01-12-2017, 11:42 AM
It occurred to me that in the press of discussion, your original question sort of got lost in the shuffle. Some thoughts below..
Energy only comes in a limited number of forms. Lasers (or masers), particle beams (in various flavors) and plasma weapons already cover most of those. Projectile weapons cover kinetic energy.
Beyond that you have exotic things like gravity waves or tidal forces. Or maybe dark energy, depending on what it is. But any of those seem to require huge masses (or distances) of one form or another to produce any significant effects. And there's nothing in current physics to make us think that is going to change. You could postulate some kind of exotic matter or energy weapon, but again this seems to require huge energies beyond anything we can produce now and no clear idea that it would do anything in the way of a weapon.
Antimatter will do a number of something and OA does have amat fletchettes and ACER rounds (boom bullets). But those aren't really energy weapons as you've been discussing them here.
Ions are just charged particles. A particle beam weapon is an ion cannon in most cases - unless we're discussing neutral particle beams, which are a bit of a different animal. Not sure what you mean by the laws of physics preventing them.
'Unknown unknowns' are by definition unpredictable and so its not really possible to say anything about what any such hypothetical developments might do one way or the other. Attempting to do so runs a strong risk of turning into either a WAG or an exercise in wishful thinking. Even if more of them appear in a given time period, there's no way to predict whether any of them would have any weapons applications at all, let alone energy weapons applications.
It should also be noted that we also have no way of knowing how many more 'unknown unknowns' are left to discover.
Todd
(01-11-2017, 12:29 PM)Avalancheon Wrote: So my question to you is: What types of energy weapons are there apart from the 'big three', I.E, laser-particle-plasma beams?
Energy only comes in a limited number of forms. Lasers (or masers), particle beams (in various flavors) and plasma weapons already cover most of those. Projectile weapons cover kinetic energy.
Beyond that you have exotic things like gravity waves or tidal forces. Or maybe dark energy, depending on what it is. But any of those seem to require huge masses (or distances) of one form or another to produce any significant effects. And there's nothing in current physics to make us think that is going to change. You could postulate some kind of exotic matter or energy weapon, but again this seems to require huge energies beyond anything we can produce now and no clear idea that it would do anything in the way of a weapon.
Antimatter will do a number of something and OA does have amat fletchettes and ACER rounds (boom bullets). But those aren't really energy weapons as you've been discussing them here.
(01-11-2017, 12:29 PM)Avalancheon Wrote: Do any of them have potential for real world use, or do the laws of physics rule them out of the question (as it does with ion cannons)?
Ions are just charged particles. A particle beam weapon is an ion cannon in most cases - unless we're discussing neutral particle beams, which are a bit of a different animal. Not sure what you mean by the laws of physics preventing them.
(01-11-2017, 12:29 PM)Avalancheon Wrote: Will 'unpredictable' technology of the future enable the creation of weapons like disruptors or blasters? By 'unpredictable', I mean stuff that qualifys as an unknown unknown. Projectrho has a paragraph about this in their futurology section, and how difficult it is to make predictions even 50 years into the future.
''Each new surge is 90 percent what you might have expected from the last one, plus 10 percent magic (in its Clarke’s Law sense). So from the viewpoint of 1920, 90 percent of the gadgets of the (roughly) Manhattan Project through Apollo Project boom would be imaginable (indeed, some, like TV, were abortively available in the previous boom). But 10 percent (lasers, nuclear power, transistors) would be absolutely incomprehensible—magic.''
'Unknown unknowns' are by definition unpredictable and so its not really possible to say anything about what any such hypothetical developments might do one way or the other. Attempting to do so runs a strong risk of turning into either a WAG or an exercise in wishful thinking. Even if more of them appear in a given time period, there's no way to predict whether any of them would have any weapons applications at all, let alone energy weapons applications.
It should also be noted that we also have no way of knowing how many more 'unknown unknowns' are left to discover.
Todd