One of the rogue tropes that shows up from time to time is the gatling laser, but can it be made to make sense? I can see applying the gatling gun to a laser, if youve got some slower than light moving part anyway. So say a plasma laser powered from a MFT, with the plasma squirting up one barrel at a time while the previous barrel vents and the one before that cools off. It would seem to make more sense as a pentagram configuration than in a hex layout. (Fire barrel one then three then five then two then four, repeat.) A gatling laser might be useful for shooting through multiple walls and/or shooting through air. For this, you want a narrow aperture beam which is narrow all the way from the muzzle to the target. Parallel beams which converge onto the target wont do, you want them all to fire along the same line. Unfortunately, the same high intensity narrow aperture that allows wall penetration near the muzzle may also prevent you from using optics to simply reroute multiple beam engines through the same muzzle. So, depending on the nature of your beam engines, it may be necessary to physically rotate multiple beam engines through the same firing line in order to provide the desired firing rates. Now, these combat ranges, the muzzle velocity advantage of lasers over bullets may be irrelevant. So, a practical alternative weapon could simply be a large caliber gun firing round shot optimized for wall penetration. However, such a weapon may be less precise than desired, especially considering the risk of ricochet. In contrast, a soft x-ray weapon will precisely tunnel through walls and air directly along the line of sight, with no ricochet and insignificant splash. Furthermore, such a weapon can do things like just barely penetrate a wall to allow sensor probes to enter, without significant danger to anyone inside. After the sensor probes enter a room, it would then be possible to attack any enemies identified with penetrating laser attacks from outside.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 18:01:51 +0000
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