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

[sevenperforce]

On 10/15/2023 at 1:19 AM, kerbiloid said:

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.

If the blaster bolts in Star Wars were moving at light speed in a galaxy with a slower speed of light, fast punches would produce relativistic effects, and ground speeders would experience time dilation.

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

If the blaster bolts in Star Wars were moving at light speed in a galaxy with a slower speed of light, fast punches would produce relativistic effects, and ground speeders would experience time dilation.

Yes plasma weapons don't make much sense in an hard scifi setting outside of sharped charges or stuff like directional nukes as stronger shaped charges. An common defense against heat weapons is cage armor. Set it off 20 cm early and you lightly armored craft is safe.  An 25 mm AP round will punch troth the armor and its possible to make them smart.  
Lasers makes lots of sense for close in weapon systems and perhaps for main guns on spaceships. 

 

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Yes plasma weapons don't make much sense in an hard scifi setting outside of sharped charges or stuff like directional nukes as stronger shaped charges.

https://www.quora.com/Can-a-metal-ever-run-out-of-electrons

Quote

Malcolm Shute

Writes on the quest to find a theory of quantum gravityAuthor has 3.5K answers and 3M answer views6y

Originally Answered: Can a metal ever run out of valence electrons?

I recently went back over some of my archive of New Scientist magazines, and one article (03-Jan-1995, p23) gives one answer to *one* interpretation of your question. In this article, they describe the work of a set of researchers who built some equipment to strip all of the electrons from a uranium atom (all 92 of them). You can imagine that this might be fairly routine for hydrogen (1 electron) but more challenging as you progress down the period table towards uranium since, every time you remove an electron, the highly positively charged nucleus holds on to the remaining ones all the more tightly. They did, though, manage to remove all 92 electrons from a uranium nucleus, and to fire it at a metal target, with a view to developing the technique as a new way of writing very fine line-width CDs.

So, uranium can lose *all* of its electrons, not just the valence ones. As pointed out in another answer, it would cease to behave as a metal, but uranium is still defined as being a metallic element in the period table, so it returns to being a metal again as soon as it gets all its electrons back.

If significantly ionize a piece of metal, kicking out a lot of its free electrons (say, by inducing the electromotive force and/or mechanically kicking it), the ions (i.e. nuclei) stop being connected enough to prevent their electrostatic repulsion, and the metal piece bursts into dust.

I've read similar pop-science article in Russian (rightfully criticized for the absurdly erroneous conclusion about the positive energetic balance), but the experiments themselves were correct, and the results table was clear.

The authors state that this mechanism explains, why do the > 2km/s meteoroids leave no debris. Plasma + hit ionizes them and makes to turn into dust cloud. An electric current (i.e. directed electrons motion) is the key, and the kick assists.

Also (not from that article), there was another illustrative case of huge steel structures unexplainably turning into dust clouds, while the attached insulated aluminium stayed solid, but why dig so deep.

So, a plasma jet has its destructive potential.

 

Edited October 16, 2023 by kerbiloid