Laser Guns or Rail Gun

Originally posted by urmomma158
I would pick both you cant just have one you need both. railguns have their own uses(mass area destruction destruction of reinforced things etc etc etc) and lasers can be used for air defense,missile defense,air superiority etc. Si it really depends on your scenario.

That's what i've been saying. they both have pros and cons. lasers can be a bit more portable if made small enough but rail guns have increadible power for just a ball of carbon and alluminum.

ok.. i read some of these, pretty funny ass remarks, but i agree, rail guns would be better even with the cost of ammo being short. the laser would like a flashlight on a tank. it wouldn't get anywhere other than in a comedians act. Now, what i mean by this, is they're useless. i'd rather trust a railgun to fire a plasma round at a nuclear warhead than a laser.

let's compare. A railgun can rip through armor like tissue paper while a laser can turn said armor into a heap of molten slag. A rail gun requires KEP slugs while a laser can eat an entire power grid and yet not scratch the targets paint. I'd prefer a railgun as the tech in nearly realistic and a laser still requires further advancments.

Railguns require significant advances in materials technology, LASERs require a quick rewriting of physics to overcome the inverse square law. Both need power in orders of magnitude that currently require nuclear power stations to provide for killing anything other than bugs.

I'm gonna hang on for laser powered rail guns wielded by ninja robot death monkeys.

I think railguns have gained many advantages at the current state of technology that lasers have not. For instance, say there were two nuclear power stations. One was guarded by several lasers, the other by an equal amount of rail guns.
Now, Terrorists want to destroy both power stations. Barring internal attack, which power station would the terrorists be more likely to blow up?

Well, Air atack. The Rail guns simply empty several slugs into the engines and airframe and the plane falls to the ground in a heap. The lasers scythe the plane in half.

Assault in numbers. The Railguns would hit the higher troop concentration areas with massive power. The sheer speed of the slug would make a large damage area, clearing out opposition with minimal losses. Security staff would clear out the rest. The lasers on the other hand would be attempting to zap away at all the troops but the small damege area would mean a high usage of electricity and most likely would not slow the advance fast enough.

Ground Vehicle-Borne explosives. If detected, curves in landscape could prevent a laser from getting a clear shot at the target until inside the blast zone. The railgun would adjust power and therefore adjust trajectory, popping off a nondescript white van from behind a hill three kilometres away.

As you can see from my little scenarioes I reckon a railgun would have definite advantages over a laser at current technology levels.

Lasers can blind troops over a large area if the beam is expanded using a lens, it can also be spread with a line generating optic. Blinding the troops would take far less energy then burning them, cutting them down at the ankles or blasting them with a railgun.

Originally posted by SiRiNO
A laser in use would look pretty cool, but you cant beat the insane speed of a railgun projectile

Last I heard they had mounted an experimental railgun on a battleship, pretty big.

In the spirit of "Deny Ignorance", I'm going to have to step in at this point.

A laser in use wouldn't look like anything, assuming that it was working efficiently. Unless you were the target, you wouldn't see anything other than atmospheric scattering from the beam. If too much of the energy is being scattered, you get a cool look, but an ineffective weapon. If very little of the energy is being scattered, you get no look at all, unless you're the target, and in that case, you're probably blind at best and crisp at worst. Regardless of the amount of scattering, nothing can beat the insane speed of a laser beam (186,282 miles / sec)...particularly not a rail gun (6,000 meters / sec, give or take).

If you can find a citation for the mounting of an experimental railgun aboard a battleship, I'd appreciate you posting it. There are no battleships currently in service, and as far as I (or Norman Friedman) knows, no railguns were ever mounted aboard the Iowa class. You might be confusing 'battleship' with the Navy's *desire* to *eventually* mount a railgun aboard future descendants of the "DDX", but those desires are based on the increasingly slim possibility that DDX becomes an actual fleet element of any size.

A rail gun is much more practical. It can fire a projectile 220 miles with accuracy of five meters. To fire a tomahawk missile it cost 1,000,000$ to fire a rail gun it cost just over 1,000.

reply to post by SiRiNO


When was this? the U.S. Navy hasn't used battleships since the 1990's.

I believe that the railgun (hyper velocity electromagnetic pulse rifle/gun) is the better of the two weapons, however a better weapon than that of the two of those choices would have to be an weapon in which projects ionized gases/plasma because of its intense heat and power but the major setback would be the power required to initiate the fusion to create the plasma and the power required to ionize large amounts of gases.

Originally posted by Amur_Tiger
It really depend on what is used though, if you use something with poor reflective properties then what you say is true it would heat up and still destroy the target, if you use the same reflective material that the laser uses to get the ray concentrated then it would work. Also a good cooling system would make this a non-issue, Liquid Ox tanks on the outside could actually become a good thing.

That's might be true.

A TRUE railgun only uses the 'rail' to direct the projectile, which infact propels itself.

The tech is how ion charge may modulate among 2 like masses, so the projectile peaks with monopoles many times a second 'till it builds a charge sufficient for thrust when field is suddenly shut off.

Now I've read that it uses aluminum shot at half light speed. If this were true; and it seems good idea, you'd have a superconductive array around an iron rod or something that..well... I can't even begin to explain all the parts here, but on my youtube you can understand part of my work. I'm reposting videos soon to explain some techs but this particular one I'm not giving away. If you're smart enough to figure it out with a little push, good for you. I don't think it's right to explain everything anyway.

Whichever method negates the need to bury a lot of bodies.

Corpses laying about create pandemics.

Lasers and Neutron Weapons cremate.

Sounds more efficient to me.

Death ray in a hollow laser, that is the way to go.