Behold! The far distant future year of 1997, when every well-dressed woman will be accessorized with a laser gun.
"Wait a minute, this is the future. Where are all the phaser guns?"
— Simon Phoenix, Demolition Man
Much of classic, and occasionally modern, sci-fi is obsessed with the concept that in the future, the predominant weapon will be some form of Ray Gun. Even if the work is set mere 20 Minutes into the Future, laser weapons will be invented or introduced by aliens, scientists, spies or supervillains.
The reasons for this may be manifold.
- In universes set in a softer science fiction, a Hand Wave often explains energy based EVERYTHING is superior to everything older by default, or at least believed to be so until Rock Beats Laser.
- Energy beams technically may pack very high energies. Improving a laser is mostly a matter of finding an adequately powerful and compact energy source, the lack of which is the primary obstacle to developing laser weapons in Real Life, while kinetic weapons are far harder to scale up. If such a source is found, laser weapons may simply outclass the impact of a kinetic one.
- From a practical standpoint, energy weapons running off a battery or a reactor have Bottomless Magazines, or, at least, may be recharged expediently in the field between firefights.note
- Focused light travels at the speed of light, and even more exotic particle bursts are significantly faster than an actual projectile, eliminating the need for leading the target, wind correction, any form of ballistics and recoil compensation. In Real Life, the US Navy is already working on laser point defence because normal bullet-based CIWS can't track antiship missiles reliably. Now imagine the difficulties doing so at realistic space fighting ranges... (The energy beam is still likely to be an easily dodgeable, Painfully Slow Projectile when portrayed on screen, though.)
- Deflector Shields may exist in the setting that render the target immune to conventional firearms but not energy weapons. (The opposite may occur just as often, however, depending on the setting.)
- Energy weapons are Family-Friendly Firearms even when in universe they are more generally deadly than kinetic weapons. As such, they may be freely portrayed in children-oriented shows because they either can be set to stun the target or, at the very least, don't leave a messy corpse behind.
- This is not as stupid as it seems, and there is some work being done to implement less-than-lethal energy weapons. Original efforts were aimed at a Pulsed Energy Projectile that would vaporize a portion of the target to knock it out. Instead, PEPs appears to have been retooled as an anti-UAV weapon, while the focus is now on laser-induced neurostimulation (Agony Beam). And no, there are no technical limitations on having it as a secondary mode on a lethal pulse laser.
This trope has two variants (note that these are not mutually exclusive):
- Ubiquitous Lasers: Ray Guns are everywhere. They may not be the only type of weapon, and kinetic weapons might even still exist, but they are hardly used.
- Overpowered Lasers: Ray Guns may not be ubiquitous, but they trump every other kind of weapon. Perhaps only the rich can afford them, or only the government has the technology. Whatever the case, all other weapon types are considered inferior.
Typical portrayals include Slow Laser and Wave-Motion Gun.
Contrast Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In Future Boy Conan, mounted energy weapons seemed to have been commonplace just before the apocalypse. The Triangle Tower's defense turrets and the Gigan aircraft's cannons all run purely on electricity; Lepka being so eager to use them despite Industria's dire energy shortages really shows his priorities. Weapons on older vehicles (i.e., Industria's only plane and gunboat) and all small arms are conventional firearms.
- Gundam:
- The general trend of the franchise is that beam weapons become more dominant the larger the class. Small arms are always ballistic, battleship cannons always energy, and mobile suits use a mix of both. Narrowing the focus to mobile suit weapons, beam weapons are generally more powerful, though it varies whether they have significant drawbacks or are just plain better.
- In the original Mobile Suit Gundam, the Gundam and Guncannon using beam rifles is one of several advances they have over existing mobile suits (though originally they had very limited "ammo" and could only be recharged back at base — later advances included the ability to reload them during combat). The luna titanium armor used by them and the mass-produced GM is incredibly resistant to ballistic weapons, putting Zeon on the backfoot as they only gradually develop their own beam weapons over the course of the series. The Universal Century setting would be dominated by beam weapons from Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam onward, with the occasional rocket or a tech advancement (such as I-field barrier or anti-beam coating) giving slug-throwers a minor comeback.
- Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: The nigh-unstoppable Gundams mostly use energy weapons, both ranged and melee, contrast with the conventional rifles wielded by early-series grunt units like the Leo and Aries. The exception is the Gundam Heavyarms, which uses ballistic rounds and missiles in enormous volume. Both unique and mass-produced suits developed mid-series would skew toward beam rifles.
- The latest technology in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED is Phase Shift Armor, which is pretty much immune to everything but beam weapons. Gundams have both, wildly outclassing most other suits.
- Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury: The contemporary mobile suits used by the Spacian military and tested in Asticassia almost exclusively use beam weapons. By contrast, the older suits used by the Earthian separatists Dawn of Fold all use ballistic and solid melee weapons, except for a pair of Gundams they were given by Spacians as deniable assets. It's not clear how much this comes from the combat advantages versus "physical ordnance" being banned for fear of space debris. Either side will still use conventional explosives when battling in-atmosphere.
Comic Books
- Buck Rogers has the 20th century hero wake up centuries in the future and packing a ray gun.
- The Marvel Universe has the future looking very ray gun, as time-travellers such as Kang and Scarlet Centurion make use of exotic energy weapons while the less far-future Cable has his weapon of choice being a plasma rifle.
Films — Live-Action
- In Black Panther (2018), the Wakandans are essentially a far-future civilization stuck in the 21st century. So appropriately instead of assault rifles as standard issue for their armies, they have spears...spears that shoot energy bolts!
- Dune: Part Two: The Fremen's military wing, the Fedaykin made extensive use of Lasguns. This is understandable, during one raid against a Harkonnen spice harvester Chani used a rocket launcher. The weapon only did minor damage against vehicles other than unshielded ornithopters, it took a long time to reload and used a team of two - a loader and a shooter. In contrast the Fedaykin had Lasguns of similar size, but a single beam can destroy massive vehicles, it could keep up a steady rate of fire and only required a single warrior to operate. The only weapons that rivaled the lasgun were individual rockets and artillery shells from Harkonnen spaceships.
- In Star Wars, virtually all projectile weapons are some sort of Ray Gun. Lightsabers are also a main focus of the universe. Ancillary materials such as the visual dictionaries explain that this is partly because commonplace body armor works beautifully against kinetic penetrators like bullets (turns out stormtrooper armor isn't completely useless after all). Kinetic weapons do exist (they are referred to as slugthrowers
) and they are mostly seen as primitive, but they do have a few advantages over blasters in some situations. In addition, while standard laser cannons can't match the power of a concussion missile/proton torpedo — both are 4 times more powerful, in turn torpedoes and missiles can't match the power of the turbo laser and super laser on a capital ship. Torpedoes and missiles have pretty much topped out and don't get much more powerful when made bigger (except in non-canon works) while the super laser (originally on the Deathstar and then sucessfully miniaturized on a super star destroyer) can blow up planets.
- When the T-800 does some weapon shopping in The Terminator, he has to settle for a nine-millimeter Uzi instead of the "phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range" he would have wanted. In the future where he comes from, even all the humans seem to use only energy weapons (it's not hard to guess why, given how easily cyborgs can tank most small-arms ammunition).
Gamebooks
- In Freeway Fighter, because it's only 20 Minutes in the Future of a post-apocalypse world, there's only one instance of an energy weapon. And it's so rare, that your protagonist has no idea what that "strange-looking weapon" is. It turns out it's a laser rifle and even though it's very new technology, there's a really good reason that humanity developed something like it. In a gamebook where your Weaponized Car can shrug off multiple machine gun rounds, the occasional grenade, and even survive getting doused in burning petrol or having a stone pillar dropped on it, getting hit by that laser rifle will instantly slice through your car's heavy armor and rip you to shreds. The only thing that compares to that in the book, is getting hit by an anti-vehicle rocket.
- In Starship Traveller, phasers are One-Hit Kill if they successfully hit making ranged combat in the book very lethal. One particular encounter may have your away team battling "primitive" aliens carrying rocket staffs. An explosive rocket to the chest is survivable if you have the Medical Officer with you, in contrast every fight with an enemy carrying an energy weapon is instant death for either side.
Literature
- In Armor, the predominant weapons are energy-based for humans and the Ants. Humans have their potent Blazer guns and even their bombs use Blazer blasts, while the Ants shoot up plasteel-armored humans with their powerful Heat Rays.
- In Dune, the predominant ranged weapons are lasguns. But due to personal deflector shields that generate a fusion reaction when hit with lasers, and because shields are unable to effectively block anything over a specified speed, making projectile weapons basically useless — any bullet or arrow going fast enough to cause damage from range will just bounce off. Therefore, most soldiers use swords, using techniques designed to get the blade in just slowly enough to get through a shield. The exception is on Arrakis, because sandworms really don't like shields.
- Played straight and subverted in Ender's Game. The zero-gravity training fights in Battle School require the students to use guns that shoot a beam at other students that freezes their armor in place. The warships at first seem to use a Ray Gun, but the weapon turns out to actually be a laser that on contact propagates a field, decomposing all the matter it touches. This weapon allows Ender to destroy the Formic homeworld, by creating such a reaction that consumes the planet.
- In the Foundation Series, nuclear laser blasters are the end-all personal weapon, and ubiquitous among Foundation traders and soldiers. There are personal Deflector Shields, but Foundation-built nuclear blasters can penetrate them, whereas blasters built by the former Empire or post-Empire successor states cannot penetrate Foundation shields.
- Partly averted in The History of the Galaxy. Lasers are used on par with Magnetic Weapons by Mini-Mecha and warships. Handheld weapons, however, are either Magnetic Weapons or old-fashioned guns. Except by Insects, whose drones carry heavy handheld laser emitters. The most common use is on the LDL-55 autonomous walkers, whose primary (and only) weapon is a 200-megawatt laser.
- The aliens in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy generally have ray guns of some type.
- In Honor Harrington, mass drivers are the rule for small arms (though there are Plasma Cannon for heavier firepower), but lasers are dominant when weapons are ship-based. The gamma ray lasers are the heaviest hitter while the missiles in this setting are really just X-ray laser projectors mounted on homing rockets.
- The Polity does feature particle beam pulse weaponry as being the heavy hitter for weapons including at the small arms level, and lasers are also quite popular as small arms.
- In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy is killed in 1976 (which, at the time of the book's writing, was the future) by an assassin with a laser gun.
- In The Sun Eater, while kinetic weapons still have their uses especially rail guns as well as nukes and antimatter missiles, human troops predominantly use energy weapons plus the Lost Technology weapons that are warp reality and capable of Star Killing — these are energy weapons. Besides hitting harder, energy weapons are effective against Royce Shields, the Dune-style force fields that'll stop mass drivers (let alone 20th-21st century-style firearms) with ease. Heavy machine guns are relegated to cannon-fodder human partisans and automated turrets for repelling unshielded Cielcin boarders.
- Lasers are the only types of personal weapons mentioned in Veniss Underground. There might be kinetic weapons in one side-story, but it's really vague.
Live-Action TV
- Battlestar Galactica: Played straight in the original, where both Colonials and Cylons used lasers (lasers are powerful and easily cut through Cylon armor which easily stop bullets as shown in one episode with a lost Cylon in a Wild West planet). Averted in the remake, where nukes and traditional firearms that utilize bullets are used instead.
- Doctor Who: Using a traditional firearm will usually just get the user killed as almost anything that isn't human is Immune to Bullets. It's a sign of technological superiority when a species uses energy weapons (with the more advanced the species, the more powerful the weapon). It even shows up for humanity, future humans in 20 Minutes in the Future settings still use puny traditional firearms while centuries or millennia in the future they use lasers or ray guns.
- Averted in Firefly with characters using traditional firearms, and ship-to-ship combat often involving grappling and boarding. A few laser weapons exist (see Awesome, but Impractical) but are a pain to maintain.
- Played with in the Stargate-verse.
- Most advanced offworld cultures use energy weapons of some form or another, in contrast to the firearms preferred by the SGC. While the latter are usually superior as weapons of war, the Tau'ri did develop a fondness for the versatility of the Goa'uld zat'nik'tel, a weapon that reliably stuns on the first shot and kills on the second. By later episodes it largely replaced the Beretta M9 as their sidearm of choice.
- Energy weapons are also shown to be superior in space combat: the railguns initially used on Tau'ri vessels are good for point defense but prove to be of little use against Wraith capital ships and have no effect whatsoever against Ori motherships, whereas Ori Wave Motion Guns can one-shot a fully shielded Ha'tak and destroy a Daedalus-class with two hits. The Asgard plasma beams fitted to the Odyssey in the Stargate SG-1 finale "Unending" are similarly effective against Ori ships and are equally useful against Asuran vessels.
- Star Trek:
- Both handheld weapons that shoot a beam and large phasers (Phasers are almost solely the province of Starfleet, but this does not mean that kinetic weapons are any more common amongst other spacefaring cultures — others just use other energy weapons, the most common being disruptors) that fire from the ships are used. You can probably count the number of kinetic weapons seen throughout the franchise on one hand. Of course, this is primarily because Star Trek's phasers function both as tools and weapons, being able to heat up objects or cut materials with a relatively high level of precision, and can range from giving a mild stun to completely vaporizing an enemy, and can even be set up as an emergency explosive, all things firearms are incapable of doing.
- Kinetic weapons are very common, and generally seen in use in all lower-tech-level cultures shown. These are at least as likely to be bows and arrows as firearms, however, but there were lots of firearms as well.
Pinball
- Laser War is about a futuristic firefight between three armies armed with Ray Guns shooting Frickin' Laser Beams.
Tabletop Games
- BattleTech:
- Energy weapons are commonly weapons used by many mechs, they usually come as either Lasers or Particle Projector Cannons. They are very powerful and can blast holes through mechs, but they require cool downs otherwise they would overheat and explode.
- Interestingly, lasers don't deal a tremendous amount of damage compared to other weapon types. Large-caliber autocannon and gauss rifles, in particular, pack a bigger punch than even the biggest lasers, shot for shot, and they generate less heat. However, they have a limited stock of ammunition, and once it's depleted, a gun or missile launcher is worthless. Lasers or PPCs, though, will keep on running throughout a battle.
- Infantry-scale lasers are superior to their ballistic counterparts, as their damage type is either poorly resisted by common armor types (flak armor, for example) or the armor that does resist lasers well, can't resist anything else (laser-ablative). The sticking point is cost; a single laser pistol costs the same as nine assault rifles, with enough left over to buy an entire ammo box. As a result, most armies bet on their soldiers facing projectile weapons instead of the much less common laser weapons, and the cycle of powerful-but-rare lasers continues.
- Car Wars uses lasers that are relatively expensive and limited in ammunition by requiring "laser batteries"; they tend to be more accurate than ballistic weapons but otherwise unremarkable in terms of weight/size/damage output ratios. Early remarks in the rules regarding lasers being abandoned by the military as ineffective against armor were later justified in that, versus military grade metal armor, standard vehicle mounted lasers are useless — being unable to penetrate a typical tank even after several maximum damage hits. Tanks themselves tend to use large bore kinetic weapons and missiles to engage each other.
- In Dropzone Commander, even the least ultra-tech faction, the United Colonies of Mankind, happily spent immense amounts of resources to develop and field a comparatively weak laser cannon. The reason is that all factions have an active point defense system, the missile halo, that will completely chunk missiles and even cannon shells fired from a rail gun are highly ineffective with the missile halo in place. However, all energy weapons bypass the missile halo with ease and even the weakest laser weapon is as strong as a typical rail gun, with other more advanced factions capable of fielding deadlier energy weapons.
- Eclipse Phase has "laser pulsers", which have a "stun" mode that acts like a flashbang on the target.
- Gamma World has most of the weapons of The Future being energy weapons, ranging from the stereotypical laser pistol to such exotic ones as the Black Beam Emitter, Rover Rifle, and the Disintegrators. More traditional firearms are available, but these just can't rival an energy weapon for power.
- In Paranoia, Troubleshooters are routinely armed with laser pistols, while "slugthrowers" require higher security clearance. (Most citizens aren't cleared for real weapons at all, though some have realized that soft drinks that explode when shaken hard enough are sort of like grenades.)
- The Technology Guide in Pathfinder has a wide variety of energy weapons, from the standard laser and plasma rifles to more exotic energy types like EMP, sonic, gravitons, radiation, etc. Others skirt the trope using particle beams or nanites. Given that Golarion is otherwise a typical medieval fantasy setting, most of these weapons originate from off-world.
- Starship Troopers: The Roleplaying Game has the Mobile Infantry just a step back in technology compared to Starship Troopers: Terran Ascendancy. The Morita Smart Rifle is still the king of the battlefield, with the only personal energy weapon being the Trench Sweeper — an underslung laser weapon attachment for the Morita. However, energy weapons have a growing place as a vehicle or Powered Armor weapon and the Mobile Infantry has lasers and plasma to provide heavy firepower that isn't a nuke or other high explosive (energy weapons and high-end bombs ignore a Bug's Damage Reduction).
- Stars Without Number:
- The standard weapon of the TL4 infantryman is usually the laser rifle. Magnetic Weapons do more damage per shot, but the standard laser rifle is more accurate, can fire in burst mode, and most importantly, ammunition in the form of energy cells is more compact and rechargeable, simplifying logistics.
- At Tech Level 5, kinetic personal weapons don't exist; standard weaponry at that tech level involves firing gravity waves and spatial disruptions.
- Laser weapons in Traveller do greater damage and have more ammunition than slugthrowers, but are considerably more expensive and bulkier. The power packs are usually backpack or at least belt-mounted.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- The Imperial Guard is primarily armed with lasguns, which translates into being far and away one of the most common weapons in any armed forces in the galaxy. The reasoning being that they are easy to manufacture in large quantities, incredibly reliable and low maintenance seeing as they have no moving parts, and the power packs simplify logistics as they can be recharged practically anywhere that there's a power source. (The Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer specifically recommends, that in a bind, charging them by leaving them out in the sun instead of sticking them in your campfire: the latter charges them faster but reduces the battery life). It should be noted that the Imperial Guard's lasguns are pretty much the weakest weapon in the setting (hence their fanon slogan of "Defending the galaxy with T-shirts and flashlights"), despite being roughly on par as the modern assault rifle. The more powerful hellguns are harder to come by and usually reserved for stormtrooper units. Lascannons on the other hand, are extremely effective anti-vehicle weapons.
- Note that the lasgun's weakness is more of a demonstration of how powerful the standard military forces out there are by comparison to rank-and-file guardsmen. In a sub-setting like Necromunda, which concerns itself with urban combat between gangs in a Wretched Hive, the armor and lasguns of the Imperial Guard are extremely powerful compared to the common "stubbers" (conventional firearms). Just the bad luck of the Badass Normals in the Guard to be born into a universe where Bio-Augmentation and Powered Armor are de rigeur and where the basic weapon of at least three other armies (Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, and Orks) is a full-auto miniature rocket launcher.
- Originally the weapon of choice of the Astartes was not the bolter, but the Volkite Charger, a kind of literal Martian ray gun which was just as devastating as Tau plasma weaponry and even more effective against armoured targets. However as the Great Crusade wore on and the legions expanded, supply couldn't keep up with demand; the classic boltgun was weaker, but cheaper and easier to manufacture and more of a tactical weapon due to its ability to accept different types of shell. The bolter won out and volkite weapons were relegated to special weapon status, like melta and plasma guns. After the Horus Heresy, the knowledge to create volkite weapons was lost forever, with the Mechanicus clinging to their few working examples.
- Humanity in the Dark Age of Technology had energy weapons such as the Voidclaw in the Imperium Nihilus books, that makes the Nova Cannon railgun and Exterminatus-class projectile weapons such as planet-busting atomics and cyclonic torpedoes look puny.
- The Tau Empire also arms its basic infantry with energy weapons, but unlike the Imperial Guard they have arguably the deadliest infantry weapons in the setting. The weakest Tau guns fire droplets of superheated plasma that are very accurate at long range and capable of taking out light armored vehicles. Meanwhile, Necron gauss flayers also seem to be energy weapons (specifically, they shoot something similar to sickly green lightning), and can take out tanks.
- The Tau also use lasers for devastating attacks, but not through the laser itself: they use markerlights as designators to fire a missile from a nearby missile tank even if the tank is nowhere nearby.
- The Asuryani also use energy based weapons, bright lances are laser weapons which can pierce through the toughest armor, and starcannons which fire plasma. The Swooping Hawks make use of a handheld laser weapon analogous to the standard-issue lasgun of the Militarum, but of course, their ones are better.
- The Tau rail gun is the deadliest contemporary weapon mounted on a standard vehicle, though energy weapons such as Laser Destroyers and Neutron Lasers rival them in power. But it's the energy weapons that come out on top when it comes to super-heavy vehicles and Titans. Also in fluff, the deadliest weapon in the setting are the Talismans of Vaul which annihilate star systems with its dimension-shearing energy weapon and there are other unique energy weapons that aren't too far off.
Video Games
- Alien Shooter has energy weapons as an emergent but widely accepted technology. They pack greater punch than their kinetic weapon counterparts and often have other advantages (though standard firearms are far more common due to the head start with some of the guns dating to the Cold War era).
- C-12: Final Resistance is set in a future where Earth is countering an Alien Invasion with cyborg soldiers. Future ballistic firearms are really good, but they just can't match firepower of laser rifle that a human corporation recently put into service, and they're certainly no match for the alien's Plasma Cannon technology.
- In the Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series, the Brotherhood of Nod have plenty of laser weapons in their arsenal. GDI mostly have some sonic weapons and the Ion Cannon as a superweapon, and the Scrin have plenty of laser weapons that are a near match to Nod. In game, the energy weapons have superior firepower compared to standard guns and cannons and in the final game, lasers are the best weapon for taking down units with the heaviest armour especially the MCV.
- Contra: It's the 27th century and when Team Contra wants to take down a tough enemy like a boss, they go with a laser gun. When later games in the series more readily embraced the future setting, newer energy weapons became available. Traditional firearms have their place, but if power at a fast pace is needed, then go with an energy weapon.
- Subverted in Fallout: lasers are one of the many weapons the player can acquire, but the Brotherhood of Steel wants to confiscate them as they deem the rest of the world unworthy of using high tech weapons. They're also the subject of significant penalties compared to many other weapon types: in Fallout and Fallout 2, they deal good damage, but most high-end types of armors are extremely resistant to laser damage compared to other weapons of similar damage level. In Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, most laser weapons are just pretty weak compared to other weapons.
- In the games, lasers fire very fast, but don't do very much damage, while plasma weapons fire slower (and have a slower projectile speed in 3 and New Vegas), but hit much harder.
- In the lore, the U.S. military was in the process to switching over to laser weapons as the standard small arms when the Great War happened. The G.I. laser weapons are the AER series rifles and AEP series pistols seen in Fallout 3 and beyond.
- Halo:
- 26th century humanity mostly still uses ballistic weapons, but energy weapons aren't unknown. The only handheld laser weapon they have is the Spartan Laser (introduced in Halo 3), which is Awesome, but Impractical against infantry, since it only has five shots, is difficult to aim, and tremendously expensive to build (it works wonders against tanks, though). However, humanity has been able to develop reasonably reliable lasers for some of its more advanced vehicles and ships, like some types of ONI Prowlers, Halo 4's Pelican gunship, various experimental prototypes seen in Halo 5: Guardians, and the Condor gunship in Halo Wars 2.
- The Covenant's most common smalls arms are plasma weapons or particles beams, and they also field ship-mounted pulse lasers and energy projectors.
- Forerunner Sentinels and Monitors fire lasers.
- The Forerunner Promethean robots are primarily armed with weapons that fire Hard Light and other exotic energies.
- In Heavy Barrel, you start off with the default machine gun which ain't too bad if you're just fighting mooks. Amongst the upgrades you can find is the ultimate weapon, Heavy Barrel. This is a rapid-fire, area-hitting energy gun that will One-Hit Kill almost any enemy and those tough enough to survive the first single hit will face More Dakka from the rest of the blasts.
- In Homeworld, even railguns the size of a frigate-class warship don't quite match the firepower of plasma bombs and ion beams. It becomes a turning point in the game, when the Higaarans gain ion beam technology. The Bentusi have even more powerful versions of these weapons and justifiably don't use anything else.
- Mass Effect:
- The series is an example of the "overpowered lasers" subtype. Though the vast majority of the weapons in the setting work by using mass effect fields to accelerate slugs to small fractions of the speed of light, warships also carry GARDIAN lasers that are primarily used for point-defense against fighters and missiles. At knife-fight range they also get used to great effect against other warships since they pass right through kinetic barriers. Tacticians in-universe have theorized that a mass-produced directed-energy weapon would force a massive shift in military doctrine since all current defense technology is designed to fend off kinetic weapons.note
- The Precursors, Protheans, have such a beam weapon you can use in Mass Effect 3, but it was developed to avoid logistics issues, similar to the Warhammer 40,000 example above. Said weapon relies on Overheating instead of ammo, but while it is very good against armor, it technically doesn't ignore shields, the same as the Collector Assassin heavy weapon based on it seen in Mass Effect 2 (mostly a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation for the sake of Competitive Balance). Both are particle beams, rather than true lasers.
- Though not a true laser, the "magneto-hydrodynamic" weapons (also known as "Thanix" cannons) fire a bright red coherent beam that slices through just about anything in seconds. A perfect example of "overpowered lasers", since they're originally a Reaper technology, and even when they are reverse-engineered by turian and human forces in the second and third games they're fairly rare. A single frigate-grade Thanix Cannon is one of the costliest upgrades in Mass Effect 2 and acts as the Normandy's Infinity +1 Sword, while in Mass Effect 3 a single ship with Thanix munitions can add as much as 20% to a fleet's War Assets rating. Thanix weapons are hybrid energy-kinetic weapons, firing a stream of molten metal that does part of its damage by kinetic force and the other part by thermal action.
- While ultra-tech ballistic cannons such as the nanite-based Nephtech-cannon rule the battlefield in Metal Saga, energy weapons have a respected place in the arsenal. They're the only weapons that can take advantage of elemental weaknesses and for characters outside of a tank, energy weapons are usually the most damaging infantry weapons.
- Parodied in Metal Slug 7 when an army of future Rebels use time travel to assist Morden in the present. Their vehicles turn out to be the exact same WWII/Korean War-era designs, but now they shoot laser beams.
- In Level 8's (formerly Chillingo) Modern Command, your futuristic MCA anti-terrorist force starts off using a fire-base that's not much different than what we have today. When the enemy starts using units with force fields, the usual point-defense guns don't cut it anymore. When your base upgrades itself, they replace those with plasma guns and lasers. You'll also have to rely on developing targeting laser turrets to burn through force fields, so your conventional missiles and autocannons can get through — until you eventually research energized ammo (as a bonus those laser designators are so strong, they can blow up tanks in a short time and can be upgraded to inflict status effects). Your ultimate weapon is a targeting laser linked to an orbital ion cannon and that'll rip through any enemy. Finally, your lasers can guide your missiles making them far more accurate, to the point where you can use a laser to guide surface-only missiles to blow up enemy aircraft.
- Played with in Phantasy Star Online where beam weapons (made from Photons) are the norm and sufficiently powerful. However, there are some kinetic weapons available such as Katanas, Zanba and the Yasminkov gun series, most of which are as powerful as their photon counterparts (though this can be explained by many of them being technologically advanced replicas and Legendary Weapons).
- In Raptor: Call of the Shadows, if your jet isn't shooting beams of light halfway through the game then it's a dead duck. By far the strongest weapons in the game are the Death Ray and the even mightier Twin Laser, while the Laser Turret is an extremely useful auto-targetting weapon. The only kinetic weapons that have any relevance are the Reaver Twin Machine Guns and Micro-Missiles, and only because they will fire simultaneously with your lasers.
- StarCraft:
- StarCraft: Terrans use lasers in their aircraft: the Wraith has a rather weak one for ground assault, while the Battlecruiser has a stronger one against air and ground targets. The Ghost's laser is only used to designate a target for a nuclear strike.
- StarCraft II: One mission prominently features a giant rotary laser drill that can be repurposed to destroy enemies quickly.
- In Starship Troopers: Terran Ascendancy, human technology has advanced significantly so the Mobile Infantry have PRISM LightRifles as the Energy Weapon alternative to the still in-use Morita Smart Rifle, the rapid-fire Plasma Gun and the heavy weapons — the SOLARIS Cannon and Plasma Cannon. Additionally, the Mobile Infantry have an energy-based sidearm when a soldier is desperately out of ammo.
- The X series has particle beams of one form or another as by far the most prevalent weapon in the setting, possibly because they're cheaper to operate since you don't have to stock ammunition. The few kinetic weapons are no less effective, however, and have the advantage of not having to feed off of the ship's reactor, which can be overwhelmed by firing energy weapons too fast, so the only limiting factor is how many boxes of ammo one has shoved in the cargo hold.
- X-COM arms the aliens with plasma weapons to deadly effect. XCOM scientists are eventually able to reverse-engineer the weapons to arm your soldiers, but the intermediary step between ballistic weapons and plasma is lasers, which represent a vast improvement over projectile weapons.
- In the original game, UFO: Enemy Unknown, lasers can be research immediately at the beginning, without acquiring a single alien artifact. In a subversion, while they are more powerful, more accurate and have better ammunition reserves (i.e. infinite) over projectile weapons, they are also subject to overengineering: the Heavy Laser is universally terrible (lower accuracy, higher weight, insignificant damage improvement, more time units needed to shoot, no auto-shot, etc.) compared to the laser rifle.
- The final tier of weaponry in XCOM 2 is "beam weapons", that are technically plasma-based but behave exactly like lasers. ADVENT's alien troops use these as well, while the hybrid troopers are stuck with magnetic rifles.
