Is it possible to direct electricity through air? I mean shooting lightning accurately at a target.
Also, is it possible to shoot lightning or create arcs in space or does the vacuum prevent that?
Just wondering because I'm in the middle of designing a board game and would like my spaceships to be able to have electricity based weapons but if that's physically not possible I would drop that. And since you are the smartest bunch on Veeky Forums I thought I'd ask here.
You wouldn't really be able to direct it, it'd just hit whatever is closest.
Also >air >spacesships
cmon
Wyatt Barnes
>Is it possible to direct electricity through air?
Companies have done it (Picatinney Arsenal [sp?]). It seems really hard to do though.
It's not possible through vacuum in the sense of lightning because you need a medium to send current through. You'd also need ground to complete the circuit in air, unless it's a double lined lightning gun. In space it might as well be some kind of particle weapon.
Robert Nguyen
I know that spaceships don't operate within an atmosphere. I just wanted to first establish whether it's possible at all because it interests me, and then ask if it's possible in the vacuum space.
I know that there is some kind of electro laser where they use a very powerful laser to create a plasma stream that lasts for the tiniest moment, but in that time they send current through that stream since it's conducting in that form to hit whatever the laster shot at. But I also want to know if it's perhaps possible to target lightning without that.
Dominic Foster
Since it's sci-fi you could just explain the system having a laser which creates a 'plasma channel' that current passes through to the target
it sounds fancy enough
Asher Anderson
But that wouldn't work in a vacuum I think.
Maybe just a harpoonlike projectile that pulls a really long, few-molecule thick carbon fiber strand after it and once the projectile gets stuck in the enemy spaceship you would just send super high current through the wire.
Would that sound feasible enough for a game?
Cooper Cox
Sure but why even bother with that? If your intention is to destroy the enemy spaceship just fire a missile at it. No need to go all Captain Ahab on it and hit it with the spaceship equivalent of a taser.
Jackson Allen
What would be cooler is a warp drive that's been modified to shoot gravity waves at other ships
Brandon Wilson
Hey that's a pretty cool idea. The plan is to have many different weapons in the game and you can do research to get more powerful weapons later in the game. For example early on all you got are ballistic turrets that aren't very accurate at longer range. Later on you could have devastating lasers and other neat stuff. How should a gravity weapon affect a spaceship on a hexgrid board aside from dealing damage? Push it? Pull it? Disrupt systems?
So there isn't alot of information to back it up. But apparently in the 1990's there was some serious development in Plasma based weaponry. The weapon launched balls of plasma which we're effectively balls of lightning and supposedly was actually very effective, But the project basically disappeared after 1995 and was either scrapped or went black-project tier.
Wyatt Davis
Wow. Really cool and interesting. Never head of it before.
>The weapon was able to produce doughnut-shaped rings of plasma and balls of lightning that exploded with devastating thermal and mechanical effects when hitting their target and produced pulse of electromagnetic radiation that could scramble electronics.
Sounds like a perfect weapon for my game. Thanks!
Tyler Walker
Would lightning be able to exist within a dense nebula?
Nathan James
Pence, we already talked about this, I don't care if it's possible we're not budgeting any money for your "project"
Jacob Reed
Why tf are we not funding this
Grayson Cox
Because of politics.
Julian Brooks
underrated
Elijah Nelson
>Implying Pence doesn't already possess this power
Jaxon Cruz
Yes, you can use a high-power lazer to ionise the path to your desired target and then pour a bunch of electrons into it.
Brody Butler
Not in a vacuum you can't. What are you gonna ionize?
Julian Edwards
air
Asher Edwards
You guys disappoint me, haven't you all heard of electron guns? You know the ones that used to be used in TVs?
It won't look like lightning though. The beam also disperses with distance due to the fact that electrons have charge.
Adam Williams
How would microwave weapons work in space? Is it possible to focus microwaves into a beam without them "spreading"? How would such a beam affect a spaceship and what would be the effective range?
Nathaniel Clark
>You wouldn't really be able to direct it, it'd just hit whatever is closest. You ionize the atmosphere with a laser, potentially creating a preferred path.
>It's not possible through vacuum in the sense of lightning because you need a medium to send current through. Vacuum is easy. You can just accelerate and focus a beam of arbitrary flux to arbitrary precision. Just depends on the voltage of your accelerating grating
With that said, it isn't really an efficient way to damage things
Christopher Nelson
Weaponized gravity waves should disrupt systems >spacetime contracts across the ship >local time dilates wildly for a fraction of a second >all shipboard clocks desync >targeting systems begin to fail Larger ships would be affected more.
Aaron Gutierrez
shoot me with your electrons satan
give me that good eye cancer
Asher Jones
yes, but you'd need to use some sort of conducting gas medium. typically you'd strike an arc between two electrodes and then direct a high velocity gas stream to form what would appear to be a blade made out of electricity. this is how a plasma cutter works.
if you want to see what a real life plasma weapon would look like
Angel Gutierrez
how do you know they aren't?
You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?
Carson Brown
>But that wouldn't work in a vacuum I think.
But for a board game, does that matter? If it worries you, do the Star Trek thiung and make up a word (We should not call these laser guns, because lasers are becoming more commonplace and people will know what lasers can do before we get this show on the air. Call them phasers.")
Carrier beam creates sub-etheric channel for directed lightning strike.
>Like putting too much air in a balloon!
Alexander Perry
>Push it? Pull it?
In addition to doing damage, doing one or the other of these might make for interesting game situations.
Jaxon White
>Is it possible to direct electricity through air? I mean shooting lightning accurately at a target.
Yes but not horizontal to the ground. You need to ionize the air with something like an x-ray laser. If it gets too close to the ground then it has a path to, well, ground and that kinda stops it short.
>spaceships
No you cant shoot lightning in a vacuum pleb.
Jose Rodriguez
Why not just use railguns?
Jaxson Jones
>Implying they actually spent $1.5 Trillion on the F35.
William Moore
>No you cant shoot lightning in a vacuum pleb. >what are vacuum tubes
Xavier Taylor
Electron beams =/= lightning.
Christopher Gray
The plasma weapons research cited came about because of SDI. The Strategic Defense Initiative, or "star wars" program was for the USAF to develop geostationary satellites that could melt incoming missiles using directed energy weapons. This is theoretically plausible by using directed-energy nuclear weapons.
Anyway, that program didn't go anywhere because in 1991 the Soviet Union died. However, the research the program created led to things like MARAUDER, the YAL-1 (pictured) and the XN-1 LaWS (currently in active service), and BAE's railgun (soon to be in active service). The part that is important are things pertaining to the actual plasma containment, as in the actual use of magnets to direct energy (such as plasma or warheads) which SDI originally developed.
Also long term this research is hugely important to the development of fusion power (whose biggest problem is plasma containment) and nuclear powered rockets (whose problem is containing the explosion and directing it away from the spacecraft).
Evan Bennett
Or just launch a projectile that lays down a trail of substrate that absorbs your laser's wavelength effectively
Charles Perez
That was a good film.
Carson Morgan
you shoot a laser through air. that creates an ionized channel for the lightning to travel down.
Adam Cruz
>air >spaceships
Joseph Anderson
Yes but I'm not sharing~
:D
Jayden Bailey
All you need to do in that case is vent a shit ton atmosphere around your space ships for the laser to ionize! :^)
Jeremiah Wright
This seems like the kinda stuff you'd find on the dark net, but afaik its just drugs, pedos, and people that are really paranoid of big brother