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[Catmeat]

Plasma coated pladium eletromagneticly propelled bolts? Or just pure energy?.
I dont think energy weapons have been considered, or have i missed them?
Are they realisticly possible or to much energy required to be practical

[smjjames]

Platinum would be extremely expensive to use for projectiles, at least currently. Don't know about palladium, if that's what you mean.

[wierd]

Yes and no.

Plasma with a very well balanced self-sustaining magnetic bottle could do pretty well for itself.

The issues would be these:

You have something in your hand that can make several shots of very dense, high energy plasma capable of blasting through a steel door. if you think short circuiting LiON batteries are scary, you aint seen nothin yet.  this is energy density much higher than can be reliably generated using a chemical process. You needs contained fusion in a small package for a starwars blaster to work. Scary asssed shit.

The plasma needs to be dense, or it will lack enough cohesion to be useful/wont deliver the energy yeild you want on impact.  That means the gun has to have astoundingly powerful magnetic accellerators baked in. The EMI of firing the blaster would make needles and the like move around on tables. If it needs to store several consecutive shots, it is going to be quite heavy, just from the mass of the dense plasma in the system.

Plasma that is magnetically contained, has a strong magnetic field. it will be strongly attracted to ferromagnetic objects, and vise versa.

it will recoil in your hand like a traditional firearm

If it malfunctions, it is going to make your day a very bad one, but shortly thereafter you will be too dead to care.


Really, dont handwave away the dangers of packing that much energy into that small a package. Just dont.

[Catmeat]

So dont roll a one with a plasma weapon

[smjjames]

Or use it as a ship (or fighter) mounted weapon than handheld. That way if it malfunctions, there probably won't be loss of life.

Probably.....

[GiglameshDespair]

We have discussed lasers quite a bit.

Remember that Airborne missile defence lasers have been tested and used to destroy missiles. While those two in particular were discontinued, laser defence systems are still in development.

For plasma weapons, I guess there's MARAUDER, a plasma railgun, but that was cancelled sometime after 1995 for the difficulties in obtaining adequate range. I believe that was intended to be an orbital weapon.

[wierd]

Magnetic plasma containment only holds plasma projectiles together. It does not prevent diamagnetic materials, like air, from coming into contact with the projectile.

The plasma projectile is like a "super ionically charged dense hot fluid".  As soon as it touches matter with electrons, it greedily rips them off, and ceases being plasma. at that point it stops being containable by the bottle, and flares out as a cloud of really hot, exotic gas compounds. (things like NOX, Ozone, and other compounds produced from the high energy nature of the plasma) Plasma rounds would "leave a smell" in the air.

Due to this interaction, the only way to get any kind of range in atmosphere would be to accelerate the plasma projectile to a significant fraction of C.  Accelerating ANYTHING to a significant fraction C would pretty much make any kind of armored defense useless, and costs so much energy to accomplish i wont even discuss how laughably improbable that is. (Maybe if you harness dark energy or something, but then firing the weapon would alter how space expands in the local area, and could have far reaching consequences.)

In space, a plasma projectile is just fine. Can be quite sublight in nature, and can pack one hell of a whollop.  Just dont use it in atmosphere.

[Tack]

Energy requirements kinda go out of the window when we hit theoretical fiction.
Between nuclear fusion and whatever we end up doing with quantums, pocket generators should be an easy sell.
Considering we already have lasers which can light fires and are about the same size as a flashlight, it's also not entirely unfeasible (unless lasers also follow some type of inverse cube law).

Plasma I have no idea.

ERA.

If I'm not mistaken, the tank just lobbed a claymore at an offending projectile.
That is not what I expected APS to be...

Edit: re: big science fallacies- laser guns shooting in bursts.
I assume star-wars style lasers could never actually happen?

Lasers do shoot in bursts, as you well know. You won't see them move though.

I meant in self-contained projectiles.
A "burst" fire laser would just be turning it on and off really quickly, and would also be kinda counterproductive.

[wierd]

to give you an idea...

You would need confinement/containment on par with what the LHC uses. The LHC basically accellerates a few picograms of hydrogen plasma (naked protons) to a significant fraction of C, then smashes them into each other. Thatns what it does.

The complex requires a small fission plant to operate, and the low density plasma it produces is able to burn through a steel plate in under a second. (and would produce copious radiation at the target in the process.) It requires a campus big enough to put a very large college on top of to be able to control the trajectory of the plasma as it gets accelerated.

Early in the LHC's life, the helium cooled superconductive coils that produce the magnetic confinement needed to compress and accelerate the plasma malfunctioned and "clenched".  The damage this did to the accelerator was.... substantial. The energy going through the coils is nontrivial.

Shrinking this to something you could mount on even a space fighter means a weapons system malfunction would blow the ship apart like a bomb. Thats just the magnets clenching. We arent even factoring the energy in the plasma there.

We are talking a weapon system that accelerates more than just a few picograms of material. More in the order of the 10s of grams, to the Kg ranges (for starships). When I say the energy needs are nontrivial, I mean it.

[Tack]

So... Only on unmanned vehicles then?
Bring Back the Fire Ships!

[Virex]

There are theories that say that Ball Lightning is a form of self-contained plasma. If true, this would mean it's possible to have a self-contained plasma in an atmosphere that's stable over relatively long time scales, from seconds to minutes. In fact, experiments with self-contained plasma vortices in atmospheric conditions have already allowed for low-energy vortices that are stable over distances of two feet: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-plasma-device-revolutionize-energy-storage.html.


Note also that the problems ascociated with the high energy densities needed for plasma weapons outlined above by wierd also exist for high power laser weapons. In fact the "laser-based anti-missile system" needed a whole Boeing 747 full of equipment to generate pulses strong enough to shoot down missiles and missiles are not known for having a lot of armor or being particularely reflective. Miniaturizing an entire 747 worth of high-voltage equipment is bound to lead to a few unintended laser-to-handheld grenade conversions.

[wierd]

The fly in the ointment is in trying to make it be more than just really hot, charged gas, and into something that delivers both chemical and kinetic punches to a target.

The plasma will be... "pressurized."

[Virex]

Reaching a high enough speed to kill something or someone by kinetic damage alone is unlikely for self-stabilized plasmas because if they need a vortex ring to stabilize themselves they are limited to the speed of sound. However, a plasma can cause significant electrical shocks so it is in theory not impossible to engineer a self-contained plasma that would lose containment at a certain position, at which point it would shower the area around it with lightning bolts. Not to mention that high temperature and density plasma made of the right material can carry a lot of heat which could set fire to objects in the surrounding area.

In other words, it would be less like a plasma blaster and more like a lightning/incendiary grenade launcher.

Also, in case someone needs to pack a lot of power in a small package for a story, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy

[Rolepgeek]

Subsonic ammunition can kill people. If there's sufficient mass in the projectile, it could probably manage it. Not against armor, probably, but still. Thermal energy helps there.

Merely sonic speeds would also explain the rate of travel of the blaster bolts in Star Wars.
Also,  don't forget Explosive Power Generators, for compact energy needs.

[Virex]

True, but I find it hard to imagine that a bolt of plasma could be made which is both self-stabilizing and as dense as lead.