Challenge: Laser handguns

You are given the power to introduce ONE technological breakthrough in 1994 to make laser handguns competitive with gunpowder ones, in terms of range, damage, cost, etc. in 2004. It cannot be anything that flatly defies physics as we know it (or else this would be in the ASB section). What do you pick?
 
Energy storage technology (batteries, superconducting rings, some sort of gas-dynamic system, whatnot...) is the only technology that is necessary. We can build (rather clunky) lasers now that do have the potential to compete with gunpowder weapons (at outrageous prices, of course), but we still don't have an effective way to power them.
 

Diamond

Banned
I'd introduce some kind of 'beamed power' technology - wireless electricity. Otherwise, as Scott said, the power source is just too big to lug around.

Of course with beamed power, laser handguns would be the least of the new innovations possible...
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
But once you increase battery storage capacity by a few orders of magnitude don't you also have a whole new platform for innovation? Right now power companies are mainly power transmission companies that also maintain separate power generation branches. These power generation companies form pretty much what would be an illegal cartel in most other industries because they have to be in order to satisfy a demand for electricity that varies daily by several percentage points without any really good method of storing their commodity.

A battery 10x lighter and with 10x more capacity might mean the end of all the cables coming to your home. You could either buy a freshly charged battery that would power your home on a monthly basis or have one delivered, like fuel oil. In either case power outages for any reason would be a thing of the past.
 
A portable battery - that fits in the back of a pickup truck. You'll have a couple dozen yards of cable to connect it to the gun itself, but you've got your laser. Laser duels will be noisey affairs with the generators running in the background. Of course if you want ranges beyond 20 feet you need to have a 18 wheeler to heft around the generator.
 
My late friend Ed Langley (who had "connections") told me that we are experimenting with laser rifle prototypes. They are powered by power belts and are being tried out as anti-tank weapons, so they are certainly competitive with gunpowder in lethality. With a backpack, you might get several shots. He died in 2001, so this was at least several years ago.
 
Bags of Mostly Water

One of the big problems with Laser as weapons is your target IIRC it takes more power to burn thru a quarter inch of Human tissue {skin} than thro a Quarter inch of armour steel. This is due to heat Conduction and Concentration.
People are big bags of Mostly water. :p
 
Tom, your friend is pulling, if not your leg, some other part of your anatomy. The power requirements for something capable of taking out a tank are about 2-3 orders of magnitude greater than anything a human being could carry, even assuming far greater power densities than are available today. The best lasers being experimented with (and these are typically designed for light AA and AM usage) require huge power supplies (truck-sized or larger), leaving them as tank-sized or fixed installations.

Now a laser rifle is a possibility (though to be fair, a bulky and inefficient possibility) if we assume some sort of gas-dynamic approach, but even then, you aren't going to stop tanks with that....

By the way, the whole waterbag thing is true as far as it goes, but it ignores that the shock wave from boiling all that water when the beam hits would do far moer damage to the target then simply burning a hole in it...
 
Maybe...he did not strike me as the joking type, but he may have sometimes gotten "carried away". Maybe it was a backpack AA or AM weapon.
Of course, he's no longer here to ask...
 
For a backpack sized weapon, the best you are going to get is some sort of sensor-blinding device, and even then, the power supply is going to be something frightening big. Now, it is REMOTELY possible that you could build something that uses a chemical burst to generate a pulse (something similar to a gas dynamic laser, actually the concept is similar enough to what they did in that silly movie 'Real Genius', but at a much lower level of destruction) big enough to hurt something, but still no way you get anything like an anti-tank weapon. You wouldn't get me to stand near the thing while it is operational either...
 

monkey

Banned
One thing I have always wonderd about with laser weapons, is that the amount of light bouncing around in laser device is actually more than the amount hiting the target so how do you get a beam powerful enough to burn through a target without it burning through the device itself?

Recent advances in solid state lasers have enabled the development of Humvee mounted lasers capable of shooting down artilery shells midair! Such weapons may make obsolete all long range artililery, missiles and warplanes, even stealth planes as they can be detected by more modern sensor technology. So that a conflict between two factions both armed with such technology would be reduced to masive tank battles and trench warfare. It could also make aircraft cariers and modern misile ships oblsolete to be replaced by battleships armed with lasers and rail cannons, and an increased importance of submarines.
 
Monkey:
And if the usual trend of smaller, cheaper, better follows in this technology, I just might get my laser pistol before I die of old age!
 
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