The Associated Worlds - technicalities

yeah, that's what i reckon is impractical

15:19

holes are practical

15:19

slicing isn't

Exceedingly so.

15:20

Plus, a pulse laser is, ultimately, a kinda-sorta kinetic weapon.

ehhh

15:20

yes and no

15:20

on impact, sure

It‘ll kill by shock action similiar to bullet penetration, not "chest of target charr-grilled".

but there are more convenient ways to ignore photons

They are practical as hand weapons, but in terms of relative efficiencies given 'verse tech, kinetics give you more bang for your buck. So to speak. (And where slugguns and hand cannons are concerned, you can't fire grenades out of a laser, or use it to shoot around corners.

)

ranging from "imperfect but workable" to "haha, my exotic matter armor perfectly reflects all photons in to deep gamma rays!"

I thought ontotech didn‘t let you ignore the energy bill?

It doesn't.

i'm not sure there's a need for ontotech at all, just really tiny, really well designed mass drivers

Granted, a su-con electrokinetic gets 95+% efficient, but even so a lasers‘s plenty deadly.

15:22

ranging from "imperfect but workable" to "haha, my exotic matter armor *perfectly reflects all photons in to deep gamma rays!*"

breaks out the electron beams

that's cheating

OTOH, if you need to deliver more than a few kJ, you probably want a laser to avoid beating yourself to hell with recoil.

now you're just using matter that is convieniently very charged per-unit-mass, making it easy to accelerate

Nope. That‘s Superior Firepower™ (A trademark of Flame Artifice Firearms)

nah, recoil effectively goes down as you increase projectile speed and decrease size

But at-this-particular-moment-in-history, it means that mass driver efficiency beats laser efficiency. It hasn't always been that way, and once the lab boys at Team Photon get around to it, it'll probably switch back again. Until Team Baryon makes their next... well, you get the idea.

Also, electron beams filament in atmosphere, and they are wonderfully lethal on target,

energy delivered is m times v^2, recoil is just m times v (edited)

Main problem is that a handheld e-beamer sprays a bit of gamma and x-rays.

@Buggy sure, if you can do that. Of course, you also have the other problem with terminal ballistics, which is sticky.

Meanwhile, at the Eye-in-the-Flame special weapons research department, the Team Better Design Through Massive Drug Use are working on guns that fire bullets that fire lasers. (edited)

i mean, we're way past terminal ballistics

The terminal balistics of relativistic ammo is "point-of-contact explosion".

15:25

Another reason I don‘t really like em.

i'm not sure what the canonical range is, but i'm under the impression that it's whole-number percentages of c

They just don‘t penetrate past 50 km/s.

15:25

They just blow up.

True. But if you're delivering 10 kJ in the form of relativistic dust, I'm not sure that'd penetrate enough to do much.

And past 3 km/s, penetration gets worse per actual studies.

well, that's why you have to stop looking at it as dust

15:26

it's not dust

It would hurt, but would it take the fight out of someone?

15:26

It's radiation, if it's fast and light enough

it's a very coherent ion stream that happens to, yknow, not be ions

Lower, mostly. (Not exclusively, because of Team Better Design Through Massive Drug Use, but there's only so much overkill you need .)

energy delivered to the target is distributed in part according to how far it can penetrate a-la radiation

But hitting your target with 10 Gy of hard rads isn't exactly useful in combat.

15:27

It'll kill, but not on tactically relevant timescales.

i think that's really lowball though

15:27

try hundreds, or thousands

Nice if you want to make sure they die eventually. less useful if you want them incapacitated, now.

enough that it's not a biological concern, it's prompt ionization

And you get backscatter and behmsstralung with particle beams in air.

that's the main issue

E-beams are x-rays x-rays oh a split atom x-rays cooked molecules oh a neutron x-rays.

15:28

In their targets.

a ion beam can't penetrate all that far in air at low energies

15:29

and also, it's a very weird ion beam with all the ions condensed in one huge packet, relatively speaking

15:29

but that's where the idea for ionizing the projectile path with a weak laser comes in

You pretty much due to Instant Internal Cooking and Prompt Radiation-Induced Biological Functions Excursion.

i mean, we know the energy that reaches the target at the end

15:30

i can't be bothered to find the quote, but it's enough to blast a gaping hole a-la bad horror movies with shotguns

15:30

so we know the end result, the question is how does it get there and other minutia

Too big a headache, to be honest.

it's not just cooking bio functions. I mean, it does that too, a bit further out, but at the epicenter it's enough to outright ionize everything in a sphere

For relativistic projectile guns.

it's not really a headache; we have the general functionality and a good guess at how the beam behaves, so the main variable that needs tweaking is "how big and fast is the projectile"

I gave up on trying to justify them in atmo, the darn atmo won‘t cooperate.

Long story short, at high enough velocities and low enough masses, the difference between a mass driver and a particle cannon is almost academic

And the PAW is better.

and the answer is "big and fast enough that we get a hole instead of severe radiation poisoning"

99+% cee particle beams can just brute force their way through the atmosphere without much the worse. (edited)

yeah, it's pretty much a particle cannon

15:32

but not a beam

15:33

it's one solid, day-ruining packet

Sure it is. A very short-duration beam.

i think the physics are probably different

15:33

if i had to reference someone who's done the math on something similar

It‘s less penetrative.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

PAWs won't work in atmosphere, unless you are planning to kill your troops from radiation poisoning

More point-of-impact Ouch.

15:34

@Unknown Yes they actually do.

15:34

And no, they are not that acute or a rad risk.

I dunno, there's a lot of atoms blocking the beam

a solid packet of atoms does behave differently than a idealized particle beam, even if it is technically a extremely short duration high intensity particle beam

You might want to avoid gunning for GeV+ beams.

15:35

And pack them into vehicles rather than personal arms.

personally i think the ionized path is very workable

Particle penetration also depends on velocity.

the projectile is already moving at values of "instantaneous" as far as plasma physics and kinetics is concerned

Aha! IIRC there are methods to ionise the atmosphere, creating a vacuum for the beam to travel through

ionize a small path for a short duration, up the laser intensity in testing until the path is rarified enough, and it'll work fine

The problem with "ionized path" is tht it is such a bastards solution that marries three approaches to Shoving Energy Downrange right at the point of Awkward.

It also allows UV lasers to operate in atmo

On another note, the ways in which hand weapons are used should be borne in mind, with regard to why relatively low-energy kinetics are popular.

if it worked

i mean, the whole concept would work perfectly in a vacuum

Actual PAW beam are better veam-wise.

15:36

Actual lasers are more efficient and less clunky.

And whether that makes sense depends on the relative effects and what you're trying to destroy.

And a lower-velocity solid round works better also.

Otherwise, just use a high-energy laser. Or a relatively low-energy kinetic, as @Overmind points out.

Namely: the infantry are the arm of restraint .

(this is why, for example, we don't generally arm cops with subguns in 10mm Auto with incendiary rounds, f'r'example)

It‘s an uggly overcomplicated marriage of systems that escaperates design, heat managment and power supply issues for questionable efficiency.

restraint, so "kill that guy and don't give the people standing next to him fatal radiation poisoning, and definitely don't set the entire building on fire"

@Overmind The arm of war is the interfacial k-rod, then.

Maxims 34 and 37 aside.

That said, if you need a weapon that says "your armor? Fuck it.", the ionized-path-particle-beam could work.

15:38

A Warhammer 40k meltagun

Don‘t need ionization.

we aren't just talking about neohuman physiology here, though

A real PAW slamms its own way.

Why not just use a big slugthrower?

No need for a burner stage.

@Unknown Recoil, if you're talking about small arms.

Good reason

Ever tried to fire a 7.62x51 in full auto?

Inefficient anyway, a laser would clear more beampath than is actually required.

a good weapon needs to be at least a little overkill, to handle the metaphorical Schlock and/or soph with a hardshell body who likes to overengineer things a bit

I have. Not real practical. And that's about 4 kJ.

@Buggy Sluggun and ESC rounds.

ESC?

25+ metric grams, equivalent to 250 grams of TNT, hypersonic detonation velocity.

15:40

That‘ll put about anything down.

that's probably not good enough

Explosive Supercondutor.

you're thinking earth armor

@Unknown Basically. The only reason to bother engaging in personal-type combat is in situations where - be it because you need it intact or because of collateral damage considerations - you don't want to just wreck the place. Otherwise there's a chap in orbit with a few terawatts of graser who doesn't get to push the big red button very often, and you'd hate for him to get bored...

you need to be thinking about things like woven multiwall nanotubes, diamandoids, and more

Dude, 250 grams explosives is a hand grenade.

As long as you're putting armor on someone made of biological stuff, there's limits to how much energy you can throw around or endure before ending up as squish, armor be damned.

15:42

Well, squish or ashes.

a effective tactic for stopping hand grenades is "jump on it", because a human-mass is good enough to stop it

80 GPA CNT don‘t stop a contact det hand grenade.

a few inches of proper tank armor can stop it dead unless i'm way off about the energies here

The shock transmission‘ll kill ya if nothing else.

@Buggy Are you trying to lose your legs?!?! A grenade is a small grapefruit of BOOM (edited)

well, it saves anyone nearby