Scifi DEW Pistols VS Real Guns... Why Even If We Had Them Guns Would Still Be Preferred...

[Spacescifi]

I was reading a novel where the heroes were shot at with a glowing beam weapon.... only problem for the people that shot at them was that they missed.

They heroes had normal guns, and were easily able to track where the beam shots were coming from and return fire in their direction to take them down.

 

Therein lies both the cool factor and the flaw of scifi beam weapons.

Unless you are a one-hit one kill aimbot who never misses, glowing scifi beam weapons are just going to let EVERYONE know your location immediately and draw a firefight to you.

So really, even if we had scifi glowing beam shooting pistols, they would not be preferred over regular guns, at least not anywhere in atmosphere.

Ironically a laser pistol would be more stealthy in space as the beam would be invisible as well as have no recoil, so for space vacuum, actual scifi beam pistols are ideal and even better than guns.

Inside an atmosphere regular guns won't let everyone know your location so they are better than glowing beams that track back to you.

Thoughts?

 

EDIT: If there were a ray gun that fired invisible beams hot enough to be as lethal as bullets but not so hot as to inonize the air... that WOULD be superior to a gun... which kind of cancels out the cool scifi look, but also makes the scifi weapon more practical.

 

 

Edited October 13, 2023 by Spacescifi

[Superfluous J]

You just detailed the main Human argument from the Stargate TV show.

Big blaster weapons are tools of terror, built to intimidate. Guns with bullets are tools of war, built to kill.

[darthgently]

36 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

You just detailed the main Human argument from the Stargate TV show.

Big blaster weapons are tools of terror, built to intimidate. Guns with bullets are tools of war, built to kill.

Based Stargate wins again.  Surgical application of force against combatants vs incitement of terror among the population 

[sevenperforce]

Have you ever seen someone fire a gun? Unless someone has a very good suppressor, you can still see exactly where "slug thrower" shots are coming from.

[kerbiloid]

The Space-X gun shoots with returnable bullets.

[farmerben]

They will probably shoot rubber buckshot at each other, so as not to rupture the hull.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, farmerben said:

They will probably shoot rubber buckshot at each other, so as not to rupture the hull.

Pretty common to use bullets who fragments fast if you don't want over penetration. 

Now the main reason why I assume side arms will be guns not energy weapons is simplicity even advanced guns like machine guns are pretty simple with an low number of rugged parts who can take lots of abuse. 
Even far future energy weapons will not be that simple and have other downsides like how getting the optic at end of an laser pistol dirty is much easier than getting an plug of dirt into the barrel of an rifle. 

Yes an laser is more accurate but this does not matter that much for pistols who is hard to aim, and even for rifles its hard to hit targets past 500 meters.
For weapons on ships or to some lesser degree on planes and cars I say this will be reversed. Lasers makes perfect sense in the long ranges of space and in real life lots of people are working on laser anti air weapons or to put on planes kind of an return to the old defended bombers from WW 2. 

[Scotius]

Quote

Unless you are a one-hit one kill aimbot who never misses, glowing scifi beam weapons are just going to let EVERYONE know your location immediately and draw a firefight to you.

Just use pulsed weapon. With short enough pulses you will notice the flashes, but locating where they are coming from will not be easy. Unless you are looking straight at the source - which won't be healthy!

[Blasty McBlastblast]

i once read a book (Run to the Stars by Michael Scott Rohan) where the villain preferred a fancy laser pistol intended for discrete murder because: a) it operated silently, b) it had a beam-mode that could slice up corpses for handy disposal, c) it contained none of the chemicals or metal shapes that would trigger the weapon-detectors found everywhere.

 

[KSK]

16 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The Space-X gun shoots with returnable bullets.

Now I'm waiting for the YouTube video, "How not to Rechamber a Returnable Round."

Also, my first thought on seeing DEW was Distant Early Warning, rather than Directed Energy Weapon.

[Nuke]

while i dont think slug throwers are going anywhere, i still think there is room for advancement. advanced targeting system, aim assist, indiredct fire (shooting over terrain), redirect in flight capability (homing bullets), advanced munitions (eg micro-grenades). slug throwers got some way to go still.

dews only make sense in spacecraft if the weight of the power supply is less than the weight of the magazine. both weapon systems represent significant mass and the weapon with the best mass to lethality ratio will reign supreme. missiles will still be dominant though because the weapon is the munition. you just need to chuck it out an airlock and let it go to work. but then again missiles with significant delta-v are going to be huge.

Edited October 14, 2023 by Nuke

[magnemoe]

5 hours ago, Nuke said:

while i dont think slug throwers are going anywhere, i still think there is room for advancement. advanced targeting system, aim assist, indiredct fire (shooting over terrain), redirect in flight capability (homing bullets), advanced munitions (eg micro-grenades). slug throwers got some way to go still.

dews only make sense in spacecraft if the weight of the power supply is less than the weight of the magazine. both weapon systems represent significant mass and the weapon with the best mass to lethality ratio will reign supreme. missiles will still be dominant though because the weapon is the munition. you just need to chuck it out an airlock and let it go to work. but then again missiles with significant delta-v are going to be huge.

Agree, tanks guns has fire control better than battleships had during WW 2 and its possible to scale this down to rifles, not the movement part but gun could shoot then in position and you don't feel the recoil until after the bullet is out.  
As for lasers in planes or space,  you have the benefit of light speed making it much easier to intercept small and fast targets who are not well armored, the front radar and IR sensor in the nose is pretty soft. 

An close to megawatt laser could swat out ballistic missiles including hyper-sonic glide ones unless its rain or fog I guess. But this is an ship or a pretty static system. Now an megawatt laser on an train would be practical and cool you need water for active cooling however. 

Edited October 14, 2023 by magnemoe

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Agree, tanks guns has fire control better than battleships had during WW 2 and its possible to scale this down to rifles, not the movement part but gun could shoot then in position and you don't feel the recoil until after the bullet is out.  
As for lasers in planes or space,  you have the benefit of light speed making it much easier to intercept small and fast targets who are not well armored, the front radar and IR sensor in the nose is pretty soft. 

An close to megawatt laser could swat out ballistic missiles including hyper-sonic glide ones unless its rain or fog I guess. But this is an ship or a pretty static system. Now an megawatt laser on an train would be practical and cool you need water for active cooling however. 

There already is a rifle system that detects when the cross hair is on the designated  target as the POI wanders due to shooter breathing and heartbeat and fires at the right moment.  

As for anti ballistic DEW, the problem is that the counter measure is fairly low tech and inexpensive: a mirror polished finish.

 

[farmerben]

The invention of smokeless powder actually increased the fog of war.

[Superfluous J]

It should be said, blaster guns with huge, bright, slow moving bolts of energy are not in the show you're watching because they're reasonable alternatives to regular guns.

They're there for 2 reasons:

1. They look cool.
2. Star Wars did it.

[kerbiloid]

We don't know the exact value of the light speed in sci-fi movie.

Say, in the Pratchett's Discworld, the light from the sun slowly expands along the planet.

Probably, this should make laser beams and light bolt spells be well visible.

[KSK]

7 hours ago, darthgently said:

There already is a rifle system that detects when the cross hair is on the designated  target as the POI wanders due to shooter breathing and heartbeat and fires at the right moment.  

As for anti ballistic DEW, the problem is that the counter measure is fairly low tech and inexpensive: a mirror polished finish.

Nah, mirror polished finishes aren't good enough and as soon as they start to degrade a bit (which they will if hit by a suitably powerful laser), they get into a downward spiral of absorbing more laser energy, which then degrades them further etc.

Even then, blackening metals using a high powered (i.e. low total energy but delivered in picoseconds or less) pulse laser is a thing. I can imagine using one of those as a ranging shot to blacken the target point for the actual damage causing laser. The optics would be tricky but I think that's an engineering problem rather than a physically impossible problem.

[darthgently]

4 hours ago, KSK said:

Nah, mirror polished finishes aren't good enough and as soon as they start to degrade a bit (which they will if hit by a suitably powerful laser), they get into a downward spiral of absorbing more laser energy, which then degrades them further etc.

Even then, blackening metals using a high powered (i.e. low total energy but delivered in picoseconds or less) pulse laser is a thing. I can imagine using one of those as a ranging shot to blacken the target point for the actual damage causing laser. The optics would be tricky but I think that's an engineering problem rather than a physically impossible problem.

I forgot other elements.  Mirror finish plus axial rotation and an ablator coating. 

[Scotius]

With Israel planning to accelerate the deployment of Iron Beam system, we should get more data about effectiveness of lasers in combat. Apparently during trials system was able to destroy missiles, artillery and mortar shells. Considering it has rather short range (up to 7 km.) it suggests both very short reaction time and the ability to deliver significant amount of energy in very short time.

Now I'm wondering if similar system could be attached to space stations, to protect them from space trash? Maybe not destroy space junk outright, but push it away - to a safer orbit. Possibly even decelerate piece enough to make it burn in the atmosphere faster? This way station could serve as a space janitor, cleaning its orbit of garbage over time.

[Nuke]

i was thinking about ablative coatings you could apply to sattelites, and hitting it from the retrograde side with a laser could give it enough thrust to nudge its orbit into a faster death spiral.

or little laser tripped srb motors, where the detonators are also powered by the beam. a circuit where you have solar cell (like the little ones you find on calculators), a cap and a transistor. the cap would have a resistor across it so if it got pointed at the sun the cap would discharge faster than it can charge, however a laser at a specific power level and wavelength would be able to charge it faster than it can discharge, and once the cap is full it trips the transistor and dumps the charge into a rocket motor igniter.  a 100% self contained module. the solar cell would also be surrounded by a shroud so it can only receive light from a certain direction. even if the thing is tumbling the lasers would only detonate motors facing the beam emmitter, it only need be pointed through the satellite's cg. just spam these all over the satellites. 

Edited October 15, 2023 by Nuke

[kerbiloid]

20 hours ago, KSK said:

Nah, mirror polished finishes aren't good enough and as soon as they start to degrade a bit (which they will if hit by a suitably powerful laser), they get into a downward spiral of absorbing more laser energy, which then degrades them further etc.

In the sci-fi gun they can use rotating dynamic mercury mirrors.

The centrifugal forces make the mercury surface be parabolic.

***

The station should be equipped with a gluegun turret.

It spits with glue, the junk gets covered with glue, the glue starts evaporating in the laser beam, the vapor pushes the target retrograde.

[Nuke]

theres always the rocket net cannon. works on drones. 

[darthgently]

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The station should be equipped with a gluegun turret.

But now you are back to non-DEW throwing of (sticky) rocks.

I'm not saying that the Tower Defense game can't be inspiration, but only limited in the glue gun case

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, darthgently said:

But now you are back to non-DEW throwing of (sticky) rocks.

Not exactly.

It can be a gluon glue gun, using a gluonic rope to attach to the target (like in the M. Kharitonov's "F...up" novel).
The end of the rope is running a quark decomposition, then the gluonic glue forces a quark recomposition between the rope and the target quarks, so the rope and the target become attached at subparticle level.

Then the gluonic rope gets weak when the beacon is close to the target, and becomes strong once the beacon gets farther.
So, the beacon stays unbreakably attached to the target.

So, then the station could either grab  the target, or kill it with electric shocker, or release its end of the gluonic rope to make the target feel kicked by a rubber thread.

[KSK]

Sings. "Gluons and gelatine. Dynamite with a laser beam. Guaranteed to fail on you. In interesting ways."