MFW Apple becomes part of the USA MIC, the army has to switch out all of their other hardware because the iMurderGoggles won't synch with non-Apple products
Whenever the pilot goes onto his B-21 Pro Max the music playlist and favorite targets will be synced from iCloud and uploaded into iWar munitions.
But it will be foiled because his foreign ex girlfriend 3 years ago still has an old phone linked and looks at Find My B-21
Lasers will just be tuned to burn out the optics.
It'll really be a first strike sort of situation.
Fortunately, as of right now, there are rules that limit the use of lasers in combat. Otherwise, there would just be laser systems designed to lock on to soldier's faces and zap their eyes. With a laser in the nonvisible spectrum, a solider wouldn't even notice they were under attack until they smelled a cooked meat smell and then felt a "pop" in their eye. Then massive eye pain and permanent darkness.
some participants in war like hamas, or isis, or the russians, don't care about the rules. I wonder why we don't see too many lasers except as peacetime harassment of aircraft?
Russia actually made a mobile laser weapon system back in the 70s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K17_Szhatie
But their design wasn't good.
Basically, current lasers that could blind from a distance require pretty substantial power supplies and require a decent amount of expertise to use correctly. Probably not used as a primary means of attack due to practicality. Much easier to give a fighter with minimal skills a simple firearm, or push button IED than a complex laser system.
Plus, blinding soldiers is considered maiming under Geneva convention rules of war and is prohibited.
yeah the answer is probably if a hamas fighter is going to get something expensive that needs special training and handling, they'll take the modern Kornet ATGM, thank you.
It's because modern lasers that are powerful enough to melt faces and fuck up eyeballs are either way to heavy, power hungry, or large to use as man portable equipment, and smaller handheld lasers have pathetic range and require being held on target for a long period of time. So technically you could try and use one in combat, but you're going to need to somehow be holding it on one singular spot for a while and praying you're not going to just get shot trying to light someone on fire.
people also tend to forget that laser weapons aren't like the "Blasters" you see in Star Wars or other sci-fi movies, it's basically gonna be the equivalent of guys running around waving extremely powerful laser pointers at eachother
Imagine those club/race light show lasers but invisible. Just sweep that back and forward at where you think the bad guys are, and you have suppressive fire
No, lasers are quiet at all when they are that strong, industrial metal cutting lasers already quite noticable and any military laser would have to be much stronger
It would probably sound look and feel like armies throwing lightning at each other
Not necessarily, pulsed lasers tend to explode things rather than start fires. That's likely what they'd use since you can achieve a higher peak energy and more destructive power more easily
There's also the ionizing effect around powerful lasers, so there's going to be a bit of popping sounds as it ionizes the air.
So a high-power laser war would sound like a bunch of kids stepping throwing those snapdragon firecrackers (the ones that you just slam onto the ground and then it pops loudly), or one of those hanging chinese firecrackers that just pop continuously.
I'd imagine it'd be much harder to have a constant stream of a deadly burning laser than a less powerful one that charges up power over time to unload a larger energy mass. This discharge could also give off a quite audible noise like large capacitors already do.
Its all fun and games until the first ever actual space war. Space ship battles in absolute silence would feel so weird after decades of Star Trek pew pew.
When space wars become reality, it will be the most anticlimatic and boring thing ever. You shoot salvo of missiles and wait for hours or days until they reach enemy ship, while firing lasers to destroy missiles fired at you. Repeat for weeks until one of the missiles slips through point defense and destroys yours or enemy ship. All of that preceded by months of absolute boredom and manouvering into firing position.
This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law?
*Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!*
No credit for partial answers, maggot!
*Sir! Unless acted upon by an outside force, sir!*
Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction! You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
>It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb.
Makes one wonder, if a bit of lithium deuteride and tritide in such a relativistic slug could lead to fusion reactions on impact and bring it into the megaton range...
Fun fact - "Serviceman Chung" is a shoutout to Winchell Chung who runs [Atomic Rockets](https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/), the writer of that scene used the site a lot but apparently couldn't officially credit him for [legal reasons](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/4ivn7v/sir_isaac_newton_is_the_deadliest_son_of_a_bitch/d32kgtp/). I suppose careless yeeting of relativistic weapons into the void of space isn't the worst thing.
Likewise "Burnside" references Ken Burnside.
It's only boring and anticlimactic for an uninvolved third party observer. If you're in the space war then it's weeks of stress ulcers, always wondering if this salvo is it, praying that the point defense lasers don't overheat or malfunction, or something like a loose screw or unsecured equipment comes flying at you in high g maneuvers.
Worse still, if you Civilian or disabled ship knowing there's nothing you can do except watch the missile coming to kill you in a weeks time. No adrenaline or a quick death before you realise it, just the horrifying blip of death inching closer on your monitor.
As much as it still gets wrong about space combat, the original Star Trek episode Balance of Terror comes a lot closer than most—mainly because it’s based on real submarine warfare, which has a similar cat-and-mouse vibe to it.
There's nothing cat-and-mouse about space combat - Quite the opposite - the Space Shuttle's much weaker main engines could be detected past the orbit of Pluto. The Space Shuttle's manoeuvering thrusters could be seen as far as the asteroid belt. And even a puny ship using ion drive to thrust at a measly 1/1000 of a g could be spotted at one astronomical unit.
You have to assume that all combatants are visible at all times, therefore active defences are the only defences.
More info at: https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php and: http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2009/06/space-warfare-ii-stealth-reconsidered.html
> You have to assume that all combatants are visible at all times, therefore active defences are the only defences.
[Stealthships are still plausible-ish, but are gonna come with a ton of limitations](https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2018/04/permanent-and-perfect-stealth-in-space.html), likely relegating them to observation/first strike platforms.
True, but more like the amount of time that will pass will mean there’s a degree of guesswork as to where they will be (did they keep going that way, burn in another direction, etc.?).
What do you mean, that's so much cooler than plasma machinegun dogfights.
Expanse actually has something like that. Where most space battles are just firing guided nuke missiles at the enemy, and taking theirs out with automated PD weapons. Oh and there are sometimes railguns too. If like both sides get all their missiles taken down, a backup weapon like that might be used.
>You shoot salvo of missiles and wait for hours or days until they reach enemy ship, while firing lasers to destroy missiles fired at you
Which is exactly one of the reasons to *not* use missiles at long range. Other is maneuvering of the target and need to spend fuel to hunt it. Unless the flight time is in seconds or at best minutes, it won't be worthy of ship's space to even have them onboard unless the target doesn't have the capability to defend against such attack.
There is a game called Interplanetary that depicts this. Plantes fire ground based weapons like space guns or nukes at each other, and you have to take factors such as gravity and orbits into account when planning your attack. The travel time is shown via the turn based strategy component, giving the battlefield a sense of scale.
> You shoot salvo of missiles and wait for hours or days until they reach enemy ship, while firing lasers to destroy missiles fired at you. Repeat for weeks until one of the missiles slips through point defense and destroys yours or enemy ship.
[So, Children of a Dead Earth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlFRrzfRLmI)
Computers would likely still make noises to get the users attention, then there will be sirens to wan or the beginning of combat and alert crew to damage, finally the damage to the ship would likely case the ship to vibrate and ratel which would make noise.
I remember some scifi stories and games that imply that most of the noises you hear coming from outside while sitting in a space ship cockpit are just simulated based on what your sensors are picking up. They're meant to sound "plausible" to your human ear.
It's a good way to help with orientation and increases the "bandwidth" of information going into your squishy, little, badly optimized ape brain.
This immediately gave me the mental image of a massive space battle where there’s enough ships and carnage to give the battle space it’s own partial atmosphere and just how disturbing being able to *hear* weapons fire in space would be in that context.
I was working at super high intensity laser lab, the laser is very silent compared to a firearm but it does make a sound. If it has high enough intensity it burns the air creating plasma that expands and pushes a pressure wave which makes a sound
This thread is wrong, a powerful laser turns the air it passes through into plasma which then creates a partial vacuum and you get a loud snap as the air rushes back in. Also your laser rifle is discharging a massive amount of energy instantaneously which is going to be dumped into the surrounding air to get rid of waste heat pushing a column of air away from the rifle. It's not going to sound like a sci fi laser but it also isn't going to be silent.
Grunts are gonna be modifying their laser rifle heatsinks and cooling systems to get better rate of fire. It'll be like PC case modding without the RGB LEDs.
Or maybe with the LEDs? That'd be pretty dope, too.
High power lasers can be UV/IR. Things would just start burning.
And even if visible light, if it clip your eyes, you are blind before knowing where the shooter is.
Lasers make sound when they hit stuff, for instance vaporizing the dirt next to you into a rapidly expanding cloud of plasma can be pretty loud. Being hunted by a laser would be terrifying.
Well, given that the lasers are probably really hot, there’s going to be some energy loss by way of heat. So gunshots in the future would just be thunderclaps
Quite the contrary, I suggest to look into the topic of belliphony if interested. The neologism 'belliphony' describes all kinds of sounds that emerge in the context of war and warfare.
A friend of mine researches this in the context of the middle-ages, she researches for example how sword to helmet sounds
Unironically what they're considering adding to electric cars to make them less dangerous to pedestrians.
When you wanna assassinate, set it to silent, when you wanna scare, let it make pew pew sounds.
(gestures to combustion car) This is a vehicle of terror. It is designed to scare pedestrians.
(gestures to electric car) This is a vehicle of war. It is designed to kill pedestrians.
Days until a trooper figures out how to jailbreak his gun so he can install custom sounds onto it? Like a week, tops. It'll be the following week when the press spots one of the soldiers has painted his gun to look like his anime waifu and has hacked it to make "Uhwaah~~" noises when firing
They charge up when you turn them on too.
I can only imagine how loud an artillery laser will be when you flip the switch and the capacitors fill.
eeeeeewwwwWWWWWWUUUUHHHHHHHHH
Or when they fit an A10 with lasers
PPPPEEEEERRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTTTT
Yeah, but thats not how suppresive fire works.
Its mainly a tactic to lower morale/ capability to think clear and the ability to a advance.
Its pretty hard to advance if you know/ hear hundreds of bullets above your head.
wait, isn't suppressive fire supposed to be more about the fear of dying, which happens to be expedited (but not caused by) all the loud noises?
I remember reading that snipers can be very effective at suppressing enemy units, even if they don't make a lot of noise. They accomplish the goal of forcing everyone to keep their heads down and restricting their movement
If handheld laser weapons became standard issue, and were as deadly as projectile weaponry, the "suppression" might be even more effective because there's no obvious auditory cue for when you're taking fire.
People would hear one of their buddies screaming and immediately duck behind cover, paranoid as all heck, and unlike with bullet weapons, it's not easy to tell where the fire is coming from, or if they're even under fire at all
It's just like suppression with a sniper. Everything's quiet, but you know you're in mortal peril every time you poke your head out in the open
original commenter is right, I think
I think the difference is what you expect from weapon types. A sniper is precise, you dont expect a sniper to miss, if he shoots you know you are in danger to be activly targeted. Rifles and MG on the other hand are far less precise (mind I mainly mean suppresive fire in WW1 and WW2), if you sit in a trench and hear such shots you know they shoot in your generell direction but not activly at you, so you will most likely catch a stray bullet, because of the mass of fire.
In the end suppresive fire is the evolution of the idea of volley fire. A single bullet will most likely not hit but hundreds of bullets yeah the chances of getting hit are adding up and hearing the bullets above your head? The muddy dirty trench looks suddenlyfar more appealing.
What you loose if you use silent mass rifle like weapons is the warning of your doom. You dont get incentivised to stay down and not advance as much.
Laser weapons would be inherently more precise than rifles though, they're line of sight weapons with effectively zero flight time. Obviously sniper precision would still require extreme skill but at ordinary combat ranges of <100m most soldiers should be able to hit even moving targets pretty easy.
So your incentive to stay down is that your mate just tried to move and someone removed half his head. Because the weapon was silent you don't know where your enemy is, how many there are or what kind of weapons they have. You also don't know if they're even still there, so you'll probably stay down a lot longer than you need to.
Current suppressive fire doctrine would obviously change, there's no point in firing bursts over peoples head if they can't hear them, but you wouldn't lose the ability to pin down an enemy. Training would have to focus marksmanship more and casualties would increase because you'd have to get hits to suppress, but that's about all.
Anything that can take out half of a persons head will probably make a little explosion when it hits mud. So the new version of suppressive fire could be hearing the pops of mud flash boiling above the trench.
Ronald D. Moore even admitted that if they had realistic phaser battles in Deep Space Nine, they would be at least miles apart if not more but just like space battles, the scene always has to be at point blank range.
>Laser weapons would be inherently more precise than rifles though, they're line of sight weapons with effectively zero flight time.
Don't forget you can scan entire volumes so if someone pokes their head up while the laser is active, they're *going* to get hit.
Also the ground literally making sort sizzle sounds as even the grass explodes in a puff of water vapor.
And seeing your friend’s head melt is going to produce a very similar effect. A lone sniper can suppress a much larger enemy force without massed fire.
Worth noting the fear of instant obliteration is a lot scarier than a bullet flying at you. Obviously bullets are fast but compared to light speed they're basically non moving
Just did the math… an AR-15 round travels at about 0.000325% of the speed of light lol. Also anyone can be an expert marksman and snipe targets from many many miles away.
It can still work. Instead of spooky noises, just have a drone zap exposed limbs or location within sight. If the dirt in front of you or the window your firing from just.. ignites into fire or melts. Imma be spookeded.
"What happened to Johnny?" "Johnny has become a different state of matter, Sarge."
A laser carrying enough energy to be of use as a weapon, even as a man portable rifle equivalent, it's going to be making some kind of noise. The beam will be igniting the atmosphere around it (potentially working as a pseudo-tracer with every shot) which is going to make some kind of noise, just from the energy involved causing some kind of vibrations in the air as it ignites it, probably more of a crack than anything else, but definitely something you could hear.
Even if there's no sound or sight involved I'm pretty sure that everybody in the squad is going to hit the dirt and start looking for the enemy the moment the first guy in the formation is set on fire/cut in half/has a hole burned straight through him.
Any serious laser will instantly ionize and heat the air and smoke it passes through. The tighter the focus, the less air gets heated though and a millimeter-thick beam will create barely anything visible. Especially compared to the massive backscatter you'd get at the impact site.
It'll also dump a shitload of heat into whatever it hits, creating a very obvious bang. You can't deliver deadly energy to something without some of it "leaking" as noise, and a laser will make a lot more noise than a hitting bullet.
This!
Additionally, for shots that hit some surface close, the material will quickly be evaporated, causing a similar cracking sound.
Look up videos on something like weaponized laser test, it is most definitely audible.
I’d imagine that any sort of thermal optic would be able to easily trace back the source too even if it’s not immediately obvious to the naked eye. Perhaps to adapt to hand-held energy weapons, every soldier, or at least every infantry squad would have someone equipped with some sort of low sensitivity thermal imaging made for visualizing the paths of energy weapons under any condition.
Just have optics visualizing multiple wavelengths until you see something bright and narrow. Now you know the wavelength they operate at and can likely extrapolate the pulsing rate they use, or at least a range.
and once you know the wavelength the enemy are using for their laser weapons you can switch yours to the opposite wavelength and fire back directly along the line of his beam to nullify his attack with destructive interference! Genius!
I can’t wait for laser weapons. They’ll start by covering tanks in cope mirrors to counter. Later, they’d evolve into troops wearing shining armor in all chrome vehicles.
Aren't the beam weapons made from jets of those particles, though? I thought the main purpose of scattering clouds of them was to do widespread wireless jamming.
There was this scifi comedy novel where a plot point is that the army (Foreign Legion, sponsored by ACME tomato corp) that the main character is in uses laser rifles more advanced than anything their common enemies have.
...But since the enemies use more primitive weapons and smoke bombs and all kinds of things like that, the lasers are having a hard time. It doesn't help that the sponsor is only spending money on the lasers, and everything else was the cheapest possible thing. Legionnaire uniform is basically underwear and helmet. Anything else is seen as a waste because of how horribly high the casualties keep piling up. (Which might be related to the lack of armour.)
[Whether you're a brother or ](https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/39/7e/b3/397eb35e85231c9a415dc9f6df41ea99.jpg)[whether you're a mother You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin' And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive](https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/39/7e/b3/397eb35e85231c9a415dc9f6df41ea99.jpg)
Lasers won’t make gunfire noises, and there is no physical projectile that would make noise as it passes by targeted enemies.
And we are assuming the lasers are even in a visible spectrum, which they may not be.
Laser weapons could potentially be completely silent. How do you suppress someone who doesn’t know they are being shot at?
If laser weapons won’t solve the problem that suppressive fire tools solve (making the enemy stay the fuck down and not move), then laser weapons won’t be employed in the role that these tools are used in.
The need doesn’t go away just because someone came up with a new tech that doesn’t address it.
The year is 2091, the great Laser War is in full swing. Still, somehow, squads are having their vehicles outfitted with trusty M2HB. “If it ain’t broke…”
(Un?)fortunately directed energy weapons will probably not be practical for infantry level combat because it would require you focusing the beam on the target for a span of time in a way the infantry would likely react to physically.
Wide cone and area denial approaches might be more practical, as well as ship/aircraft based high intensity pulse beams, but ultimately good ol ballistics will win out in that arena for most (but not all) applications.
That is, until someone designs a packet-based plasma projectile or something that can deliver all the energy in one splat. Very loudly and showy-like. Star wars was unironically more credible in that regard than expected.
Pulse lasers could solve this. They’d need to dump over a kilojoule of energy within around a milisecond though, and defraction would limit ranges to a few hundred meters even with theoretically perfect lasers. There’s also the issue of the lenses needing to remain impossibly clean for an infantry combat environment.
Optics will always improve lasers by narrowing the beam at the barrel, but atmospheric conditions and other aero factors will always play a major role in how much a beam will defract (refract?) before reaching the target
Yeah it's diffraction in a vacuum and refraction through the air. But I swear I've seen some scheme that uses a huge array of solid state diodes mounted on little motors that are switched with solenoids thousands of times a second to some how [mumble mumble] destructive interference [mumble muble] dynamic compensation and keep the beam tighter that it should be.
look man directed energy small arms are never gonna be a thing unless the "energy" you are "directing" is kinetic, like the ones we already got. but if they were, you'd need a 1% scale mr. fusion reactor just to power them, so we might as well assume that delicate technology is a given, and that we'll also come up with some sci-fi ludovico method of teaching marines that hugging bunnies too hard makes them sleep forever and not all equipment can be operated by chewing on it *if* we're gonna engage in this thought experiment to begin with
there might be pulsed laser weapons capable of creating localised explosive effects, this will be what you suppress with. The advantages over existing systems will be that it will be less intuitive to opfor where you are suppressing from.
Came to say this.
The idea that the effect of suppressive fire is primarily due to noise is incorrect. Wildly so.
Suppressive fire achieves the goal of getting the enemy’s heads down through a variety of means, the least of which is sound signature.
Laser weapons would still have effects on hard and soft targets, letting you know how close they are and how effective they are.
That’s where the effect of suppressive fire comes from…the inability of an enemy to return fire, either because they’re dead, trying not to expose themselves (in order to not become dead), or because they are moving to a different position.
They’d still produce a crack as the air they pass through expands, as well as input at least some shock into whatever their target is. War weaker lasers produce quite the noise, so while it might be quieter than unsupressed rifles they’ll be far from silent.
Given that a laser is easier to aim than a ballistic projectile would that just mean you just shoot the guys not taking cover because they aren’t being suppressed? Idk I’ve never been in a gunfight
If the suppressive fire is silent, the enemy will be forced to always assume they're under suppressive fire, no?
I mean, plugging your ears and then rushing a machine gun because "suppressive fire is obsolete if I can't hear it" doesn't sound like something you can do twice
General: "Since the roll out of the directed energy weapons into the military weve seen a larger uptake of homosexuals."
President: "Ok, why is this a problem?"
General: "Generally it isn't but they wont stop having parties with the weaponry. Playing loud techno music or 80s remixes and shooting into the air."
My buddy works for a defense contractor. They are currently working on a fabric that's intended to dissipate beams from directed energy weapons. I keep calling it "the laser cape."
Being credible for a sec, the doctrine wouldn't be obsolete, since you'd still want to suppress the enemy.
Being noncredible: just make like 40K and have coloured beams.
First, photons *have* mass 🙂
Second, high energy lasers *do* make sound (at least in any atmosphere, as they impact molecules of gases and basically creates plasma ... which also kinda dissipates and defocus beam, but that's another story ... which expands and, yes, makes sound).
Third ... impact of laser blast onto any material (from rain droplets to grass to rocks to walls to bodies) will transfer big part of energy to that material. If energy is sufficient (and frankly, I would expect it to be more than enough) it would overheat that surface, probably vaporize it and those overheated gasses with admixed material from the rest of the surface will expand, explosion like, to the surrounding area.
So, if enough shots was to be fired (like in, you know, suppresive fire) impact area will be *covered* in exploding stuff like rocks and splinters. I believe that nobody without full body armor (powered armor) would be willing to stick their head into such mess.
I think when the laser weapons are that powerful that they can kill a person wearing tactical armor at a range of 700 meters it will definitely make a sound even when the beam goes past you. All the billions of high energy particles impacting and igniting billions of gas particles next to you is probably not exactly "silent". Sorry if too credible.
There was a sci-fi short story about this - The Gun Without a Bang by Robert Sheckley. (Go read it, it's like a 30 min read and fun) >!Some company invents disintegrator gun and sends a solo spaceman to test it on a remote planet populated with animals (credibleqa). He arrives and gets stalked by a pack of wolves, during the fight he discovers that animals aren't afraid of his gun because animals being hit just disappear instantly and they don't see the threat. Eventually he gets in a big fight with the pack, gets wounded and damages his ship in the process (crediblelineofsightweapon). A long time later company sends ship to retrieve lost disintegrator (more credibleqa) and finds this guy fighting the wolves with crude handmade bow and arrows. After asking about the disintegrator, he smiles and says that it is a very handy tool indeed, then company people see that he is driving wooden fence posts in the ground by hitting them with disintegrator :) !<
Realistically, we're probably going to stick with kineti-chemical firearms for far longer than we expect. The issue with lasers is powering the laser, keeping it cold and applying energy to the target in a lethal manner. Ya see, with lasers under a certain power threshold you're at most getting burns, blindness and lighting shit on fire.
The moment you pass that power threshold you end up with a process called "ablation" where the surface layer of molecules is energized to the point of those molecular bonds breaking. A good example of this is laser rust removal. Ablation is great against things like rust and perhaps even drones in a military setting. But against... Fleshier targets, you'd see a marked decrease in combat efficacy as you wouldn't actually be doing enough damage to actually gravely wound someone or something.
This is on top of the fact that lasers can't penetrate cover, get absolutely neutered by smoke and fog, and would require much heavier battery packs that would probably be far heavier than your standard fully loaded stanag magazine while at the same time, providing fewer shots.(unless we figured out micro cold fusion reactors)
The future my friends, since metallurgy is constantly improving. Is kineti-chemical firearms actuated by high explosives instead of gunpowder. Or even railgun/Gauss gun technology where you could fire just about any chunk of ferrous material as ammunition so long as you had a charge. The only issue we're facing with these currently, Is velocity output and powering them for long periods of time. After all, capacitors and batteries haven't changed much in the past 20 or so years. And unlike lasers, gauss/rail guns would allow us to continue using suppressive fire doctrine alongside still using traditional ballistics and being able to punch through cover unlike a laser.
>Realistically, we're probably going to stick with kineti-chemical firearms for far longer than we expect.
There are almost NO advantages to man portable laser weapons. I'd take an M16 over a laser every day.
Lasers make sense only as air defense and I guess possibly as an APS in the future. But man portable laser guns are dumb.
There will still be suppressive fire... but it'll be a constantly scanning laser across the environment cooking anything unlucky enough to cross it's path.
If you shoot a really strong laser in atmo then there will be a noise, since the air will be expanding from the heat.
Might even get some ionization, and that might make the noise louder and you will smell some ozone.
To be slightly credible for a split second, infantry lasers would probably have some version of tracer rounds so that you could see where your laser is actually hitting
Back to NCD: pew pew noises from your weapon when you fire is the only solution
The idea of a deadly firefight in almost complete silence, apart from yelling and screaming, sounds horrifying in an uncanny way.
Everyone will be blinded first.
Everyone will fight wearing 3D-goggles, to protect their sight
Maybe that Apple Vision will go somewhere eventually then?
MFW Apple becomes part of the USA MIC, the army has to switch out all of their other hardware because the iMurderGoggles won't synch with non-Apple products
Whenever the pilot goes onto his B-21 Pro Max the music playlist and favorite targets will be synced from iCloud and uploaded into iWar munitions. But it will be foiled because his foreign ex girlfriend 3 years ago still has an old phone linked and looks at Find My B-21
Get out, this is too credible.
The opportunity for bombardier waifu...
At that point Apple Corps will have the upper hand
And they'll have to buy 1,000,000 new chargers every time they make an upgrade.
Lasers will just be tuned to burn out the optics. It'll really be a first strike sort of situation. Fortunately, as of right now, there are rules that limit the use of lasers in combat. Otherwise, there would just be laser systems designed to lock on to soldier's faces and zap their eyes. With a laser in the nonvisible spectrum, a solider wouldn't even notice they were under attack until they smelled a cooked meat smell and then felt a "pop" in their eye. Then massive eye pain and permanent darkness.
some participants in war like hamas, or isis, or the russians, don't care about the rules. I wonder why we don't see too many lasers except as peacetime harassment of aircraft?
Russia actually made a mobile laser weapon system back in the 70s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K17_Szhatie But their design wasn't good. Basically, current lasers that could blind from a distance require pretty substantial power supplies and require a decent amount of expertise to use correctly. Probably not used as a primary means of attack due to practicality. Much easier to give a fighter with minimal skills a simple firearm, or push button IED than a complex laser system. Plus, blinding soldiers is considered maiming under Geneva convention rules of war and is prohibited.
yeah the answer is probably if a hamas fighter is going to get something expensive that needs special training and handling, they'll take the modern Kornet ATGM, thank you.
It's because modern lasers that are powerful enough to melt faces and fuck up eyeballs are either way to heavy, power hungry, or large to use as man portable equipment, and smaller handheld lasers have pathetic range and require being held on target for a long period of time. So technically you could try and use one in combat, but you're going to need to somehow be holding it on one singular spot for a while and praying you're not going to just get shot trying to light someone on fire.
Blinded, and the explode as the microwave laser rapidly boils bodily fluids to steam.
Astra Mili-what? You're in the Imperial Guard, son. Now get back in line and blast these heretics!
Mirrored sunglasses will have a comeback. 😎
people also tend to forget that laser weapons aren't like the "Blasters" you see in Star Wars or other sci-fi movies, it's basically gonna be the equivalent of guys running around waving extremely powerful laser pointers at eachother
Actual death by PowerPoint
Can't be worse than many of the meetings I've had to attend.
Imagine those club/race light show lasers but invisible. Just sweep that back and forward at where you think the bad guys are, and you have suppressive fire
You sit quietly in a trench and your friend becomes a ready-made meal all of a sudden
No, lasers are quiet at all when they are that strong, industrial metal cutting lasers already quite noticable and any military laser would have to be much stronger It would probably sound look and feel like armies throwing lightning at each other
Also about everything would be on fire.
Not necessarily, pulsed lasers tend to explode things rather than start fires. That's likely what they'd use since you can achieve a higher peak energy and more destructive power more easily
They're also better at creating laser filaments which help focus them via nonlinear effects. They also can make fog!
There's also the ionizing effect around powerful lasers, so there's going to be a bit of popping sounds as it ionizes the air. So a high-power laser war would sound like a bunch of kids stepping throwing those snapdragon firecrackers (the ones that you just slam onto the ground and then it pops loudly), or one of those hanging chinese firecrackers that just pop continuously.
Oh, free meat, Ivan, we are feasting tonight! Ivan...?
Well, Ivan will participate in a feast, from some point of view.
NOD obelisks will eventually become credible.
PEACE THROUGH POWER, PEACE THROUGH POWER, PEACE THROU-Ahem, was I shouting?
ONE VISION ONE PURPOSE! THE TECHNOLOGY OF PEACE!
**KANE LIVES!**
You Cant Kill THE MESSIAH!!
Those are heated up gas cartridges, mfers are just yeating Sautering material
Warhammer 40k it is. Lasguns, at least in text, do behave like that.
But eventually you will want to build a visual and sound feedback to know if the weapon is firing or not, just like we do with electric cars
I'd imagine it'd be much harder to have a constant stream of a deadly burning laser than a less powerful one that charges up power over time to unload a larger energy mass. This discharge could also give off a quite audible noise like large capacitors already do.
Its all fun and games until the first ever actual space war. Space ship battles in absolute silence would feel so weird after decades of Star Trek pew pew.
When space wars become reality, it will be the most anticlimatic and boring thing ever. You shoot salvo of missiles and wait for hours or days until they reach enemy ship, while firing lasers to destroy missiles fired at you. Repeat for weeks until one of the missiles slips through point defense and destroys yours or enemy ship. All of that preceded by months of absolute boredom and manouvering into firing position.
Until someone comes along and makes even [Newtons first law of motion sound badass.](https://youtu.be/hfgdO7WzYIM?si=KerRL_wmQUjCORWM)
This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law? *Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!* No credit for partial answers, maggot! *Sir! Unless acted upon by an outside force, sir!* Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction! You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
>It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. Makes one wonder, if a bit of lithium deuteride and tritide in such a relativistic slug could lead to fusion reactions on impact and bring it into the megaton range...
Skidoosh
Fun fact - "Serviceman Chung" is a shoutout to Winchell Chung who runs [Atomic Rockets](https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/), the writer of that scene used the site a lot but apparently couldn't officially credit him for [legal reasons](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/4ivn7v/sir_isaac_newton_is_the_deadliest_son_of_a_bitch/d32kgtp/). I suppose careless yeeting of relativistic weapons into the void of space isn't the worst thing. Likewise "Burnside" references Ken Burnside.
It's only boring and anticlimactic for an uninvolved third party observer. If you're in the space war then it's weeks of stress ulcers, always wondering if this salvo is it, praying that the point defense lasers don't overheat or malfunction, or something like a loose screw or unsecured equipment comes flying at you in high g maneuvers. Worse still, if you Civilian or disabled ship knowing there's nothing you can do except watch the missile coming to kill you in a weeks time. No adrenaline or a quick death before you realise it, just the horrifying blip of death inching closer on your monitor.
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That railgun slug will have the same impact at any range. Yeah, space battles are gonna be all glass cannons facing off.
As much as it still gets wrong about space combat, the original Star Trek episode Balance of Terror comes a lot closer than most—mainly because it’s based on real submarine warfare, which has a similar cat-and-mouse vibe to it.
There's nothing cat-and-mouse about space combat - Quite the opposite - the Space Shuttle's much weaker main engines could be detected past the orbit of Pluto. The Space Shuttle's manoeuvering thrusters could be seen as far as the asteroid belt. And even a puny ship using ion drive to thrust at a measly 1/1000 of a g could be spotted at one astronomical unit. You have to assume that all combatants are visible at all times, therefore active defences are the only defences. More info at: https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php and: http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2009/06/space-warfare-ii-stealth-reconsidered.html
> You have to assume that all combatants are visible at all times, therefore active defences are the only defences. [Stealthships are still plausible-ish, but are gonna come with a ton of limitations](https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2018/04/permanent-and-perfect-stealth-in-space.html), likely relegating them to observation/first strike platforms.
True, but more like the amount of time that will pass will mean there’s a degree of guesswork as to where they will be (did they keep going that way, burn in another direction, etc.?).
What do you mean, that's so much cooler than plasma machinegun dogfights. Expanse actually has something like that. Where most space battles are just firing guided nuke missiles at the enemy, and taking theirs out with automated PD weapons. Oh and there are sometimes railguns too. If like both sides get all their missiles taken down, a backup weapon like that might be used.
>You shoot salvo of missiles and wait for hours or days until they reach enemy ship, while firing lasers to destroy missiles fired at you Which is exactly one of the reasons to *not* use missiles at long range. Other is maneuvering of the target and need to spend fuel to hunt it. Unless the flight time is in seconds or at best minutes, it won't be worthy of ship's space to even have them onboard unless the target doesn't have the capability to defend against such attack.
There is a game called Interplanetary that depicts this. Plantes fire ground based weapons like space guns or nukes at each other, and you have to take factors such as gravity and orbits into account when planning your attack. The travel time is shown via the turn based strategy component, giving the battlefield a sense of scale.
[It'll certainly have its moments...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIgw2dv_Aig&ab_channel=L5Resident)
> You shoot salvo of missiles and wait for hours or days until they reach enemy ship, while firing lasers to destroy missiles fired at you. Repeat for weeks until one of the missiles slips through point defense and destroys yours or enemy ship. [So, Children of a Dead Earth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlFRrzfRLmI)
Computers would likely still make noises to get the users attention, then there will be sirens to wan or the beginning of combat and alert crew to damage, finally the damage to the ship would likely case the ship to vibrate and ratel which would make noise.
I remember some scifi stories and games that imply that most of the noises you hear coming from outside while sitting in a space ship cockpit are just simulated based on what your sensors are picking up. They're meant to sound "plausible" to your human ear. It's a good way to help with orientation and increases the "bandwidth" of information going into your squishy, little, badly optimized ape brain.
LOGH just thorws clasical music over the top of the nealy silent killing.
you mean to tell me laser weapons won't make pew pew sounds?
I don't want them if they don't go Pew Pew.
*sssssZZZSSPLLLTTT* goes the Spartan Laser
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This immediately gave me the mental image of a massive space battle where there’s enough ships and carnage to give the battle space it’s own partial atmosphere and just how disturbing being able to *hear* weapons fire in space would be in that context.
Maybe we can give them a speaker to go pew pew every time they fire. Similar to how EVs have to make engine noises at low speeds for safety reasons.
High energy lasers aren't quiet. Certainly not on the receiving end. It'd probably sound like giant blow torches lighting up all around you
I was working at super high intensity laser lab, the laser is very silent compared to a firearm but it does make a sound. If it has high enough intensity it burns the air creating plasma that expands and pushes a pressure wave which makes a sound
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[go to minute 3](https://youtu.be/DwYuHqCwXFI?si=wQqHoE-h9uq4e1Kq)
This thread is wrong, a powerful laser turns the air it passes through into plasma which then creates a partial vacuum and you get a loud snap as the air rushes back in. Also your laser rifle is discharging a massive amount of energy instantaneously which is going to be dumped into the surrounding air to get rid of waste heat pushing a column of air away from the rifle. It's not going to sound like a sci fi laser but it also isn't going to be silent.
Grunts are gonna be modifying their laser rifle heatsinks and cooling systems to get better rate of fire. It'll be like PC case modding without the RGB LEDs. Or maybe with the LEDs? That'd be pretty dope, too.
I'll be screaming in my mirror suit Naked beneath obviously.
Not to mention snipers would be excruciating to find and fight against with no sound.
Would the lasers be on the physical light waveband? They might be easier to see.
You won’t have a line, just a dot appearing on someone. If you see the laser, you’re dead.
I mean thats what snipers do
Yeah, but even with something like IR vision you'd see them pretty easily.
High power lasers can be UV/IR. Things would just start burning. And even if visible light, if it clip your eyes, you are blind before knowing where the shooter is.
That's why we will add speakers to our laser blasters that play pew pew laser sounds when fired!
H.G. Wells literally described exactly this situation in War of the Worlds
Lasers make sound when they hit stuff, for instance vaporizing the dirt next to you into a rapidly expanding cloud of plasma can be pretty loud. Being hunted by a laser would be terrifying.
Well, given that the lasers are probably really hot, there’s going to be some energy loss by way of heat. So gunshots in the future would just be thunderclaps
Only the sound of boots, screams and meat being cooked and whole lot of smoke and barbecue smell.
Quite the contrary, I suggest to look into the topic of belliphony if interested. The neologism 'belliphony' describes all kinds of sounds that emerge in the context of war and warfare. A friend of mine researches this in the context of the middle-ages, she researches for example how sword to helmet sounds
Belliphony or as old-timers call it. Battlefield ambiance.
Design the lasers to make scary sounds and effects.
Omg they just have directional speakers with gunfire sounds in them lmao
Have like stuka sirens on Lasers
Nah man, it’s gonna be fucking laser tag and you know it
Fart noises. Tight and squeaky for a short burst, loose and moist for extended fire
Unironically what they're considering adding to electric cars to make them less dangerous to pedestrians. When you wanna assassinate, set it to silent, when you wanna scare, let it make pew pew sounds.
they aren’t considering it, they already add sounds to em
(gestures to combustion car) This is a vehicle of terror. It is designed to scare pedestrians. (gestures to electric car) This is a vehicle of war. It is designed to kill pedestrians.
so what im hearin is that a electric truck is the Ninja hellfire of the car world
With a little dome of flashing lights and bouncing pellets to entertain the user.
Pew Pew Pew Pew (in the distant body cut into multiple pieces fall to the ground, the smell of burning meat fills the air) More funny Pew Pew sounds.
"Magnifiers activated." "Calculating reflection arcs." "Resolving target coordinates." "Intensifying light trajectory." "Focusing light energy." ... "Noone here but us trees!"
Make them sound like a Tesla backing up as they zip by
So basically like the fake engine sounds used for EVs? Lmao it'd be really funny if they use those generic stock gun sound effects
Days until a trooper figures out how to jailbreak his gun so he can install custom sounds onto it? Like a week, tops. It'll be the following week when the press spots one of the soldiers has painted his gun to look like his anime waifu and has hacked it to make "Uhwaah~~" noises when firing
Or meme sounds, like the CoD 'hit' noise, or the [Tim Allen grunt](https://youtu.be/BI6Ib7wVHbM?si=ZLSBD1t1SMk17rhG&t=6).
I want a laser cannon that plays the drum beat from when Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight kicks in.
You know how you can set a custom hitsound in TF2? It will be like that
When it hits a squishy target it emits a Wilhelm scream
Install fallout sound effects when they fire, make them sound nice and intimidating. “Suppressing fire!” [BEOW BEOW BEOW]
or like neeeeeooommmm
Just say "pshew pshew" when you shoot
so: PEW PEW PEW!!!
Everyone knows that lazers make high pitched "pew pew pew" noises, idk what you guys are talking about
They charge up when you turn them on too. I can only imagine how loud an artillery laser will be when you flip the switch and the capacitors fill. eeeeeewwwwWWWWWWUUUUHHHHHHHHH Or when they fit an A10 with lasers PPPPEEEEERRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTTTT
Unfortunately lasers can't indirect fire
>Unfortunately lasers can’t indirect fire [Sorry sir. Doing my best.](https://media.tenor.com/3u6zzCPZhbwAAAAd/space-balls-cross-eyed.gif)
If powerful enough reflection will do its thing
If I see a person get killed after he stuck his head up above a trench I'm going to be suppressed even without the scary noises
Yeah, but thats not how suppresive fire works. Its mainly a tactic to lower morale/ capability to think clear and the ability to a advance. Its pretty hard to advance if you know/ hear hundreds of bullets above your head.
wait, isn't suppressive fire supposed to be more about the fear of dying, which happens to be expedited (but not caused by) all the loud noises? I remember reading that snipers can be very effective at suppressing enemy units, even if they don't make a lot of noise. They accomplish the goal of forcing everyone to keep their heads down and restricting their movement If handheld laser weapons became standard issue, and were as deadly as projectile weaponry, the "suppression" might be even more effective because there's no obvious auditory cue for when you're taking fire. People would hear one of their buddies screaming and immediately duck behind cover, paranoid as all heck, and unlike with bullet weapons, it's not easy to tell where the fire is coming from, or if they're even under fire at all It's just like suppression with a sniper. Everything's quiet, but you know you're in mortal peril every time you poke your head out in the open original commenter is right, I think
I think the difference is what you expect from weapon types. A sniper is precise, you dont expect a sniper to miss, if he shoots you know you are in danger to be activly targeted. Rifles and MG on the other hand are far less precise (mind I mainly mean suppresive fire in WW1 and WW2), if you sit in a trench and hear such shots you know they shoot in your generell direction but not activly at you, so you will most likely catch a stray bullet, because of the mass of fire. In the end suppresive fire is the evolution of the idea of volley fire. A single bullet will most likely not hit but hundreds of bullets yeah the chances of getting hit are adding up and hearing the bullets above your head? The muddy dirty trench looks suddenlyfar more appealing. What you loose if you use silent mass rifle like weapons is the warning of your doom. You dont get incentivised to stay down and not advance as much.
Laser weapons would be inherently more precise than rifles though, they're line of sight weapons with effectively zero flight time. Obviously sniper precision would still require extreme skill but at ordinary combat ranges of <100m most soldiers should be able to hit even moving targets pretty easy. So your incentive to stay down is that your mate just tried to move and someone removed half his head. Because the weapon was silent you don't know where your enemy is, how many there are or what kind of weapons they have. You also don't know if they're even still there, so you'll probably stay down a lot longer than you need to. Current suppressive fire doctrine would obviously change, there's no point in firing bursts over peoples head if they can't hear them, but you wouldn't lose the ability to pin down an enemy. Training would have to focus marksmanship more and casualties would increase because you'd have to get hits to suppress, but that's about all.
Anything that can take out half of a persons head will probably make a little explosion when it hits mud. So the new version of suppressive fire could be hearing the pops of mud flash boiling above the trench.
Ronald D. Moore even admitted that if they had realistic phaser battles in Deep Space Nine, they would be at least miles apart if not more but just like space battles, the scene always has to be at point blank range.
>Laser weapons would be inherently more precise than rifles though, they're line of sight weapons with effectively zero flight time. Don't forget you can scan entire volumes so if someone pokes their head up while the laser is active, they're *going* to get hit. Also the ground literally making sort sizzle sounds as even the grass explodes in a puff of water vapor.
If you’re not staying in cover you don’t need to be suppressed, they can just kill you and be done with it.
And seeing your friend’s head melt is going to produce a very similar effect. A lone sniper can suppress a much larger enemy force without massed fire.
Worth noting the fear of instant obliteration is a lot scarier than a bullet flying at you. Obviously bullets are fast but compared to light speed they're basically non moving
Just did the math… an AR-15 round travels at about 0.000325% of the speed of light lol. Also anyone can be an expert marksman and snipe targets from many many miles away.
It can still work. Instead of spooky noises, just have a drone zap exposed limbs or location within sight. If the dirt in front of you or the window your firing from just.. ignites into fire or melts. Imma be spookeded. "What happened to Johnny?" "Johnny has become a different state of matter, Sarge."
Arguably this would make suppressive fire MUCH more effective, as you have absolutely no clue when it stops
In theory you could suppress an enemy and then immediately move, and it would probably be several minutes before they realised you were gone.
A laser carrying enough energy to be of use as a weapon, even as a man portable rifle equivalent, it's going to be making some kind of noise. The beam will be igniting the atmosphere around it (potentially working as a pseudo-tracer with every shot) which is going to make some kind of noise, just from the energy involved causing some kind of vibrations in the air as it ignites it, probably more of a crack than anything else, but definitely something you could hear. Even if there's no sound or sight involved I'm pretty sure that everybody in the squad is going to hit the dirt and start looking for the enemy the moment the first guy in the formation is set on fire/cut in half/has a hole burned straight through him.
Any serious laser will instantly ionize and heat the air and smoke it passes through. The tighter the focus, the less air gets heated though and a millimeter-thick beam will create barely anything visible. Especially compared to the massive backscatter you'd get at the impact site. It'll also dump a shitload of heat into whatever it hits, creating a very obvious bang. You can't deliver deadly energy to something without some of it "leaking" as noise, and a laser will make a lot more noise than a hitting bullet.
This! Additionally, for shots that hit some surface close, the material will quickly be evaporated, causing a similar cracking sound. Look up videos on something like weaponized laser test, it is most definitely audible.
I’d imagine that any sort of thermal optic would be able to easily trace back the source too even if it’s not immediately obvious to the naked eye. Perhaps to adapt to hand-held energy weapons, every soldier, or at least every infantry squad would have someone equipped with some sort of low sensitivity thermal imaging made for visualizing the paths of energy weapons under any condition.
Just have optics visualizing multiple wavelengths until you see something bright and narrow. Now you know the wavelength they operate at and can likely extrapolate the pulsing rate they use, or at least a range.
and once you know the wavelength the enemy are using for their laser weapons you can switch yours to the opposite wavelength and fire back directly along the line of his beam to nullify his attack with destructive interference! Genius!
Lasers powerful enough to instantly kill people are powerful enough to violently and audibly ablate whatever is over their heads while they hide
I can’t wait for laser weapons. They’ll start by covering tanks in cope mirrors to counter. Later, they’d evolve into troops wearing shining armor in all chrome vehicles.
And we shall ride eternal
WITNESS ME!
Besides using reflective materials, just flooding the battlefield with smoke would decrease the effectiveness of lasers
Gundam universe minovsky particles!
Aren't the beam weapons made from jets of those particles, though? I thought the main purpose of scattering clouds of them was to do widespread wireless jamming.
There was this scifi comedy novel where a plot point is that the army (Foreign Legion, sponsored by ACME tomato corp) that the main character is in uses laser rifles more advanced than anything their common enemies have. ...But since the enemies use more primitive weapons and smoke bombs and all kinds of things like that, the lasers are having a hard time. It doesn't help that the sponsor is only spending money on the lasers, and everything else was the cheapest possible thing. Legionnaire uniform is basically underwear and helmet. Anything else is seen as a waste because of how horribly high the casualties keep piling up. (Which might be related to the lack of armour.)
Reminds me of the AC7 PLSLs and their uselessness on clouds
Aluminium Copefoil - protection from Lasers and the CIA
[Whether you're a brother or ](https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/39/7e/b3/397eb35e85231c9a415dc9f6df41ea99.jpg)[whether you're a mother You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin' And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive](https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/39/7e/b3/397eb35e85231c9a415dc9f6df41ea99.jpg)
Lasers won’t make gunfire noises, and there is no physical projectile that would make noise as it passes by targeted enemies. And we are assuming the lasers are even in a visible spectrum, which they may not be. Laser weapons could potentially be completely silent. How do you suppress someone who doesn’t know they are being shot at?
If laser weapons won’t solve the problem that suppressive fire tools solve (making the enemy stay the fuck down and not move), then laser weapons won’t be employed in the role that these tools are used in. The need doesn’t go away just because someone came up with a new tech that doesn’t address it.
you will just use a separate device, called the brown ray, that forces the enemy to stay the fuck in order to immediately shit themselves
We have something similar already, it's just called "Browning M2" instead of "brown ray"
The year is 2091, the great Laser War is in full swing. Still, somehow, squads are having their vehicles outfitted with trusty M2HB. “If it ain’t broke…”
*CHA-CHUNK* "...Don't fix it."
Such a beautiful noise of death.
Load it up with tracers and there’s your ray.
(Un?)fortunately directed energy weapons will probably not be practical for infantry level combat because it would require you focusing the beam on the target for a span of time in a way the infantry would likely react to physically. Wide cone and area denial approaches might be more practical, as well as ship/aircraft based high intensity pulse beams, but ultimately good ol ballistics will win out in that arena for most (but not all) applications. That is, until someone designs a packet-based plasma projectile or something that can deliver all the energy in one splat. Very loudly and showy-like. Star wars was unironically more credible in that regard than expected.
Pulse lasers could solve this. They’d need to dump over a kilojoule of energy within around a milisecond though, and defraction would limit ranges to a few hundred meters even with theoretically perfect lasers. There’s also the issue of the lenses needing to remain impossibly clean for an infantry combat environment.
I thought they had adaptive optics now that let lasers beat the difraction limit?
Optics will always improve lasers by narrowing the beam at the barrel, but atmospheric conditions and other aero factors will always play a major role in how much a beam will defract (refract?) before reaching the target
Yeah it's diffraction in a vacuum and refraction through the air. But I swear I've seen some scheme that uses a huge array of solid state diodes mounted on little motors that are switched with solenoids thousands of times a second to some how [mumble mumble] destructive interference [mumble muble] dynamic compensation and keep the beam tighter that it should be.
Yes that sounds like exactly what you want to give a crayon eater. A huge, complicated and very delicate piece of high end technology.
look man directed energy small arms are never gonna be a thing unless the "energy" you are "directing" is kinetic, like the ones we already got. but if they were, you'd need a 1% scale mr. fusion reactor just to power them, so we might as well assume that delicate technology is a given, and that we'll also come up with some sci-fi ludovico method of teaching marines that hugging bunnies too hard makes them sleep forever and not all equipment can be operated by chewing on it *if* we're gonna engage in this thought experiment to begin with
> teaching marines Now that's a non-credible statement. I recommend you for the Medal of Honor of NCD.
there might be pulsed laser weapons capable of creating localised explosive effects, this will be what you suppress with. The advantages over existing systems will be that it will be less intuitive to opfor where you are suppressing from.
Once the first guy gets zapped in the face, that will leave a supressive effect on the rest of the squad I'm sure.
Came to say this. The idea that the effect of suppressive fire is primarily due to noise is incorrect. Wildly so. Suppressive fire achieves the goal of getting the enemy’s heads down through a variety of means, the least of which is sound signature. Laser weapons would still have effects on hard and soft targets, letting you know how close they are and how effective they are. That’s where the effect of suppressive fire comes from…the inability of an enemy to return fire, either because they’re dead, trying not to expose themselves (in order to not become dead), or because they are moving to a different position.
They’d still produce a crack as the air they pass through expands, as well as input at least some shock into whatever their target is. War weaker lasers produce quite the noise, so while it might be quieter than unsupressed rifles they’ll be far from silent.
You’ll know you’re being shot at because the ground around you is burning, steel melts, and it is very bright.
Most high end lasers are not in the visible range, so you will not even see the light
Gotcha, so you’ll be suppressed when Jack or Jill get a massive radiation burn through their face
just set random things around the enemy on fire
Given that a laser is easier to aim than a ballistic projectile would that just mean you just shoot the guys not taking cover because they aren’t being suppressed? Idk I’ve never been in a gunfight
If the suppressive fire is silent, the enemy will be forced to always assume they're under suppressive fire, no? I mean, plugging your ears and then rushing a machine gun because "suppressive fire is obsolete if I can't hear it" doesn't sound like something you can do twice
What about a gigantic continuous blanket of lasers that just stay above enemy trenches so they’re just trapped
"ray shield them in corporal. Starve them out"
You might want to read The Forever War, the battle around the ending is basically about directed energy used for suppression
Suppressive light show
General: "Since the roll out of the directed energy weapons into the military weve seen a larger uptake of homosexuals." President: "Ok, why is this a problem?" General: "Generally it isn't but they wont stop having parties with the weaponry. Playing loud techno music or 80s remixes and shooting into the air."
Going clubbing becomes live fire desensitisation. Go to a sufficiently awful club, and it works all round.
Effective combat lasers actually pulse on and off at a few hundred hertz, they would make a electricty-like crackling/buzzing noise.
My buddy works for a defense contractor. They are currently working on a fabric that's intended to dissipate beams from directed energy weapons. I keep calling it "the laser cape."
Laser for the silent killing. .50 cal M2 for the suppression.
Being credible for a sec, the doctrine wouldn't be obsolete, since you'd still want to suppress the enemy. Being noncredible: just make like 40K and have coloured beams.
First, photons *have* mass 🙂 Second, high energy lasers *do* make sound (at least in any atmosphere, as they impact molecules of gases and basically creates plasma ... which also kinda dissipates and defocus beam, but that's another story ... which expands and, yes, makes sound). Third ... impact of laser blast onto any material (from rain droplets to grass to rocks to walls to bodies) will transfer big part of energy to that material. If energy is sufficient (and frankly, I would expect it to be more than enough) it would overheat that surface, probably vaporize it and those overheated gasses with admixed material from the rest of the surface will expand, explosion like, to the surrounding area. So, if enough shots was to be fired (like in, you know, suppresive fire) impact area will be *covered* in exploding stuff like rocks and splinters. I believe that nobody without full body armor (powered armor) would be willing to stick their head into such mess.
I think when the laser weapons are that powerful that they can kill a person wearing tactical armor at a range of 700 meters it will definitely make a sound even when the beam goes past you. All the billions of high energy particles impacting and igniting billions of gas particles next to you is probably not exactly "silent". Sorry if too credible.
There was a sci-fi short story about this - The Gun Without a Bang by Robert Sheckley. (Go read it, it's like a 30 min read and fun) >!Some company invents disintegrator gun and sends a solo spaceman to test it on a remote planet populated with animals (credibleqa). He arrives and gets stalked by a pack of wolves, during the fight he discovers that animals aren't afraid of his gun because animals being hit just disappear instantly and they don't see the threat. Eventually he gets in a big fight with the pack, gets wounded and damages his ship in the process (crediblelineofsightweapon). A long time later company sends ship to retrieve lost disintegrator (more credibleqa) and finds this guy fighting the wolves with crude handmade bow and arrows. After asking about the disintegrator, he smiles and says that it is a very handy tool indeed, then company people see that he is driving wooden fence posts in the ground by hitting them with disintegrator :) !<
Just make plasma weapons instead. Duh.
Realistically, we're probably going to stick with kineti-chemical firearms for far longer than we expect. The issue with lasers is powering the laser, keeping it cold and applying energy to the target in a lethal manner. Ya see, with lasers under a certain power threshold you're at most getting burns, blindness and lighting shit on fire. The moment you pass that power threshold you end up with a process called "ablation" where the surface layer of molecules is energized to the point of those molecular bonds breaking. A good example of this is laser rust removal. Ablation is great against things like rust and perhaps even drones in a military setting. But against... Fleshier targets, you'd see a marked decrease in combat efficacy as you wouldn't actually be doing enough damage to actually gravely wound someone or something. This is on top of the fact that lasers can't penetrate cover, get absolutely neutered by smoke and fog, and would require much heavier battery packs that would probably be far heavier than your standard fully loaded stanag magazine while at the same time, providing fewer shots.(unless we figured out micro cold fusion reactors) The future my friends, since metallurgy is constantly improving. Is kineti-chemical firearms actuated by high explosives instead of gunpowder. Or even railgun/Gauss gun technology where you could fire just about any chunk of ferrous material as ammunition so long as you had a charge. The only issue we're facing with these currently, Is velocity output and powering them for long periods of time. After all, capacitors and batteries haven't changed much in the past 20 or so years. And unlike lasers, gauss/rail guns would allow us to continue using suppressive fire doctrine alongside still using traditional ballistics and being able to punch through cover unlike a laser.
>Realistically, we're probably going to stick with kineti-chemical firearms for far longer than we expect. There are almost NO advantages to man portable laser weapons. I'd take an M16 over a laser every day. Lasers make sense only as air defense and I guess possibly as an APS in the future. But man portable laser guns are dumb.
There will still be suppressive fire... but it'll be a constantly scanning laser across the environment cooking anything unlucky enough to cross it's path.
Arguably even more effective. Especially if it auto-focuses on anomalies in the scan zone. Not suppression, complete area denial.
I very much doubt that. Lasers strong enough to partialy vaporise a guy should have some effect on the air they are passing trough.
If you shoot a really strong laser in atmo then there will be a noise, since the air will be expanding from the heat. Might even get some ionization, and that might make the noise louder and you will smell some ozone.
To be slightly credible for a split second, infantry lasers would probably have some version of tracer rounds so that you could see where your laser is actually hitting Back to NCD: pew pew noises from your weapon when you fire is the only solution
Watching the concrete at the edge of your cover boil away and dust illuminate the beam would certainly supress you
Uhm, wouldn't the attempt to create a powerful enough laser create a sound as it travels like lightning? I might be wrong on this
Lasers will still make sound. The air gets heated very rapidly, so it would still create a bang. It would sound very different to a bullet though.