Celebrating the Sci-fi Ray Gun 158
brumgrunt submitted the latest Den of Geek compilation story: this week it's the the science fiction ray guns. From Han Solo's blaster to the Forbidden Planet, there's a lot of nostalgia to get your pew pew out.
Phasers (Score:5, Interesting)
Phasers are essentially inferior to contemporary firearms. For starters, they are actually slower than bullets. You cannot dodge a bullet (in real life, anyway). But there are several examples of the Enterprise crew dodging phaser/disrupter blasts in TNG. Granted, it's possible to retcon this by saying it's some sort of charged plasma that doesn't travel at the speed of light blah blah. But my point is not that it doesn't travel at light speed (which is obvious) but that it's actually SLOWER than a bullet. Which raises the question, why on Earth (or in the Alpha Quadrant, for that matter) would they use essentially inferior technology? If our present day firearms are superior to phasers, why the switch? It defies all logic.
And don't even get me started on the horrible scene in Star Trek: First Contact where the Borg have adapted to Picard's phaser so he lures them into the holodeck and mows them down with a tommy gun. So, 1940s machine gun > 24th century phaser. And they don't keep a stash of machine guns in a weapon's locker? Hell, they can't even replicate a few dozen? Sigh.
Really, it's easier to suspend disbelief about Warp Drive even though that violates everything we know about relativity and modern physics than it is to accept the concept of the phaser replacing the superior firepower we already have in this century.
Anyway, angry Trek nerd rant mode off. Sorry about that.
Re:Phasers (Score:4, Interesting)
IANASTN, but here's my angle: phasers are something that the Borg encountered often enough to warrant an adaptation, but slugthrowers are something so ancient the Borg don't even remember them, therefore saw no reason to ever adapt to it. If Picard was slower to pick them off, they might have, eventually.
Also, I recall that the phasers are not full-time weapons, but multipurpose tools that can cut, weld, heat, stun, kill, etc. Typical jack-of-all-trades, acceptable in all, great in none. Our guns, however, have one purpose: to kill. And being the single-minded things they are, they perform this task admirably.
Re:BSG chose bullets over lasers (Score:5, Interesting)
Not exactly in orbital bombardment, the full title was "Mining the Moon? - Dilemmas of Space Law". One of the topics explored was the use of space for warfare, and inside this, I showed that even the Shuttle can (could, by now...) carry a requisite satellite into orbit: it has a lifting capacity of 22 tons of cargo, a 20 ton projectile (ten meters long, half a meter radius cone) is well inside this limit, even if I'm generous with the support structure.
Ideally, the satellite needs no maneuvering, nor targeting, the only thing it needs to do is house the round, then drop it when ground control tells it to. It may include a large capacitor bank and a railgun assembly to give it more punch (since it fires only once anyway, rail erosion can be ignored), and maybe some additional processing power to select targets for itself, and maybe maneuvering capacity to change orbits. The strike is the ultimate tactical weapon: fully anonymous (the course cannot be traced back to a launch point, unlike a ballistic missile), devastating, undetectable and indefatigable (the launch generates no observable signature and the round descends too fast to even come up on radar before it's too late to do anything about it. Not quite relativistic, but taking into account today's reaction times for weapons, it's like "By the time you see it coming, it's already too late".), and ultimately targetable (with the proper inclination, it will eventually fly over all points of the planet. At this point, it's just choosing the time of release to hit any nation you want).
It can also be aimed precisely, though I only did rough mock-ups in Satellite ToolKit, but those indicated that the descent path is roughly like the cot(x) function, and the ground path is predictable at any latitude, so it can theoretically be aimed with pinpoint precision, discounting signal lag.