Even if the bulk of the laser is huge and heavy, the emitting part can be a lightweight hollow sphere that can be rotated pretty swiftly.

The business end of a laser is merely a blob of optic elements that can be re-oriented without the need to slew the whole weapon around.

Multiphoton ionisation from longer wavelengths and single photon ionisation from shorter ones will damage it. Even fancy handwavium 'thermal superconductors', even assuming such things could exist above the temperature of liquid helium, will be vulnerable to ionisation because it isn't a thermal effect.

You cannot make armour out of regular, solid matter that will protect you from a high energy laser pulse.

This will be substantially faster than any projectile weapon, and a reasonable amount faster than any particle beam, too.

Lasers beams propagate at the speed of light.

Laser beams have straight trajectories in anything other than totally unreasonable gravitational fields (where you won't be using bullets, that for sure).

How can I justify that directed energy weapons are not just specialist tools fore nice applications, but can compete with slugthrowers, so that picking between a slugthrower and a directed energy weapon is more a matter of personal preference than anything else? Even worse, modern slugthrowers deliver up to 80% of the chemical energy as kinetic energy to their target. This sounds pretty decent, until one realizes that just putting the antimatter into a bullet shot at the enemy will deliver almost 100% of the energy. Thus the weapon might deliver about 40% of the antimatter's energy to the target. Assume the chamber has an efficiency of 0.7, and the laser an amazing efficiency of 0.6. This is the pinnacle of my settings technology, so lower tech societies might use something less energetic, but the issue remains. The weapons energy source is a very small quantity of antimatter annihilated in a chamber made of a gamma-voltaic meta-material. Let me illustrate the issue by going over an example. The issue is something Atomic Rockets calls Routledge's Law.Īny interesting battery material for a laser gun would be more usefully deployed as an explosive warhead. they are optimal for the purpose they are meant to serve.ĭirected energy weapons, however, do not generally fulfil that condition. The slugthrowers and exotic weapons all fulfil this criteria, i.e. Since the setting is supposed to be hard-scifi, I want the weapons to be plausible from a basic physics and efficiency point of view.

In my scifi setting I want a broad range of slugthrowers (bullets, smart ammo, grenades.), exotic weapons (flame/chemthrowers, high tech blades, nano-bots.), and directed energy weapons (heat rays, blazers, plasma rays, particle beams, plasma weapons).

Best energy weapon fallout 4