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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agemegos" data-source="post: 2796759" data-attributes="member: 18377">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 thinking of machineguns, anti-personnel rounds fired from mortars and guns, hand grenades, etc. I see no sign that they are vanishing from the battlefield.Nope. The leaves, smoke particles etc. disperse the beam by diffraction and Rayleigh scattering. And if you pump enough energy down the beam to burn them away, the heating induces thermal bloom. Lasers are lousy at penetrating light cover.Invisible wavelengths are all very well until you start trying to pump enough energy down the beam to burn your way through smoke and leaves, evacuate an air-channel to overcome thermal bloom, and then deliver enough energy to burn through ablative armour and inflict a dissabling wound, all in a fraction of a second (soldiers don't stay still for a second after they have been hit). Then you are talking about a beamso intense that it heats the air to incandescence, and your 'invisible' laser beam is about as inconspicuous as the invisible electric current in a lightning bolt.That's because the low power of the flame did not deliver enough energy to heat the paper to its ignition point (451 Fahrenheit, of course) in the short time. Take into account that the paper was losing heat to radiation and convection even while the flame was heating it, and you will see that the low power is a significant issue. Any sort of effect laser weapon is going to have to deliver at least a kilojoule to an area no larger than a few millimetres across in a small fraction of a second. That will start fires.More often they are delivered by grenade launchers, mortars, and artillery pieces. Remember that we are talking about energy weapons replacing ballistic weapons in general, not just energy smallarms replacing ballistic smallarms.That won't be as effective or as long-lasting as CS gas, glue-guns etc. Such a beam is unlikely, for example, to penetrate street clothing.Possibly you are better-informed than I. My understanding was that  we don't yet have a laser smallarm that is powerful enough to injure as well as light enough to carry, even if it is plugged in to the mains. Not to mention that the large lasers we have are delicate and need cooling. The power issue involves weapons that fit in a 747 and are intended for anti-missile use, not weapons that are small enough or rugged enough for troops to take into ground combat.By the way, you ought not to talk of delivering 'watts within the time needed'. Watts are a unit of power, ie. a unit of the rate at which energy is generated, delivered or consumed. The issue is delivering joules within the time needed, or in short developing enough watts.</blockquote>

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