Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

Unless there is a large scale war going on there is generally no reason to deploy military resources attacking some ragtag colony out in the sticks.

Thats the thing, because its a rag tag colony in the middle of no where you don't need to deploy much.... a single destroyer or two could do the trick.

And if you set up the defences to stop that? Your just signaling that whatever your sitting on is valuable enough to protect.

It is a lot easier to attack and raid isolated outposts, small colonies, and similar locations, and forcing your opponent to exert attention to their periphery in fear of raids. It provides military and civil pressure to an enemy. Who then either have to decide how much if any forces to send after the raiders.

Nothing stops the opposition from taking them over and turning them into staging points for future offenses and raids either.

It boils down to who is doing the raiding and why.

Would wounds from energy weapons be medically treated like first-to-third degree burns or would something more exotic be needed?

Edited by Jasaiga on Jul 1st 2018 at 9:02:36 AM

Yes, they'd be treated as burns; however, additional complications could result if the weapons create or employ ionizing radiation — a particle beam would have this sort of effect. Ionizing radiation can cause radiation poisoning which can have serious and fatal results independently of the immediate effect of the weapon.

I imagine so. Actual damage caused by lasers is usually heat based with the rare occasion of a pulse laser causing the tissues to rupture. I say rare because anything heavier than a T-shirt will tend to catch most of the energy and probably melt or catch fire or something.

So the real danger would be having burning hot clothing right up against the skin.

We know so little about plasma that I can only speculate that it would cause similar damage and a lightning gun would cause electrical burns. For obvious reasons.

Depending of the type of laser, you'd also have localized flash heating, which can create an effect of mini explosions in the afflicted area.

For an example, an pulsed laser strong enough could bore a hole through the armor, pushing smoke, vapor and debris away fast enough to create hot shrapnel and the laser in contact with skin tissue can effectively heat the blood and water in the skin fast enough to flash boil them and create a small steam explosion.

A laser wound can do a lot more than just burns depending of what you are hitting.

In a laboratory setting, yes. However, battlefields are messy. Just the slight shake of someone holding their arm outstretched subtly shifts the aim point of a weapon. Because a pulse laser needs pulses to hit the same point again and again even the slightest variation of aim point destroys the armor penetration of the weapon. Add in things like movement for both the shooter and the target and you're basically asking for a miracle nine out of ten.

And that's assuming you can actually vaporize the material with the laser you have available. Maybe the material creates thick smoke when it burns. Maybe it's thick like a sweater and takes time to burn through. Maybe the material just has a particularly high specific heat or maybe it's translucent and distributes the heat more evenly between layers.

Bel: Not really. They have field tested such devices to begin with the PEP. The pulses happen in tiny fractions of a second. Also it doesn't require a pulse laser to occur. Explosive ablation from rapid heating like that is not a new occurrence and a single pulse can do the same thing.

I do feel like energy weapons would have their own specialists in the medical field.

All kinds of ways it can fuck you up

Edited by TacticalFox88 on Jul 1st 2018 at 10:00:13 AM

@Tuefel

I wouldn't use the PEP as an example of a weapon. Despite weighing 500 pounds it was a non-lethal weapon of questionable effectiveness. Also, last mention of it was about a decade ago as scientists claimed it was a weapon of torture.

As for laser ablation in general? Clothing. Each pulse only takes off micrometers of material. Even a very powerful pulse would do more damage to the clothing than the skin. The bulk of the tissue damage would be the secondary effects, the hot gas from the vaporization searing the skin underneath. That would cause incapacitating pain before the laser actually ruptures the skin. Yes, you could certainly rupture tissues with a pulse laser but it's more likely that you won't get that kind of output on bare skin. There's simply too many obstacles.

They'd depending on the weapon be treated for burns (temperature and chemical), rupture trauma/laceration, radiation/radioactivity, electrocution and like how you deal with treating lightning strikes. (Lightning strikes are basically nature's Plasma Cannon.)

What about lasers in the RF spectrum? Blast some sucker with a fifty kilowatt beam in the UHF or microwave spectrum and give him some nasty RF burns.

^ And he'll also start smelling of microwaved bacon.

Bel: I would use the PEP as an example because it was built to scale from less than lethal up to lethal effects. Last mention was not as weapon of torture last mention was the weapon entering into a special forces weapons testing an development program as an anti-drone weapon and nearly all of those programs are black as far as the public is concerned. The torture angle was a concern of some scientists pointing out that it could be used as torture device not that it was. Which is all info the last time such lasers came up. It also reportedly pointed to an EMP like burst of energy being able to affect human tissue especially the nerves which is where the torture concerns started to come into play.

No a very powerful pulse would easily destroy more than a micrometer of cloth and would still produce a noticeable explosion as the surrounding material and everything in contact would still get heat dumped into it almost instantly. Your grossly understating how much ablation can occur. You want to see a good example of what injuries you could suffer look up arc flash injuries. Individuals not only received injuries to exposed body parts but through their clothing due to heat transfer from the event. Not even the protective clothing is a guarantee depending on how powerful an energy discharge we are talking about.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jul 1st 2018 at 10:38:26 AM

What justification is there for those old-timey science-fiction guns to look like they do? I'd figure that the coils on the barrel are magnetic lenses and the parabolic dish is a radiation baffle. What would you think?

Largely rule of cool in most works. Some give some form of technobabble for what the parts do. Depends on the work. Atomic Rocket has some classic examples listed on its pages.

Radiator fins on the barrel for cooling?

One thing I want to do in that sci-fi story that I'll totally write one day, is feature a directed energy weapon which is the smallest practical such weapon available, but is itself rather largeish, something you'd fire from a prone position or a fixed emplacement normally, but could be hip-fired in a pinch. It would have the firepower to core out a small pillbox, but would feature Raygun Gothic cooling fins on the barrel and would make the most emasculating "Pew!" sound when fired.

The character thus equipped would have seriously mixed feelings about using it, of course.

@Tuefel By the time you've got the power to vaporize more than a micrometer of cloth reliably you're basically using an autocannon to swat flies. Might as well switch to a MASER and cook them from the inside out.

@AFP Have you ever heard of Reason

Everybody listens to Reason.

Bel: Again that is not true, not only is it dependent on power of the beam but the wave length and how tightly the beam is focused at the target. Even the reflected light from a laser strike has caused almost instant burns from industrial cutting lasers. Throw in lasers in the 1-10kw range, hardly weapons grade lasers in the first place, are listed as capable of burning both skin and clothing in a fraction of a second if they are not careful. We aren't talking unpleasant surface burns like a sunburn either.

Fighteer: Lol. One of the more interesting if odd parts of that book.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jul 2nd 2018 at 2:40:30 PM

@Tuefel

That proves my point. The damage would be more burns than ruptures. You also can only kick the frequency up so far. Eventually you're ionizing rather than heating and that causes more deep tissue burns than surface heating. X-rays, for example, would cook the target right through rather than cooking a minute area on the surface.

Bel: The point is you don't have to hold a laser for seconds only a fraction of a second depending on how powerful and tightly focused it is and what wave length you are looking at. It can easily produce injury way deeper than a micrometer and that much heat in a relatively small area dumped all at once has been noted to cause small steam explosions from the rapid heating of water in tissue. That is one of the known mechanisms for eye injuries from very low power lasers to begin with. That by the way is a type of thermal injury just not the strictly burning kind. Your skin below the top most layer has a lot of water in it. Oregon State EDU discusses laser injury to various tissues. Not only can a number of wave lengths penetrate deeply but even a short pulse can produce some notable injury at rather low outputs of power. A 250W laser commonly found in universities and in industrial settings is hardly a weapons grade laser weapon like the US military has been working on.

Again, this doesn't help your case. Skin is translucent while cloths can be opaque You're still more likely to damage the foe with burning cloths than a steam explosion.

I honestly don't know what your argument is anymore.

Given the output we’ve seen with some military grade lasers I think you could get through cloth pretty easily.