Bullets are stopped by Armor

Bullets are stopped by Armor
Lasers are stopped by Energy

Is this right, or would you make it the other way around?

Why?

I'd probably make it the other way around, because lasers are light and since you can presumably see through your energy shield, that creates problems.

Probably the other way around. The best way to block light-based attacks is by absorbing or reflecting them. Maybe mirrored armor, or even solar panel-esque armor to reflect a lot of the energy and capture some of it for power.

Meanwhile you can avoid projectiles by warping their path you could do that with lasers, too, but that would mean that the entire outside world would be warped from your point of view or stopping them cold, which you can do better with a barrier than with armor. If your armor blocks a projectile, you're still gonna feel the force behind it.

Similarly, armor tends to be opaque, so light has a tough time getting through.

If anything I imagine an energy shield would only really be useful in two ways: If it vaporized bullets (if it only melted them you'd get sprayed with hot liquid lead instead of protecting yourself) or if it were painful or damaging to pass through (spherical electric fence) .

I think the idea is that armor absorbs the laser (which could transfer to the defender) while an energy shield would disperse it around you.

The "science" isn't sound, but as an abstraction for a space opera that's probably not required.

What if it repelled high velocity objects but allowed slower objects to pass through?

I agree with these other anons that the other way names sense.

The reason people perceive it initially as bullets-armor lasers-energy is because one is associated with modern, the other with sci-fi. When you say that weapons have advanced, people expect defenses to be similarly advanced.

Or perhaps writers do it out of convenience. They need an excuse to use lasers, so they say it burns through armor, so people developed energy defenses to counter lasers.

So Mass Effect shields, essentially.

Of course, everything is out the window if you're using "laser" to mean "blaster" or "ray gun". I guess I would just say that you want to come up with an idea of what the energy shield does to stop the beam or bullet, even if it's pseudo-scientific at best: "it robs the energy of its kinetic energy", or "it de-magnitizes the plasma bolt, causing it to disperse".

Paul Atreides: "In shield fighting, one moves fast on defense, slow on attack ... Attack has the sole purpose of tricking the opponent into a misstep, setting him up for the attack sinister. The shield turns the fast blow, admits the slow kindjal!"

Dune popularized that particular shield dynamic.

Okay, then Dune shields.

ME shields don't seem to try to stop someone thwacking you with a knife. Dune shields do, and popularized the concept.

Although Dune shields and lasers mix poorly. As in "one or both parties explode and possibly frag nearby teammates" badly.

it's a dumb mechanic, just lob slow grenades that detonate inside of the shield.

The defenses that characters typically use in-setting will defend against the weapons that characters typically use.

If there is a weapon that can bypass the commonly used defenses, then characters will seek to use that weapon over weapons that the defenses stop. Unless there is a serious disadvantage to that weapon, like it being really expensive and/or hard to use.

That'd be pretty tricky. You'd have to lob it so that it would roll right up to their feet.

What if you floated over a bomb with a remote trigger on a balloon?

If by possibly frag nearby teammates you mean tactical nuke sized energy release then yes.

Back up. Wasn't it a major point of EU materials that personal shields basically aren't worth the money in atmosphere? Even the SWTOR books don't have characters using those, and that's before the dark age that lowered tech to Movies levels.

Both should be stopped by armor. You have different types of armor that are specialized to more efficiently deal with different projectile types. Thats how the real world works anyway.

Sounds like a powerful weapon, really.

This sort of mechanic always seemed too convenient to me. Like they were trying to make up a rule to allow energy shields to be magic.

I really like one of the Halo books did energy shields. The Spartans had to relearn how to do a lot of things with their shields on because it was a thin layer over their armor that made touching things feel sorta slippery.

Like a bomb tied to a balloon that says "Get Well Soon!", or happy birthday?

Well, I mean, obviously it couldn't look like a bomb. So maybe that.

What I was thinking is they could make the bomb look like a baby. So then they're like "wait, is that a baby floating over here?" and they'd take it and then in the split-second before they realize what's going on, you hit the switch and blow the bomb.

The downside is that then you'd have to sometimes send over actual babies. So then when they try to ignore one, they find out it's an actual baby and they're like "oh, shit, we should have saved it!" But then you'd be giving up a lot of babies and that's unsustainable and bad for morale, so maybe not babies. But something like that.

They ain't lasers

Completely agree.
If my memory of MechWarrior is correct, you can choose between reflective and reactive armor to counter laser and ballistic more effectively.

Therefore, to rephrase the OP:
Bullets are stopped by a type of armor, and lasers are stopped by a type of armor.
I have no idea what level of physical possibility OP wants us to consider here.

>absorbing or reflecting them. Maybe mirrored armor, or even solar panel-esque armo
Nigga this isn't how high yield lasers work. At fucking all. You don't reflect a military laser, trying that shit will lead to it just melting your mirror. You need ceramics.

Well they're very high tech mirrors, obviously.

So, like sticking a grenade in an apple?

Apples aren't valuable enough. They'd be willing to pass up an apple to avoid getting blown up. If it's a baby, they'd feel terrible for shooting one or letting it float away. That's why I said "like a baby".

Possibly intelligence reports containing classified information about their enemy's actions?

Ablative armour can stop lasers. In fact, regular armour, just due to how thick it is, could provide some minimal protection.

I've always really liked how armor functioned against lasers in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos. When it comes up, the armor actively changes its polarity/color/etc in order to match or counter the lasers/radiation weapons/etc that are targeting it. I have no idea how realistic this is, but it's a cool idea.

Completely right.

The fields in dune literally envelop their whole area of effect, they're not thin walls of energy. It's even a major plot point that Paul can't keep up with the fremen warriors at first because he's trained to accommodate the slight delay in reaction time caused by shields. Grenades would do fuck all.

Paul easily outclassed the first Fremen that he dueled to the death with knives.

It wasn't that he couldn't keep up, it was that he was used to delivering the slow final stab to penetrate a shield. Everyone watching was getting pissed because they thought he was toying with the guy.

Doesn't really matter. Make them strong or specialized enough either one could block anything.

There are things like plasma, particle, and electromagnetic shields and weapons that complicate this argument even further.

So, lasers are made of light- the exact same energy given off by the sun and light bulbs, just more focused.
This means you shouldn't be able to see through laser-proof shields. Such a shield should appear like a mirror or that vantablack stuff as it reflects or absorbs all light.

If it detects and intercepts incoming lasers, said laser should appear to hit a small black hole or mirror right before it would hit the target.

It doesn't matter how tech your mirrors are, they aren't capable of reflecting radiated heat that is going to fucking warp and melt them. Even if you somehow build a mirror able to bounce a laser off, the latent heat from something able to penetrate armor and kill a man (like modern lasers), will cause it to instantly fail.

Although the better question is what kind of retard uses a laser gun in the first place. Lasers are SHIT for anything but intercepting fast moving targets, serving as point defense against missiles and mortars. If you have the energy to make a handheld laser lethal, use that and make a god damn railgun. Leagues more damage for less waste.

Well they're REALLY high tech mirrors.

>Although the better question is what kind of retard uses a laser gun in the first place. Lasers are SHIT for anything but intercepting fast moving targets, serving as point defense against missiles and mortars. If you have the energy to make a handheld laser lethal, use that and make a god damn railgun. Leagues more damage for less waste.
Lasers are for more accurate, and also cause plasma explosions on impact. They also don't have recoil, aren't affected by wind or bullet drop, and hypothetically can have infinite ammo with chargeable batteries.

Lasers are pretty damn good.

This. Wound cauterization and lack of tearing/impact damage doesn't matter if you hit a vital spot, which is easier to do with a more accurate weapon.

Where should I begin with the Dune franchise?

Rifles RIGHT FUCKING NOW are more mechanically accurate than most humans could ever hope to achieve. Even if you're talking about mounting them to a robot to aim and fire, you would still be better off with kinetic weapons as lasers are dissipated by atmosphere. You can have a 100% accurate laser and it still can't fire beyond line of sight which modern guns CAN ALREADY DO.

the first book you fucking faggot

Will do. Are any of the films/TV adaptations worth viewing as well?

>Wound cauterization from laser weapons
That's a bloody good meme there m8. Cauterization occurs from slow burning. Getting hit with a laser is more akin to putting a marshmallow in a microwave, mind you sped up greatly of course. Absorbing lots of energy in one place causes what could more or less be called an explosion. This would produce kinetic energy, ripping apart flesh and the like, as molecules go from 0 to 100 in 0.01 of a second.

>Modern guns can fire beyond line of sight
What, are you using fucking M16s for indirect fire or something? Also, laser weaponry lowers the bar for marksmanship and makes it easier to takes shots at longer distance due to my aforementioned reasons.

>That's a bloody good meme there m8. Cauterization occurs from slow burning. Getting hit with a laser is more akin to putting a marshmallow in a microwave, mind you sped up greatly of course. Absorbing lots of energy in one place causes what could more or less be called an explosion. This would produce kinetic energy, ripping apart flesh and the like, as molecules go from 0 to 100 in 0.01 of a second.

I honestly did not know that. I always wondered why lightsabers did not cause bleeding (not that Star Wars is accurate like) but thanks for the explanation.

not any IMO. The movie does have some fans and admittedly, a very good soundtrack though.

It's not super commonly known, I don't know why exactly. Actual laser wounds from a high powered pulse laser would be large and messy, like someone detonated a grenade against your flesh.

Not of your latter points are wrong. The inherent mechanical accuracy of a shoulder fired weapon does NOTHING to help a person hold it on target. I said GUNS fire beyond line of sight not rifles. You know, high energy, large bore, firing angles greater than 15 degrees. The kind of things where efficiency and accuracy of weapons actually become a concern. The difference between 2 MOA rifles and 0 MOA lasers at 100 yards is effectively zero. Both will hit what you're pointing at. The difference between a laser GUN and a kinetic GUN is that one of them can fire around the knap of the earth beyond the horizon and the other can not.

The first three books and ONLY the first three books

Typically people refer to "GUNS" as "Artillery" in that context, you nerd.

The David Lynch movie is pretty good in it's own way but not really 'dune'

It's also one of the few films you want to watch the THEATRICAL cut, not the "Directors" cut. the Directors cut is garbage and Lynch had nothing to do with it. Despite what it adds in extra scenes, it kind of ruins other elements for no reason, and Dune is already way too fucking long as it is.

If it had been made today they would have split that shit into a Trilogy and it would have come much better off (though I would argue that Dune, much like The Hobbit, is best served by being a Duo-logy - three films requires just too much stretching)

Clearly you've never been stuck in a trench outside New Kasmir, with no ammo to speak of, and completely out of rations.

If you don't think God Emperor of Dune is the second best book in the original series, you've failed to understand the point of Dune.

If it had been made today, it would have been an 8 episode event miniseries exclusive to Netflix, with a strong hint of optioning the rest of the series on the horizon.

Other way around.
Armour has to be really advanced to block bullets, without completely destroying anyone wearing it.

Meanwhile, lasers could be reflected by certain surfaces on the armour, while the heat could be absorbed by something beneath the surface.

God Emperor is where it fucking falls apart, Leto II's whole plan makes no fucking sense. If he KNEW shit was coming why didn't he just TELL people and COMMAND them to prepare!

They already DID an HBO miniseries. It was OK.

Is your capslock key randomly engaging?

>If he KNEW shit was coming why didn't he just TELL people and COMMAND them to prepare!
Because nothing was coming. His visions of the quintillions of every possible future showed that humanity would collapse and go extinct from the inside unless they followed this one specific path, the Golden Path. The whole point was to oppress humanity so badly that his death would make mankind surge outwards in every direction, physically and technologically, and make it impossible to be truly rendered extinct.

Wouldn't the laser jump from armor to armor eventually hurting someone in the formation and causing a lot of confusion and chaos?

NO. What on EARTH would make you THINK
that?

In Energeos energy shields don't stop lasers at all. Energy shields are basically just a magnetic point defense system similar to the magnetic field of a fusion drive turned inside out. Incoming solid rounds are slowed or stopped, and if only slowed then they make armor much more effective at stopping the solid rounds. A laser on the other hand ignores this entirely and is really more of just an especially focused heat lamp. Armor is very effective at stopping lasers in a manner of speaking, as long as you're something that doesn't mind a layer of cooked armor slagging or boiling off from you.

Energy shields also tend to be big and bulky, but with very limited range. For the most part they are only found on tanks. They are nearly useless on starships, and cannot be usefully condensed to personal size. Some of the heavy Energeos in the setting can use them, but they typically stick to light armor and cover tactics.

Except this takes a truly ridiculous amount of energy as not only do you need energy to power the laser to such lethality and to such a concentration that it does not simply dissipate beyond 300 meters, but you need to cool the gun after each shot, which also takes energy.

Railguns meanwhile require far less energy and will provide you with a lot more bang for your buck. Energy weapons make zero sense as infantry weapons from a realisim perspective.

Lasers again, don't have recoil. And you seem to be assuming that we won't advance technology to the point where laser weaponry becomes practical, which we will. Lasers are also far more damaging against tissue than railguns, and far more difficult to protect against.

Recoil isn't a problem, especially when troops are liable to be wearing exoskeleton reinforcement in the not-too-distant-future. And lasers are absolutely not becoming practical, not on an infantry scale. They're too expensive and need to be hooked up to a very large power source, and would require the invention of something like a miniature working fusion reactor to become viable.

You would need a very powerful powersource for an effective railgun as well. And if you have these assumed exoskeletons, you could have massive batteries mounted on them, if you're so sure we will never miniaturize batteries.

It should be the other way around.

Obviously we can't make any statements about the properties of magical energy shields because those don't exist - but let me tell you something about how lasers interact with armor. Given enough energy a laser beam that hits a solid surface will melt/boil the part that it hits - how big an area depends on how good the surface is at heat conduction. Vaporized material from the armor will tend to diffuse the incoming laser beam, meaning the more armor you melt through the less effective your laser is.

tl;dr lasers would actually be less effective against armor because ablation

>I didn't understand what was happening in God Emperor, so that means it's a stupid story with a big stupid plot hole

>HBO made a Dune miniseries

Wrong.

Read Dune. That is all.

The 2nd book, Dune Messiah, is a decent book in its own right, but it in no way compares to Dune and therefore reflects badly on it. Children of Dune is schlock. I can't attest to the others because Children of Dune did me in.

>If it had been made today they would have split that shit into a Trilogy and it would have come much better off
Given how dense the book is, and how much happens, I agree that you really can't do it justice in one movie.

>though I would argue that Dune, much like The Hobbit, is best served by being a Duo-logy - three films requires just too much stretching
You think? Dune is literally split into three sections it calls "books". It seems pretty obvious to make each into a movie.

Artillery is the name of the unit itself, artillery fires guns.

Fine, howitzers.

Actually, artillery fires shells.

Artillery UTILISES guns to FIRE shells. OH god MY capslock IS now INFECTED

Okay, I know It's fucking retarded but.
You know what would be cool?

Jedi Order with no lightsabers. Like, make those non existent.
Just forcefield belts or some shit, to accentuate the pacifist way of the force.
Now, I admit that the plan falls short when you are attacked at a melee range but that's where the cool thing gets to shine.
Martial Arts. Force Karate. Sith Death Fist killing techniques.
And Yoda teaching one inch force punch

Blasters don't fire lasers.

>this complete retard mashing his face into his keyboard
Way to completely miss the point of God Emperor. Leto is the pinnacle of humanity. He's the amalgamation of all accumulated human knowledge, wrapped in a badass worm body. The reason Leto did not want to be worshiped as a god is because he knew his death, and freedom from his genetic oppression, would allow humans to blossom.

He literally uses a metaphor were he's a predator. The purpose of a predator is not to murder, but to cull the weak and make the species stronger. How in god's green fuck did you miss that when he literally says it 100 pages into the book?

I would leave it that way but make the energy fields take the form of a transparent pyramid that splits the laser like a prism

Fortune from MGS2 had a shield that reduced all grenades in her ''shield'' into duds.

you may want to rewatch matrix.

Metal Fatigue was a great game.

If its lasers specifically, give them 'optical cover'.

Based on a tech for an invisibility stealth system that didn't pan out, the optical cover bends the path of light that passes through it. Set to passive mode, the optical cover just makes you look a little blurry and only kicks into gear when a sufficiently high-energy light concentration enters its area, at which point it bends it away from you. This protects you from lasers, as well as offering partial protection from strong flashes of light, like from flashbangs or powerful explosions.

There are a couple of downsides to this. The first and most obvious is that, in the brief instants where the optical cover is actively defending you, your own vision gets screwy because your view of the battle gets distorted. All in all, still better than dying to laser fire.

The other, much more significant, downside is that nothing is free. To bend the path of a laser, your cover needs to expend an amount of energy equal to that in the laser. The system heats up about as much as you would imagine. So optical cover systems are limited by their power source and their cooling system. If the former fails you are defenseless, if the latter fails your shield system catches on fire, which is a problem since you are probably wearing it.

Optical cover, it should be noted, ONLY works on lasers. Other energy weapons, and any physical weapon, will be unaffected. Still, even a weak optical cover system can be a lifesaver. It only has to save your life once to be worth it.

Howitzers are in fact a type of gun, yes.

>foggy morning

>smoke grenade

I personally like the idea of 'reflecting' armor; shiny, mirror armor that harmlessly bounces the diffused mirror back. It's a good excuse to have everyone dressed up in shiny, sequin spacesuits.

Sadly the mass impact dune has had on pop culture will probably have you thinking. Oh great this cliche again the whole way through it.

Assuming that your "lasers" are actually energize plasma because a laser is traveling at the speed of light. You would want to stop the lump of 10million degree plasma before it touched you. Otherwise it would turn out about as well as an armor piercing tank round versus a Toyota. It would instantly melt through any armor and so the best option would be to deflect it with a sheild before it cooked you alive in your armor.

>Scoffs in Fremen

Muad'dib?

Depends on the setting really.

In Star Wars, for example, energy shields stop pretty much anything and most armor is impervious to solid slug weaponry. Which is why blasters are so common.

Lazers are stopped by
MIRRORS.

Is this really that hard?

If you can make a 100% reflective mirror, yes. In reality, no.

A weaponized laser would be definitely energetic enough to break through a mirror.

weaponized mirrors

Meme mirrors

Why bother differentiating?

>Physical damage
>radiation/burn damage
thats why

What does the system gain from that granularity?

What does the narrative gain from that granularity?