Personal laser weapons.

Somtaaw wrote:

Dafmeister wrote:The conditions of a battlefield tend to count against personal laser weapons as well. Lasers lose effectiveness if they have to pass through anything that absorbs, reflects or refracts light, such as fog, rain and smoke, all of which have an annoying habit of cluttering up terrestrial battlefields.

And that's just the environmental possbilities. Know your enemy is firing lasers, right before poking your head up out of a trench you could do anything from throw a craptop of dirt, to spraying aerosol cans among countless other effects.

They have some laser weapons in the Furies series, but they're the laser version of SAW's, so it'd be a minimum of a tribarrel for Honorverse. A full up backpack, probably with one or two of the pinnace hip-pocket fusion bottles, and it'd be a 2m long 'rifle' complete with bipod/tripod for stabilization. But they also have chameleon 'cloth' in the Furies series, and in Honorverse nothing smaller than battle armor has it.

The chameleon surfaces of battle armor might degrade lasers, and when you count in all the possible environmental and military possibilities to deflect & degrade lasers in addition to chameleonic surfaces, you'd be shining a high-power laser pointer for all the 'damage' you'd actually do. Perhaps useful if you're trying to lase targets for airstrikes, but otherwise you're lucky if you temporarily blind a few people.

All in all, warfare has been very conservative in it's technologies. The standard soldier still carries a knife and Spear (rifle bayonet) while drone airplanes fly overhead and drop smart bombs guided by satellite. Why - nothing has truly replaced it's capabilities. The laser, with it's limitations will probably never completely replace slug throwing weapons, due to their simplicity and cheap lethality.

The only 3 advantages a laser has over a slug thrower, is:
1) speed - you just cannot beat light speed so there is no ability to dodge
2) Ammo supply - non-Chem lasers can keep firing until the electricity runs out. So if you can connect a laser to a city power grid, or siphon energy off a Ship's central power system. But a soldier hauling batteries to power a laser system completely negates this advantage in tactical combat.
3) Ballistics - Lasers just ignore them. you can fire straight for thousands of miles. Unfortunately, atmospheric bloom, smoke, platform jitter, etc are all issues with hitting a target at a distance.

And really, all those advantages are minimal or non-existant for the battlefield soldier The slug does the same job - in some cases better. The personal laser's main advantage is logistical - the batteries which power them can be recharged off a power grid, or other power source. Until the economics of laser weapons make the propellant industry too expensive to maintain, and the individual cost of ammo raise too high, the slug will be superior to lasers. In the Honorverse, gravitonics removed the propellant costs, keeping the slug superior.

Sometimes, there really is no substitute for sticking a pointy bit of metal into your enemy.

The laser could become effective, if like with shipboards, they shifted the beam to something harder to defend against. Most other sci-fi's tend to stick with standard laser, for all the defensives, but usually don't have gravitonics for their slugs.

On the other hand, Alicia DeVries from the Furies, was well trained in both slugs and 'energy' weapons, both laser and otherwise. And even there, the Cadre seemed to prefer their slug-throwers with only a few armed with all-up plasma cannon.


I'm also not sure if it's been mentioned already, but they do have 'personal' energy weapons in the Honorverse. They just happen to be full up SAW level, and/or requiring battle armor to be considered personal

The Marines that landed on Basilisk on OBS used a few plasma cannon, and they were also used on Kornati against the FAK. The only other time we've seen plasma cannon used, was in Echoes of Honor, aboard the Tepes against StateSec. And those were specifically mounted on some form of mount and I think were only used because they had amazing firepower, but the assault shuttles in the bay could keep them fed.

Somtaaw wrote:I'm also not sure if it's been mentioned already, but they do have 'personal' energy weapons in the Honorverse. They just happen to be full up SAW level, and/or requiring battle armor to be considered personal

The Marines that landed on Basilisk on OBS used a few plasma cannon, and they were also used on Kornati against the FAK. The only other time we've seen plasma cannon used, was in Echoes of Honor, aboard the Tepes against StateSec. And those were specifically mounted on some form of mount and I think were only used because they had amazing firepower, but the assault shuttles in the bay could keep them fed.

I don't have my books handy but I thought it was in HotQ that someone (Scotty?) was mentioned as qualifying as high expert with a 'plasma carbine'. I got the impression it was a heavy rifle but not r ally an all up man portable crew served weapon.
Still it seems that, yes, Manticore went for plasma weapon over lasers for ground side energy combat.

yes it was scotty and was something i'd been about to bring up my self.

as Jonathan says it shows that there is at least one energy weapon that doesn't require battle amour to be man portable but no info has been given for it.

not even a basic "could only hit targets with 1/4 of the power of battle armour plasma rifle".

in theory if they shrunk it doing to that size could it be made into a bulky and heavy but hard hitting plasma pistol?

Dauntless wrote:yes it was scotty and was something i'd been about to bring up my self.

as Jonathan says it shows that there is at least one energy weapon that doesn't require battle amour to be man portable but no info has been given for it.

not even a basic "could only hit targets with 1/4 of the power of battle armour plasma rifle".

in theory if they shrunk it doing to that size could it be made into a bulky and heavy but hard hitting plasma pistol?

From "House of steel"
The M107 Plasma Rifle and M109 Plasma Carbine are the RMMC’s standard antiarmor weapons. The M107 uses twin M13 power cells, while the M109 carries only one. Each cell is good for three to twelve shots, depending on power settings. Maximum effective range in atmosphere is about four thousand meters, but bloom and energy bleed begin reducing terminal effect very rapidly beyond twenty-two hundred meters. In vacuum, maximum range is usually line of sight, with minimal energy bleed.

... clipped ...

Heavy weapons squads are equipped with a variety of crew-served weapons, including the M247 Heavy Tribarrel, M271 Plasma Cannon, and M223 Mortar among others.

Just guessing here, but it looks like the plasma carbine would be able fire 3 effective shots against powered armor, 12 lower power shots.

I can think of two possible differences between the carbine/rifle and the cannon. either the cannon has a more powerful shot or it has a faster rate of fire.

The plasma weapons are probably better. As we've discussed, there's all manner of ways to reduce effectiveness of mere lasers, even portable gamma or xray laser weapons. But there's only so much you can do to drop plasma effectiveness since it's primarily heat.

For the differences between plasma carbines and plasma cannons, there was the OBS portion where they used plasma cannon to take out an entire bloody rock to drop it on an aircar. And it only took a few seconds, and two shots for the plasma cannon to do it. And I believe they had something similar on Kornati, where a plasma cannon was used for either entry or to prevent an escape.

And I'm not entirely sure they really could miniaturize a plasma carbine much more than it is. Aren't carbines the official designation for something larger than a pistol, but smaller than a rifle? Could be that's because without Manticore applying it's advanced miniaturization mindset, there's certain size restrictions. Good evidence of it still being rather sizey, Scotty not only had to perform some odd skip, step and hop to keep up with Honor while carrying it (presuming it was slung not in his arms).

Somtaaw wrote:The plasma weapons are probably better. As we've discussed, there's all manner of ways to reduce effectiveness of mere lasers, even portable gamma or xray laser weapons. But there's only so much you can do to drop plasma effectiveness since it's primarily heat.

For the differences between plasma carbines and plasma cannons, there was the OBS portion where they used plasma cannon to take out an entire bloody rock to drop it on an aircar. And it only took a few seconds, and two shots for the plasma cannon to do it. And I believe they had something similar on Kornati, where a plasma cannon was used for either entry or to prevent an escape.

And I'm not entirely sure they really could miniaturize a plasma carbine much more than it is. Aren't carbines the official designation for something larger than a pistol, but smaller than a rifle? Could be that's because without Manticore applying it's advanced miniaturization mindset, there's certain size restrictions. Good evidence of it still being rather sizey, Scotty not only had to perform some odd skip, step and hop to keep up with Honor while carrying it (presuming it was slung not in his arms).

from wikipedia:
A carbine (/ˈkɑːrbiːn/ or /ˈkɑːrbaɪn/),[1] from French carabine,[2] is a long arm firearm but with a shorter barrel than a rifle or musket.[3] Many carbines are shortened versions of full-length rifles,
********
The carbine was originally a lighter, shortened weapon developed for the cavalry. Carbines were short enough to be loaded and fired from horseback, but this was rarely done – a moving horse is a very unsteady platform,

As a general rule, most carbines have barrels 13-24" long and have sholder stocks, while most rifles have barrels longer than 24"

Based on HoS text, I suspect that the plasma carbine and rifle fire the same power of charge, we still don't know if it's power is more powerful than the plasma cannon on individual shots.

darrell wrote:Based on HoS text, I suspect that the plasma carbine and rifle fire the same power of charge, we still don't know if it's power is more powerful than the plasma cannon on individual shots.

My guess would be that the rifle is no more efficient than the carbine. So if you set each to the power level that drained 1/12th of a power cell they'd deliver basically the same terminal damage (but the rifle could fire twice as many shots of that power).
However I also strongly suspect that the rifle carries 2 cells for more reasons than just more shots before you reload. Its top power setting, drawing on both cells, should exceed the 1/3rd of a cell max of the carbine. I don't know if it can go full double of that, but even the ability to draw 1/4 from each would give it 50% more peak damage capability than the carbine.

Also, thanks for digging up that HoS reference / quote. I'd forgotten ground weapons were addressed there

darrell wrote:Based on HoS text, I suspect that the plasma carbine and rifle fire the same power of charge, we still don't know if it's power is more powerful than the plasma cannon on individual shots.

I suspect the relationship is similar to the relationship of M1 Garand and M1 Carbine -- similar actions but different cartridges with greatly dissimilar power. (30-06 and .30 Carbine.) The Plasma Rifle having two power cells vs one for the Plasma Carbine suggests the possibility of twice the power for the same number of shots instead of twice as many shots.