Fallout energy weapon power output

iGrievous

iGrievous

Star Paladin
Something I've been wondering for a while. We know that energy weapons from Fallout are capable of shooting off limbs to outright disintegrating enemies. My question is how hot/powerful would these weapons have to be in order to turn a human being into an ash pile? Any temperature estimates?
 
basically you need a core nuke temperature to just evaporate human biomass. nowhere a hand sized, even if its a fusion battery could reach that efficiency to create such firepower.
 
iGrievous said:
Something I've been wondering for a while. We know that energy weapons from Fallout are capable of shooting off limbs to outright disintegrating enemies. My question is how hot/powerful would these weapons have to be in order to turn a human being into an ash pile? Any temperature estimates?
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Turning into ash with a focused beam is impossible.
Shooting off limbs, though...
You'd probably have to deposit energy on the same of order of magnitude as a rifle bullet, so between 2 kJ and 20 kJ. Let's take 3.5 kJ, the energy of a 7.62 mm NATO round. It's not advisable to deliver all of that energy in a single pulse, you'd have to send a pulse train to basically drill through the target. The reason for that is that you have to wait for the debris of a shot to clear out because it would just absorb too much of the laser power.
Divide those 3.5 kJ into 35 pulses with 100 J each in 1 ms pulses, you'd have 10 kW of average laser power right there, and your shot would take 35 ms.
Needless to say, quite a lot. Diode lasers of that power could fit in a handheld weapon, but the power cell and the cooling wouldn't.
 
Yeah, a laser weapon disintegrating someone into a pile of ash is about as likely as a pistol bullet exploding an entire human body into bloody gibs
 
peadar87 said:
Yeah, a laser weapon disintegrating someone into a pile of ash is about as likely as a pistol bullet exploding an entire human body into bloody gibs
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well its possible if said pistol were at least chambered with .44 magnum and explosive round. though, not the whole body.
 
but once again, we need to figure out why develop energy weapon in the first place.
 
eissa said:
but once again, we need to figure out why develop energy weapon in the first place.
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Yeah, that's another thing. In the end it's almost always more efficient to just throw the powercell at the enemy as a grenade instead of using it as a powersource for a laser.
Cooling, adaptive optics, massive dangers for the eyes of everyone around, issues with atmospheric absorption in slightly bad weather... Laser weapons have a lot of issues, at least in portable weapons.
In space combat/ship to ship they might work, especially if you have a nice, big Free-Electron-Laser that radiates in the X-Ray spectrum. That fucker would be a pure death ray.
 
I always though that a laser weapon would be easier to use and maintain than a comparable "combustion pistol", to quote OWB. No moving parts, no recoil, no bullet drop, no Coriolis effect, no need to lead targets (unless Chinese soldiers can run at relativistic speeds). A solid-state diode-pumped laser would be a pretty robust weapon if you had a power supply of sufficient density. Logistically, it could potentially be easier as well, depending on the power source. Instead of shipping crates of ammunition around the place, you might only have to have a handful of rechargeable energy cells and a few generators.
 
peadar87 said:
I always though that a laser weapon would be easier to use and maintain than a comparable "combustion pistol", to quote OWB. No moving parts, no recoil, no bullet drop, no Coriolis effect, no need to lead targets (unless Chinese soldiers can run at relativistic speeds). A solid-state diode-pumped laser would be a pretty robust weapon if you had a power supply of sufficient density. Logistically, it could potentially be easier as well, depending on the power source. Instead of shipping crates of ammunition around the place, you might only have to have a handful of rechargeable energy cells and a few generators.
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The problem is focusing. The intensity at the target goes down with r^-2, and the optics of your laser rifle have to have a certain dimension for certain ranges. That means you'll have to have some moving optics for your rifle, and you'll have to keep the muzzle very clean (believe me, dirt on lenses is not good at all). So yeah, you'll have moving parts, very much like a camera objective. And that shit is sensitive.
And lasers being robust... No. For a weaponised system you'll either want to use a direct diode laser (giving you shitty beam quality but maximum efficiency) or a fiber laser (less efficient [although not much], but higher beam quality and compared to other solid state lasers much easier to use). All the components need stable temperatures, the optics and fier couplings need to be set up with quite some care, and any kind of dirt will ruin your day.
I guess one way around the problem with dirt is to have the final lens behind an aperture that only opens for the shot, and some other possibilities to ruggedize the laser.
But the worst is that lasers will be near useless in bad weather. Heavy rain will refract and scatter your laser pulses quite badly, and foggy conditions are even worse.
Oh, and the usage of such weapons in civilian areas will lead to many, many cases of blindness unless all the civilians have protective glasses like the soldiers.
 
ShoddyCast actually did two separate videos on the subject; one on laser weapons, and one on plasma ones.

They're pretty big Bethesda fanboys, but if you can get past that, the videos are pretty decent.


 
Hassknecht said:
The problem is focusing. The intensity at the target goes down with r^-2, and the optics of your laser rifle have to have a certain dimension for certain ranges. That means you'll have to have some moving optics for your rifle, and you'll have to keep the muzzle very clean (believe me, dirt on lenses is not good at all). So yeah, you'll have moving parts, very much like a camera objective. And that shit is sensitive.
And lasers being robust... No. For a weaponised system you'll either want to use a direct diode laser (giving you shitty beam quality but maximum efficiency) or a fiber laser (less efficient [although not much], but higher beam quality and compared to other solid state lasers much easier to use). All the components need stable temperatures, the optics and fier couplings need to be set up with quite some care, and any kind of dirt will ruin your day.
I guess one way around the problem with dirt is to have the final lens behind an aperture that only opens for the shot, and some other possibilities to ruggedize the laser.
But the worst is that lasers will be near useless in bad weather. Heavy rain will refract and scatter your laser pulses quite badly, and foggy conditions are even worse.
Oh, and the usage of such weapons in civilian areas will lead to many, many cases of blindness unless all the civilians have protective glasses like the soldiers.
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And on top of your excelent post, I think we should not forget that we are looking at a very long development cycle with weapons too. Conventional weapons, with moving parts and charges in the round/bullet have been used well for the last 200+ years. And all of that knowledge and experience has lead those weapons to where they are now. And they are still seeing improvements. I have no doubts about it, electrical/energy weapons will come, like the railgun/coilgun, Laser weapons etc. But I think it will still take a long time before they end up in the hand of the common soldier. If I remember correctly, they are thinking about rail guns for ships in the 2020s? or 2030s? Not sure.
However, there might be also different concepts which they will follow in the future. Also electrical and without moving parts. But a lot more ... traditional in that sense.
 
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