Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Difference between revisions

Compare [[Rock Beats Laser]], [[Boring but Practical]], and [[Break Out the Museum Piece]].

 

 

== Anime & Manga ==

* ''[[Firefly]]'' is set some 500 years into the future. Projectile weapons are mainly used, since they are cheaper and more reliable than energy weapons. Hand-held energy weapons do show up at a few points:

** The target of the heist in "Trash" is a valuable antique prototype laser. When the time comes, though, Inara doesn't want to gamble that the antique still works, instead pulling out her own piece.

** In "Ariel," as Jayne and the Tams flee the Hands of Blue, Jayne fails to blast open a locked door by shooting it with a high-tech sonic stun rifle. A moment later, Mal and Zoe shoot out the lock from the other side with good old kinetic slugthrowers. Though that might be playing with the trope, because a weapon designed not to cause lasting damage doesn't cause lasting damage.

** The sound effects used for the gunshots have caused some to believe that the guns are energy weapons, despite the cartridges being shown in multiple scenes.

** The [[Wave Motion Gun|Nova Cannon]], the main weapon of Imperial battleships. It's magnetically fired at just under the speed of light for some... [[No Kill Like Overkill|interesting effects]].It fires shells with a diameter of fifty metres, which are frequently packed with fun stuff - Vortex warheads leap to mind. The weapon can create an explosion that blows up a squadron of kilometre-long ships, thousands of kilometres apart, in a single blast.

** The Eldar seem to survive using shuriken weapons, which accelerate a hailstorm of very small sharp things at immense speeds towards their target. In-game, shuriken weapons are the equal of or better than bolt weapons (be they pistol, rifle, or a massive hulking heavy weapon too big to be carried by a single normal human) in every respect except for range. For those who aren't familiar with WH40K, these are basically Shuriken Needlers (or picture a militarized Salad Shooter) that shred a block of polymer for ammunition and the resulting shurikens are ''[[Absurdly Sharp Blade|monomolecular]]''. The Eldar's main ship-to-ship weapons are also largely made up of shuriken cannons - scaled up to eleven, of course.

** [[Gaiden Game|Spinoff game]] ''[[Necromunda]]'', by virtue of its slum-style setting, makes armour and energy weapons hard-to-get elite gear. Ordinary slug-throwers and shotguns are the predominant weapons in the game.

* In ''[[Battle Tech]]'' chemically propelled cannons and lasers coexist, both having advantages and disadvantages. There are still discussions which is better in-game. The Gauss Rifle was added later. It uses common metal slugs, propelled by magnetic fields and it fricking rocks, though its size weight limit the usefulness somewhat. And, even in the far future, the lowly but battle-tested machinegun is still fitted to mechs tasked with clearing infantry. Even centuries later, there's been nothing developed that does the job as well as bullets and gunpowder.

** Also, UNSC weapons deal out more damage to unshielded opponents, although Covenant weapons bring down shields faster. A player who takes advantage of this fact with UNSC/Covenant combos can bring down enemies with ease.

** As of ''Halo 3'', the UNSC have started using laser weaponry (the Spartan Laser); it is a lot more powerful than normal weaponry but it takes a long time to charge and uses up its battery quickly, making it more of an Anti-tank weapon than anything else.

** Although there may be an aversion to this trope, in that Covenant ship-to-ship weapons prove painfully effective in utterly annihilating human vessels, ''boiling'' away their reinforced titanium hulls in seconds. ''The Fall of Reach'' describes a gigantic laser-plasma beam thingamajigger that is proven capable of slicing through human ships in one stroke.

** There's some aversion, though not entirely. Besides the Forerunner Halos, the Super MAC, which is an entire satellite that's just one massive coilgun, is the most destructive weapon in the entire known galaxy. Upon impact with a fully shielded Covenant ship the Covenant ship promptly either explodes or - more likely - has a humongous hole punched through it, as the hyperspeed shell maintains enough forward momentum to punch through a ''second'' ship, and possibly even keep going after that. That's what happens when you shoot a 3000-ton slug of ferric tungsten and depleted uranium at 150,000 kilometers per second (.5c).

* Unlike [[Sci Fi]] and fantasy genres where all manner of exotic weapons are commonplace like lasers, phasers, blasters, lightning guns, plasma cannons, etc, in real life all of them are unnecessary due to one simple unalterable fact: The laws of physics tell us that anything, absolutely ''anything'' in the universe can be destroyed if you simply hit it hard enough.

* The most basic, ubiquitous kinetic weapon currently in use? Plain old firearms. A bullet fired from a handgun or rifle does damage to its target not by exploding, but simply by going really really fast. Every army on the planet uses them; arguably, there are more small arms and small-arms-ammunition deployed by the world's militaries than all other types of weapons combined.

** APFSDS rounds will go all the way through an APC or lightly armored vehicle, sometimes without doing any real damage. (An APC is mostly big empty box) They will, however, cause any deer that wander onto a firing range to go pffftt.

* The picture above is a round from the US Navy's prototype railgun, a [[Magnetic Weapons|weapon that uses electromagnetic fields]] instead of exploding gases, to propel projectiles to incredible speeds. It fired a shell at 10.64 MJ with a muzzle velocity of 2,520 m/s (over Mach 7), a good bit faster than even the above-mentioned state-of-the-art APFSDS tank rounds. The flare behind the projectile is not propellant -- it is air that has been turned to plasma by the sheer amount of friction heat the slug creates. The expected performance for future railguns entering military service is a muzzle velocity over 5,800 m/s (Mach 17), accuracy enough to hit a 5 meter target over 200 nautical miles (370.4 km) away, and a fire rate of 10 shots per minute. Its damage per shot is expected to be roughly equivalent to a Tomahawk Cruise Missile, but each shot would be cheaper, not needing an engine, warhead or guidance system, and be much harder to intercept. The primary problem the Navy is facing is that the amount of energy rapidly wears out the "barrel" of the gun, with immense electromagnetic forces - the 'recoil' of the railgun - trying to push the rails apart, and friction and resistance generating a huge amount of heat. Also, while nuclear-powered warships shouldn't have much trouble generating the energy for the railgun, smaller vehicles like tanks would need to spend a lot of effort charging them up. So, for the immediate term railguns are [[Awesome but Impractical]].

** Navy fired BAE systems prototype railgun in late Febuary 2012. Unlike previous models, this railgun is the first model that looks like something that might get mounted on a ship. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uV1SbEuzFU\]

* Laser-guided concrete bombs are an example of purely kinetic weapons being just better than kinetic weapons that go BOOM. Need a target in an urban area destroyed while minimizing the collateral damage using shrapnel-and-blast-force-inducing high explosives? Just drop a slab of good old-fashioned concrete right on top of your pesky target. Who needs fancy high-explosive mixtures when you have the simple blunt force of a solid chunk of concrete dropped from the sky?

** On top of the advantages for avoiding collateral damage, concrete is both cheaper and far safer to handle than high explosives are, making this a wonderful alliance of [[Rock Beats Laser|Rock and Laser.]]

* This is how dual-stage anti-tank weapons such as the NATO Javelin work. Although they appear to destroy their targets through high-explosives this is not actually the case. They are composed of two warheads. The first warhead defeats the target's explosive reactive armour. The second warhead is a shaped charge that propels a kinetic energy penetrator through the hull and out the other side. Aside from the catastrophic impact damage, the pressure wave created effectively turns the crew to pulp.

 

[[Category:Weapons and Wielding Tropes]]

[[Category:Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better]]