TheFlatline said:
segara82 said:
Okay. Something like a lasgun would have to have an energy output in the megawatt range. Maybe only one megawatt. That's 1000 kilowatts. Right now, a battery the size of a fridge can store 20 kilowatts. So 50 fridge sized batteries that weigh several hundred pounds each would generate one megawatt laser shot. And those liquid core batteries don't output all that power at once. The prototype outputs that energy over 4 hours or so. Most deep-storage batteries with high density don't output all at once, which you'd need to be a practical weapon. Having even a 3-5 second recharge time between shots while a capacitor fills up is simply not practical compared to a solid state projectile. We simply do not know how to store massive amounts of suddenly-releasable power in the megawatt range and do it in something that is roughly the size of a man's fist aside from capacitors, which carry their own issues.
Basically, we're several orders of magnitude away in both weight and size, and let's say one or two orders of magnitude away on storage. We haven't come *that* far in 30 years as far as batteries are concerned.
On top of that, laser effective range is generally considered to be a non-constant. Lasers will encounter temperature and humidity changes during it's flight, which will cause diffusion. Over long ranges (say half a mile for a long las?) right now the Air Force is unsure if performance would be steady enough to make worth while. And that's a law of physics, not a technology hurdle that needs to be overcome.
It might be feasible some day, but right now there aren't even theories out there for how to solve those logistics. My guess is that if laser/energy based weapons are to be feasible, it won't be batteries that supply power, it will be small-scale generators providing power directly to an array of ultra-efficient capacitors, bypassing batteries (which the chemists have always lagged behind the physicists) entirely. With, say, 10 capacitors in an array, if it takes 2 seconds to charge a capacitor, you could sustain a higher rate of fire for longer.
Even then, if you could produce power that efficiently, say cold (or at least contained) fusion, then it'd probably be much deadlier to unleash that level of power as plasma than as a laser.
You are correct there, the physics of energy containment are a long way off, if at all even possible. Your last statement is a thinker, plasma can be very deadly when super heated far enough (Plasma is a 4th state of matter, the sun for instance is considered to be in the plasma state, rather then a gas state). We know how to generate extremely powerful lasers, we don't know how to generate extremely hot plasma and contain it, let alone finding a way to then project it. Your only hope would be to use magnetic fields, which for those who care to know is how most people assume a light saber would function.
