Fasers, lasers and blaster guns; the go to weapon for just about every science fiction movie or T.V show. Unfortunately
-for all of you nerdy gun nuts out there- such a weapon is unlikely to ever become science fact. The reason for this –if you overlook for a moment the fact that a portable laser powerful enough to burn a hole through a person would require a battery roughly the size of a brick- is that, quite simply, such a device would be almost completely useless as a weapon.
In order to fully understand why this is, it is necessary to look at what makes a gun a useful weapon:
When a bullet hits its target it generally doesn’t just pass straight through, and there’s a reason for this: it’s not designed to. Bullets are SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO leave a messy entrance wound and to be fired with enough force that they will ricochet around inside the target, thereby inflicting the maximum damage possible and maximising the chances of death via bloodloss. If however you contrast this with the effect of a laser you will find that not only does a laser prevent the issue of blood loss by directly cauterising the wound; but also, as the beam has nothing to ricochet off of (unless of course you’ve swallowed a mirror or large prism, in which case you‘ve enough to worry about already) it is going to damage only one small section of tissue. In other words you could potentially cause more damage by throwing a water melon at their head.
-for all of you nerdy gun nuts out there- such a weapon is unlikely to ever become science fact. The reason for this –if you overlook for a moment the fact that a portable laser powerful enough to burn a hole through a person would require a battery roughly the size of a brick- is that, quite simply, such a device would be almost completely useless as a weapon.
In order to fully understand why this is, it is necessary to look at what makes a gun a useful weapon:
When a bullet hits its target it generally doesn’t just pass straight through, and there’s a reason for this: it’s not designed to. Bullets are SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO leave a messy entrance wound and to be fired with enough force that they will ricochet around inside the target, thereby inflicting the maximum damage possible and maximising the chances of death via bloodloss. If however you contrast this with the effect of a laser you will find that not only does a laser prevent the issue of blood loss by directly cauterising the wound; but also, as the beam has nothing to ricochet off of (unless of course you’ve swallowed a mirror or large prism, in which case you‘ve enough to worry about already) it is going to damage only one small section of tissue. In other words you could potentially cause more damage by throwing a water melon at their head.