How come nobody EVER does lasers right? I have quite literally never seen a sci-fi movie, book, or game that has lasers operate the way they should.
You're firing a beam of extremely "energetic" light at someone. It hits them. No, it shouldn't fling them backwards, or punch a hole through them, it has no mass to speak of, no impact. It should convert directly into heat on contact.
Some systems apparently think this should cause burns, like you've just touched something hot, except this is hot enough that you slump over dead. Something that hot to kill you would have to get through your skin, muscle, blood, fat, and bone to one of your vital organs. And if it's THAT hot, it won't just directly apply heat to your heart or lungs or brain or whatever, it'll heat stuff up on the way.
And what happens when you heat stuff, especially that liquid that is some 70% of a human body by weight? It expands. Laser weapons should make people explode dammit, and I've never seen it. Why can't anyone get this right, the fucking cretins?
well I suppose it's more like set microwaves to stun, but whatever
Caleb Wright
It should, yes. But it's going to be a localized explosion, since the heat conductivity of human flesh isn't that great and you're going to get a build up at the point where the laser hits. So you're going to get big ragged wounds that in practice would look like the laser just punching a hole through them.
Liam Taylor
Nah, the fluid expansion will mean that they'll be bursting outwardly around the point of "entry". They're not going to be looking like a hole being punched a la a bullet.
For that matter, I can't remember seeing too many ragged laser wounds either. Usually they're either neat holes or cauterized blistering.
Owen Bennett
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Kayden Johnson
In which games can i slaughter innocents with a "Huge Funnel"
Bentley Torres
>Photons are massless m ≲ 10−14 eV/c2 motherfucker.
Blake Flores
rest mass you pedant
Christopher Thompson
Guess what system uses explosive kinetic (well, crushing in system parlance) damage to model lasers?
That's right. GURPS.
Easton Peterson
I don't know where you're from, but the term
> No X to speak of
usually implies that there is some of X, but so small as to not worry about. In OP's case, they do have some mass, but honestly, not enough to do any damage.
Josiah Murphy
>lasers are the same as this stick I just picked up ok
William James
Because real lasers are climatically BORING
Angel Stewart
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Landon Davis
>No, it shouldn't fling them backwards, or punch a hole through them, it has no mass to speak of, no impact. It should convert directly into heat on contact.
The vapourised armour creates enough force to push them back.
Brandon Diaz
Lasers are nowhere near as cool in real life as science fiction portrays them. I would know, my job revolves around lasers and I curse them every single day.
Landon Ross
Settings with realistic lasers don't have them as weapons because they're a fucking garbage weapons platform compared to projectiles.
Grayson Harris
So what, they're supposed to look like larger, messier cigarette burns?
Jack Gray
I assume you're talking about how hard it is to get them to actually do significant damage in an energy-efficient manner, or even focus closely enough to be useful?
Carter King
I got your back.
Adrian Hughes
Akira
Jordan Young
This guy gets it. Everyone shot with energy based weapons in District 9 fooking exploded.
Hunter Bailey
Minor laser related question I was thinking of earlier. If you were to use a repeating pulse laser gun as a squad support weapon, would having the beam be visible or invisible be better for the purposes of suppression? Also, would you be able to hear anything if it was being shot at you?
Nolan Sullivan
Nope. Crushing is the damage type, explosive is a modifier that changes how it works. Crushing damage is blunt damage in general. Is it a perfect modeling? No. Is it good enough, and certainly better than just plain "fire damage!".
Pretty much >heating things up is a shitty way to cause damage unless you have a FUCKLOAD of energy >lasers do better than most things at transferring heat energy over a distance, but they're still shit at it when you involve atmospheres and large distances >Making a laser powerful enough to actually do anything meaningful requires tons of fragile, sensitive equipment and volatile chemicals >focusing a laser to hit anything at range requires huge, expensive, and fragile lenses The only upsides are that it fires perfectly straight and the beam travels as fast as physically possible (instantaneous for most terrestrial ranges). But if you just want to destroy something you'd be better off with pic related.
Jonathan Turner
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Parker Ramirez
Because when we see a projectile, whether it's a bullet or a beam of red light, leave a gun barrel we expect it to punch holes in things or explode. We've had the equation "Gun projectile= hole or explosion" drilled into us as long as we've had television so it would make sense for "LAZAH gun projectile=hole or explosion", not "Rapidly boils flesh with continuous beam".
Nicholas Stewart
What book are you pulling from? Every damaging laser in GURPS (both in Basic and Ultra-Tech) does burn damage. The only Ultra-Tech weapons that do cr ex damage are the anti-particle weapons. Sure, they use the Beam Weapons skill, but they're not lasers by any measure.
Anthony Rivera
Yeah. I'm pretty sure Evangelion also portrayed damage from high-energy weapons well, although they were more lightsaber-type weapons than lasers, but they caused flesh to expand and burst on contact.
Luis Jackson
Aren't lasers tight-beam burning?
Levi Lee
Pulse lasers (the sort you'd actually see in combat, because they're the actually useful type) are cr ex. UT 118. Beam lasers are tight-beam burning, but that's unrealistic for actual use.
Brayden Baker
Blake 7, a British sci-fi show broadcast 1978 to 1981, did laser guns pretty well. The beams are invisible, all you see when the gun fires is a bright flash at the muzzle. When the beam hits there's a small explosion expelling a cloud of material as the target area violently vaporizes, which on humans results in ragged bloody wounds (though for budget reasons this isn't always shown). It's all pretty much perfect except for the stereotypical ray-gun sound they make, a real laser weapon would probably just quietly click or buzz.
>research scientist/phd student who has to deal with alignment and lasers breaking all the time detected.
Joseph Jackson
that's because we're playing in the world of imagination, dog
Lincoln Perez
I find fallouts dustification hilarious. But yes explosion of a person would be wicked!
Eli Rogers
>Laser weapons should make people explode dammit, and I've never seen it. There was a William Gibson book where a laser exploded somebody's head. It's been decades, so I can't really remember which one. Count Zero?
Aiden Ross
>You're firing a beam of extremely "energetic" light at someone. It hits them. No, it shouldn't fling them backwards, or punch a hole through them, it has no mass to speak of, no impact. It should convert directly into heat on contact.
>heat on contact >Human body is 70% water >Water expands into steam when heated >Boiling water exploding out of someone shouldn't impart any velocity to them.
Lrn 2 physics scrub.
And yes, seriously, a powerful enough laser will blow people apart. An infantry-scale weapon is only gonna do localized damage. I can't believe I'm saying this on Veeky Forums, but you're suffering from insufficient autism and it's your own damn fault.
Angel Reed
Half the shit you are talking about is completely made up. A human body would not explode. You are a moron. To generate an explosion, you have to have the interior pressure rise until the point that it would rupture the exterior container...ala the skin.
You, know, the skin that you penetrated to heat the underlying material...
Hmmm...
I think I found the dumbass flaw in your logic.
Like trying to get a pot of water to explode with the fucking lid off....
Alexander Bennett
You've never seen a pot boil over?
Nathaniel Howard
Laser strong enough to cause immediate damage with a short pulse is going to be burning up the air, so it would leave the contrail of light even after it passed.
Also you'll be able to see and hear sizzling of anything that it landed on.
Michael Gonzalez
Guys you're looking at what kind of lasers to use all wrong. Electrolasers (essentially LIGHTNING GUNS) are the way to go:
Space is a bigger issue for me. We're just getting our feet wet with laser tech, but we've been to fuckin space and sci-fi shows still can't get it right.
