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Maybe, but cost is far from being the only issue. The sheer practical difficulties of generating and transmitting it are a constraint that makes some of your suggestions absurdly impractical. Another issue is that you don't seem to have given any thought at all to the other things you would be...

You must be disappointed.

That's the second viking conquest of England. What about Sweyn Forkbeard? Knut the Great? What was their day job when they weren't ruling England?

Normandy. The Norman kingdom of Sicily. The Rus.

Yeah. But Lord of the Rings has about eight people in the whole world with a demonstrated capacity to cast spells.

This varied according to the conceptions of different writers. In some episodes they are talking about travel to the rim of the galaxy, and in others people are complaining about distances that wouldn't even get you to Mars. What with one thing an another, I recommend that you are best to go...

Besides which, plasmas are very hot, and therefore they radiate heat (see the Sun for an example). Unless that have an enormous volume to surface area ratio, or unless their energy is constantly replenished (eg. by fusion) they cool down. Very quickly. And a cooled-down plasma is essentially a...

That's a ballistic weapon. You also need an absurdly powerful laser. As you will recall from freshman (or maybe sophomore--I don't know the curriculum at your university) physics, the energy and momentum of any photon are related by the equation E = pc. Given perfect reflection you get an...

Property taxes? It isn't given that there are going to be any. They have been rather uncommon historically. Realistic maintenance costs will have to depend strongly on the material of construction. Compared with timber, thatch, and wattle-and-daub, stonework is expensive to build and cheap to...

Because the Norse (vikings) had agriculture.

Isn't that overkill? A millilitre of star-core must contain on the order of 40 MJ of heat alone. Add in the energy of its compression and the gamma rays it contains and you really have something.

Very true. You can only do one thing at a time. Better to do the same thing well time after time than to do a lot of different things in sequence, all of them badly. Besides, some of your 'DDG' feats, although their names sound as though they ought to be basic fighting techniques, are in fact...

I would be interested, for another. Regards, Agemegos

Sounds like a ballistic weapon delivering energy to me. Still, you are right about thinking outside the box.

It was cute. But unfortunately the authors misunderstood their science. Mesons decay exponentially with time. They have a half-life, not a definite life, and the trick would not work.

Indeed not, but it can be done with mortars, grenade-launchers, field guns, and gun-howitzers, all of which are ballistic weapons, and therefore germane to the subject: whether energy weapons are capable of completely displacing ballistic weapons. Perhaps you are thinking of landmines. I an...

Are you interested in the physics? The microwaves that are strongly absorbed by water and useful in a microwave oven have a frequency of 2450 MHz, which implies a wavelength of about 12 cm. Supposing that your microwave rifle had an emitter about the size of a dinner plate, diffraction effects...

Well, recoilless weapons and to some extent weapons with compensators can reduce recoil by throwing something else backwards other than the weapon. But recoil springs, recoil pads and automatic actions can only smooth out the jerk, they can't reduce or absorb momentum. Most especially, they...

On the contrary. In science fiction you are supposed to ask that sort of question. It is in thinly disguised fantasy that you are not supposed to ask how things work and what they do.

You are forgetting about diffraction. The tightest that any beam can be held in principle is a number of radians approximately equal to the wavelength divided by the beam width. In any sort of laser small-arm you are going to keep the beam narrow to give a high intensity at manageable power...