Laser Guns or Rail Gun

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.

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.