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2020-11-30, 10:14 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
I think I got it!
It's probably a twisted final fantasy interpretation of a bardiche with a short handle.
Spoiler
If you make the handle all metal and hammer it flat to fuse with the blade, it could kind of look like a sword. Still wouldn't work as described, but it would be one plausible explanation what the writer was thinking.We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on very tall tower of other dwarves.
Spriggan's Den Heroic Fantasy Roleplaying
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2020-11-30, 10:28 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2016
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- The Lakes
Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
Could they be misinterpreting the falx?
It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.
Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.
The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.
The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.
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2020-11-30, 05:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
Oh, I think I know what it's based off of. Once Yora's post suggested to not think of just swords, it hit me.
It's a mambele.
Mambele itself is a word used for two distinct weapon types, one a sword shaped a lot like horseman's pick/bec de corbin, the other a throwing dagger. If you heard mambele was a sword and then googled pictures for it, you'd get results of the dagger versions as well, and some of those are drawn very simplistically, which could make it seem like it has a secondary grip, if you know little about melee weapons.
Spoiler: Sword mambele
Spoiler: Dagger mambele
Spoiler: Picture that is likely responsible for this
I have no idea if the terminology for these on the web is correct or not, this area and period is really far outside of my area of interest.That which does not kill you made a tactical error.
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2020-12-01, 11:10 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2019
Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
Last edited by Saint-Just; 2020-12-01 at 12:49 PM.
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2020-12-01, 12:42 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2014
Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
It sounds like it's based off a scythe with a short grip, which would (I think) normally be a sickle. Which I guess is where they pulled the name from.
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2020-12-01, 12:52 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2019
Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
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2020-12-02, 08:04 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2010
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- Slovakia
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
Maybe a really misunderstood war scythe?
Spoiler: Standard-issue war scythe, just take a scythe blade and mount it more sensibly
Spoiler: German or Swiss war scythe, 17th c.
Edit: if anyone wants to know, the weird handle up there is for hooking shafts of other polearms, occasionally a sword or an axe. It can also be used to bind opposing blow in a pinch, but you're better served by batting that away. Oh, and it's also useful in storage, just hang that from a tree branch or a rope or something, or prop several of them together, musket-with-bayonet style.
Yeah, there are a bunch of different tribal names for them, but only one that conflicts with an actual sword name is mambele. As far as I know, which in this case isn't that far.Last edited by Martin Greywolf; 2020-12-02 at 08:07 AM.
That which does not kill you made a tactical error.
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2020-12-04, 06:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2019
Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
What would be the blast radius of a barrel full of gunpowder and how destructive are they? I'm planning on introducing gunpowder in a future campaign and I am rightfully concerned that they are both smart enough and chaotic enough to build a bomb, to Pandemonium with the consequences.
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2020-12-04, 08:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
How big a barrel? Beer barrel? Oil barrel? Gun barrel?
This page contains a table with different sizes simplified as with creatures (medium etc.) as well as damage and blast radius, you can adapt the numbers as you see fit. Gunpowder (D&D equipment) - Hastur It looks easier than calculating per pound or kg.Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
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2020-12-04, 08:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2008
Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
The third edition of GURPS High-Tech had rules to figure this out. I'm sure it could be adapted to another system pretty easily. You'll have to figure out how many pounds of powder they are using and then go from there. You can probably find a copy of the third edition used and cheap. I'm not sure about the 4th edition, but I think it has much of the same information.
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2020-12-04, 09:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2005
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- 61.2° N, 149.9° W
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
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2020-12-04, 09:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2019
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2020-12-04, 11:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2005
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- 61.2° N, 149.9° W
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
You're welcome. Fast note that I worked up cannons & bombs for a D&D 3.5 setting. Tried to keep as close as possible to RL ranges & blasts as I could figure. Will post spreadsheet/text later when have real computer time. It should be reasonably convertible, although I added a negative effect modifier at amounts smaller than a kilo or so because I wanted cannons but not small arms in that setting.
Edit: Got file https://drive.google.com/file/d/19ZG...ew?usp=sharingLast edited by Telok; 2020-12-05 at 05:12 AM. Reason: got file
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2020-12-06, 12:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2010
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
It also depends on what powder. Any tables you will find floating around are probably out of reach for your average medieval black powder, it took quite a while to figure out granulation after all. Even then, there is a pretty sharp upper limit on gunpowder explosions, or any slow burning medium explosions - once you get to certain size, the explosion near the fuse will throw powder away without really igniting it.
Black powder is inefficient enough for this to happen on a pretty small scale - I remember seeing a video where some guys loaded a black powder musket, and by loaded I mean stuffed the entire barrel save for the last 10 cm full of powder and set it off. The damage was about equivalent to a quintuple load IIRC, because a lot of the powder was ejected unlit.
That's not to say you can't have big gunpowder explosions - churches storing it went away after a lightning strike often enough - but the efficiency of adding more powder will start to decrease rather quickly.That which does not kill you made a tactical error.
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2020-12-07, 11:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2019
Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
Yeah, the main way you get REALLY big gunpowder explosions is when you have large numbers of containers and a confined space, where they can chain off each other. Especially if there’s a lot of powder in the air. Even things like coal dust and flour can cause huge explosions when dispersed in air.
But you will have a hard time getting that effect from a single charge.The stars are calling, but let's come up with a good opening line before we answer
Spoiler: Homebrew of Mine
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2020-12-07, 05:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2008
Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
Gunpowder can indeed be tricky, and involves many factors. Old serpentine powder (simple dry compounded powder) often requires careful packing (tamping) to get the desired effect. For granulated powder, the size of the grains can be used to slow down or speed up the rate of combustion. (GURPS covers different forms of gunpowders, but not with too much detail).
GURPS calculates damage based on distance from the explosion for concussion, although the damage can be enhanced if used in an enclosed space. Fragmentation damage in GURPS is consistent across the blast range, but the chances of being hit by a fragment decreases with distance. Fragmentation depends upon the container.
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2020-12-09, 01:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2016
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
Persian chromium steel?
https://phys.org/news/2020-09-chromi...nt-persia.htmlIt is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.
Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.
The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.
The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.
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2020-12-09, 02:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
Clickbait title. What they actually found was medieval era crucible steel with some added chromium from a specific ore, something that doesn't break any records, really. Any pre-modern-chemistry manufacturing process was discovered by trial and error, and there were some... interesting things added to steel while it was made in crucible or heat-treated (e.g. blood of a buck in rut). The bit about deliberately adding a mineral with chromium content is mildly interesting.
And under no circumstances should this steel be confused with modern chromium steel, since it would have all the usual problems and impurities of pre-modern steelmaking.
I may as well claim that first combat divers were deployed in 1052, which is also technically correct, but falls apart in detail.That which does not kill you made a tactical error.
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2020-12-09, 04:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2016
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
Figured I'd get a straight analysis here.
Thanks.It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.
Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.
The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.
The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.
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2020-12-10, 09:36 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2009
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
Huge arms and armour donation to the Met Museum
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/a...gtype=Homepage
Contains a couple of nice photos, especially of a top class 1490 pair of gauntlets made for Maximilian I.Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
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2020-12-10, 09:42 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2015
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
How much power would a laser need to be to instantaneously blow a hole in a person like in TV and movies?
I'm thinking 10 nanosecond pulse, visible blue, about as wide as a Star Wars plasma shot.
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2020-12-10, 10:33 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
Depends on what you mean by blow a hole through, lasers don't actually do that, they burn. According to a wonderful article, it's
- 267 kJ to boil 1 kg of person
- 2.5 MJ to vaporize 1kg of person
Since we need to deliver that in 10 ns, or 1/100 000 000 of a second, the power (where 1 watt is one joule per second) is:
- 26,7 TW to boil 1 kg of person
- 250 TW to vaporize 1kg of person
- 2.5 TW is current global energy consumption
That is only necessary energy, though, and we aren't delivering that with perfect efficiency. Laser diode efficiency is, per this thread, about 50 percent, so we need double the energy in power source to get target energy in laser beam. Then you have things like diffraction, and with lasers of this high an energy, I have no idea how atmosphere in the way would react, you'd probably burn it away as well.
Also consider this:
- Little Boy is 63 TJ
- Tsar bomba is 245 PJ
What I'm saying is, you better hope whatever energy source you have doesn't have a failure, because you're walking with at least a low-yield nuke strapped to your gun.That which does not kill you made a tactical error.
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2020-12-10, 11:02 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
That very short time to deliver the energy (10 nanoseconds) makes a huge difference.
There are lasers that can burn a hole in a missile in flight and ruin the inards, but they have to stay exactly on target for several seconds.It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.
Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.
The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.
The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.
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2020-12-10, 11:17 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2019
Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
I do not think it is a question that can be answered with any meaningful precision. To start with Star Wars plasma shot is different depending on the weapon and the era of the film. Additionally all or almost of all of them seem wider than the muzzle of the weapon, which should not be the case if the shot can fly for hundreds of meters without dissipating. Finally even if we only look at, say Stormtroopers' blasters in A New Hope perception of those fast-moving never-seen-directly-from-the-front objects may vary.
And then we go to calculations of actual values, which are even more insane. Even if we have people well-versed in physics here it's like asking them to predict them how big a powder charge should be for a bullet to penetrate a person front-to-back if they have never seen or heard about firearms before. There so are so much unknown values (pressure profile of the powder, construction and materials of the bullet, even the ambient temperature - and that is assuming that we know bullet weight and the length of a barrel) that it is absolutely impossible to calculate except in the roughest possible terms ("500 grams is enough in any circumstances").
I will give you insanely lowball answer. Assume that width is 9 mm, like the actual Sterling SMG, and a depth of penetration required is 30 cm (about the depth of chest front-to-back). Assume that we need enough energy to boil a cylinder of water 9x300mm (insanely low, because energy will dissipate to the sides, and flesh is likely to require more energy, and vaporized anything will not go out of the way but will continue to absorb energy, oh and we ignore bringing it to the boil). This works out to 1.06 moles of water which require 43.1 kJ. Oh, and we assume 100% efficiency of energy conversion, of course.
I suspect that if we were building a real laser...thing we would actually need to know it's wavelength. But since we're in the ideal world with 100% efficiency we only need to know how much power will be needed to deliver 43.1 kJ in 10 ns. Which is 4.31 TW. And this with all uncertainties rounded down to probably lower order of magnitude.
The only laser weapon successfully deployed in the field as far as I know was THEL (and it was not adopted even then). Northrop Grumman claims it's a "megawatt-class" laser weapon. It was immobile, another Northrop Grumman "megawatt-class" thingamagic was mobile by the virtue of placing it on Boeing 747. US army currently "considers" systems that are supposed to be between 30 and (questionably) 150 kW.
It's not like you can't kill (maybe even instantly kill) a human with much lower amount of energy delivered by a laser, but it still doesn't really work for anything man-portable. Lasers causing prolonged or permanent blindness at a few hundred meters can be made today (Norinco was offering a blinding laser in the 90's) but open development of such weapons has been stopped by the UN Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons.
If it is in a "tomorrow world" it would be hard to argue that it doesn't run afoul of aforementioned Protocol IV of CCWC, but even there is no legal problems, I think it's still likely to act less like a bullet and more like... let's say flamethrower, but with better range and requiring a direct hit. Since it's unlikely that all the pulses will fall in the same spot, or even close to same spot it will make many shallow holes, unlikely to immediately damage the vital organs but which may incapacitate the target with pain, or even with damage to the muscles well before he dies.Last edited by Saint-Just; 2020-12-10 at 11:51 AM. Reason: corrected numbers, they were 4 times higher than they should have been
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2020-12-10, 12:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
Thanks to those who answered my question! I figured the required energy would be insanely high.
Though just in case this changes the answer what if the laser is pulsing on and off (something like 10 ns on, 10ns off, 10 ns on)? I'd heard continuous lasers can have trouble burrowing through a target versus pulse lasers because the layer of plasma created at impact acts as a reflector, where as if the laser flicks on and off it doesn't have to worry about the plasma because it has dissipated.
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2020-12-10, 02:03 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2008
Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
What is the benefit of a laser weapon, anyway? It seems like bullets or explosives do far more damage to the target without a prohibitive energy requirement. So... why bother?
I guess there’s some theoretical advantage in the fact that a laser travels at the speed of light and therefore can’t be evaded, but it seems like if you’re firing at a range where that matters your laser’s effectiveness is going to be diminished by things like cloud cover or atmospheric dust.
And a laser doesn’t need ammo, but you have to go through an awful lot of ammo before you match the bulk and cost of your laser’s power source.
Is this just a case of people trying to apply Rule of Cool to real life, or are there real benefits that justify the ongoing research into this?
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2020-12-10, 02:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
I had an inkling that you'd need absolutely massive power outputs to use lasers the way you do in sci-fi (though IRL antipersonnel lasers exist), and that it'd be better in practice to just go for using railguns or something if you were thinking about raw numerical damage vs power required.
However a quick google search for laser weapons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZM-87), shows that the intent of these laser weapons is not to turn humans into fine red mist but rather to maim them (permanent blinding can occur with a "mere" 5 mw beam after all). Additionally the lasers the Navy uses to shoot down drones aren't nice awesome cinematic lasers, they're invisible lasers (and they light the drones on fire, not vaporize them).
IRL you don't actually need to do insane amounts of overkill damage to take out an enemy combatant, so there is no need to have a small-nuke strapped to your back.
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2020-12-10, 03:32 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2019
Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
The greatest problem in your example was not pulsed/continuous laser but requirement to deliver that amount of energy in so little time. If you wanted to use a laser pulsing 0.1 ns on 0.1 ns off for 20 ns the required power would stay the same. Practical effectiveness may have been better but for our order-of-magnitude-calculations we have been already granting 100% effectiveness.
Now let's say you have a pulsing laser which is pulsing X ns on X ns off for 1 second. It's the same power requirement as continuous laser working for 0.5 second (practical-effectiveness-may-differ-but-we-are-already-granting-100%).
My benchmark (boil 1.06 moles of water, 43.1 kJ) requires 83.2 kW
Martin Greywolf's benchmark (boil 1 kg of human tissue, 267 kJ) requires 534 kW To the MG: I take the issue with idea that personhood is in any way relevant to the boiling temperature :P
Both require a lot of energy instead of insane amount of it. Maybe even something a little bit plausible if you look far enough in the future. But even in ideal situation unless the weapon is used on an immobilized person, the shots are not going to hit the same area. So you are going to see a lot of shallow wounds, burns etc, and a really low probability of a lethal hit. I already compared it with a flamethrower, but now I can give you even better comparison: shotgun slug vs a birdshot shell with 500 pellets (it's hard to kill people with birdshot that small). I do not mean it would have a worse range (it may even have a better range because each individual impulse is insufficient to turn atmosphere into plasma) but the wounding characteristics. So it's gonna be messy, unpleasant, will leave combatants crippled or dying a slow death where one tenth of that energy in any sort of kinetic projectile is more likely to produce "cleaner" either-dead-or-ok situation, and will be significantly worse vs any armour (even modern body armour, but if it's going to be a normal weapon and not screw-the-phhysics-I-am-a-mad-genius one-off you can bet there would be development in armour to stop lasers; in fact Chinese seem to already have a good vehicular anti-laser coatings). So it's kinda useless.
If you really want a directed energy weapon against humans I think microwave weapons are more useful. Current iterations for "non-lethal" employment are reported to be very painful while causing no identifiable damage (except maybe to the eyes, as usual). If you can crank the power up to actually cause damage the incapacitation may be very quick and it can fry electronics into bargain. And the weapon is already available vehicle-mounted and man-portable variants may follow in the nearest future. It also may have trouble with armour but it's unlikely to be worse than a laser.
If agony beam/crucio/algolizer is not how you imagine whatever you are trying to imagine, tough luck. Stick with kinetics and explosives, for now.
P.S. With the current electronic advancements if blinding lasers were to actually become a thing I feel that in the worst case the greatest military powers would soon go to a helmet with screen and cameras. Cameras can be made less sensitive, cameras can be replaced. Or even simpler, auto-darkening faceplates as used by the modern welding helmets (though I am not 100% sure that they can be made to react quick enough).Last edited by Saint-Just; 2020-12-10 at 04:30 PM.
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2020-12-10, 04:01 PM (ISO 8601)
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2020-12-10, 05:32 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX
Looking at current or near future tech, there really isn't one. Assuming energy supply gets better and more portable, then it might get better as an option. As far as space weapons go, the fact that lasers are more or less unlimited range, and don't have to deal with bullet drop like traditional guns, which will need to be recalibrated in different gravity, if you take your standard ballistic firearm to another planet or the moon or on a ship in zero G, your earth sights will be way off. So, there's a theoretical advantage, if we assume the tech gets better.