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.
DL-44 Mauser? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the Han solo weapon looks more like a mauser than a Luger.
Re:DL-44 Mauser? (Score:5, Informative)
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Yup, C96 broomhandle
And of course the stargate guns are based on the FN P-90 (full auto) or PS-90 (semi only).
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So are many of the guns in Doctor Who. The ones used in The Impossible Planet/Satan Pit are barebones P90s, the ones in The Doctor's Daughter have a small flamethrower-like attachment to generate muzzle flash.
Why is the P90 so popular with sci-fi writers?
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That was pretty much it. Without the shell casings flying at their faces, they could stand the actors closer to one another, which is helpful for framing shots for television.
Its all about the horizontal magazines ... (Score:2)
Why is the P90 so popular with sci-fi writers?
Recognizably different + highly plausible.
It is different from designs people are familiar with yet it represents a highly plausible next generation design. For example a horizontal magazine in-line with the sights allows a user to easily see how many rounds are available. A horizontal magazine also allows the user to get closer to the ground. A vertical magazine sticking out the bottom unnecessarily raises the weapon and the users head, making the head a better target for an opponent. This limits the ca
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Because, it's popular among military and police institutions. If you're gonna pick a small, close-quarters weapon with selectable firing rate ... go with what the real guys are using.
Before the P-90, you saw an awful lot of Heckler & Koch models like the MP5 -- because, they already look bad-ass and don't need to be tarted up.
It's hard to "invent" a fictional design better than what you know the tactical guys are using -- and if you have video of how they c
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A P90 is a weapon that you can pretty much look at, and understand that it's intended for close quarter combat, and not fancy long-distance competition shooting. It's a very business-like beast.
Except it is a bullpulp design, incorporating a 10.4" long barrel, much longer than most comparable submachineguns. That gives it significantly higher muzzle velocity and range than most traditional submachineguns.
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WTF, the role of a police force is to arrest people not put them down and make sure they stay down, It seems like the term 'Law Enforcement' has gone straight to the heads of many US police forces. Just a reminder the police assist the the public in upholding the law and the courts and only the courts 'enforce' the law.
A gun and a badge does not make a police officer, judge jury and executioner, well, at least it should not. Your comment seems to indicate US police forces seriously need to rethink their
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Must be the new shows - all the Dr Who I watched (first thru 5th doctor) all the military units were on loan from the Brits so they all toted the FN-FAL/L1A1
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New series, seasons 2 and 4. During the old series, I doubt there was even thought of the P90... :)
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So are many of the guns in Doctor Who. The ones used in The Impossible Planet/Satan Pit are barebones P90s, the ones in The Doctor's Daughter have a small flamethrower-like attachment to generate muzzle flash.
Why is the P90 so popular with sci-fi writers?
Conspiracy answer: FN are paying them to feature the weapons in their shows. This is why the P90 stopped being used in seasons 9 and 10 of SG1, HK made them a better offer so the writers switched to MP7's and G36's.
Serious answer: because they just look cool and futuristic... and it's cheaper to get an off the shelf gun and paint it rather then build an entirely new prop.
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"Needs more mustard."
-Mike "Don't call him Mickey" Mauser
ZF-1 (Score:2)
It's light. Handle's adjustable for easy carrying, good for righties and lefties. Breaks down into four parts, undetectable by x-ray, ideal for quick, discreet interventions. A word on firepower. Titanium recharger, three thousand round clip with bursts of three to three hundred, and with the Replay button - another Zorg invention - it's even easier.
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A real warrior, however, would have asked about the little red button on the side.
BSG chose bullets over lasers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:BSG chose bullets over lasers (Score:5, Funny)
How would one conduct such feasibility studies? I'm guessing it starts with stocking up on cheetos and jolt, calling a pizza joint, making sure Wikipedia isn't down...
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You mentioned a joint, but forgot to insert it properly into your theory.
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Energy transfer efficiency?
I'm not interested in transferring energy with a laser. I'm interested in slicing an arm off.
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Which is done by a transfer of energy, whether you do it with a laser or with a knife.
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Bullets transfer energy in a very turbulent manner.
Lasers do it in a very precise manner.
The same energy from a laser and a bullet will do very different things. A bullet will hit the surface and by the time the energy has reached the part that you want divided in two the effect is much lower. The energy has spread througout the tissue and dissipated, causing pointless bruising in most of it. Many bullets don't reach the other side or break bone along the way. A laser will complete the job by focussing
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500 J from a laser with picosecond pulses is a lot of juice. It's like turning that umbering, tumbling, energy-dispersing clod of bullet into a thin, light, fast-moving knife. Ooh! like the sword in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, if it was 40 meters long and all the mass was in a few inches of blade at the far end.
Arms, all over the place.
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I doubt those would get much past the end of the barrel, though. Wind resistance is worse than v^2 at those speeds...
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Airsoft is practically stationary compared to .8c.
I suspect that a .8c bullet would simply dump 2 GJ into the air as soon as it exits the barrel (we're presuming a magic gun that the projectile actually makes it out of...). The projectile wouldn't be stopped, so much as nigh-instantly vaporized. Along with your face. And you might get your target, too, if the room is smaller than an airplane hangar...
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Hey, I just used a Mass Effect reference (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p77XnhzJz7g) in another discussion, although that pertained to why you need to aim properly at those energies.
Maybe not grains of sand, but a 20kg steel slug sure packs a punch. I also used the idea in my thesis as an orbital bombardment system: 20 tons of iron dropped from 20,350 km, impacting with 1/500 the energy of a tactical nuke. Sure, a lot less, but clean and a darn sight cheaper in the long run to maintain then a nuke...
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Ummmm ... where does one write a thesis on orbital bombardment and in what discipline of study?
Besides, I should think getting your 20 tons of iron into orbit and aiming it so it lands where you intended. Hell ... I should think a rail gun would be more feasible than getting multiple 'rounds' of 20 tons of iron up into space. :-P
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.
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Someone needs a lesson in Newtonian physics. Being in orbit is not like Wylie E. Coyote where you can just magically stop where you are and fall straight down. You have to precisely slow down using rockets, just enough so that your orbit shifts you into the atmosphere so that the drag can decelerate you down the rest of the way right where you want to end
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Except if you give it's velocity a downward component in addition to its tangential component (let's call that one lateral). In that case, it goes straight into the atmosphere at which point the lateral component is dissipated or brought under control via friction/steering. Like I said at the end, I did some rough simulations in STK (before the trial expired), and found it feasible...
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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
You've already checked out Atomic Rockets [projectrho.com] and Rocketpunk Manifesto [rocketpunk-manifesto.com], I presume?
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Ah, "Rods from God"; concept's been around for decades. If I had to take a stab at it, I'd guess Aerospace Engineering or Physics student might write it up as a thesis. 20 tons is for the strategic option; you get something close to a nuclear explosion from it. You wouldn't need or want many of 'em. By way of comparison, the Hubble weighs over 10 tons. You could 20 kg ones to kill tanks fairly effectively.
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Let me type up the maths for a 20t mass, I've got my notes right here:
v = sqrt(2 x 20,350,000m x 9.81m/s^2) = ~1.998x10^4m/s (assuming no drag and no pre-acceleration, just a simple drop)
E = (20,000kg x (1.998x10^4m/s)^2)/2 = ~3.993x10^12J = ~953.4t TNT equivalent.
20kg would get you about a ton of TNT equivalent. "Fairly Effective" indeed...
Sure, projectile profile means this is going to go deep rather than wide, and the transit time is on the order of tens of minutes, but even so, it's not so much a tank-b
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The title was "Dilemmas of Space Law", I'm an international relations student. :)
And yes, Rods from God is mentioned explicitly as the title of this chapter "Rods from God and Crowbars - Striking from Orbit" (translated from Hungarian). The name I gave to this particular system was Crowbar, admittedly based on the webcomic UserFriendly, since that's where I saw it called such, and took a liking to the name. In the thesis, I explain the name as an analogue for the method: "[...]on a smaller scale, it's the e
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I'm an international relations student. :) And yes, Rods from God is mentioned explicitly as the title of this chapter "Rods from God and Crowbars - Striking from Orbit"
Ah Gordon, I see you've chhhanged your majjjjjor. Are you certain this decision will have no unforessssseen consssssequencessss?
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20 tons is for the strategic option; you get something close to a nuclear explosion from it. You wouldn't need or want many of 'em. By way of comparison, the Hubble weighs over 10 tons.
Hubble, eh?
Just out of curiosity, how much propellant is left in the Hubble fuel tanks and how well firewalled are its attitude control uplink stations? Also, do we know if anyone in Anonymous works at NASA and has access to Stuxnet source code?
Hmm? Oh, no reason.
War college (Score:2)
Ummmm ... where does one write a thesis on orbital bombardment and in what discipline of study?
Perhaps at a war college, its the place one visits on the way to becoming a general or admiral. Something like: ,"The War College is a place of original research on all questions relating to war and to statesmanship connected with war, or the prevention of war.""
"Throughout its history, the college has held fast to the belief, first articulated by its founding president, Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce, that
http://www.usnwc.edu/About.aspx [usnwc.edu]
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Ummmm ... where does one write a thesis on orbital bombardment and in what discipline of study?
Somewhere in Colorado Springs, perhaps?
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The basic idea of mass effect fields, as well as how they're used in weapons, is interesting. However, ME2's "heat clips," which supposedly cool the weapon by being discarded are nonsensical. If overheating is truly to problem to solve, you could just wait, but the heat clips are actually just a stand-in for universal ammunition.
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It was the dumbest system ever. I hated it, and hope it gets returned or at least improved in ME3. I basically saw it as a way to prevent me from being the sniper I was in ME1. With only 10 or so shots available on the sniper rifle, I inevitably had to run out of my cover with a practically useless pistol to find more ammo. The timed cooldown of the weapons in the original game made more sense with the physics and made for much more strategic battles as accuracy wasn't as important as your position. I also missed the varied upgrades you could do to weapons in ME1, though I do agree it was probably overly complicated, but I liked it as I could tailor my weapons based on each mission.
Also, I liked shooting randomly in ME1 to fill the long walks on alien worlds... No more in ME2, I had to conserve every shot.
Yeah, I'd much prefer to snipe everything. I've only played ME2, but now I'll have to get ME1.
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It was the dumbest system ever.
I feel like it improves the pacing of combat. Spending half your time hiding and waiting for weapons to cooldown is kind of boring. On the other hand, it makes no sense in universe for guns to work this way. I'd like to see a compromise with thermal clips *and* weapon cooldowns. So essentially, you'll get so many free thermal refreshes in a mission (and maybe thermal clips themselves are rarer). That would encourage you to use them strategically.... but otherwise, your weapons will cool down on their o
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Can't find the original article but I recall reading the BSG creators did feasibility studies on bullets or rayguns for the series and came up with laser powered handguns just not being as effective as bullets.
If by "effective" they mean for purposes of drama and entertainment, I can understand that. If, on the other hand, they mean "effective weapons" . . . this is Sci Fi -- it's as effective as you want it to be!
Seriously. What's a study like that look like? "Ok guys, what's better: a gun or some as yet un-invented personal weapon employing some known or unknown technology?"
The Ray-Gun: A Love Story (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
IANATrekie but re-watching TNG (I was 8 when it was first screened here) but the Borg need to be shot with a weapon before they can adapt to it, which is why in the TNG series they can normally kill one or two drones before they adapt. The same would be true of traditional projectile fireams one would think.
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but slugthrowers are something so ancient the Borg don't even remember them, therefore saw no reason to ever adapt to it.
Yeah, except that what Picard actually fired was a holographic simulation of a Tommy gun. Which was a bit like suprising a burglar in your house by firing up your 3D HD TV and waving your Halo: Reach controller at him and then have the guy actually die because the pixels were so sharp.
Course we all know the Holodeck is a lethal deathtrap if you turn off the safeties (which happens every couple of weeks), but you'd think if it's that useful as a weapon, Starfleet would have decided to either mount it on the
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To be honest, guns DO have "stun settings", if they're loaded with stun rounds: beanbag, hard wax, rubber, and maybe some others. It's just that these leave a ruddy big bruise, while phasers just drop you like a sack.
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Gun stun settings don't work too well against PCP.
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It also takes more time/effort to switch to 'stun' with a shotgun.
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By the time they were what they were, they evolved way past slugthrowers. After that, they didn't target races too primitive, so they never encountered them again, until the Day of the Holodeck.
Re:Phasers: How about longbows? (Score:2)
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Big difference is it takes years of training to be able to use a longbow effectively, whereas anyone could aim and operate a musket effectively.
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The weapons at the time were cannon and musket. Muskets were iron, hard to make, heavy to carry, hard to operate, dangerous to the user (they could explode), had a horrific rate of fire, noisy, created a lot of smoke to obscure the battleplace, etc. Ben Franklin, I think it was, argued for the longbow as it could be manufactured anywhere, was light, safer to operate, had a massive rate of fire, was silent, and just as deadly as the musket - the ideal weapon for the Americans.
The problem is, Longbows require
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Erm, but you can set a phaser to a wide dispersion and stun everyone on a city block. Or you can set it to vaporize your opponent with a single hit. And it's the size of a garage-door opener (I was going to say Pager, but we're far enough into the future that there are people who have no idea what that is reading these fori).
FTW.
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And it's the size of a garage-door opener (I was going to say Pager, but we're far enough into the future that there are people who have no idea what that is reading these fori).
Hey, I used to carry a pager, you insensitive clod!
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Key words there: "Used to"
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Phasers are essentially inferior to contemporary firearms.
Depends on what you're trying to do with them.
Phasers could be "set" to stun or kill an opponent, something that normal firearms cannot do. Phasers also seemed to be able to shoot far more rounds than contemporary firearms. It was rare that you heard about a phaser being "drained" in a battle--I'm not that knowledgeable about TNG, but in "The Omega Glory," Captain Tracy claims to have killed "thousands" with only four phasers. Furthermore, phaser power-packs could be rigged to explode like a grenade. Ph
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Perhaps I missed the episode but I don't really recall people dodging phaser beams. People may have ducked for cover and moved out of the aim point prior to the phaser firing but once the beam was "in flight" there was no ducking, much as with a bullet. The key to ducking is the time lag between the decision that the weapon is on target and the trigger finger moving far enough to fire the weapon.
Well there is a scene [youtube.com] in the ST:TOS episode Wink of an Eye where Deela, Queen of the Scalosians, dodges a phaser beam. To be fair, though, she was in an "accelerated" time frame.
Can't even dodge a paintball ... (Score:2)
TNG generally had beam phasers. But DS9 and later tended to use blasters that shot slower balls of whatever.
As someone who has watched many a slow paintball coming in and yet has been unable to dodge them, I'm still a little skeptical. Then again I am not starfleet material. :-)
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B. You can dodge light-speed fire in a universe where information can travel faster then light (subspace comms)
C. IM really confused as to what frame of reference you are using to determine that phaser fire is slower then a bullet.
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C. IM really confused as to what frame of reference you are using to determine that phaser fire is slower then a bullet.
As I recall, it's not uncommon to be able to actually track the progress of the beam with the naked eye even without a high speed camera. This is true of a bullet at long range (being able to track tracer rounds, for example), but I remember doing this with phasers sometimes when guys were shooting at each other in the same room.
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That's because the cable company automatically puts graphics over the phaser beam so that you can see it. Much like the blue dot they use for Hockey games.
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One advantage is that phasers carry a whole lot more shots than a pistol, and you don't have to stock ammunition, just maintain a recharge station. Another is that they have selectable power.
Now where is the masking tape? My glasses have broken again ... snort-heh-snort-heh.
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But bullets have been dodged in TV shows and movies, so clearly TV show land has different rules in the first place.
And why wouldn't a tommy gun kill a couple of Borg, if you kept trying they'd adapt and their shields would deflect them (or whatever). Normal phasers kill the first couple of Borgs just by changing the frequency...
Phasers have at least three benefits:
1. No need to carry ammunition.
2. No need to adjust your shooting for varying levels of gravity that someone exploring space and planets and wha
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Phasers are essentially inferior to contemporary firearms
Apart from not requiring ammunition, ease of handling, multiple energy settings and so forth, not to mention the possibility of a projectile weapon breaching the hull.
This probably had more to do with the special effects at the time and has just stuck.
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So basically: projectile weapons were banned, I guess. Because they're much more deadly than phasers (which are designed to incapacitate).
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All depends on where you sighted in your weapon.
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A lot of guns - most modern ones, really - can be fired without their lubricant, and the AA-12 was designed for such thick lubricant that the solid carbon fouling is an ideal grease. It'll also turn a good weapon into a disposable one. On the other hand, the air sealed in a shell casing will provide all the oxygen needed for the powder to burn.
Han Shot first! (Score:3)
Laser Guns fired like bullet guns. (Score:2)
The part of the movies and Star Trek I hated when you had the laser/phaser type of gun which fires a beam for a few seconds. Is that they actually miss, Because they stand there fire in one direction opps they missed and re-aim and fire again. As anyone who used a laser pointer knows If you miss you can correct rather quickly and there the bad guy is fried. Perhaps with some collateral damage, but not much more then a bunch of random laster holes in you hull.
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Phaser != Laser. Also != Light Saber. Also doesn't really fit into the "Pew! Pew! Pew!" class of weapons. Photon torpedoes, on the other hand, are the king of "Pew! Pew! Pew!"
The real deal - MTHEL (Score:2)
The real deal: MTHEL [youtube.com], from Northrop Grumman.
That's 10 year old technology, and it's a chemical laser. Back then it took three semitrailers for all the support equipment. Since then, electrically-powered lasers are catching up. The Navy Laser Weapons System [youtube.com] is not as powerful, but it's a much smaller package, only needs electrical power. and can shoot down small UAVs.
Pew? Pew? (Score:2)
I though that is how you celebrate the SciFi ray gun.... Run around with a sharpie in hand yelling PEW PEW PEW at your co-workers....
BTW: accounting department has NO sense of humor.... Throwing a dry erase board eraser into their office and yelling grenade was frowned upon... at least the Marketing department acted like it was real and looked like they panicked and ran from it. They are such good sports!
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Watch out for Shipping & Receiving. They throw back shit like box-sealers, and those hurt.
Klono's Whiskers! (Score:3)
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And don't forget the Q-gun.
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Sad but true. I doubt very many people under the age of 40 have read the Lensman series.
I have read the first two, and then I was too bored to read further. There is lots of other SF from the 50's that is more fun to read in my view. I really enjoyed reading some old Perry Rhodan books last year for example.
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That was my first thought, how can you discuss Science Fiction ray guns without mentioning E.E. Doc. Smith ? Those Lensmen had a ray/beam/field/etc for every eventuality. I still enjoy pulling his books out every coupla years.
Kill-o-Zap (Score:3)
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The Kill-O-Zap gun is a long, silver mean-looking device, the designers of which decided to make it totally clear that it had a right end, and a wrong end, and if that meant sticking blacked and evil-looking devices and prongs all over the wrong end, so be it.
You've got to love a good design ethic.
Oblig. (Score:2)
Great article, but no mention of the greatest ray gun of all: the Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator.
Is that pew pew in your ... (Score:2)
Is that pew pew in your in your pants or are you just -- Oh god, oh god no!
Ray gun trickery (Score:3)
When I was a teen, I read a science fiction novel which contained a nifty subplot involving a ray gun.
I believe the novel was The Secret of the Martian Moons [wordpress.com] by Donald A. Wallheim.
Our hero, a young spaceman from Earth, is crewman on the first spaceship from Earth to land on one of the moons of Mars. He is involved with the humanoid aliens who live there. He is pretty sure there is something odd going on, and he doesn't entirely trust them. A faction of these aliens gives him a ray gun, and tells him that it is a harmless stunner, and it is vitally important that he use it to stun some person (I think the person was an alien but I'm not even certain). Because he is suspicious of them, he wonders whether the ray gun might not be as advertised; perhaps it is a lethal weapon. Perhaps, even, it emits some sort of horrible radiation that would kill the user. So, when the moment of truth comes, he doesn't pull the trigger; instead he throws the ray gun with great force against the head of his target, knocking the target out. Later it is revealed that the gun is a convincing prop, not a working ray gun at all; and the faction he didn't trust was setting him up to fail. But instead he succeeded, throwing their evil plans into disarray. Moral: don't trifle with spacemen from Earth.
If anyone else has read this and can confirm any details, or if this is from some other book, please post a follow-up here. I would actually like to get a copy of this book and re-read it. It probably isn't as good as I remember, but I still want to re-read it.
steveha
Glad you mentioned Firefly... (Score:2)
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I can't remember if they get into why ray guns didn't catch on, I think they were incredibly expensive and unreliable.
That's basically it: In the episode Heart of Gold the baddie brags about his state of the art laser weapon - when it comes to the big shoot-up he gets off a few shots, causing some minor unpleasantness, before it starts flashing "battery low" errors.
Of course, in a colonisation situation, you really don't want tools with "no user serviceable parts inside" that rely on irreplaceable spare parts made from exotic materials at the top of a huge "technology pyramid".
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