The Turn Away from Energy Weapons in SF Movies

[jordan179]

I've noticed that science fiction movies have tended to turn away from depicting their future combatants with energy weapons, and towards equipment which looks as if it came out of the wars of the mid- to late-20th century. This is first noticable in Aliens, and has become increasingly prevealent since then.

Comments

[pathia]

What about rail guns? They're extremely high-tech, yet they're using the same core concept as a modern gun. Make a thing go from point A to B, very, very fast and splat anything in its path.

[korgmeister]

Big, heavy, fragile, serious heating problems. Practical for battleships, but not really for tanks or other smaller vehicles.

[pathia]

Um...thought we're talking about 400-500years from now...

[mrmeval]

With the energy densities the storage systems of a staff weapon displayed you could have a nice coil gun that mitigates the problems rail guns have.

I did see a paper about a plasma rail gun that accelerates a plasma arc to near relativistic velocities which then slams into a projectile. Not something a human should be near but it looked to solve problems with some rail damage. The rails would last longer than contact projectiles and damage would be more even.

[korgmeister]

400-500 years from now, self replicating nanobots which can infect your targets and do all sorts of horrible things would be way more practical (not to mention cooler) than rail guns.

[jordan179]

400-500 years from now, self replicating nanobots which can infect your targets and do all sorts of horrible things would be way more practical (not to mention cooler) than rail guns.

Why does one preclude the other? Incidentally, the hard thing of which to conceive is not the nanobot attackers, but the likely modes of defense against such attacks.

[jordan179]

Precisely. The railguns of centuries from now will be the end product of many generations of improvement over the ones that we are today working on as prototypes, and they will be far more capable.

The three disadvantages that no railgun will surmount are these:

(1) It requires energy to fire,

(2) The projectile is material and hence interceptible, and

(3) The energy travels very slowly compared to lightspeed weapons.

These are indeed disadvantages, but scarcely fatal ones, especially compared to chemically-propelled round artillery, which is with what they will initially be competing.

Pretty much all weapons heat up when fired, by the way, including the chemically-powered projectile throwers that we use today. It's just that with CPR slug throwers, we've refined the design to a point where this rarely impedes their operation.

[jordan179]

Big, heavy, fragile, serious heating problems. Practical for battleships, but not really for tanks or other smaller vehicles.

"Indeed," quoth Korgmeister de Mandeville. "Much like bombards are useful for siege work, to batter down stationary walls, but not against men on the battlefield. This gonnnepowder will ne'er be more than another engineer's trick, methinks!"

In fact, every one of the defects you point out as applying to railguns also applies to early black powder weapons. They were big and heavy, even compared to torsion or tension-powered siege engines (because of the need for a reinforced barrel). They got hot in combat, to the point where they had to be allowed to cool before the laborious reloading process could commence. And they had a tendency to explode, especially if fired more than once every few hours, which can't have made their crews too eager to begin reloading immediately

[jordan179]

Rail guns (gauss guns, magnetic accelerators) are the likely successor to chemically-propelled round artillery, especially for planetary surface applications. In video SF, Andromeda notably used them for point defense work, which is one of their likely roles in space combat. In real life, we are researching them both as orbital launch systems and as artillery.