In the future of space, why do people use rayguns instead of bullet guns? A bullet will still kill a person...

For the same reason why the navy is ditching all of its guns for lasers and missiles.

While I consider OP a retard for defining undefined to favour himself

I do not agree much with this side of the argument. On kinda almost the same grounds, actually.
>More to the point, bullets + spaceship = breached hull if you miss = oxygen leak
>Ray + spaceship = somewhat charred bulkhead if you miss = break out cleaning supplies but otherwise you're good.
Why would spaceship bulkheads be breached more by a bullet than a lethal power energy pulse? We are still talking about a hefty load of energy being transmitted (even without bringing in the "turn you to fucking ash" power blasters).

>your shit than rayguns which mostly shoot light and heat.

So instead of suffocating you are boiled alive by radiant heat that has no medium to actually radiate away, because space.

Heat management, behind fuel and life support, is one of the big problems involved in the space travel problem. Radiation is the least efficient means of heat dispersion but it's the only real method you have when you're sailing through space.

There is a very real danger of your spaceship becoming so hot its inhabitants die off.

Not really, no. Sci-fi lasers are superior to bullets in every conceivable way. They are lighter and easier to use - no bullet drop, kiddos. Your "projectile" is light speed. Point and click.

Lasers that could pop out a few kilowatts of energy would be devastating to soft tissue, far more so than bullets.

projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmenergy.php

>using arcane chemical powered projectiles

hahahah do you need a ramrod with your arcane pistol?

get with the times kiddo. 50-100 rounds in an average laser pistol, and you can set it to stun instead of kill. something ancient firearms can't do

no shooting someone in the leg does not count as "stunning" them.

In all seriousness most sci fi settings have modern firearms and energy based weapons existing side by side, they each serve different purposes, one is less effective against ablative armor, and is rechargeable at any power point or via solar panels, the other requires you to lug around extra ammo

>Laughingvargr.jpg

Because, when nothing but a bulkhead separates you from the vacuum of space, someone was bound to come up with an infantry weapon that doesn't punch holes in spaceships/spacestations.

40k:
-Laser guns has a power setting, and has no real logistic issues since batteries recharge in very easy ways. Power setting also means they can be used as both anti infantry and anti structure weapons
-Stub guns has exotic super powerful ammo(nuclear bullets), but logistics means the chance of Stubbers with Nuke Bullets being unlikely to ever be fielded

A hull breach isn't actually that big of a deal, at least in comparison to a projectile colliding with irreplaceable machinery (i.e. most the things keeping you from boiling alive or from pure carbon). A leak the size of a bullet, or several bullets, should be fairly simply dealt with, as there is a hard restriction on the amount of mass that can pass through a hole that size within a certain time and so doesn't pose an immediate threat.

Because it's such an impractical weapons by our technological standards, its use by future humans/an alien civilization in science fiction is proof of how much more advanced theirs is. I can't find the quote, but IIRC that's what H. G. Wells said about the Martian heat beams in War of the Worlds, which are among the very earliest directed-energy weapons ever to appear in science fiction.

So to use your example
>you can fit more bullets into a small area than batteries that hold enough charge for multiple shots stronger than the bullets
The use of an energy weapon which proves to be able to do that just goes to show that whoever's made it has advanced energy storage to the point where it IS, in fact, possible.

Adding to this, any long-term or dedicated space flight vehicle is bound to have some sort of automatic repair system in place, even if it's something as simple as a ceramic or plastic gel barrier that flows between bulkheads and fills in holes or cracks.

Micrometeoroids and other space debris would mean your hull and bulkheads would be constantly under attack and at risk of penetration. It would be impossible to manually fill all those holes.

Because the amount of bullets your regular soldier is given require more materials to make than a battery pack for a 'laser'
So war economy and effiency probably

The only setting I have seen where they try to go full example is Legend of Galactic Heroes.
Proper weapon can't be used inside space ships because of Zephyr particles, hull breaches, chance of hitting life support, explosive oxygen and far worse.
Meaning SPACE AXES is a thing, alongside armor.

Space Lasers are worse than missiles, but missiles only barely reach relativistic speeds.

Space troops is generally outfitted with lasers, to avoid dealing with recoil
Ground troops uses whats economical. Mostly rifles with bayonets.

>Assumptions

Because a ray gun is presumably designed to kill via heat rather than kinetic force, and the amount of heat needed to kill a dude is far less than the amount of heat needed to melt whatever metal the hull of your ship is made out of.

That's how it worked in Babylon 5, anyway; PPGs ("Phased Plasma Guns") were used by station security and starships precisely because they were far less likely to cause a hull breach. EarthForce still used more conventional weapons for its ground troops, however, since when you're on a planet that's less of a concern.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_plasma_gun

because ray guns equals futuristic
bullets are 500 years old, and may last hundreds more, so it stands to reason that ray gun must be EXTREMELY powerful to replace them

So is the amount of kinetic force required to rend soft tissue and shoot through a sheer metal wall.

Bullets also ricochet, potentially into important equipment. Ray guns don't.

the idea is that the premise, rayguns > bullets, precedes the rest of the setting, and the setting is designed to accommodate that premise

so it isnt, "bullets > rayguns therefore not using bullets = dumb", but rather "what would a raygun be so that Raygun > Bullets"

depends on your pretend battery technology, if it manages a higher energy density and release rate than gunpowder or other chemicals like it, them ray guns would be at least on par or better.

They could also have fewer working parts, require less maintainance, be easier and cheaper to manufacture. Which is certainly going to appeal to military forces stationed in space away from supply lines.

Batteries could be rechargable which means that rather than needing to stockpile millions of bullets for an invasion, you would need to have twice the combat load of the average solider, recharge the depleted pack in the ship which probably has at least fission reactors on it which would supply much more energy than stored gunpowder.

>and the amount of heat needed to kill a dude is far less than the amount of heat needed to melt whatever metal the hull of your ship is made out of.

Hm, depends, I guess.

To have some numbers, let's have a 1cm thick titanium plate as our hull, and a ray with a cross sectional area of one square centimetre, so we melt through a 1cc of metal (obviously it's a very rapid procedure, both for user friendliness, and so the metal won't have time to conduct away significant amounts of heat).

Now, if it's a pressurised hull, we don't really need to melt it. Metals weaken as they get hot, and as a rule of thumb their strength is effectively nothing when we hit 80% of the melting (solidus for alloys) point. So push it 1250K above room temperature and the air pressure will blow through.

1cc, 4.11g/cc, 1250K, 0.544J/gK -> 2800J

So about a .308 NATO rounds worth of energy.

Hitting tissue instead we'll start boiling water. Taking one g of water from 37C to 100C steam takes 2500J. So our ray gun blast here manages just over 1g of water, so maybe 1.5 to 2 cc of tissue, or our 1cm square beam penetrating 2cm into your body. By firearm standards that's utterly pathetic, and is highly unlikely to disable or kill any time soon.

For furtehr comparison, the kinetic energy of a .50BMG round is somewhere in the ballpark of the excess thermal energy you dump into your guts by drinking a small cup of lukewarm espresso. Or expressed in terms of food and nutrition, it can have a kinetic energy of about 3.5kcal.

Heat based weapons kinda suck really, until you get to flame-throwers and incendiary bomb carpets and that kind of thing. But then it's hardly the more discriminating option to bullets.

So it'll take a pretty high technobabble quotient to make this happen.

>In the future of space
>space
>0G
>bullet gun recoil vs raygun nothing.

Also, assumptions much?
It would make for a nice pasta, though. 14th century "why do future people use guns instead of bows".

>Blah blah blah real life blah blah blah

youtube.com/watch?v=rLDgQg6bq7o

>To have some numbers, let's have a 1cm thick titanium plate as our hull

Not to punch a different kind of hull in this, but 1cm thick for anything bigger than a one-three-man fighter feels a bit... Flimsy to say the least.

Not to mention it being purely titanium. There's also composite ceramics and so forth to consider, and as I understand, even on modern space vessels, it's a titanium allow. Then there's the fact that the inner walls will be covered in various things as well, which, admittedly, will unlikely be nearly as protective as the "core" and "outer" hull and bulkhead shells.

A soft sci-fi setting I've been mulling over has is pretty much like this:
Personal armor is really good. What is essentially high-tech clothing is enough to mostly disperse energy off a handgun bullet. Rifles and similar can be dangerous but not for heavier armor. Heavier stationary guns is where danger lies.
Energy weapons are very very powerful but mostly have a limited amount of ammo. Like, "1 shot for a pistol-type weapon" limited. Also, tends to boil people inside their armor. And banned on starships so there's less risk of making a hole into space.

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>feels a bit... Flimsy to say the least.

Things that fly, even military such, usually don't have more plating than what they need to keep the air form blowing through. A centimetre of titanium (yes, probably an alloy) is a lot compared to that.

Space shuttle fuselage: about 33m long, around 6m diameter,

>it's a titanium allow

Some alloying elements increase the melting point of the base metal. Others decrease it. The latter is probably the most common. But as people seldom appear to throw huge amounts of other things into their titanium alloys, the difference in the end won't be all that big.

The core of the problem is simply that water is extremely good at soaking up heat. It take s a lot of heat the change its temperature, and once it hits a hundred it will refuse to get any hotter until you've turned it into steam, and doing that takes a simply preposterous amount of heat. Metals on the other hand may survive much higher temperatures than human tissue, but they can also get a lot warmer a lot quicker when we start pumping in heat. Per volume we need more than twice as much heat to change the temperature of water than we need for titanium, and if we count per mass that increases to nearly ten times as much.

Now you can certainly bring in a host of fancy materials and apparently not very important but utterly fireproof equipment and whatnot. Dough soft SciFi is fun. Just keep in mind that's what it is.

>In the future of space, why do people use rayguns instead of bullet guns?
Cool factor. Of course, a weapon that fires a antimatter bomb inside space-time bubble to reach speeds close to that of the light or that expand space until the intermolecular connections stop existing and whatever was hit by it disintegrates in fine, molecular dust are cooler, but sadly rarely used.

Better question is, why did 80's scifi spaceship crews dressed like fucking homos?
Even their guns looked like fucking sex toys and remote controls.
And don't even get me started on the fishbowl helmets.
Even the helmet on SK-1 suit worn by first fucking man in space looked better than that shit...

Today we are coming into another scifi retardville, with suits and armors so overdesigned, you look at it and you're not even sure what the fuck is half of the shit bolted on them even supposed to do.

Sweet child
read up on
Sputnik

Bullets aren't rechargeable. You can spend time looking for a port that sells the right kind of bullets, potentially fall victim to price-hiking, and be left with a finite supply for who knows how long, oooooor just find a 9V outlet.

Disco ball with a radio inside made america dress their fictional characters like faggots?

I think a better question is: assuming your portable death ray is effective as a weapon, would you still want to use it? It's going to be powered by some combonation of exotic (read: highly toxic or dangerous) materials if it runs on batteries, and even some sort of fusion device will spray hot hydrogen all over the place if it fails. Gunpowder weapons are reliable, and anto personnel rounds exist now.

1st Mass Effect did it right.
You've had a gun shearing tiny bits of metal from a solid block of material and propelling them with titular magic field at fraction of a light speed. Virtually unlimited ammo for any reasonable stretch of time, the only concern was weapon overheating quite fast, but much better to just wait for a bit than having to scour for conveniently scattered magazines all over everywhere.
2nd and 3rd games really fucked it up.

Because most science fiction is not hard science fiction, and lasers are cool.

Passengers could use frangible bullets. Iirc that's what law enforcement uses in pressurized airline cabins.

The shotgun?

And in settings with comically callous or cheap corporations like SS13, they pretty much don't take any such precautions at all, not that it would matter much because the design of most Nanotrasen facilities is perversely cheap and dangerous anyway.

When you have windows that readily fail in a catastrophic fashion when hit with any real force by pretty much anything, and which are extremely common, it almost doesn't matter what kind of bullets are regularly used.

I mean, when any space debris at all hitting them pretty much wrecks them, (and very often, the walls too) or a guy with a crowbar can fairly quickly break one, it's bad to begin with.

Never mind relatively minor explosions easily breaching the floor and wall, which generally consists of about one layer of scaffolding and thinnish metal.

I like multi-guns desu

You use a pulsed laser, delivering very high power in very short bursts. Each pulse flash-boils only a small amount of tissue; the expanding gas then blows out a cavity, which is what actually does most of the damage. You then wait juuust enough time for the ejecta to clear the crater, then another pulse. Repeat as necessary.

This both allows the beam to be material-specific (since different materials will require different timing of the pulse train; if it's too short, then the ejecta will get in the way of the beam, reducing penetrating power; if it's too long, then it won't be as effective at drilling either, since the material will have time to cool off)

It's not like Atomic Rockets is a real source, but they give numbers for 1 kJ (1000 instantaneous 1-Joule pulses at 5-microsecond intervals, focused on a 1 mm target) excavating a ~30 cm deep by ~4 cm diameter hole in soft tissue, with depth more like 15 cm in bone or plastic, 5 cm in brick, or 2.5 cm in steel and ceramics. I'd investigate this more deeply, but the laser damage calculator appears to be broken (panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeathRay/DamageFromLaser.php) and I haven't gotten around to reimplementing a calculator for those equations myself.

We Fear Agent now?

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Depends on the setting. In some setting, rayguns are more efficient.

You missed the SOVIET BASTARDS IS WINNING THE SPACE RACE!
NEW AGE AHEAD MORTAL!

What if every laser takes one AAA battery?

Wait, why are you treating tissue damage as being equal to boiling water?

I can see the rough analog, but also that it is super rough. You're also ignoring energy transfer rates within the material.

The human body is pretty poor at conducting heat, which localizes damage but also means a fairly small amount of heat can raise the temperature of a small area high enough to do damage.

It the plating has better heat conductivity, then you won't transfer all that heat to only the one square centimeter.