>gun that shoots bulletor>gun that shoots laser/plasma/energyWhich is superior? What are the pros and cons of each?
Both is best, like in Battletech
>>94818099Nothing about Battletech has ever been good. They stole their entire concept from GW Knights.
>>94818099This. The simple fact is that they will each have their own advantages based on situation, because the defenses that work against one will be largely ineffective against another. For example, lasers. Imagine you have man-portable efficient laser technology. You can dial the power up and down as needed from 'bright light' to 'starts fires at a distance' to 'makes a man's arm explode off his body because you vaporized the water in him into steam in an instant'. All you need is electricity, so as long as you have enough spare batteries to get through the fight and a place to recharge them, logistics are extremely simple. Lasers, however, dramatically lose effectiveness during bad weather. Anything that fucks with visibility fucks with lasers. Your range and damage can go to shit just because its humid. On top of that, anti-laser coatings that disperse or reflect away a majority of the heat are cheap and will take multiple hits to burn away. So while in idea conditions the laser is a very efficient and cost effective weapon, in bad conditions or against prepared opponents that stops being true. Solid projectile weapons are much less prone to those specific concerns, but have their own. They need physical ammunition that its easier to run out of, requiring constant resupply. While humidity doesn't fuck with their aim, distance and wind does. And if lasers exist in the setting, then automated defense arrays might very well exist that can track and vaporize small bullets from midair before they reach their target, or at least blast them enough to alter their trajectory and effectively randomize their path into being a probable miss. Not enough to stop mass gunfire, obviously, but certainly enough to make small groups of enemy attackers do nothing more than trip your alarm and discourage hit and run style attacks.
>>94817997Energy weapons all the way.>how it worksIt shoots laser you keep on your target and after couple seconds target gets hit with nuke from orbit.
>>94818233Personally, what I would want for my future-tech soldiers is to be carrying the best solid projectile weapon for the job, but to have shoulder mounted laser weapons with computer-assisted targeting linked to a heads up display. Think something like the Plasmacaster that Predators use. The advantages here, then, are that you can tag a target with your HUD and then let the computer take care of letting of aiming the laser and burning that down, which is essentially fire and forget while you use your hands and rifle to engage whatever else you want. You now can use your laser to pick off targets to conserve gun ammo, engage multiple targets at once depending on how advanced your targetting computer is, focus multiple weapons worth of fire on a single target per soldier, and if you are really lucky act as a portable defense array for the laser to shoot down missiles or bullets. If you are future enough to be operating in space, you would want to have a computer controlled laser on you anyway, because laser communication is what you are going to want to be using most of the time instead of radio anyway. No reason it can't be the same machine, the laser hardware itself doesn't change much between functions its the software package that matters.
>>94818239
>>94817997That would depend on the game system and the relevant rules. Can you please specify which game you're talking about?
>>94818325Go away.
>>94818325Oh of course. The system or setting you yourself prefer.
>>94818173Ironic shitposting is still shitposting.
>>94817997Energy weapons
>>94818233I think your modeling is inaccurate. Even assuming some insane density of power storage, you would probably just use a more penetrative wavelength like a UV or maser, and the potential alternate wavelengths make optically reflective defenses ineffective unless you know which specific frequency your enemy is using. If they mix and match at a squad level you'd need heavy multi-layer defences that might still just have the outer layers absorb it all and soak you in heat. Actually a super-absorbative armour with an aerogel insulation might be more reliable. Also, is this a "burst" laser or a time on target laser? If burst then you have some exotic form of laser generation, you might be able to cycle wavelengths as part of the pulse like a startreck phaser>>94817997Depends on if your target has graphine-composite nanoarmour or is sufficiently borged out to dodge bullets. Kinetics have a simple beauty to them. Theres a famous quote that goes "a stake to the heart and decapitation are highly favourable tactics since they also work on non-vampires", and for bullets thats absolutely true. They're extremely cheap and reliable. Lasers have advantages too, but they're really more for leveraging size advantage while bullets are for punching up.Personally i prefer the middle-ground, massive and highly unstable exotic particles emitted at a high fraction of C. All the speed of a laser with the burst and pen of a shell
>>94818233WRONG
>>94817997>Which is superior?Generally speaking if your energy weapon isnt strong enough to BTFO conventional weapons then they won't ever be used unless they fill a very specific niche, ballistic weapons are simply too easy to make compared to all the bits and bobs of an energy weapon>What are the pros and cons of each?That entirely depends on the world you're playing in, they all have their reasons for energy weapons to be used over ballistic weapons, Star Wars did by saying armor advanced far enough that slugthrowers simply couldn't keep up and blasters could hold a fuck ton of "ammo" before needing to be reloaded, Fallout did it by saying they were in the process of swapping ballistic weapons with energy counterparts when the bombs dropped so now your average wastelander can find both in equal chances
>>94818325Based post, makes all the nogames seethe.
>>94818660I think that regardless of what wavelength you use, you're still fucked if its raining. Because any raindrop your beam passes through on the way to the target dissipates some percentage of your energy as you boil that water. Water is much more thermodynamically conductive than air. And now you have created a cloud of steam in the path of your beam, which will hamper the focus of your laser and diffuse it. Unless you are intentionally overcharging your laser with more power than you need to make a mortal wound, such energy loss can be the difference between a killing beam and a minor injury. Getting around this would require more power and stronger lasers, which risks changing the math on whether these weapons are cost effective to be using or depleting your batteries much faster than you want to be doing so. This is a problem that doesn't exist with bullets, which can pretty much fire regardless of the weather with at worst an impact to accuracy.
>>94817997Both. Energy weapons emulating projectile weapons, like laser shotguns and shit, is cringe.
>>94818325>>94818785
>>94818347Well that makes whole thread completely pointless because the projectile/energy weapon comparison is not at all consistent between settings and rulesets. Or are you claiming 40k, Star Wars, Battletech, Infinity, and Traveller all follow the same rules in this regard?
>>94818980Why would such consistency be necessary, or even remotely relevant? Do you not understand what a preference is?
>>94819007OP asked whether projectile weapons or energy weapons are better and what their pros/cons are. Your preference doesn't matter, this is an entirely mechanical question that can't be answered unless we know the system we're dealing with.
>>94817997I always thought blasters are lame as fucl
>>94817997Superior in what way, to what? Weapons don't quite work this way, they're made for a task within logistical and tech considerations, or just because.All those weapon concepts work, plasma included, though energy weapons have inherent issues inasmuch as power supplies are concerned, as any sufficiently powerful battery can double as a bomb, all laser and particle weapons can kill you via reflection or radiation backscatter, plasma is hard to weaponize and bombs too and so on.Not to mention that those big power numbers bother a lot of people as logistically inefficient
>>94819036It can be answered as the sci-fi genre and stated weapon types imply certain adherence to even the most surface level takes on physics.The problem is that this thread probably isn't really about that and OP has no actual interest in anything.People on this site are like bots nowadays, except actual public bots can at least provide a passable conversation.
>>94820776/tg/ is a retirement home for old nerds who played games back in 2009 and remember the wellspring of creativity that was old 4chan, but were not a source of it themselves. They don't understand why the people who made the content they enjoyed moved on, and don't have anywhere else to go themselves, so instead we just get cargo-cult tier threads trying to imitate the bygone eras of fruitful discussion but without putting in any of the thought or effort it takes to make such threads thrive themselves, not in their threads and not in anyone elses.I used to make RPGs for /tg/. One of them even blew up to be a longstanding feature of the board that got multiple editions and had an active playerbase here for years. But even by 2016, new fanmade games posted here were decidedly unwelcome and fell off the board basically without comment or interest. I still try to give thoughtful and detailed responses to threads in good faith, and you know what I get for it most of the time? A single question 6 hours later to revive the thread from page 10 that asks for elaboration or clarification on a single part of what I said, and thats the most interaction and discussion that exists in the whole thread besides two nerds having a slapfight over the semantics of a word that ever fantasy setting redefines when they use it anyway. We live in the ruins of the once-great board of /tg/, where people cling to scraps of paintings and call it art.
>>94817997I think someone just needs to invent single use energy weapon cells that you can put and fire from a regular gun, that way modern guns stay in use but the ammo is actually still lethal to more exotic futuristic materials.
>Szymon, give me the pellets, I'm about to run out of ammo!>Laser or regular?>Fuck, he's lived with me for so many years and he still hasn't learned, of course the regular! Laser pellet is less accurate, the wind blows it away!
It's best when you have both.Like Stargate is cool cause everyone has energy weapons except Earth who tear shit up with P90's & C4. Sometimes that's a big advantage.Or like in Starwars how the best way to merc a Jedi is with a shotgun & explosions cause you can't fucking parry that shit as easily.But on the other hand. Everyone loves a death ray. Every fucking person on the fucking planet loves a laser sword. It's a staple of the genre to have some kind of energy weapon. Having a bunch of material based weapons in scifi just comes off as boring & lame
>>94817997The real question is;Do you have interesting enough weapons tech/world building to make things weird but believable?Do you lick your weapons to know how many shots you have left?
>>94817997Rail/gauss guns. Satisfying impact of a kinetic weapon but works in vacuum and has a sufficient sci fi vibe.
>>94817997Plasma has mass. If you can find way to accelerate it fast enough, it should theoretically be the strongest of those. Not sure how you would do it, but a plasma railgun seems pretty cool.
>>94820893>I used to make RPGs for /tg/. One of them even blew up to be a longstanding feature of the board
>>94821228But anon firearms work in vacuum, they even work under water, only with much shorter range because water have greater ressisstance than air.
>>94817997everyone uses percussion cap weapons and cold steel.
Can laser guns be reflected by mirrors and other reflective surfaces? I don't know enough about lasers or science to know how that works.
>>94821361Percussion cap blasters, ray guns and laser guns right? Right?
>>94821250I'm almost imagining a plasma railgun where the plasma part is a bit incidental.>Projectile is accelerated to percentages of the speed of light>Projectile basically turns to plasma from the air friction but remains cohesive because persisting electromagnetic field from the magnetic coils>Atomize target, and everything them in a five meter radiusI admit, the physics there is dodgy at best.>>94817997All of the above. Kinetic, explosive, energy, railguns, etc.In universe, though, I think the big plus of most energy weapons that don't rely on plasma is that they'd be easier on logistics, depending on power consumption and how reuse-able energy cells are. I think it's also going to depend a little on what kind of armor and other personal defenses are available.
>>94821409had an idea for blasters that worked like cap and ball revolvers in that the "chambers" in the cylinder housed charges that would discharge when hit with the hammer (or rather the hammer hit a reactive material in a cap that would "fire" off the charge), but got incredibly volatile afterwards and would need a minute or so to cool down or they'd blow up. So mounting several in a cylinder would make sense and unless they were fired with a slow deliberate manner the gun would still need to cool down before firing again (or the shooter could do the hollywood cylinder swap, although real gunfighters would just carry another gun).But also gunpowder cap and ball firearms in space.
>>94821251
>>94817997Generally I have energy weapons as large scale weapons for vehicles and (space)ships. They require huge amounts of power but they're perfectly accurate and some do fun things like irradiate anybody standing too close to the impact point. Grunts get ballistic weapons. There are a couple of man-portable energy weapons but they have limitations like only being able to fire 10 times before the liquid metal battery solidifies or needing several gallons of Me-163 fuel strapped to your back that will melt you if it's punctured
>>94817997I'll take gravity guns for 500, alex.
>>94821475Kinda like the Treasure Planet guns.
>>94818980The point of the thread is to discuss your preferences. Please be less autistic.
>>94820977based bomba poster
>>94823470OP does not ask for anyone's preferences in any way.
>>94817997>BulletPros: Kinetic impact, physical force harder to circumvent with shielding, shoots well even in harsher environments, even underwater with some gun types.Cons: Not light speed, affected by wind/gravity etc still. More an issue with snipers. Ammo needs to be manufactured. Ammo requirements may get very specific.>Laser/energyPros: light speed hit, can be very precise and deadly for surgical hits on the enemyCons: Energy hog that can overheat, sucks in dense atmospheric conditions due to diffraction and jittering, relies on very good tracking systems.>Plasma (I think they are different from lasers)Pros: Very destructive against organic and soft cybernetics. May have electromagnetic properties, lots of customization on the plasma glob's pattern of destruction possible. Very good shock and awe weapon. Cons: Also an energy hog that can overheat, poor armor peneration compared to lasers, the plasmoids sometimes are slower than bullets.
>>94817997Bullets because energy weapons don't exist and we have no idea what effect if any they'd have on a living target.
>>94824266lasers exist thoughever
>>94817997generally speaking energy weapons are going to be much more high-maintenance, so unless you have some seriously good repairing or replacement options, those shits are going to break down much faster. Ballistic firearms rely on mechanical parts, which are comparatively easy to repair, combined with chemical propellants that tend to remain usable for upwards of fifty years or more (the shelf life of a laser weapon's energy source depends entirely on how it actually works, which is setting-specific)
My dad read a book where they shoot sand at each other in space and it's just a cloud of shit that fucks up your fleet.
>>94825572Sandcasters are a common tactic in Traveller.
>>94817997Well it depends heavily on the system and settings if you wanna know DA TROOF of it.
>>94825572>>94826463How does that work? Are just space ships that weak they get fucked up by little bit of sand?
>>94826533Counters lasers
>>94826678You just vaporise sand with first salvo. Since you can detect release of sand you can also put lasers on lower power just to vaporise sand and hit enemy ship later.
>>94817997Logically the big one would be that lasers transfer heat to things with pinpoint accuracy at extreme speed, making them very useful for engaging distant targets at ranges where the radically slower speed of slugs or flechettes or whatever would compromise their ability to actually hit the target simply because it is also moving. Anti-Missile defense comes to mind here, so would frying lots of drones or even guys.But the mechanical problem with dumping heat via a laser into, say, a tank, should be immediately apparent because a tank is one gigantic heat sink, and if there's one thing which is not going to change it's basic thermodynamics. So for destroying armored targets, maybe bullets will be better, and perhaps the electric limitations of battery size and such will further limit the practicality of lasers--we're not really close to man-portable lasers of offensive practical military use, right now really all you can do with them is blind people, which is probably super effective it just happens to also be a horrific war crime that nobody wants to let out of the bottle.
>>94826727Ok
>>94826533Presumably it's not so much of an offensive strategy as creating fields of particulate matter that would diffuse/weaken lasers, also making them hazardous to move through for the same reason that micrometeors pose a risk to vessels, moving at thousands of kph through a cloud of gravel could be disastrous.
>>94825424This is retarded. My Emerson X-244 Raygun has no moving parts & was inherited by me from my father, who got it from his father, & so on all the way back to the 4th Psychic Gulf Rebellion, when he stripped it from the corpse of a filthy Trencher. This raygun is so well made & calibrated that besides using a bit of Oran oil (Pare's Signature Oran Oil is best by the way) on the H6 crystal it needs no maintenance. Meanwhile your sluggun has a thousand moving parts & if even one goes wrong you are fucked, hell SAND fucks up your sluggun & SAND is the prominentfeature of 90% of every world in the Empire. Plus you need complicated bullets & not all bullets match to a gun. Meanwhile my Emerson's H6 crystal works with any other H6 crystal meaning that if my crystal got damaged from whatever calamity would need to befall to even malign it, I can just pop a back up in & never worry about that again
>>94827837>trusting an Emerson product>in the year of our CyberLord 4057 UCSome people just aren't gonna fuckin make it
>>94828107Let me guess, you're another Topin Tightbeams faggot aren't you? The tightbeams is a fucking meme gun.
>>94818325Ryuutama
>>94821478>>94820893I think I agree that it's an age thing, but I also think that every group of people encounters stuff analogous to this in their lives.
>>94821250You know, typically media present laser weaponry as the low-tier of direct-energy weapons, while in fact I believe it would be OP as fuck against living targets:> Not visible, so you can't see where the fire comes from, and even with right equipment, pinpointing the exact location would be difficult without super speed camera> Hits target instantly> Burns living tissue to a crisp, so one can't even realize they got shot
>laser gun>fires a projectile instead of being a lethal laser pointerI seriously hope you guys don't do this
>>94817997Energy for shields ballistics for armor is my favorite way
>>94826533Micrometeorite damage is one of the key concerns of spacecraft construction
>>94828939Yes but none of spacecraft constructed today have to worry about being fired upon by enemy spacecraft. They don't need to survive railgun or laser shoot.
>>94825572>when the Rebels learn that Vader is Anakin SkywalkerSprinkle some boarding parties consisting entirely of parrots and the Empire is done for.
>>94826727How large do you think a laser beam will be by the time it reaches the target and just how small a sand cloud will be?
>>94829220Are parrots known for using sand-based weapons?
>>94817997There should be pros and cons of each. For instance while laser/plasma/energy can disintegrate, or cause a miniature explosion on a person, the guns that shoot bullets can fire exotic rounds of your homebrewing choice.
