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

[jordan179]

It's not unreasonable to think that the benefits of a pure-energy based system won't outweigh the accurate, reliable ruggedness of a good rifle. Laser weapons are inherently more complicated, even if the supply situation is simplified.

Note though that lasers are bound to become more "reliable" and "rugged." (They are already more accurate than CPR guns).

This is a situation where even if it *does* work a bit better, there's not much impulse to change it, because shooting someone with a laser won't make them *more* dead than putting a supersonic chunk of metal through them.

Lasers have one major advantage, though. Speed of delivery. If you shoot at an unpredictably moving target with a CPR (chemically-proplled rifle) rifle at a range of more than a mile, the chances are that you're going to miss, no matter how good your rifle or how skilled you are, because the projectile takes half a second or more to close the distance. This is significant because popping out, firing, and then getting back under cover is a standard infantry tactic; it's even more significant in vehicular combat where the engagement distances tend to be long ones.

There is also the issue of armor. We are close, right now, to developing man-portable, field-practical body armors capable of defeating standard military rifles at normal firing ranges. When these become common on the battlefield, it will of course become necessary for infantry to weild heavier rifles in order to be able to kill or injure enemies wearing the improved body armors.

At this point two things happen:

(1) Rifles lose some of their portablity advantage over lasers, and

(2) The precision of a laser becomes more important, as a laser is more able to aim for weak spots on an enemy's armor.

[sianmink]

Pressures that could just as easily make infantry obsolete on the battlefield, with remote drones able to put a 5-kilowatt laser through the eyes of a dozen simultaneous combatants and boil their brains in an instant. If you have to encase your soldiers eyes to tonails in armor, Looking at a screen to see what's right in front of them, it's probably better to just go remote at that point. When you have good portable laser weaponry, why rely on fallible, analog soldiers to aim them? The precision of a laser is wasted when aimed by people. Also when you have the energy storage capability for good man-portable energy weapons, you also have the energy storage for combat drones that can operate for days on a charge.

the future battlefield could *easily* be too deadly an environment for people to even set foot in.

And then the machines will take over.

[jordan179]

Oh, that's exactly what will happen. Human soldiers will increasingly become "HQ units" or "drone carriers" operating swarms of drones against each other. This development is in its infancy today: I expect it to take 100-250 years to complete itself.

By the time "the machines ... take over," though, if we play our cards right "the machines" will include Man. Or something that is memetically descended from Man, in any case.