Will portable, weaponized handheld lasers be a thing in out lifetime?

>>31554837
Technically speaking, they're a thing now. Just shit for battery life.

>>31554837
Yeah, they'll probably never be as widely used as normal guns because of the problems with power supply, heat generation, component size, etc. Even those problems might be mitigated to a substantial degree with enough time and work, but a tube that throws little chunks of metal really fast using an explosion will always require less effort.

no. lasers guns are a fantasy weapon.

The amount of energy you would need to be able to store in a battery to make them work would be a horrible idea in a combat situation. It would be a walking liability.

Further lasers can be fucked with by atmospheric conditions. Are going to have much worse penetrating capability requiring even more power to punch through light cover than you would need to be able to kill someone, are much more easy to mitigate with kinds of armor materials and coatings than kinetic impacts.

By the time we have the materials capability to make something like that viable there will be far superior options.

Chemically propelled kinetic energy weapons will always be the primary weapon of choice. A kinetic weapon has inertia which is harder to hide from, it has followthrough. Chemically stored energy doesnt go bad anywhere near as fast.

A laser gun would have horrible heat dissipation problems, if you had the materials to counteract that, you will have materials to make effective anti laser armors.

Lasers are stupid. Their one and only advantage is their speed which may mean they have some future as point defense weapons for large facilities or ships with massive energy production capabilities. But as far as offensive weapons on that scale they arent even practical since they cant even fire over the horizon.

Kinetic energy best energy forever and all time. A bigger rock, thrown harder, is always the way forward.

>>31554899
And to clarify because millenials seem to have a hard time reading between lines. By fantasy i mean in the same sense that steampunk is fantasy. We could technically build steam powered tanks and shit, but it would be a bad idea because by the time we had the technology to do that, the concept was obsolete. Like crt monitors in futuristic spaceships. Personal laser weapons will never be a thing.

>>31554899
I agree with this somewhat, but I feel chemically propelled chunks of metal will be replaced by electromagnets ie railguns

>>31554942
Those might outstrip chemical propellant guns on the large scale but the power supply issue seems like it would confound an easily man portable railgun. Railguns also suffer from the overheating issue, those rails get really fucking hot after consecutive shots and while barrel longevities for them have been improving they still wear out or warp faster than those of conventional chemical guns. A man portable railgun will always need two types of ammo, power and projectiles.

>>31554942
railguns and coilguns have the same kind of energy concern issues for man-portable weapons.

There is also distance to take into consideration. A railgun can fire a projectile really fast. It gives up a lot to be able to do that in terms of general ease of use. Infantry just doesnt need to worry about that, even today we favor the logistical advantages of assault rifles over more powerful rounds

So you come up with this rediculous scenario of maybe.. anti material rail guns. Ok, thats a reasonable concept. Is it going to be something a single futuristic sniper uses? Most likely not. Its just going to be a remote controlled thing connected to a power supply targeted by a computer.

As far as the kind of personal weapon the average fodder carries around or sidearms people use for defense, what we have now is pretty much the apex.

Maybe in the future, when we have those better heat management systems, we might move to caseless small arms. This might provide a logistical advantage IF the propellant is standardized from everything from pistols up to heavy machine guns. Anything else would just add extra logistical burden and probably wouldn't happen even if we had the technology to do so.

its just a good solid system we have. Personal firearms may have evolved to the point that the spear has evolved to. Cant get any better in design. Materials and modified designs made possible due to these materials may make them more durable, more reliable, etc. But in the end the basic concept of how they are designed with magazines and self contained cartridges is about the peak.

>>31554837
No. There's a reason that most sci-fi stories now use super heated plasma instead of lasers. For the reasons >>31554899 listed, lasers just aren't that practical.

But I seriously doubt plasma weapons will ever be practical in the next 150 years. We simply do not have the energy availability or storage. The big developments you will see in our lifetimes are improvements in recoil reduction, which may cause some militaries to go back to .30 or larger calibers. Also, you will see improvements in optics, and probably "smart" optics.

probably not. its dumb and bullets work fine

>>31554899
>Lasers are stupid. Their one and only advantage is their speed which may mean they have some future as point defense weapons for large facilities or ships with massive energy production capabilities. But as far as offensive weapons on that scale they arent even practical since they cant even fire over the horizon.

The one exception is in using lasers to fry the eyeballs of meat bags. It's effective, it's as good as a kill, it's instant, it's vehicle mountable and doesn't require a terribly power laser.

Besides that, yes, point defence. Also anti satellite.

If we find a material that can emit high-energy x-rays or gamma-rays that can be amplified into lasers for an energy cost that can be stored in whatever battery technology we have that is available, then yes.
None of these weapons, should they come to exist, will perform in the same way as projectile weapons. They would be very good for punching tiny little holes in things. We'd have to rely on force from the sudden vaporization of the target to generate any kind of 'impact' or damage to soft targets like people.

>>31554837
Well im old, so no.

>>31554942
Electrokinetics complicate matters because you need to carry electric power in addition to ammunition .Granted, you need far less power than a laser and the ammo weighs a lot less than normal but it's still more to carry.

Still, they plan to test naval railgun artillery next year since a ship already has a power plant. Logically, if we ever get powered exoskeletons with a battery surplus you could see man portable coilguns and possibly railguns if they can solve the barrel erosion issues.

>>31560456

Tell us a story, grandpa