What's more realistic in space combat, beam weapons or bolt weapons?
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- Опубліковано 20 сер 2024
- Star Trek, Star Wars, and most other mainstream science fiction content has us believing that fighting in space will be a lot like fighting on the ocean, but of course that's complete nonsense. So, in this video, I break down exactly what is more "realistic" for future outer space combat, but most specifically I demonstrate the differences between beam weapons and "pew pew" weapons, and hopefully settle this argument once and for all.
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The biggest issue is obviously that you won't see either, no matter if it's a long shot or a short pop. Because every bit of energy that goes to the camera won't go to the target.
Unless you're firing tracers or really damn hot rounds, or rocket propelled rounds
@@alexanderawe8031 ah yes, rocket propelled lasers
@@HappyBeezerStudios was talking about weapons in general, for lasers you wouldn't see the beam but could still see the damage they do and the light being reflected off, and plasma is just straightup visible
The two problems you list about turbo lasers are solved by the same answer.
Blasters, or turbo lasers, are plasma fired along a targeting laser. The laser part is there to guide the plasma along the intended path. This has been tested in several prototype plasma based cutting devices, and laser based lightning rods.
And considering how plasma works, you can't really "guide" plasma, so much as merely launching it. Plasma, by definition, is a state of matter, in this context it's usually a superheated ionized gas in condensed form. Considering its properties, it only works as a close-range weapon (at most medium), because it will disperse without something to contain the plasma long enough until it could deliver its payload onto the target, that is thermal and kinetic damage. Also, plasma projectiles would very likely travel at a speed slower than you'd might think, hence its suitability to being more of a close/medium-ranged weapon.
oddly this is one thing about Star Wars that might actually track, scientifically speaking. we always wonder "why do they fight SO CLOSE to each other??"
maybe it's because plasma IS so short-ranged but at the same time is the only thing that can reliably punch through shields.
just a thought. I know SW is short on science, but I think by sheer accident they may have made this part of the canon logical
@@Josua070 As I was stating, you can actually guide plasma.
ua-cam.com/video/9XuAX-L2xxo/v-deo.html
@@maxsideburn also in cases like Gundam they use a thing called I fields it's basically some form of containment field for beam weapons. It's in the beam sabers the rifles etc. But you rarely see a I field. Only when it's specifically used in defense do you see them flicker.
@@Josua070 I mean in the Star Wars universe two to three kilometers is the maximum. 1.5 can definitely be achieved
Regarding pulsed vs. continuous lasers - other than obvious benefits of not needing to track the target to deliver that energy, there is one more - once you reach a certain threshold of energy density, you no longer heat the material up, you blow off electron layers and disrupt chemical bonds. Speaking of which, on the year you released this video a Nobel prize was awarded on the topic of wide spectrum lasers compressed into high density pulses of energy. By now most laser surgery machines use this technique to ablate tissue without overheating surrounding areas. Of course in real life, unlike in games and such, you don't need to actually destroy target to win a battle - continuous laser beams even if they can't effectively penetrate the armor, can damage sensors and other equipment necessarily located outside of the hull.
Wrong about heat dissipating quickly in vacuum.
He's also wrong about about why lasers are invisible. It doesn't matter what frequency the photons are at since the light is all hitting the target, not the eyes (or camera) of a third party observer.
I always thought it would make for an interesting scenario where the whole goal of space fights is to overwhelm the enemy heat management.
At which points lasers would be interesting again, because they could just heat up the enemy ship. Or a microwave beam. And if done right, that beam projector can take heat off the own system.
Projectiles would be focused on radiators and coolant pipes.
Spaceships would have to tread the line between optimal radiator placement and armored cover. And you don't want to blow the heat from your radiators into your armor, so one of the systems would have to be adjustable. Like having radiators that fold in, which stops them from working. So the longer the fight lasts, the more the ship heats up. Turns every fight into the equivalent of a submarine battle with limited air supply.
I first had the idea myself when trying this sandbox called The Powder Toy. Some spaceship models people made could really take a beating, but heat buildup would in many cases have taken it and the crew out ages before a hull failure.
My thinking for this has always been that there is an initial pellet or packet which serves to break or create an initial incision, and then there is the beam which follows behind that, and then behind the beam which does most of the damage there's also a tail or trail -- and in this way, a beam has a sort of structural anatomy. In this way, every beam we actually see is actually all three anatomical components, but they are in different ratios for different specialty purposes.
If the pellet is particularly big, we get the impression of a bolt. If the beam is very long, we get the impression of a beam. If the trail is slow (suggesting that the shot becomes out of phase with the firing assembly) this could make sense, as that's energy you could be using for the next shot, so lazily dismissing the shot is more like clearing the barrel or the firing subassembly for the next shot and reducing the latency between shots.
This seems like a design flaw, but its highly desirable if we want to engage multiple targets or if we have an energy shortfall over time due to the design of the energy exchange subassembly having an initial high onset efficiency and then a lower efficiency over time (much as we see with real capacitors) so the energy and matter shunted to the focusing and acceleration subassembly has a latency to deal with -- so the trail is a trade-off of trying to be more efficient.
My favourite example of these dynamic forms is probably the beam magnum on the RX-0 Gundam, which burns through a full magazine with every shot and as such stacks them behind the condenser. A pellet forms of a selected diameter, trading off the width of the beam for the velocity based on the distance of the target (not unlike a phaser strip) and then the condensed M-particle degeneracy is pierced asymmetrically so it acts almost like a rocket, propelling itself forward while the front of the barrel acts like a pusher-plate and reflector.
As the pellet travels, it leaves a trail behind itself, which its constantly trying to symmetrically repel (further propelling itself forward) which in turn expands. The result is the magnum doesn't require a direct hit to make a successful strike, since the resulting beam left behind by the pellet and the reflector trail have a massive diameter making it an area of effect weapon. In turn, the M-particles *REALLY* want to lower their charge-states, so they release photons whenever they strike baryons (such as matter) so you get these huge slow cascading fractals of light (its not lightning: there's no medium!) and huge amounts of gamma radiation that superheat whatever it strikes.
The thicker your armour is, the worse the damage tends to be -- so the resulting doctrine of these weapons is to be incredibly evasive and depend on the imperfect information created by M-particles distorting photons naturally (sort of like how light diffracts through water) which makes a lot of long-range communication and sensors functionally useless, and wrecks havoc on digital optical and electronic systems -- meaning mobilesuits are usually running highly isolated and filtered analogue computers to compensate. The technology ended up rendering laser technology functionally useless, and so the nature of space combat changed entirely in under 50 years. The one exception found was using an O'neil cylinder's mirror assembly and a custom focusing ring as a literal space-laser by refocusing the light of the sun and by packing the colony with millions of tons of monocrystalline focusing substrate, at which point lasers became a weapon of mass destruction but were too big to move using propellant technologies of the era.
Yeah Gundam is a... Little bit smarter than it lets on. If you like this stuff, go look up the physics behind muon catalysed Minovsky ultracompact fusion, and the M-particle theory that the show uses. Its really cool stuff.
I like both. I imagine beams to just be a continuous shot. Almost like a machine gun.
The bolt type is not even possible
Actually, classified Project MARAUDER proved that it was possible to fire contained toroids (doughnut shapes) of plasma using a railgun. Assuming such a device could be powered by a Casimir generator to use zero-point energy (a technology that has been unfairly suppressed so those in power can maintain their control and wealth), as well as the rails being made of some highly-efficient superconductors (carbon nanotubes seem like a good candidate at this point), then it could certainly be achieved.
1:45 In Star Wars no lasers are shot, but heated and highly compressed gas.
Exactly my friend. He doesn’t understand that.
'They're called "lasers" in the film".' I like your video in general however I take issue with this point. Nomenclature doesn't have to be completely accurate in how it describes a machine's operation. To use another SW example, they refer to hyperdrives as 'lightspeed' which is clearly inaccurate since they traverse the galaxy far far away at many, *many* times c. 'Turbolaser' could be named that way for any number of in-universe technical reasons. But as you point out in the rest of the video, 'realistic' lasers would be invisible. Even IIRC if they were in the visible part of the EM spectrum (which as you point out is unlikely) they would still be invisible in a vacuum.
So what can we conclude from this? Perhaps turbolasers have A laser in the mechanism, but aren't actually wholly or completely lasers? There is a visible 'bolt' that propagates at sub-c velocities. Could there be an invisible part that's the actual 'laser' part of the bolt? (IIRC some fx 'flaws' seem to indicate this i.e. things vaporise before the visible part of the turbolaser bolt hits, the example I vaguely recall was a Star Destroyer shooting up asteroids in Empire). The 'plasma' bolt that's visible might be something like a tracer effect. I'm sure there's SW technical jargon that explains this.
As far as Star Trek weapons go, well, they're explicitly NOT lasers but exotic particle beams. Phasers in particular shoot nadion particles that interact with normal matter and give it a very energetic and rapid existential crisis. I tend to handwave away fx issues with phasers because of this :D
we arent advance enought to have such combat yet such combat like film will become real when we have more pinpoint accuracy warp drive and surprise our opponent when we move near them and mass engaging them in close combat
Both weapon systems have their advantages and drawbacks. Energy weapons attenuate over distance no matter how well focused they are, so your max range is when your beam doesn't have the power to penetrate the target anymore. Kinetic weapons won't lose penetration over distance, but projectiles become easier and easier to avoid the farther you are from the firing platform. And each missed shot is now a high speed object flying through space just waiting to hit someone in 10,000 years.
Nice video, but if want a really in depth breakdown watch Spacedock's video on realistic laser or the one one realistic particle beams
The first wave of attacks would likely be ai driven ship to ship missiles & unmanned fighter craft, attacking enemy vessals thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers away. Having good radar will help immensely.
Wow!! Nice!!
Big surprise I'm a writer....😅😊😂
Do Gundam lasers next
How fast it goes depends on how much the particles are accelerated in my story I have some slower bolt type particle weapons and the reason they accelerate the particles to a slow speed is because they don't want to create too much kenetic energy because the faster the particles are accelerated the greater the mass and the more kenetic energy so that's why they are slow in my story
which is fine, so long as you've given a REASON they're slow ;)
that's the great thing about scifi, we can do anything we want. I do things like that in my writing as well, I just make sure to explain why something might behave in an odd fashion.
@@maxsideburn yea
@@maxsideburn yeah these particle weapons are made to be a multipurpose weapon because 1 shot is meant to just stun someone by flooding Thier body with a fictional particle I made up and it's supposed to kill after several shots basically the more of these particles there are in the body the more lethal it is, it's not meant to have much of a kenetic effect
A pew beam, a small laser beam
You really haven't read up on the law of star wars/trek?
my great question is: WHY CAN'T WE KEEP USING BULLETS?
Because armor? We don't even know if atomic bombs would have any effect on Star Wars or Star Trek ships.
@@Auvas_Damask i mean, bullets wouldnt lose effectiveness over distance if there is no gravity or atmosphere to slow it down, so why not? Something like tank or shell artillery rounds like we use on earth would still be useful, I think.
@@GabrielRGomes Beskar cannot be cut by lightsabers. The same stuff that is used in stormtrooper armor is used to construct buildings. Star Wars has different raw materials than reality.
Bullets obviously still work. But there are often different reasons why they aren't used. Like the need to need more of them or you run out. Or it's an image thing. Maybe they don't want blood and gore everywhere.
A good example for the limitation of projectiles is given in Stargate:
The Daedalus is fighting a Wraith ship, railguns and everything, but the enemy armor is holding up. So let's send out nuclear missiles. Which prompts the enemy fighters to intercept them kamikaze style. Okay, but we can beam the nukes over. (Something seen surprisingly rarely in scifi that has teleporters and bombs) That works.
Until the Wraith find a solution that simply blocks the teleport.
Also ifggry were invisible movies would be boring so would Gundam 🤣
Particle beams can deliver kenetic energy not just heat because they are particles being accelerated at a target by an electromagnetic field, lasers are really inefficient particle beam weapons are way better, and particle beams aren't light they are physical particles that have mass