber against them.
- Not to mention the player character being an actual Jedi themselves and being unable to block said shots.
- Jedi Outcast does allow the player to dodge the Disruptor Rifle shots, if you have Force Speed. It activates Force Speed for the duration of the dodge animation, making it look cooler and drain a lot of Force Power, so the Computer is still a cheating bastard. Still, better than the Rocket Launcher Force Push hot-potato game.
- In a mission to capture Boba Fett, he is also able to insta-dodge Disruptor shots, with the same animation (maybe he learned it from Remo Williams).
In the Crusader games, laser bolts are slower than bullets. It's not like the speed of light was actually altered in-universe or anything, but the fact remains that bullets do hitscan damage and lasers fly through the air slightly faster than rockets.
Space sims vary somewhat, usually for gameplay reasons more than anything else — for shooters, players are expected to have to lead their targets in addition to lining them up, so nearly everything is a (pretty) projectile, lasers included. 4X games vary, since the player isn't the one doing the lining up and shooting.
- In the Escape Velocity games, lasers, plasma, protons, and bullets all move about as fast, but a number of special weapons (like the original game's particle beam) move instantly but with a very short range. Some projectiles, though, are faster or slower in the third game: "blaster" shots are fast, with railguns and fusion pulse shots being slower. Weapons described as "lasers" like the Capacitor Pulse laser, Bio Relay laser, and the Thunderhead do hit instantly, but all had visible beams. There were also some non-laser beam weapons that hit instantly.
- In Freelancer, everything is a projectile. The laser and photon weapons just have faster projectiles.
- The Freespace games saddle the player with lasers that fire projectiles. However, capital ships in the second game usually mount "beam" type weapons as their main guns. These are highly visible so that the player has a chance to avoid flying through them and being destroyed.
- All the Wing Commander games (you guessed it) feature projectile weapon mechanics even for the "lasers". Interestingly, the laser is universally the weakest ship-mounted weapon, even though it has a high rate of fire and is the most efficient in terms of energy usage.
- A different kind of space sim, the 4X game Master Of Orion II used lasers as its most basic ship-mounted beams — big red beams, of course. They traveled as quickly as every other beam, and only traveled instantaneously with the "continuous" upgrade, which several other weapons could also use.
Too Human avoids this, as its laser weapons shoot an immediate continuous beam, which also heats up and does more damage the longer its kept on target.
Touhou often has these kind of weaponry in Spell Cards. Two notable examples are the slow laser beams rampant in Keine's and Nitori's attacks (from Imperishable Night and Mountain of Faith, respectively), and the laser sight to laser in Mokou's and Patchouli's attacks (from Imperishable Night and the gaiden game, Shoot the Bullet respectively)
- How did we manage to mention Touhou WITHOUT mentioning the Master Spark and Nondirectional Lasers Marisa — uh — "borrowed" and then souped up to ludicrous levels?
- There are also quite a few instant laser attacks, generally done by having a faint and harmless laser appear for a second or two before the opaque laser that damages you appears in the same location.
Eve Online has lasers, used primarly by the ships of the Amarr Empire. EVE lasers are visible as solid beams, but do strike the target instantly.
In Tachyon: The Fringe, the fighter-mounted pulse lasers travel slower-than-light and are visible. Ironically, capital ship-mounted beam lasers strike the target instantly (still visible beam though). To top it off, one of the factions has a railgun weapon, which strikes the target instantly (i.e. faster than lasers).
Kirby can gain a "laser" ability (slower than light, travels in tangible lumps rather than as a continuous beam); in the words of the ability description screen, "it bounces off walls, too!".
Even Castlevania is not free from this trope, despite all but two of the games taking place pre-scifi. Orlox and the Nova Skeletons in Symphony of the Night, Joachim in Lament of Innocence (and how!), those wall-eyeball things in Bloodlines — even Dracula gets in on it in Castlevania III (with more Beamspam for your buck in the American version than the Japanese... Nintendo Hard indeed) and Curse of Darkness, and that's all before Soma gets his hands on the beam gun-type weapon in Aria of Sorrow. Wheeee!
Star Wars: Battlefront, being a Star Wars game, of course has the slower-than-light "blaster bolts" we've come to expect. However, it at the same time subverts this trope: sniper rifles and some vehicle-mounted weapons utilize a beam that travels at the speed of light. In the case of the vehicles' beam cannons, it can even be swept across an enemy front For Massive Damage.
The Fallout games feature laser weaponry in the mid- to late game areas. In the first two games, they're not terribly effective since even plain metal armour reduces laser damage by 75%. On the other hand, the laser weapons family does include a Gatling Laser.
- The Fallout games do partially avert this trope, although in a very subtle way involving the recoil: Although you can physically see them recoil back when shot, the energy weapons skill is based on your perception score, implying the recoil is so negligible that you only need to see your target to hit them. Contrast this with the small weapons skill using agility (your natural reflexes allowing you to better deal with the recoil) or heavy weapons using endurance (the recoil being so massive, you have to worry more about passing out from the shock).
- The third game goes further with the aversion, in having its laser weapons be hitscan, while the two previous titles had them fire the more "traditional" slow-moving bolt of energy.
Most robots from the Future era in Chrono Trigger have energy weapons as part of their arsenal (Robo and his "Laser Spin" technique included).
Cloud of Darkness in Dissidia is kinda all about this with her non-physical attacks, and how!
Raptor, the Apogee shareware shooter, did deal nicely with lasers. Your best bet was to not be in front of it when it fired: whether from you or foe, there was no real lag between fire and impact. Unusually for a shooter, you could also mount a small laser turret. Pew pew pew.
FEAR 2 has a laser gun that pretty much averts this trope. It is a constant beam with no recoil that hits instantly. Especially annoying since the enemies can still hit you even in bullet time.
The Falken and Morgan superjets from the Ace Combat series mount laser weaponry. However they act more like Laser Blades, as a beam is "pumped" continuously for a short period that can be swept around to cut enemies up.
Several different varieties of laser are staple weapons in Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri, and like all weapons, have various stats describing how they supposedly work (aside from their flat Attack Value), including Active Medium, Type, and Burn Rate for one meter of steel. The basic laser, the first new weapon you can research in the game with AV 2, is a fiber-coupled diode laswer and burns through one meter of steel in 0.76 seconds. The Singularity Laser at the end of the game, with AV 24, is a singularity induction laser using a temporal boundary as its active medium. Burn rate? Relative.
- There's also the Gatling Laser, Fusion Laser, and Quantum Laser amidst the other weapons.
There's an arcade shoot-em-up called Strikers 1945. As the title suggests, it ostensibly takes place during World War II. You have a choice of six or so planes to fly against the ostensible Axis powers. I say ostensibly because the only thing I've ever noticed about the game, even while playing it, is that these are WWII-era planes in 1945 shooting Frickin Laser Beams at transforming Humongous Mecha. A clear adherence to the Rule Of Cool if I've ever seen it.
The first-person shooter Command And Conquer: Renegade has perhaps one of the most realistic instances of lasers. They are instant, they fire in short pulses (with gattling lasers being able to saturate the target more), and their blooming effect causes the air to be transluscent rather than opaque. Perhaps one of the few unrealistic effects of the laser is that on Easy mode, auto-aiming will cause the lasers to turn slightly from a direct line to hit targets.
I Wanna Be The Guy has at least one room which rapidly fills up with absolutely huge laser beams coming out of nowhere to reduce you to splatter.

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Scientists have created a Terawatt laser (over 1,000 gigawatts!) that can fire a beam into space... for scientific purposes. The laser is so powerful that it can only be fired for brief periods, creating a visible pulse that seems to "travel" through the atmosphere like a sci-fi "blaster" due to the ionizing effect. The ionization of the atmosphere around the beam creates a temporary plasma vacuum that allows the laser to remain coherent over much longer distances, which is what propagates as a visible pulse, hence the glowy visible laser effect is actually the intended purpose.
In 1984, the Soviets used a ground-based laser to illuminate the Space Shuttle Challenger as a warning to the USA over Reagan's SDI plans. However, they underestimated how powerful it was and the laser actually caused damage to the shuttle and temporarily blinded several crew members, sparking diplomatic protests. One can imagine what might have happened if just a little more damage had been done and the shuttle had been destroyed....
The nearest we'll ever get to a direct energy weapon (i.e. a weapon which shoots energy, or plasma if you want to stretch it, and nothing else) are flamethowers (as fire is a form of plasma) and tazers (versions of which are being developed which ionize the air, essentially meaning that it can fire an arc of electricity rather than needing to extend wires).
- Well, the nearest we'll get with modern scientific understanding, at any rate. Each century has brought hitherto unknown concepts and ideas to light. If you tried to explain the idea of nuclear fission to someone two hundred years ago you'd be greeted with an odd look, and back during the crusades, anyone claiming that sickness was caused by tiny organisms would be branded a loon. Who knows what we can do in another two hundred years? Still, for today's level of comprehension, the previously stated point stands.
  - Actually, directed-energy weapons of various sorts are in development and (depending on which sources you believe, since all the details are, naturally, classifed) quite possibly ready for deployment in the next decade or two. Unlike their fictional relatives, most of these take advantage of the light-speed property: shooting down a missile with another missile is, as Eisenhower said, like shooting a bullet with a bullet, so having a weapon that you can fire where the missile is, rather than where it will be, makes the process much simpler. Most of the other projects focus on the potential of lasers as nonlethal weapons, using them to blind or cause pain rather than life-threatening injuries; the idea has made many activists very unhappy, though, so chances are these won't see action anytime soon, especially since guns will remain the weapon of choice for killing people rather than just disabling them. The central problem in making lethal lasers better than guns is getting a portable source with high enough energy density. Of course, lots of people are working on this problem because whoever solves it will have a good shot at making humongous piles of money because it is also a critical technology for making better personal electronic gizmos, electric cars, increasing the practicality of wind and solar energy, and some other such useful applications.
  - Most of the practical energy weapons fall into the maser and sonic categories and as the above troper points out will be most useful as non-lethal weapons. They attack the senses rather than the body directly. In the end all energy weapons cannot be as powerful as their solid mass counterparts due to the simple e=mc^2 equation. Even the cruddiest bullet has an inherent mass of energy in the physical bullet that dwarfs the explosive propellent that sends it to the target, hence the massive devastation that a meteor strike causes, a simple kinetic kill weapon. The universal rule of energy weapons is that you would be better off throwing the power source at your target and letting it explode. The alternative is cheating, insdead of direct damage the maser weapons that we are using now excite the water in the skin tickling the tiny nerves that exist there causing excruciating pain.

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