laser weapons

[Ryconn]

before you hate me I am not saying they would be effective I am saying they could be mining lasers and maybe used in combat to weaken armor so bullets can penetrate it.(they would consume a ton of energy aswell forgot about that.)

[SuperWarDog]

im down for that idea but I doubt they will add it in the game

[Skcarkden]

Originally posted by SuperWarDog:

im down for that idea but I doubt they will add it in the game

Are you kidding? How could they possibly pass up lasers D:

[Jimmiefan]

Originally posted by Skcarkden:

Originally posted by SuperWarDog:

im down for that idea but I doubt they will add it in the game

Are you kidding? How could they possibly pass up lasers D:

As much as lasers would be fun to have, they would have to get them balanced, like rockets. I personally don't think the devs will add lasers, it's still a possibility, expecially for modders.

[Mr B.]

Feasibility wise, it's easily possible. The 2 main issues of laser based weapons have been resolved in Space engineers.

1. Power - Theres those reactors generating gigajoules of energy.

2. Refraction - In space theres no atmosphere, thus much less reducing the power of the beam as we currently have on the planet.

Also far easier to cool.

[Darenkel]

Beam Lasers (like beam arrays from Star Trek) would probably be much harder to balance than a laser cannon (Star Wars style lasers), due to one doing constant damage to an area with little to no travel time, while the other does all of its damage in a small area and has a travel time similar to a missile.

[Gorrir]

The thing with laser is that if you take a blue laser for example you just need so paint the object blue and the laser would do nothing at all to it.

[Hotel Kilo]

Originally posted by Gorrir:

The thing with laser is that if you take a blue laser for example you just need so paint the object blue and the laser would do nothing at all to it.

or how if you get a black balloon and a laser it usually doesnt work, so maybe if your ship is black you wont get affected by the lasers.

[Master Zone]

I think we should have laser weapons, I mean we already have laser as weapons in real life right now.

[dusttraveller]

If you look at how lasers are currently used today, they are essentially low damage, high accuracy weapons that have to be trained on a target for significant amounts of time to destroy them.

While there is no atmosphere or particulate matter to cause beam dispersal through specular reflection, lasers do have a focal point where the beam is focused. Anything closer than that focal point isn't getting a fully concentrated beam. Past the focal point, the beam begins to disperse, widening out and gradually lose concentration.

Picture it kind of like an hourglass, where the bottleneck in the glass is the focal point, where the beam is the most concentrated and thus the most powerful, and the gradually widening areas past and before the focal point representing less and less concentration and thus less and less energy delivered to target. Unless the beam has an autocollimater, basically a telescope of transfer optics which can adjust the focal point of the beam, it's going to have a fixed distance where it is the most effective.

Interestingly though, the farther from the focal point the target is, the more likely that SOME energy will be transfered on target, because the beam has a wider "cross section".

Real lasers don't make good science fiction weapons in games because real lasers are not terribly dramatic weapons. The pew pew lasers you see in most depictions of them are laughably false, especially in vacuum. Even if a laser is operating in a wavelength of light that is visible to the eye, (most lasers are not, the lasers I worked with were predominately Mid-IR spectrum, and were completely invisible to the eye) unless there is some vapor or matter for the beam to specularly reflect off of, it is completely invisible. This is because one of the criteria which must be met in order to meet the definition of a laser is that the photons must all be traveling in the same direction, and if all the photons of a beam are traveling in the same direction, none of the photons which make it up are hitting your eye. When you see a laser through fog or after it hits a target, you are seeing what is called specular radiation, the photons are striking the object or vapor droplets and are being skewed off course, and some of them finally reach your eye to be registered.

Watch a video of those test fires they do at drones. You'll see a glowing dot (that can only be seen because the camera is an IR camera) that gradually heats up the drone until its flight surfaces catch fire and it falls out of the sky. While there is some really cool stuff you can do with that laser (they can accurately pick up incoming mortar shells and focus the laser on them before they hit the ground, essentially frying them until they either explode or simply fail to work and become duds) it isn't terribly dramatic. I gather the creators of this game kinda want to keep the weapons at least relatively realistic.

Now, that being said, guided missiles should certainly be a thing, and THAT'S where lasers come into their own, because a laser can be both a targetting tool, and a countermeasure. Any missile which detects radiated heat and tracks it (your heatseeking missiles) can be blinded with a laser operating in the same wavelength it is looking for. Actually that's what I used to build for a living, is multiband Mid-IR laser missile countermeasures. A detector senses the gas plume from a missile launch and orients a laser turret at the missile, which fires a Mid-IR laser at the incoming missile, blinding it. If the missile can't see the target its seeking for, it has a much lower chance of hitting, especially if the pilot adjusts his course.

So realistically, either lasers would be antifighter weapons with low damage but high accuracy (speed of light, you don't have to lead the target) that steadily chip away at the targets structure and can't really be dodged because they're invisible, probably only detectable by a bright glowing spot on the hull of the ship they're aimed at, or they would be targetting tool/antimissile countermeasure.

This of course ignores the possible use of them as a form of secure communication, but I'm not going to get into that.

[Master Zone]

But since we already have laser weapons now (no matter how weak), imagine what they will be like in 100 years time. I think in 100 years laser weapons are going to be much more deadly.

I mean look at normal guns now and then look at them 100 years ago.

[dusttraveller]

Certainly there may be advances, but the laws of physics aren't going to change. So they aren't going ot be visible, at least, not until they vaporize part of the armor block they're hitting and the vapor causes specular radiation.

[Gogdog The Magnificent]

If you really wanted to make it accurate, then you could add fluff saying the suit's built-in computer gives you a visual on your screen. But seriously, I'm sure if they did add lasers they would make it visible, I mean you can't actually hear rockets and explosions in space, but that's in there regardless.

[SamanionX]

All of this sounds interesting, but if you want to, then just pitch these myriad of ideas to the devs.

[Cafnuar]

Or you could have a laser aimed at a receiver and it could be a way send energy through spacers long as there was no atmosphere in the way there would be nothing to stop the laser from transmitting energy from one station to another about 50km away

[Zefnoly]

Dudes... Stop flaming lasers as SCI-FI. I have seen the guns the americans have tested on their boats that can burn down large drone planes in seconds... I'm stil suprized this game doesn't have it yet. (Take in mind that the navy gun was on earth in atmosphere doing this. In space it would melt stuff even faster)