Plasma Based Weaponry vs. Lasers in the real world

[General_Finley]

So I was looking through a few sites like DARPA, Lockheed martin, Boeing, and so on, looking for any modern day real world atempts at creating a plasma weapon like what we see in Stargate but I only found three (projects MARAUDER, Shiva Star, and MEDUSA) and all have lost funding and been discontinued. Today most of the research into directed energy wepons is more or less focused on laser weapons, while the only plasma based projects are shields(DARPAS working on them) and cloaking devises(The Russians are inventing a new form of stealth through plasma fields don't ask me how, I don't know). So I was wondering what everyone thought of this, I mean which would be a more devistating weapon? Is it wise to put all are eggs in one basket? And which do you think we should focus more on?

[thekillman]

well the only weapon in stargate that can actually be built in Real Life is the zat. essentially, you use a laser to create a conduit through the air (by ionizing it) and then fire an electrical discharge.


i bet Lasers will be most popular, combined with more advanced missiles and other types of radiation weapons, like the PHaSr

[ggf31416]

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/...maWeapons.html

[K^2]

Plasma is a bad idea all around. Projectiles and lasers are where it's at.

[General_Finley]

well the only weapon in stargate that can actually be built in Real Life is the zat. essentially, you use a laser to create a conduit through the air (by ionizing it) and then fire an electrical discharge.


i bet Lasers will be most popular, combined with more advanced missiles and other types of radiation weapons, like the PHaSr

actually DARPA recently tested there first operational Ion cannon, granted it is nowhere near as powerful as the Tollan Ion cannon but it is a step in the right direction.
ggf31416 obviously the writer of that page hasn't looked at any of the projects that I listed, the main reason they were canceled wasn't because they were failures (although the Shiva Star technically failed at its purpose of being a space based orbital bombardment weapon, but you can't start a working on a new form of weapon and expect it to be able to destroy cities from space can you?) they were canceled because of budget issues. Project MARAUDER got past the problem of blooming by firing a dense toroid shaped plasma projectile held together with a magnetic field and fired at a velocity between 3,000 and 10,000 Km per hour. This would have been impossible only twelve years ago but advances in containing a fusion reaction for energy purposes have opened up the opportunity to create all sorts of sci-fi weapons.

[Alan Wake]

I found this article interesting

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...1CBcQD98HFHGG3

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,522857,00.html

Kind of scary though. I'm sure money can be better spent then trying to fund research for a plasma weapon.

[Ouroboros]

So I was looking through a few sites like DARPA, Lockheed martin, Boeing, and so on, looking for any modern day real world atempts at creating a plasma weapon like what we see in Stargate but I only found three (projects MARAUDER, Shiva Star, and MEDUSA) and all have lost funding and been discontinued. Today most of the research into directed energy wepons is more or less focused on laser weapons, while the only plasma based projects are shields(DARPAS working on them) and cloaking devises(The Russians are inventing a new form of stealth through plasma fields don't ask me how, I don't know). So I was wondering what everyone thought of this, I mean which would be a more devistating weapon? Is it wise to put all are eggs in one basket? And which do you think we should focus more on?

In the real world lasers are a lot more practical. Plasma based weapons have a whole host of drawbacks, mainly boiling down to you're essentially trying to fire a stream of superheated gas at someone. Plasma, like gas, naturally wants to disperse itself in all directions, which makes it an extrmely lousy choice for a directed beam type weapon.

If plasma weapons ever do become a reality it's much more likely to be in the form of some kind of grenade or flamethrower type weapon.

[K^2]

Can someone please just explain to me why you even WANT plasma as a weapon? (Living out your sci-fi dreams doesn't count.) A good weapon needs to deliver a LOT of energy to the target. Plasma has TERRIBLE energy density. And even if you manage to build a good high energy plasma beam, it takes a relatively weak magnetic field to disperse it.

Why not build X-Ray lasers? You cannot reflect or block an X-Ray beam. It will simply cause everything within a target to heat up dramatically, regardless of shielding. Granted, we are no closer to building one of these than we are to building a plasma cannon, but at least I can see why you'd want one.

[Ouroboros]

Can someone please just explain to me why you even WANT plasma as a weapon? (Living out your sci-fi dreams doesn't count.) A good weapon needs to deliver a LOT of energy to the target. Plasma has TERRIBLE energy density. And even if you manage to build a good high energy plasma beam, it takes a relatively weak magnetic field to disperse it.

Why not build X-Ray lasers? You cannot reflect or block an X-Ray beam. It will simply cause everything within a target to heat up dramatically, regardless of shielding. Granted, we are no closer to building one of these than we are to building a plasma cannon, but at least I can see why you'd want one.

I want an antineutron beam for my spaceship. All the same fun of a neutral particle beam, now with the added taste of anti-matter!

[K^2]

Neutrons are unstable, costly to produce, and are fairly neutral to most forms of interaction. (Hence the name.) Why not simply have a complete anti-matter stream? Have anti-neutrons, anti-protons, and positrons there combined into some sort of a ferofluid. No more hassle to produce than a bunch of anti-neutrons, but this stuff will at least be easy to store, accelerate, and aim.

[thekillman]

why not nuke your enemy...

[K^2]

Because anti-matter has two orders of magnitude better energy density than any nuclear device, and it's a lot easier to destroy a nuke than to divert the anti-matter stream heading your way.

[thekillman]

than to divert the anti-matter stream heading your way.

fire a matter beam at it.


oh why not use a Pain Ray Gun

[Splitsecond]

Neutrons are unstable, costly to produce, and are fairly neutral to most forms of interaction. (Hence the name.) Why not simply have a complete anti-matter stream? Have anti-neutrons, anti-protons, and positrons there combined into some sort of a ferofluid. No more hassle to produce than a bunch of anti-neutrons, but this stuff will at least be easy to store, accelerate, and aim.

Anti-protons and positrons are very hard to produce, even harder to store and almost impossible to aim outside and accelerator. As for anti-neutrons, what's the point, they're just neutrons. It's far better to have 14+TeV protons, they work just as well as anti-protons. The same goes for positrons, at high centre of mass energies a matter-matter collision is as energy-releasing as a matter-antimatter collision of the same centre of mass energy. You'll still find it nearly impossible to get a good beamsize at the target. You may hit particles between you and the target, which will disrupt the beam with secondary particles. You'll lose a lot of energy because the target is effectively stationary. Also the accelerator weapon will likely be several 100s of kilometers in length/circumference. Furthermore the beam is in fact a sequence of pulses and is not a continuous beam. One other thing, cosmic rays are much more powerful than any particle beam we can hope to produce and they don't destroy spaceships, cities, tanks, aircraft, ships or people so it's impossible for a lower power beam to do anything like that.

and it's a lot easier to destroy a nuke than to divert the anti-matter stream heading your way.

Diverting an antimatter beam is really easy. They do it all the time at a large number of accelerators. The magnetic field you would need to turn the beam by 90 degrees is not too large given the energies we are realistically capable of creating using a weaponised accelerator.

[thekillman]

one answer: LAZORS