For example: laser rifles or pistols, anything that shoots out concussive energy that you see in sci-fi shooter games. This is obviously in the realm of science fiction but I can’t imagine that kind of technology is impossible to come by. With those weapons they can probably hold up to hundreds of rounds worth of energy/plasma/etc.
What would be the main roadblock with this kind of weaponry?
In: Engineering
Energy density. Explosives and bulllets once fired store a lot of energy. Electrical energy methods are low density for the most part.
After energy density it is a race for a whole bunch of things. I am only good about lasers, but I will try and address some more.
Plasma: Has about the same mass as air and will bounce off it and be cooled by it (guess)
Microwave: Large wavelengths require large emitters for long range. Pretty sure water in the air absorbs it. Metal is pretty good at reflecting it and a lot of things of interest are metal.
Electro-laser: A short pulse of laser light turns the air to plasma. Plasma is conductive. You connect that plasma wire to an electrical source and send electricity through your target. This doesn’t work over long range because the laser has to be absorbed by the air to generate the plasma, but that means the laser is losing power and can’t make more plasma eventually. Then the plasma moves in the air from wind and its own heat, breaking your air wire.
Laser: Needs a lot of power, so is relatively big. Lasers don’t actually go straight, they get bigger with distance. High power lasers get bigger faster unless made very well to make them good beam quality. Even then there are other limitations that fix the max power of a single laser and you kinda have to push them all at once because they are already all being bottlenecks. There are ways to make lots of lasers work together and have good beam quality, which gets you a lot further, but adds even more little bottlenecks and increases size.
If you do the math on the new US aircraft carrier you can see it has a lot more power generation that it can ever hope to use for aircraft carrier things. Try and guess what that extra power will be used for.
There are 2 main problems
1. Batteries arent very energy dense, explosives are. You have to some how justify using a battery to power your device electrically instead of just using explosions
2. Energy dissipates quickly as it travels. Long range lasers dont do damage, concussive energy is just sound (and doesnt work like in video games) and plasma cools and dissipates quickly. Compare this to solid projectiles which dont have any of these problems.
together these mean that the best you can do is a Gauss rifle or rail gun firing a solid projectile, and even then you have to figure out #1.
The closest thing we have right now are the railguns and laser weapons on our warships and Israel’s Iron beam. You need a fuck ton of energy to run this in the shortest burst and the actual weapons are huge.
Unless you know some secret way to make a tank cannon fit into your hand and a nuclear reactor on your back, we’re no where close to sci-fi laser weapons.
Storing mass amounts of power is not super easy. Think about trying to surge strain a battery. I feel like it would melt the connections. Need something to handle high voltage if it was available. I don’t think shared electrical household wiring can supply it. Like ive dropped lights connected to house hold and it fried the wires because they could not handle the current. Go ahead and state if I’m wrong.
For a non-ELI5 answer, check out peruns video on directed energy weapons
[Video](https://youtu.be/JGzL3fZgPZY?si=7WIdNnNHKTrNRly6)
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