Plasma Weapons in Science Fiction (And Why They Don't Work) 

Upvoted for the Look Around You reference

🙃

The Butterfield Diet! Haw haw!

why didnt you mention plasma grenades in the clip? they might be one of the most realistic aproaches to plasma weaponry. unless you plan a video on space ship artillery or something.

I get around the issues of dispersal and density by using gravity field generators to launch what are essentially miniature fusion reactions at short to moderate ranges

Ain't that hard sci-fi in general ? With some exceptions of course

@@ulforcemegamon3094 Yeah, I think that's the difference between hard and soft sci-fi; how much of the technology _could be_ explained by known science. Something like Warhammer 40K is Science Fantasy because not even the characters in the universe understand how their own technology works and some of it is *literally* magic.

Lol y’all ever heard of Warhammer 40k?

I call such things "skiffy".

@@BlooCollaGal I mean sometimes it’s also discribed by some resources that they have in sci fi that we don’t for example in warhammer it’s the warp, which does get magic fuckery at times and I feel like the lore as to why people don’t know as well works great in warhammer (specifically just the imperium) is that the tech was lost to time and is only able to be used if the imperium has the stcs

Except when they targeted the Enterprise and it forced them to go to yellow alert.

Turbolasers are lasers though right?

@@Souledex All the blasters, from a pistol to a death star, use lasers to initiate fusion. The projectiles are plasma.

Not pseudo. All weapon there use containers of special plazma gase as ammo cartridge and electromagnetism device inside weapon ionizes and fires the plasmoid. The same but ionizes liquid naquadah mineral make staff weapon in Star Gate.

@@Skyblade12 That's the regulation sir.

russia has this but it instead makes it invisible to radar

@@mrfigaloopierre9610 that's handy too

i never understood in starwars, why they didnt make a lightsabre warhead-missile...

So... A Stargate's Ancient drone weapon then. Because Kinetics Are Superior.

@@EgorKaskader well my idea was it would just explode

I would not be surprised if the US has some Marauder-equipped Space Satellites. But also Near Atmosphere has a lot of Particles reducing the range of weapons significantly.

🙃

@@FranksFilmEcke MARAUDER actually depended on atmospheric effects to stabilize its projectiles, and wouldn't have worked in a vacuum. Also, it would require far more power to operate than you can currently pack onto any practical satellite; when they were testing it, they had to borrow DARPA's Shiva Star capacitor bank, usually used to power lasers for fusion research, to run it. Deploying such a weapon on a satellite would be impossible to keep secret; such a satellite would need an extraordinarily powerful launch vehicle to get it into orbit, and would be highly detectable once it's up there.

@@yetanother9127 nothing to add, just wanna say MARAUDER

Plus there's the Outer Space Treaty

FELLOW HALO BOOK NERD! Chad.

Haven't gotten to that book yet. I'm stuck listening to them on audible. The narrator they have is a dumbass who can't even pronounce Mjolnir correctly. He pronounces it as "ma-jol-nur".

Was gonna say, a buncha settings have plasma being controlled through magnetic fields in some way.

Yep but as soon as the plasma is fired from the gun no more magnetic field for plasma unless you make it into a ring that's spinning inwards or pump the magnet field though the plasma in the form of a beam.

​@@haminatorainz7227if the plasma is conductive, as it's traveling it would generate a magnetic field as it travels. Plasma has a net neutral charge, but could consist of two phases electrically separated by 180 degrees. Electric universe covers plasma discharges on a large scale, so their work would be best to use as proof of concept for plasma weapons.

If that was the case, we'd had fusion energy by now!

@@Phootaba I feel like that level of control over magnetism goes beyond knowing how to simply perform fusion.

You're actually right on- magnetic fields are caused by moving electrical charges. Which plasmas happen to be made entirely out of! The entire field is called magnetohydrodynamics. And there actually are certain ways you can shoot plasma so that it self-focuses. I had hoped he'd talk about it with the MARAUDER tech, but a toroid of plasma fired through a cool gas (ie an atmosphere) self-focuses because of its magnetic fields- the plasma on the outside of the toroid slows down, and Lenz's law does its thing and makes a magnetic field that confined the plasma. It's just that it's a very short and very violent and unstable thing, which makes it less than ideal for producing steady fusion power. (I studied plasma confinement and controlled fusion in uni).

🙃

Yes this is possible but not likely viable. Such a field would be very easy to disrupt and would be leeching power from the plasma at a very high rate. It could totally work if you could force enough power into the system but you are talking about magnetic fields stronger than the sun can produce and even then you are merely delaying the inevitable by a few fractions of a second.

🙃

toroids (rings that look like balls) don't expand and when fired at high speed will explode on impact

I always preferred the geth route to plasma weaponry, myself. Charged superconducting toroids that split apart and arc on impact, causing plasma.

The trick is to not describe it too much. If you just say something brief like "Charged nanoparticles" then that's enough and the audience will get the idea.

I've always been a sucker for explaining things too much, though. I like technical details, sue me q.q

🎆Perfection🎆

I think a conventional shaped charge explosive would have done a better job of punching through armor.

@@nil981 HEAT doesn't do what the Protectorate wants, they want the armor burned away so the 100mm HEHC can do lots of damage, so they have 400mm plasma ampoules which destroys armor in an area allowing lighter weapons to break thorough and destroy the ship itself.

@@nil981 in that game the protectorate doesn't really have true military tech. They mostly jury rig their stuff to fight their enemies guerilla style. Also heat on naval scale seems not very useful.

So plasma grenades

Agreed. I just wish more SciFi IP holder would take this to heart.

The "old-style" weapons you can get in one of the DLCs for 2 kept the blobs, so it has both! - hoojiwana from Spacedock

​@@hoojiwana Hell yeah, personally prefer the original style with the new graphics

​@@Ian501st I personally prefer the plasma beans instead as they are a far more realistic depiction of plasma based weaponry.

my first exposure was Decsent and Warhammer/Epic, to date myself

Rather it's a iconic "weapon"

Aye but was it the gun or the games animation system. Loved it even with the Pulse Rifle. Say what you will but I liked all three. Need to try Calisto Protocol. Gotta get my gamefly to work.

To be fair a fully upgraded plasma cutter it's definitely doable because that is a damn good weapon. I am a member of the line gun party everybody hates on it, but once it's upgraded it is damn good weapon

I mean the plasma cutter is literally the best weapon in the entire game.

But we don't know how ball lightning works

@@bernadmanny A self-containing plasmoid is the prevailing theory. How to get it into that state is currently unknown, but if nature can do it, so can we, eventually. It's a matter of time until a computer simulation hits the right magnetic field shape. Of course ball lightning is relatively slow-moving, so not immediately useful as a projectile weapon.

​@@bernadmanny It works like the gasses that are released out of Uranus 😂

To expand on this theory, you could think of a lightsaber from Star Wars as a fancy plasma torch or cutter. According to basic Star Wars lore, the energy blade is nothing more than a condensed amount of plasma, emitted by the Khyber Crystal housed in the hilt and is projected by the 'blade emitter,' in which a magnetic field contains the 'blade.' A power cell is in the hilt to provide energy to the emitter and the magnetic field.

it simple realy you know how the earths core;s three or now four layers is like. well self contaning plasma is just like that. how you do it is bascly you super heat the plasma. then you use the lernzo elctromactnic force to ball up and stableize it. then you fire it out of a elctromactic coil or rail gun like you would a rail gun projectile. the main issue is you got to do it very very quick befrore it gets to cold.

I remember the plasma rifles in the old 2300AD RPG. They were indeed plasers.

It's one of the cooler laser applications. In fact, lasers have even been experimentally used to guide lightning strikes with some limited success. 🤯

It works in Atmo, but for Vacc you will need a low powered charged particle beam, so if you can't build high output Charged Particle Weapons yet just use a little one to get the most out of your Plasma.

I was actually about to comment a similar thing, if a laser couldn’t be used in atmosphere to carve a path and/or mess with particle charge the create a stable channel. For space maybe sufficiently enough sci-fi tech could fire a laser puls to clear a path, quickly followed by a directed EM stream to create a channel, then followed by the actual plasma bolt?

Wrong. Electricity will follow the path of least resistance. Using a pulsed laser to create a plasma channel through air is more of a lightning gun not a plasma gun. A long range taser.

For Karl!

Rock and Stone to the bone!

Did i hear a Rock and Stone?

That's It, Lads! Rock and Stone!

If you don't rock and stone, you ain't going home!

They actually did mention radiation in the dedicated particle beam video

And you seriously think that a spaceship designed to go around in an environment where radiations and high energy particles are as common as water molecules in an ocean would be easily penetrated by the amount of x-rays a puff of plasma could produce? Moreover, if that same ships is also designed to survive planetary re-entry, the thermal energy from the plasma puff could have the same effectiveness as a hairdryer.

@@ObatongoSensei Maybe not, but I think an X-Ray Laser could get the job done. That'd be a fantastic weapon for a spaceship, not to mention you can use it for other stuff too.

@@BlooCollaGal Yeah, but an x-ray laser is not a plasma weapon. By the way, most high energy photons and neutrons can be stopped by water, the most common molecule in the universe.

@@ObatongoSensei All I'm saying is that if the purpose of the plasma weapon is to make a burst of X-Rays _over there_ then it would be more efficient to just make the X-Rays here and shoot them over there as a Laser instead of making plasma first.

Wouldnt laser weapons transfer the same energy far more quickly and efficently? And from further away? Also, I think that if you are in "knife fight" range, both ships should be dead.

Plasma actually transfers very little energy, because its density is so low. Its temperature may be super-high, but its density is so low that boiling water would transfer more energy at any sort of range.

What are you going to use as a source of atoms for the plasma, and then how would you keep them at a density that allows that energy to be transmitted rapidly? Think of trying to use a "gas bolt" weapon and then remember plasma is more diffuse at the same temperature as its gaseous state. The plasma in a star's core would indeed be powerful, but how can you maintain the pressures needed to use it? The only plasmic projectiles that could work are ones like the torroid pulses that travel at 30-70% of C. Fermi lab was working with them in the 80s, and today its a potential technique to initiate fusion so there might be a way to weaponize that process but again the range isn't even useful on a 1km scale let alone in space.

"...a good way to make heat management an actually interesting part of the story." If you want some interesting heat management consideration in a story read larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's, "The Gripping Hand."

I mean, they already have that. Tracer rounds. Hell, the Germans and Americans in WW2 used red and green - which looked *exactly like* and inspired the blaster bolts from Star Wars. They're the reason you can see bullets at all when firing a machine gun; the belts go Reg, Reg, Incind, Tracer, repeat. So give your team extra-bright blue tracers to make it easy for conscripts, or give them yellow because the planet they were stationed on before was desert and they were low-light in that theater - whatever color you like T R A C E R S .

@@EgoEroTergum Eh, tracers still tend to move considerably faster than a plasma bolt you might see in sci-fi, close up it's going to look more like a very short lived beam due to persistence of vision (or the camera sensor!). And of course that's unlikely to scale to spaceship battles, there's generally no need for tracer rounds if you're not aiming the gun by hand. That said, I do remember the Expanse's PDC's using tracer rounds, probably for visual effect. They didn't resemble plasma bolts though, the fire rate was much higher and the length of the bolts was much shorter, more like lots of little glowing dots.

@@EgoEroTergum Normal bullets are boring

Yeah we could the same with rifle rounds that work like airburst

I read that modern day HEAT rounds create plasma, with their directed chemical explosive warheads, when they strike the armor of their target. While contained plasma is the ideal way to go with a futuristic sounding plasma warhead, it's still safer and easier to store and use that energy in the old fashioned way from what I can tell. Plasma missile/torpedo is still the way to go for future-cool sounding weapon though.

Aren’t the plasma warheads in the expanse just a type of nuclear fusion bomb weapon?

​@@NefariousKoel HEAT and EFP rounds aren't plasma. They're just a rapidly formed jet of potentially liquid, metal.

@@botonslaught I've read that different explosive lens designs create different effects, from lance, to jet, to shotgun, and plasma.

I was thinking plasma escaping behind the slug as propellent. With any left over exploding on impact. Short range anti-personnel weapon?

That is essentially what the Halo wars Rhino artillery is

It's effectively a really really hot Molotov cocktail. Give it a way to penetrate armor before containment failure and you'll have a pretty nasty little warhead.

@@LeCharles07 Is that really much better than the molten streams of metal current sabot rounds use?

@@rapidrotation in theory it can irradiate the crew without the round fully penetrating the armour; in practice you'd need a rather big plasmoid and somewhat thin armour for it to have any noticeable effect, so you could just make your life simpler and use a bigger/faster slug or a nuke

I love rolling a 1 and having my space marine explode.

@@Sifeus Not with the new rules, that only happens if you actually fire on overcharge (for more AP and damage) and roll a 1. If you have your plasma guns fire on normal setting, then they are pretty much a straight upgrade to lasguns and boltguns since there is no risk over 'Gets Hot'.

The whole Covenant weaponry uses plasma. Except for needler guns. That... aren't guns but ok. It's just to say. By the way, Covenant use of plasma is way more realistic than 40k. I mean... There's something realistic in 40k? 🤔

Gets Hot!

Ah, a fellow Tau fan

All other things being equal, sure it’d do more damage. In addition to the kinetic energy, there's also the thermal energy of the plasma. Besides, even if you can’t actually pack in more energy due to practical concerns it's guaranteed to change the damage profile, which may be desirable.

@@justinthompson6364 I see the plasma as a heat, corrosive and electromagnetic payload. It's definitely worth it IMO if the defense is meant to protect against kinetic projectiles.

If you could get it to retain the charge, in theory you could make it more explosive than any conceivable chemical explosive. Just the pure mechanical force of too many electrons pushing on each other.

@@EgoEroTergum I know this is more far future/miracle tech, but micro fusion reactors could do it probably, as there is a form of fusion the extracts electricity directly from the fusion reaction, no need for steam or turbines.

@@justinthompson6364 very true. So many different types of damage packed into a single weapon would be more useful against a wider array of targets with potentially different defense technologies.

🙃

Eh, the problem is that the mechanisms to make plasma viable, especially as typically depicted, make the plasma itself irrelevant.

Meanwhile I kill your approaching ships with shaped charged nuclear missile launchers as you approach with your plasma weapons.

@@Betrix5060 Shut up, gringo

Does it really matter? At the end of the day plasma is just a cool word and trying to come up with something plausible just so you can use it in your work and still be able to call it hard sci-fi is such a waste of time. Just embrace soft sci-fi or space fantasy and throw around plasma to your heart's content

While this is commonly proposed in science fiction, it is actually completely impossible under our understanding of plasma physics. Self-stable toroids just don't exist.

I think the ideal ballistic weapon for a pressurized area would be something sub sonic yet high mass to still have significant killing power like the Russian 9x39 ammo for the VSS. I also think dead space had the right idea with the pulse rifle’s squash head ammo to liquify tissue through hydrostatic shock without piercing armor.

The explanation given in B5 for how they actually function doesn't really make sense, but my head-canon is just that the character explaining it (Garibaldi?) didn't actually know or care about the technical details... Really just interested in conveying "here's how to use it".

@@travcollier Garibaldi being half clueless tracks.

@@mzaite Fairly early in B5, I remember a scene where the commander asks one of the crew if something can be done, and the crewmember starts into a technobabble explanation... The commander cuts him off and says something to the effect of "I don't care how it works, just do it." Loved that! BTW: I say "commander" because I honestly can't remember if it was Sinclair or Sheridan. Might have even been Ivanova, but I don't think so... it would have been very in character for her though.

@@travcollier Earth Force was much more Air Force than Star Treck’s Navy style of having to qual in every system to be in charge. I dug that. Not everyone needs to know how the shitter flushes when it’s done by a robit.

I was thinking about that exact same thing watching this

Flamethrowers

That reminds me of a fight scene in a Harry Dresden story, where a mercenary "guy" has a golf bag full of double-barreled shotguns that he brings to a fight against vampires. Each barrel fires an incendiary round that absolutely WRECKS the vampires, but also damages the barrels, so after two shots, he drops the now-glowing shotgun and pulls another one out of the bag. In the aftermath of the fight, he has to take time to go around and pick up his discarded shotguns, as some may still be useable, or at least the stocks and trigger housings are. Plus leaving expended firearms around the infield at Wrigley Field in Chicago with your fingerprints on them is a bad idea...

Arca Plasmor in Warframe is a shotgun that shoots out an expanding wave of plasma.

In Synthetik there is a plasma shotgun called PSG Emerald Sword. Does awesome damage and has strong slightly delayed ammo regeneration but extremely weak against shields and worst of all, ejecting the magazine is an incredibly hot event toasting your shields and setting you on fire meaning you need to rely on the ammo regen and the gun cant be shot empty because empty mag pauses the ammo regen forcing a manual reload. I avoid that think like a plague lmao

Maybe stable long enough to function more like a zappy-shotgun rather than a glowing-green-booger-thrower. No mosquito will challenge me now!

The halo arrays were kinda described however. Effectively using the power siphoned from another universe, a single halo ring unleashes a massive burst of I think gamma ray equivilient? A type of radiation that does not care what's in it's way, amplified to stupid high levels, if I recal.

Exactly! Or even use glowing hot molten metal slugs that will essentially look just like plasma bolts.

@E-Hamel No, I mean HEAT rounds shot at a rapid fire rate.

@E-Hamel I am aware.

At that point though isn't it just a particle beam with extra steps?

But electron beams bloom and won't guide an effective mass of plasma. OTOH, diffuse electron beams at very high energies are basically Beta radiation weapons. And dense metal shielding will cause the crew to get strongly X-rayed on the other side of that shielding.

@@LordOceanus yes, but the power requirement will be much smaller, maybe. I’m no physicist lmao

@@Bacopa68 We could use relativistic electron velocities to prevent bloom, but then you get the same effect of a plasma weapon anyway lol

@@LordOceanus Because they don't want to, is that so hard to comprehend?

Fusion reactors are interesting in science fiction because there are over a dozen different ways to build one, and we in the early 21st century don't have that much of an idea what reactor design is best for what application (we're just trying to build *any* design with an an engineering Q greater than 1!). So there's a lot of scope for form and function.

@@Croz89 Yep. Love how you can do variations of them too, and blowing up a ships fusion reactor is always a fun story element too.

@@g.williams2047 It is, though it's perhaps the most unrealistic aspect, nuclear power plants, fission or fusion, can't be made to explode like nuclear weapons. In the case of many types of fusion reactor, "overloading" it would cause plasma to touch the walls, contaminating it with unwanted ions and causing the reactor to immediately shut down. In other cases the thing would likely just overheat and destroy itself in an very anticlimactic and non-explosive fashion. Any explosion would be limited in size, and would be chemical or mechanical, not nuclear, either from pressurised steam or steam heated up so much it cracks into hydrogen and oxygen, which then react with an ignition source to form back into steam. Both of which would probably not be enough to completely destroy a spaceship. TL;DR: for hard sci-fi, don't "overload the reactor" because that's not a viable self destruct mechanism. If you have to blow up your ship, use a bomb, and have some justification for having it there (denying the enemy equipment or intelligence, failsafe in case of a loss of control, etc.)

@@Croz89 Thankfully what I'm writing isn't hard sci fi. After all, we have to make gravity come out of a horizontal floor somehow ;)

When we finally figure out fusion power, people are gonna be so disappointed that its going to be just another method of boiling water to spin a turbine

I hope development leads us down the plasma doughnut machine gun dev tree. That would just be the most fun option.

@@LeCharles07 lol agreed