What's a realistic timeline on directed energy weapons of equivalent power to an ordinary firearm in 5.56 or 7.62?
Battery tech is developing at a sufficient rate, and the technical limitations that applied in the past are being eliminated rapidly, if not already.
When bullets stop doing the job
Would it be fair to say that when the energy generation capability became more cost-effective than the cost of a single bullet is when bullets could start being phased out?
Yes but God knows when that will be the case given the institutional inertia cartridge firearms have. Plus you have to factor in the cost of switching over and the simple pushback traditional manufacturers will have against the switch. The only way I see it going forward if some extreme green initiative is signed into law straight up banning the use of lead in anything
That'll be forever away. If batteries and other components needed for energy weapons get better and cheaper we'll just see coil guns being used for small arms and artillery. No report, potential for way longer range, no smoke, smaller ammo, and you can accelerate to vastly higher speeds, meaning you'll just need 3mm for most uses.
Lasers make more sense for hitting targets that have interceptors.
Energy weapons will never be a thing, not in two hundreds years at the least. Listen, The next phase of weaponry in small arms that we are capable is already in the works. The sig fury is a step in the right direction but moving at the rate humanity is currently we'll be severely undergunned in the upcoming galactic wars. Humanity needs unity.
>upcoming galactic wars
hmm
Energy weapons will 100% be a thing.
Especially on aircraft.
Ships* With the nuclear reactors to power them. The US navy is already using lasers to destroy drones and target systems on aircraft
and that's probably where they're going to stay; well, that and on ships and a few ground installations. Even if you could lower the cost of man portable laser/energy weapons to the point where they could compete with projectile weapons (best of luck, that would require breakthroughs in so many areas that all of society would be unrecognisable before anyone started thinking about applying the tech to weapons) you'd still need to get over the huge production and supply chains we've set up for projectile weapons. Just look at the various times that armies had the opportunity to upgrade one of their guns but chose not to because they had a shitload of ammunition stockpiled for it - particularly the French keeping their shitty WWI tank gun long after it became obsolete.
>Equivalent power
And you've told us you know literally nothing about ballistics or theoretical energy weapons. You cant equate a laser and a bullet, if they penetrate the same amount of meat they'll penetrate a different amount of steel, dramatically.
It's an abstract equivalence not a literal one.
Different weapons do different things, nobody uses a 7.62 rifle to shoot down missiles.
>40K
>It's an abstract equivalence not a literal one.
If you read what I fricking said you'd see why that's a meaningless phrase.
You can equate one dead human with another within a certain timeframe, ie a soldier on a battlefield who is identified and shot dead.
That's why it's abstract and not literal.
Your inability to grasp this concept indicates to me that you have autism.
>You can equate one dead human with another within a certain timeframe, ie a soldier on a battlefield who is identified and shot dead.
Not if they might be wearing a covering with a level of thermal resistance literally orders of magnitude removed you spaz.
Things is kinetic and laser (thermal) energy are different things, and damage differently. 2000j of kenetic energy would just blow someone's head apart. 2000j of thermal energy? It's teaspoon of boiling water.
Though when aplied to eyes it becomes different. Laser weapons are best when using to blind.
I think that's a warcrime, but obviously generating that energy and its application are entirely seperate and I'm not suggesting slap a 2000 joule laser on a stock and call it a day.
I was more thinking about how the navy has been testing a CIWS or anti-missile laser system and how that could/would apply to man-portable stuff
Some examples I've been contemplating:
A guy who has to carry 100 9 volt batteries is carrying twice as much weight as 100 5.56mm rounds, but if you can fire more than twice as much human-lethal shots off that much then is that an "equal enough" trade?
What about directed energy weapon vehicles?
No more ammo rack, just a battery pack for a laser weapon that can melt steel, in a weapon system that can automatically track targets.
>Just tell me the laser is the same as the bullet! Just tell me!
>Battery tech is developing at a sufficient rate
Lmao you are fricking moronic, battery tech is moving at a snail's pace and can't even keep up with modern consumer electrics. batteries are absolute dogshit technology and will remain so for a very long time
there's absolutely no use for handheld offensive lasers on the battlefield. You need to be very precise to keep heating up specific spots on a target, so manual aim is impossible.
by design, variable wavelength lasers are less efficient, which means that for handhelds we're looking at single wavelength ones, which then means that your handheld laser can be reflected with specific materials (whereas broadband reflective surface exist).
Anti-aircraft/missiles/drones laser solve this by being frickhuge and dumping ungodly amount of energy, and most of their target need to be stealthy so their material selection and geometry are greatly reduced, which isn't the case for ground targets and grunts.
Also, some of the lasers we use nowadays don't actually use electricity but chemicals, and kinda work like engines do : we inject some "fuel" and we get light out. that's not practical for handheld lasers since the chemicals need to be kept in precise conditions and need to be very pure (so you can't just "switch" canisters because if there's a tiny speck of dust on the input port, you risk burning the whole assembly).
so we're stuck with laser diodes, and batteries.
Lastly the optics used are very expensive and heavy. since you need to aim at different ranges, you need to focus the laser (just like a camera does) and further your target is, the larger/heavier your optic gets.
honestly i can see some kind of smart dazzler firearm existing in the next 10 years, with AI to specifically aim at the eyes for some nonlethal temporary blindness, but even then it wouldn't take much tinkering to make a version of that that straights up burn your retinas in <0.05 seconds, so if those exists they'll probably be banned pretty quick. We'll probably keep developing microwave and acoustic weapons for LTL situations, but they already exist so you probably don't care about it.
Lasers are fun and all, but they're only really important for science and industry, not much else.
>Battery tech is developing at a sufficient rate
Unless we get solid state batteries 100x better than anything we have right now energy weapons are a dream.
5.56 delivers ~1700 joules of energy at target.
If you think about, the number is clear. 1.7 kw laser weapon can deliver the same amount of energy per second. But lasers could be fired in pulse sequence, maybe we want to fire it only for 0.5 second, that means it lasers need to be 3 kw. If we want to fire it for 0.1 seconds, it needs to be 17 kw laser.
Effective range for a 5.56 is ~400 meters. A 10 kw lasers from 10 years ago can engage target from 2 km away, 5x the range of a firearm.
We already have the capability to field anti-personnel laser weapons with 1-40 km range. You may think its short range compared to a missile, but if you think about it, its quite good.
Imagine a drone flying 10 km above you as most high flying drones do, it can silently/invisibly target/kill any vehicles, any enemy soldiers, any missiles within 40 km range. Any targets on ground, in air, etc becomes stationary target for lasers that can zap enemy soldiers to charcoal.
The reason we don't is 1) we want to keep our weapons close to our hands in case of a real war 2) geneva conventions regarding laser weapons against humans.
Also
>what about batteries 22RX8
A diesel generator would work fine to provide power, possibly combined with a lightweight supercapacitors for fast burst.
Slightly off topic but the US recently announced its beginning testing on a 20kw laser on an infantry squad vehicle and 50kw lasers mounted on strykers. How damaging would these be if fired at a person? I feel like a jltv/stryker hidden in the woods would be devastating to enemy squads, invisible, silent, fires at light speed, perfect accuracy. It doesn't have to kill to be effective, imagine just sweeping the beam across a fireteam at face level. It's going to instantly incapacitate them. Not to mention the morale effect of fighting a truly invisible enemy. Obviously it's going to perform like dogshit in adverse weather, but I feel like the benefits more than outweigh the negatives
See
If 20kw power can be reached to a person 1 km away, that's equivalent to a bullet being fired to their body. Just 0.1 second is enough energy transferred. Depending on the size of the laser point when it hits the target, the energy may dissapated across that diamater, so a longer duration fire of 1 sec fire on a person would absolute burn them up
>Directly comparing the energy of a bullet and a laser to predict terminal effect
Holy shit you noguns are moronic.
When energy weapons are taking roles from conventional weapons for large scale weapons then they can work on miniaturizing them.
There are zero widely fielded energy weapons anywhere for an offensive capability and they have a limited capability for missile defense.
Man portable energy weapons are a meme and quadrupling the energy density of modern batteries won’t make a difference.
20 years only used in artillery
40 years for mainstream adoption of dew rail guns for first world military special forces. Optimistically.
>What's a realistic timeline on directed energy weapons of equivalent power to an ordinary firearm in 5.56 or 7.62?
They aren't going to be like that. Its going to be an invisible heat ray that sit on the back of a truck and fries anything in a 5 yard radius from a mile away.
Real nightmare shit.
I've been thinking about it for a bit, but electric cars should make a great off the shelf laser energy source.
For example, the cheapest Tesla Model 3 can draw a max power of ~165 kilowatts maybe a sustained power draw of ~130 kw for their electric motors. If someone wanted to just war-rig (during war) an adapter to take the power from those battery, they could field a ~10-50kw laser weapons on those cars. A 10 kw laser can operate and sustain itself for 5 hours of continuous use on a 50 kwh battery. 50 kw laser can sustain in 1 hour. With lasers being fired maybe once every 10 seconds or so, this could mean 30 hours for a 10 kw laser and 6 hours for 50 kw lasers. For a portable system.
Now imagine a drone with 10 kwh of battery that weighs ~100 kg and a 10 laser system that weighs ~100 kg that can operate in continuous firing every 10 sec for 6 hours straight.