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Plasma weapon behaviour


MC.STEEL

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So i was thinking about plasma weapons and i scraped up a couple of notes:

You will need a ludicrously large power supply for it to even generate sizable amounts.

Overheating will be a very annoying issue,and no one likes to handle a malting plasma caster.

I have absolutely no idea how do you make it into neat little globs like you see in Sci-Fi,I heard some talk about the plasma being held under its own magnetic field but i am too factually illiterate to know if thats true.What we can however is bypass this problem and make a rad flamethrower esque weapon that shoots a nasty storm in its general downrange direction,however the plasma will need to be at a very high temperature so it can travel the distance.

A welding mask will be necessary just as protective goggles are needed for high intensity lasers.

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"Caution. Point away from face."

Yeah, the self contained magnetic field always sounded a bit too handwavy to me, can't say for sure, of course.

I mean, even if you could create a clever arrangement that lets the plasma glob contain itself, it seems to me that the magnetic field would need to be very powerful, and it would probably drain away most of the energy in the plasma very quickly. And then you are left with a very inefficient mass driver-type weapon...

Then again, if you accelerate the glob to a great velocity, a split second of containment might be enough.

Edited by Awaras
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there was project marauder back in the early 90s which had pretty good success, enough that it was classified. it would be interesting to know what became of that. according to a weak wikipedia article, with no sources, no pictures and not a lot of text, it was able to produce lightning balls and plasma rings, essentially, a real world ppc. awesome stuff.

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Well, we know that a self contained sphere of plasma is possible: It's been done.

The question is why you would want to use a plasma weapon in the first place. The eventual goal of any weapon is to pump energy from A to B until B stops working. Using a kinetic projectile is just so much better at energy transfer. The only reason you'd want to use anything else is because it moves faster and thus has an easier firing solution. So your choices are either:

Lasers: extremely fast and accurate, but low energy transfer.

Projectiles: Not very fast so you end up missing a lot. But if it hits you have a near guaranteed kill.

A plasma weapon is like the worst of both worlds. It moves slower than light and it transfers less energy than a bullet. I guess you could use it to shock someone, thus having some use as nonlethal antipersonnel weapon. But I don't see that much use for them otherwise.

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supposedly it has a strong localized emp effect, useful if you are fighting a high tech adversary. if you hit a tank or a ship with it, you are going to throw off all their fire control systems and leave them momentarily vulnerable while they switch to manual. if the terrorists had one it would definitely screw with america's war machine. then again in the time it takes to make them momentarily vulnerable, you could have just destroyed them. it might also come in handy when you need to neutralize a threat, but are not authorized to destroy it.

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supposedly it has a strong localized emp effect, useful if you are fighting a high tech adversary. if you hit a tank or a ship with it, you are going to throw off all their fire control systems and leave them momentarily vulnerable while they switch to manual. if the terrorists had one it would definitely screw with america's war machine. then again in the time it takes to make them momentarily vulnerable, you could have just destroyed them. it might also come in handy when you need to neutralize a threat, but are not authorized to destroy it.

And lets not forget the psychological factor.How would you feel if your enemy looks like an alien invasion. :P

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Wouldn't it act like a gas? It would just shoot upwards towards lower pressure and rapidly expand?

Sort of like breaking a steam pipe. Steam would shoot out and kill anyone in the direction of travel of the hot steam, but its range would be negligible at best.

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Wouldn't it act like a gas? It would just shoot upwards towards lower pressure and rapidly expand?

Sort of like breaking a steam pipe. Steam would shoot out and kill anyone in the direction of travel of the hot steam, but its range would be negligible at best.

Well yea, that's one way it can behave. But plasma is extremely conductive which gives it all sorts of interesting tricks.

For example, if you run a current through a wire this generates a magnetic field. So the electrons within the wire are moving through a magnetic field, and as anyone will tell you charged particles in a magnetic field bend their paths. In this case it is towards the center of the current. Normally the current is trapped within a solid, so this does very little (crushes pipes in lightning rods etc). But in a plasma there's nothing holding the charges in place so you can pinch it into a narrow high density line.

If you make that line a loop and you drive extremely high currents through it you can use this to make a high density, high energy torus of plasma. The high density counteracts the atmospheric bouyancy and the current prevents the gas from dissipating. If you give it a bit of a twist you can probably even make it self propelling like a smoke ring. One of those plasma donuts could be used at considerable range.

If you're in a vacuum its even easier, you can use the pinching effect to speed up the plasma to relativistic velocities and just spray your enemies with a particle accelerator.

The problem lies in the amount of energy these tricks cost and the relatively little damage they'll actually cause. A bullet is much simpler and works much better.

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