Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[wierd]

In space, maybe. (nothing to steal energy from the plasma projectile)

In atmosphere? No. would decay the instant it left the barrel.

[Rolepgeek]

Could be less dense, but larger (especially longer).

[Tack]

Another question: so regardless of magnetic fields being used, wouldn't a handheld plasma projector inevitably degrade at an alarming rate?
Not sure if traditional steel's melting point is higher than air's ... "Plasmising?" Point, but it'd need just as much extensive heat management as the previously discussed armor.

[wierd]

Inside of the barrel is coated with high temperature ceramic, and the plasma does not touch the barrel at all. The coating  is to keep it from being irradiated by the strong "light" emissions of the plasma.

Mostly, the heat will come from resistence in the containment and mag coils of the accelerator.

[Tack]

How which are?
The closest any popular sci-fi lasers have gotten to it is WH40k, and in that lasers have more of a "crack and fizzle", rather than a "click on, click off".
Sort of like there's a tertiary coil being filled from the battery pack and then power for the shot being dumped from there.

Which IMO is a cool, if possibly inefficient use of laser.

[Amperzand]

While usually so rapid as to be undetectable to an unaided human, any high-energy laser pretty much needs to be pulsed, since each impact produces a plasma burst that blocks any further beam for a fraction of a second. One suggestion I've seen pulsed about a thousand times over approximately a millisecond, with something around 20-20kW in a 1mm dot.

As for not firing for longer than that, and indeed your suggestion, a stable long-term storage "battery" likely doesn't have the instantaneous energy output of a capacitor bank, which usually can't hold a charge for very long. So yes, it is seemingly likely that your main battery would be used to charge a separate capacitor bank between shots.

The same likely applies to railguns, and possibly most other DE weapons.

[Amperzand]

Because sustained fire reduces the efficiency, with plasma bloom at the impact site obstructing the beam. If you give it a few microseconds to clear out between pulses, it's much more efficient.

[Tack]

So modulated beam is great and logical.
What about actual, intermittent, visible to the naked eye burst fire?

... Why do we use burst fire with conventional weapons? Ammo conservation or Accuracy?

[GiglameshDespair]

Both. Fully automatic is hard to control, and thus inaccurate. Burst fire modulates that a bit.

As far as I know, a standard amount of ammunition an American soldier carries in the field is 210 rounds. The M4 has a rate of fire of what, ~800 rpm on automatic?
 I don't remember precisely, but it's probably around that ballpark. So as you can see, if they always shot in fully-automatic they'd run out of ammo very quickly.

[Tack]

Plus I guess stressed out soldiers tend to get trigger-happy.

[Parsely]

If you need to shoot accurately, single is perfect, and it's perfectly adequate for suppressing a target, but if you REALLY need to put a lot of lead downrange you can just flip to burst and hammer the trigger.

[Tack]

Well last I heard modern ballistic armor isn't really able to stop a standard 5.56.
Whether or not the source is credible...

[Dirst]

Marines usually use single fire in normal circumstances though.

Apparently there is no situation they would ever use fully auto.

You use "the weapon's highest setting" when engaging aircraft or if you're on point and make sudden contact with the enemy.  Full-auto makes sense in those situations, but the problem is that full-auto got used in a lot of other situations (like suppressive fire) where it basically just wasted ammo.  So the M16A2 had a three-round-burst mode instead of a full-auto mode.  As GUNIN mentioned, you can always pull the trigger a bunch of times.

(If you have ever looked inside an M16A2, a burst mechanically fires semi-auto three times, as opposed to doing full-auto for a set period of time/rounds.  My guess is that this was to prevent soldiers from field-modifying it back into a full-auto mode.  I looked at the mechanism because I was... curious.  Yeah, that's it. *whistles*)

[Parsely]

Well last I heard modern ballistic armor isn't really able to stop a standard 5.56.

Soft ballistic armor will keep you safe from fragments and small caliber rounds but not a powerful rifle round.

[Amperzand]

Whereas ceramic and steel can stop up to full-power rifles, but not magnum rifles or AM rifles.

In other news, I've been thinking about high-density explosive/propellant compounds. Things with roughly the same mass-power ratio of standard gunpowder and high explosives, but a factor of ten denser. It would, I feel, allow some interesting variations upon standard themes.