Energy Weapons VS Ballistic Weapons

[John Q. Mayhem]

You know, Dune is one of my favorite SF books. In it, there are cheap, widespread personal shield generaters that stop fast-moving things, but if you're good, you can slip something in slowly. Also, they exploded if struck by a laser (there were no other energy weapons). Huge explosion, that is. Short blades and slow dart thrusters were the weapons used by most peoples. Perhaps not entirely realistic, but Dune is so incredibly good that little things are forgiveable

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

Sci-fi is all over the map on this topic.

Stargate SG-1 had an alien threat called the replicators. They were immune to energy weapons, but slug-throwers turned them into confetti.

Having said that, you NEVER saw an advanced race using firearms. They always had energy weapons. Even the Jaffa, who used energy weapons that were both inaccurate and easy to dodge. Doh.

Firefly/Serenity, Aliens, and the new Battlestar Galactica all have personal firearms.

Babylon 5 used PPGs, which were basically a mix between an energy weapon and a firearm.

David Brin's uplift universe uses literally every tech imagineable. Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn used kinetic weapons even in space combat. Larry Niven's Known Space had flashlight lasers, monomolecular swords, and a variety of odd weapons.

Star Wars and Star Trek both had hand-held energy weapons, as did Buck Rogers and the original Battlestar Galactica. Nobody seemed to use anything else.

 

[Storyteller01]

A home-brew campaign setting I played in used both. Some races had energy weapons; others used kinetic energy. One race had the UPS (Universal Problem Solver). Accelerated anything that could fit in the breach to near light speeds. Effectively unlimited ammo; whatever you could grab worked.

One Shadowrun story used kinetic tech at near nuclear levels. Dropped VW sized chunks of metal with guidance systems from orbit. Gravity did the work. And this is a setting with magic that bypasses armor.

In a 'Berserkers' shortstory, humans developed kinetic weapons that used their C-drives (the ships engines, essentially).

 

[hobgoblin]

the shadowrun tech your talking about is known as a thor shot. basicly a mass of metal dropped from orbit

most recent use was by lofwyr (A german dragon owning one of the biggest companys in the world), who used it to obliverate a troublemakers residence after the corporate court (basicly the only "entity" that can "order" the mega corps around) gave the green light on what was known as a omega order (basicly open season on whatever the order is about).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Larry Niven had at least one story in which masses were accelerated to high percentages of C to use against the Kzinti.

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

In a 'Berserkers' shortstory, humans developed kinetic weapons that used their C-drives (the ships engines, essentially).

Well, they fired mostly solid missiles with C-drives, IIRC.

Man, I love Berserker. One of these days I'm going to read Saberhagen's Holmes Dracula Files.

 

[Ralts Bloodthorne]

Given a big enough Future society, you'd want to be careful when going to the field against your opponents.

Say you could only pack one kind of shield. You guess, by thier progress level, they've entirely abandoned kinetic weapons, so you load up on energy deflection shields.

And catch a mass driver shot in the teeth.

Or, you load up on kinetic dispersion fields...
And eat a nuke-pumped guided X-Ray laser.

Both have thier advantages, from amount of contaminates in the atmosphere (a planet with a high level of micro-fine light refractive crystals in the atmosphere) that degrade energy weapon use to long distances that prohibit energy weapons.

Thus, without getting into the arguement on which is better (which makes for an interesting campaign background seque) I still posit that neither weapons will ever go out of style.

 

[Pbartender]

Larry Niven had at least one story in which masses were accelerated to high percentages of C to use against the Kzinti.

In fact, most of Larry Niven's heavy ship-board weapons consisted of simply turning the ass-end of your starship toward your enemy and giving them a face full of fuson exhaust. ...After all, when your accelerating at 100's of G's and travelling at almost the speed of light, engine wash suddenly becomes a very dangerous thing.

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

In Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, rebels on the moon use mass drivers to bombard locations on Earth. The only implausible part is that:

a) The moon has been sending ore to Earth this way for years, yet
b) the Earth government is so clueless about this potential weapon that they allow tourists to gather at the announced target point to "laugh at the moonies."

Of course, using a mass driver as a weapon when the book was written (mid-60s) was still a new concept in the real world...but it wouldn't have been for the society in the book.

Thor shot was used to great effect in Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. You will also find nuke-boosted x-ray lasers, and the use of both lasers and controlled nuclear blasts to launch a ship into orbit.

My favorite weapon, though, is probably the multi-purpose firearm used to "pay" mercenaries in The Fifth Element. "A real warrior would have asked what the red button was for." There was actually a more plausible version of this described in some of Dan Simmons' novels (in the Hyperion series).

 

[hobgoblin]

heh, i find it funny that no-one jumped on my replicator gun idea

or maybe it have been tought about before?