Halo taught me that you need both: energy weapons are more efficient against shields and kinetic are more efficient against armor. Although in Stellaris it's the other way around.
In a more realistic scenario, it would come to witch type of weapon against which type of defense. Eg, lasers are bad against mirrowed armor; kinectics are bad against deflector shields, etc.
Using both is my favorite style. There are many reasons you need both. As you maybe shields are weak to one but armor weak to the other. Have different countermeasures that can negate one or the other. Even just have some environments screw with one or the other is
My general preference is kinetics (well, electro-magnetic accelaration. Though I can accept straight up ballistics as CIWS as well) as main anti-ship guns and lasers as point defense (plus missiles for both roles) (somewhat influenced by Children of a Dead Earth) But depending on your tech level and what technologies you have in your setting you can easily justify whichever is used or even both being used simultenously as anti-ship weapons because they have different strengths (especially if you have shields and one is better against shields and other against armour as you mention and is the case a lot of the time).
@@gokbay3057 there's also social and doctrinal concerns, such as how the tug-of-war between offense and defense played out for the culture that made the weapons. For the Halo example, the Covenant had a religious reason for their preference for energy weapons. Given that we can just make things up in fiction, I think using "soft" factors to justify a group's use of a weapon and then presenting a counter-example of a group that came to the opposite conclusion in the same setting is one of the more alluring ideas.
In wise words of The Road to El Dorado: Both. Both is good. Also, kinda sad that people always forget about using gravity catapults as propelling method for kinteci weapons.
The Eldar's shuriken weapons in Warhammer 40k use gravity manipulation to launch their projectiles, which are; as the name implies; disks with monomolecular edges.
The Asguard in Stargate wished they'd kept Slug Throwers instead of abandoning them for a Pure Energy Weapons Doctrine once they started dealing with the Replicators... 😄😁😆😅😂🤣
It's really ironic that artificial gravity is everywhere in sci-fi, except to be used in any way except to keep things stuck to the 'ground.' I mean, imagine a mothership that fires extremely powerful lasers or railgun rounds, and a forward observation ship that uses artificial gravity to bend the shot closer to the target to increase accuracy? Or gravity missiles that turn ships into micro-black holes for a few microseconds. Sci-fi authors always seems to want to invent something completely exotic rather than simply applying their existing technology to do the same thing.
A something to consider, weapons that require large amounts of electricity might still have the risk for something like magazine explosions even if there are no chemical propellants or explosive shells to worry about. Capacitors and high power batteries can react violently to being damaged, catching fire, shooting jets of molten material, or just straight up exploding, and that's with relatively low power devices today. Scale that up the energy requirements of something like a laser weapon and overloaded phaser pistols acting like grenades in star trek seems pretty reasonable. This applies to other methods of energy storage too, flywheel storage systems can rip themselves into a spray of shrapnel or send heavy metal disks bouncing around if damaged the right way and superconducting loop storage can straight up vaporize itself if the cooling fails while the loop is charged up.
Really good point. One thing that's still an advantage is most of those types of failures would release the energy of one shot, as opposed to a magazine explosion which can release the energy of every shot you could take, nearly at once.
@@wyrmh0le not necessarily just the energy of one shot, as you can absolutely charge up a capacitor bank for multiple shots AND the energy required to power a shot is greater than the amount of energy that shot delivers to the target, ESPECIALLY with lasers
@@wyrmh0leIf I have a rifle-ish raingun that, say, is capable of launching hundreds to thousands of bullets per minute at sci-fi-worthy velocities, it would obviously need to have somewhere it could either store, or produce, all the requisite energy. All the energy that is in normal bullet propellants, in fact... It's a lot of juice. Take something like modern lithium batteries. They don't even come close to having the requisite energy density, and you've surely seen how volatile they can be under some (very specific) circumstances. Something that is much more powerful, well, it's not guaranteed, but it follows that there's a good chance that the handwavium can go kaboom.
@@mnxs I ran into this when trying to figure out how a character's railgun pistol could work in one of my stories after I'd tweaked the setting as a whole to be more "realistic." I realized that the energy density requirements for the battery and capacitor system of a pistol-sized anti-materiel weapon would not only be well beyond the capabilities of the setting, but it would also effectively have the explosive potential of multiple hand grenades at once if it ever blew a fuse. So my character got a "normal" gun instead, which honestly felt better anyway. "Over-engineered hand-held artillery piece that only a cybernetically-enhanced individual can effectively use" ended up being way more fun to write than "handwavy sci-fi brick that makes cool noises when it shoots."
A more recent example of this is the Railgun in Helldivers 2. It has a safe mode and unsafe mode. In unsafe mode you can very much charge for more penetration power but charge it to long and it explodes killing you and destroying the weapon so you can't pick it back up when you respawn like other support weapons.
One of my favorite examples of Energy vs. Kinetic weaponry is found in the Space Battleship Yamato. It's primary armament is Positron Shock Cannons, which as the name implies, fires high energy positron beams. However, in certain cases, the Yamato's guns can also fire Type 3 shells, which can be fired even with the engine off (which supplies energy for the energy beam attacks). This flexibility is a good compromise I believe.
Loved the scene where enemies tried to attack Yamato while they where in subspace while traveling through the hyperspace gates. Due to the Law of the subspace -laser beams- energy weapons couldn't effectively be use since they just simply dissipated and forced them to charge their mega weapon the Desslar gun. Meanwhile Yamato immediately started to lob physical cannon shells back at them at full effect and managed to destroy them before they even could fully charge up.
As an example, I'm deeply fascinated by Steel Battleships. Yellow Sea, Tsushima, and Jutland are fascinating naval Battles and I would love to see that sort of Warfare translated into space. It wouldn't be a setting where missiles would work well. The justification could simply be that the combination of electronic warfare and point defense have made missiles impractical or something like that. Instead, Warfare is dominated by powerful batteries of kinetic energy weapons. The vibes very much work better in a soft sci-fi story where technology is closer to magic.
If we want to stick to realism, I think it all comes down to two questions: - Over what distance can laser beams be focussed effectively, without overheating? - Over what distance will kinetic projectiles be able to reach their target before they can be dodged or intercepted? (To which velocities can kinetic projectiles be accelerated?) In the void of space, range is everything and stealth is basically impossible, so whatever weapon type will have the longest reach will render the other one obsolete. I personally think lasers are more plausible, but it’s hard to say.
I agree about everything except when it comes to stealth. If you're soft sci-fi then you can have cloaking, or any kind of crazy tech, and then if you're hard sci-fi you can have conventional stealth, with a hull that absorbs as much radiation as possible with internal heatsinks. The second one works in that setting because also in hard sci-fi you'll reinforce the vastness of space, where even radar/ lidar and optical sensor systems have an unbelievable amount of vacuum to scan.
I kinda disagree with the notion stealth is impossible in space, I definitly think we could see techniques used to lower the crossection, or infrared radiation or whatever of the ship. Kinda like modern stealth you don't make the plane invisible you just make it seem smaller, and even a tiny reduction in radar crossection in the vastness of space could mean a lot.
Also lasers in space probably would be very stealthy, because you just cant see beam before it hits and when it hits you wont be able to determine position of shooter from it
I like how in LOGH, the weapons of their ships are so powerful they can effectively send a beam volley across a solar system, so to compensate they simply build massive fleets and fight via attrition
An important note about kinetic weapons (guns, missiles, and guided shells in between) is that they become more effective in damage, range (based on difficulty to evade), and difficulty to intercept as the closure rate between the two ships increases. This means that a ship with slow weapons going up against a ship with fast weapons (especially beams) should aim to approach at the highest possible speed and will be in trouble if it fails to destroy the enemy before closest point of approach. Unfortunately, when both ships use the same weapons, neither one can gain a relative advantage this way, so it's harder to come up with interesting maneuvers.
This principle also makes chasing a fleeing target a riskier proposition than it might be otherwise, since the pursuing vessel would be actively accelerating into any incoming fire, increasing its effectiveness. I've been working on a setting for a while that features a trio of highly-specialized cruisers that are designed to exploit the living hell out of that principle, sacrificing effectiveness against lighter craft for the sake of having incredibly powerful reverse thrust and a fixed gravity-boosted rail cannon normally found turreted on dreadnoughts. The idea behind them was they'd be able to keep ahead of any ship in their own weight class even with the ship flying backwards to keep the main gun on target. The theory works, but the incredible cost of the ships combined with their need for a robust picket screen means the production run is limited to just three ships.
@@griffinfaulkner3514 An even more specialized design only has powerful thrust in one direction (forward) and just has the gun mounted backwards. That has difficulty chasing down fleeing enemies, though.
@DecidedlyNinja The whole design was incredibly focused on shredding apart more conventional cruisers, so being able to run down fleeing enemies with extreme prejudice is extremely important. Most of the reverse thrust would be accomplished with literal thrust reversers (think Saab J-37 Viggen), so you wind up with a ship that's obscenely fast in more conventional flight regimes for its mass. For reference, the top-down profile of the ships somewhat resembles the Concorde, since shield effectiveness is directly proportional to angle of impact. The whole ship almost has a blended wing design, with the furthest outboard and rearward sections of the "wings" housing the radiator panels, and the tail protrusion housing the dampers that keep the spinal railgun from literally ripping the ship in half. The railgun itself is a whole other can of worms, but I could probably write a 60+ page design history of these things, but I digress. Suffice to say, the only conventional thing about the ships in-setting is their FTL system.
@@DecidedlyNinja halo has really good examples of this with the keys loop, taking the tech advantage of shielding out of the question by ramming a ship and hiding a nuke to emp other ships, ramming is a tactic the unsc navy uses whenever possible at least in the early war because one ship of similar weight can decimate one of any tonnage where without the tactic it would take at least 3 ships of similar tonnage take out a single covenant ship while also likely losing 2-3 of the 3 ships in the process and 3-1 isn’t even a guaranteed victory it’s an even playing field
@@epicassassin8502 I'm not talking about ramming at all (and at the speed the book implies, really both ships should have been vaporized by the collision), but I can see that battle as an example anyway. Iroquois successfully employed the slowest weapon of the engagement (a drifting nuke) by launching it at a high closure rate. However, it only worked because Iroquois was able to simply sidestep with emergency thrusters the also somewhat slow plasma torpedoes; otherwise, charging straight at them at flank speed would have been the fastest way to die. In the Nylund space battles, those emergency thrusters proved to be quite an excellent defense, somewhat undercutting the theme of human technical inferiority.
Planetside 2 did this in a cool and fun way. TR had normal bullets. NC had gauss rifles. VS had energy weapons. Which I feel is a great way to help differentiate between the factions.
Mobile Suit Gundam Iron Blooded Orphans was an interesting subversion of expectations when it came out. Energy weapons were a staple of the series up to that point, so it was a surprise that they weren't used for most of IBO's run, and one did show up, it was a big deal.
Let me first admit that I haven't come around watching IBO (yet?), but counterpoint: in the original MSG the fact that the Gundam was carrying a beamweapons was a major plot point, and a socalled 'big deal'.
@@Martel_Clips And the Dawn of Fold, the Earth-rights terrorist group, uses them anyways because they likely don't have the industrial capacity to produce beam weapons.
The reason not many mobile suits in GIBO have energy weapons is that all the MS have very high resistance paint/armor. They are basically worthless so they changed to melee weapons. Even kinetics were only useful for shipping off armor. sm
@@Tuning3434 True, but as the original series progressed, more and more units came out with beam weapons, and the main character in the show always had one. IBO was focused on mostly brute force melee weapons (just giant chunks of metal being thrown around) to give it a more "primitive" feel, even though it's all giant robots in space. The later addition of beam weapons was like bringing sniper rifles to a medieval battle.
I must admit that I'm a sucker for conventional kinetic and/or explosive weapons, even in science fiction. Guns, cannons, missiles, bombs, torpedoes, it's not just about the damage they deal, but the physical factors involved in using them. If you've ever seen a submarine movie where you have scenes of the crew loading torpedoes into their tubes, if you've ever seen the broadside guns in Revenge of the Sith spit out those massive shells accompanied by awesome sound effects, if you've ever played Halo 2 and heard the MAC gun on Cairo Station spooling up to fire from right below the barrel, and if you've ever seen Galactica absolutely fill the black of space with heavy cannon rounds and tracers from point-defense turrets, then you know the sheer satisfaction ballistic weapons can have in any setting. Sure, energy weapons might be more practical or effective, and definitely more creative in many examples of sci-fi franchises... but they'll never be as COOL as the good ol' gun.
@@theploot8230 hey fuck you pal seeing a gundam dodge a gorillion missiles will never get old and besides, kinetic weapons will never be primitive, launch it subluminal velocities and you have a weap that can burn your ass harder than any laser
I like how in Dune, lasguns are extremely powerful, but noone typically uses them because most things are shielded making them kind of a kamikaze weapon. Yet, for the same reason, shields are inherently risky because if someone really wanted to kill you, a lasgun would insure destruction. It also makes things interesting since shields don't work well on Arrakis, so lasguns can be used, but there's still that risk.
Weren't lasguns weak and ineffective in Dune and only changed to powerful in movies? I remember from books that even before shields during war with robots, ships and infantry had kinetic weapons. Even cymeks didn't care about lasers. And during early shield trials they had to look for a lasgun in a museum.
If i remember correctly they Were great against other unarmored human infantry but virtually useless against Omnius' basic Ground units early on in the human/machine war
@@Sicarius888No, they worked just fine, but when Holzmann shields were invented and their little side effect discovered, they were deemed too risky to use and fell out of use in favor of edged weapons and slow-moving slug-chuckers. (The side effect being the random chance of an explosion nearly nuclear in scale at a random point between the gunner and the target.)
For me it depends on the feel of the faction and what the weapon type says about said faction, add to that the effect the weapon will have and you have a lot of options to play with. Want a factions grounded in reality?, give them chemically propelled guns and leave it at that, with the occasional laser weapon (as was done with BSG and the Expanse). Want a faction to fell high tech? Give them particle/plasma/ion weapons and a sleek look. Want a faction to feel brutish? Give them large weapons, that fire obscenely large rounds for their given size and make the weapon effect feel more like an impact, than a cut. Want your faction to feel mysterious? Give them weapons that are so out of the realm of the possible that they feel like magic or that they create things that we consider impossible. Intent and effect are essential to developing the feel of the setting and the factions within. The 40K Orks would feel very different if all their weapons where shiny and efficient, similarly the Shadows wouldn't work if their weapons weren't so brutally efficient and terrifying, all of this matters when creating our sci-fi setting.
side note, capacitors [used in magnetic accelerators or energy weapons] can explosively discharge if damaged, so you still have an "ammo explosion" possibility
It's funny when people realize that lasers aren't supposed to be visible bright beams of light and instead are more like the ones in The Lunar War, that you can only see them if you're the target
In a story I'm working on there will be beam based weapons but the visible light is just for aiming as the weapons are still prototypes and the actual beam that hits is invisible.
Not necessarily they can still be made visible because they are ultraviolet or infrared lights which with certain optic systems can be made visible. Three however, when it comes to the amount of colors of lasers that are in cipher films, yes, you're right, there are not that many.
@@airplanecat not sure if you are commenting off mine or not but if you are the reason the prototype lasers in my book are visible is to provent accidents in testing and during exparaments so they know where the beat should be hitting if its not and to provent anyone from accidently dystroying something with the invisible beam. or anyone walking into it. the final version will be invisible save for maybe a red or green dote laser like in real life.
Using a laser to entertain the cats, we can see the "beam" by it partially reflecting off dust in the air. Perhaps in the given sci-fi setting, even if the laser is not visible light, what is being seen is small particles and debris intercepting the beam being superheated to plasma. Similarly, a "smoke" screen or flack cloud would act as a particle screen to disperse the beam and dissipate the laser's energy.
yes but taking this into consideration, in the vacuum of space the only particles that would make the laser visible would be the parts been destroyed by the weapon, that could be launched creating a small area around the point of impact where the laser would be visible.
IIrc, in MS Gundam: The Witch from Mercury kinetic weapons are considered some form of war crime, due to physical ammunition that would just go on indefinetely when used in space. Which I found a very interesting consideration I didn't remember seeing elsewhere, except, as I type this, I remembered some NPCs talking about it in Mass Effect. An officer scolding a recruit due to some error in his target calculations, and the consequences of a very heavy slug of metal accelerated to near light speed.
@@YiFan-q6f Problem is that it will eventually hit *something*, which might be anything from a black hole to a diplomatic forum planet on the other side the next galaxy.
My definition for an energy weapon: If you need to load any kind of ammo (Excluding power packs) it isn't an energy weapon. If you can hook it straight up to a reactor to fire it with nothing required except power, it's an energy weapon.
@PaintedBirds Honestly, kinda 😂 To be fair, they're kind of honourary energy weapons, as you can achieve a similar effect with enough raw power; it's just a different way of powering the beam, so the chemicals come under the same heading as replaceable power packs.
@@Paradukes ok, I see that. I feel like a better divide would be how it packs a punch. Is it using solely the speed of the projectile? Or is the mass also important? Any solid projectile weapon is using the projectile's mass and shape to its advantage, even if it's also going really fast. However plasma, lasers, and nukes all rely on the energy of the weapon. Ultimately this is just like classifying ships, where there will always be edge cases, and everyone has their own definition, and actually separating out these types is almost entirely subjective
Spacedock. Many years ago, a brilliant Irish author Anne McCaffrey wrote several groundbreaking novels. The one I would bring to your attention is The City Who Fought. If you've never encountered her work, that alone would be full of brilliant things for you to explore. The reason I am mentioning it, is because during one scene one of the bad guys, a genetic freak show version of Humans with a Nazi background, called High Clan Kolnari demonstrate one of their weapons. Something that would normally be a crew-served for a normal human, is a rifle for one of the Kolnari foot-soldiers. A deuterium pallet with a spent Uranium Sabot core loaded into a magnetic constrictor/accelerator coil-gun which can apparently punch through an armored Hull with ease. And they're are on a space station at the time!
Okay! I was not expecting to find so many fans of such of an exceptional author. Do any of you recall the Brain/Brawn ships or the Talents or the Dragons?
I ran into this energy / kinetic weapon problem and came up with an elegant solution. In my game, weapons (armaments) are split into delivery systems, rather then damage types; projectiles (ballistic, gauss, casimir, etc., any unguided missile), beam (laser, plasma, ion, etc., a stream of energy) and munitions (mines, torpedoes, missiles etc., any guided missile or bomb). There's a good mechanical reason for this. Projectiles, based on their velocity, have drift and aren't 100% accurate. Projectile damage is relative to distance and velocity, the further away or close-in you fire, the less likely you are to hit the target, making them an ideal medium range weapon. Beams on the other hand are relatively instantaneous and are 100% accurate, however distance diffracts / reduces damage, so long range does damage, but is sub-optimal, but short range ramps damage up, making them an ideal weapon for short range combat against faster or smaller targets. Munitions are staged and guided with near 100% accuracy unless being jammed or disrupted, making them ideal for long range combat, but useless at short range combat (dead / arming zone). Being a game, players build around these limitations to maximise their ship's effectiveness while having access to many different damage types and not being restricted / shoe horned into a specific damage or weapon type.
I feel like this is the best solution. I've always thought it was silly when I saw people claim, "x is the best for space combat and makes all other weapons obsolete." They never seeem to consider the downsides of their preferred system or the advantages of the dismissed systems.
I can easily see some sort of Arms Control Treaty in place that limits the scale of kinetic weapons on ships. After all, an energy weapon becomes less dangerous with distance from diffusion/dispersion if it misses, but that railgun slug stays lethal UNTIL it hits something. To paraphrase that famous bit of dialogue from Mass Effect, 'Isaac Newton is the deadliest somvabith in the universe'.
If you shoot your bullets fast enough, they'll escape the solar system so you don't have to worry about them. They won't hit anything for a very, very long time, and it'll most likely be a star. Worse is what happens when you hit: you just create even more projectiles!
I like the idea of wrapping plasma around a MAC shell, or an Alterran drone from Stargate - that one is a missile with an energy field around it as well - Yeah, best of both worlds!
an energy field could be used to counter a shield if the energy type/harmonics align, the solid internal shot could then pass through utterly unaffected and deliver its full force to the target either raw kinetics or the spaceship version of a high explosive round
I mean, canonically Projectile Weapons in Mass Effect have near unlimited ammo. They have a chunk of metal, and a "shaver" to shave a few dust bits off and then uses mass effect fields to accelerate these specks so fast they hit with the same punch as a much larger projectile moving much slower. In Mass Effect 2, 3 and Andromeda, you're not replacing the ammo block, you're replacing a heat sink which allows the weapon to be fire sooner rather than having to let it cool off (like you did in 1)
The pistol in the game Ultrakill works on the same principle- firing near microscopic flecks of metal at high speeds to deal large damage. It has effectively unlimited ammo, and even when it does run out it can be reloaded simply by chipping a small sliver of metal off of the gun's casing and using it as ammo.
It never made much sense, though. A tiny metal flake of a presumably irregular shape going Mach Jesus through air without either veering off course and quickly slowing to uselessness or disintegrating and very quickly slowing to uselessness is not plausible. Maybe they could use force fields to create a tunnel of vacuum for the bullet, but that's never mentioned and would suggest that the technology exists to make holes from a distance without using projectiles at all.
@@DecidedlyNinja As far as the irregular shape goes, I've headcanoned for a while now that the real way to do the ammo-block concept would be to have essentially a bunch of pre-formed projectiles held together with a binder rather than a solid chunk of metal. This way it's less paint chip, more tiny bullet with actual aerodynamic ballistics. This would be easier to engineer too, since you don't essentially need to micro-fabricate your ammo on demand at machine gun speeds. Instead you just need to laser off some glue. This would also make the in-universe ammo mods make a bit more sense. @Grimmance Depends on the the metal. Lead, yeah that probably vaporizes, but something like tungsten might hold up for instance.
@@DecidedlyNinja Lest I'm mistaken, the guns use the same technology as the Mass Relays so whatever the shape of the shaving, it's being propelled at faster than the speed of light so it'll hit the target before it has the chance to veer off or slow down.
I think you missed something very important. "Kinetic" is often used not for the weapon but for the warhead action on target. In other words, I would consider kinetic warheads to be distinct from explosive warheads. Where you put other types of warheads, such as chemical or biological or communications, etc. Kinetic and explosive warheads can be propelled by laser ablation too, making lasers as much a propulsion system (or comms system) as a weapons system. I think a useful, if arbitrary, distinction between Directed Energy Beam weapons could be the size of the interacting element. If it's an atom, sub-atomic particle, or photon, then it's directed energy. I'd probably include Mascons in the Beam category, which I'd consider the same as or equivalent to Directed Energy. If it's a non-explosive bullet or shell, then it's kinetic. If it's a warhead that relies on some sort of internal release of energy (mechanical, chemical, nuclear, etc.), then it could be a third class. I'm not sure what is the best name for that class or category. Thoughts?
My favourite weapon mix was described in the Honorverse. Missiles with Nuke or X-ray Laser head for long range (5+ million km range); and Grazers, over powered beam weapons for short range (≤1000 km). The tactics were mostly trying to get past electronic and regular counter-measures, or slipping around the wedges (the stressed gravity bands that propelled the vessels), as nothing can get though the wedge.
I’ve always been a fan of having a mix between kinetic and energy-based weaponry on sci-fi warships. Think a battleship with a primary armament of heavy railgun batteries, plus a trio of heavy energy beam cannons, plus a spinal-mounted superheavy particle lance, a secondary armament of coilguns, missile batteries, and pulse lasers, and a point-defense armament consisting of anti-missile lasers, CWIS-style chainguns, flak batteries, and some interceptor missiles. Or maybe a bomber carrying missiles or guided gravity bombs for precision targeting, and a plasma weapon for general carpet bombing. Or a fighter that uses missiles for long-range engagements, and a kind of nucleon shotgun for closer range. For ground combat, think a tank with a beam cannon and a coaxial machine gun. A soldier’s primary weapon being an automatic plasma gun, and their anti-tank weapon being a missile launcher of some kind. A sniper hitting their target from 5 or 6 kilometers away with a laser rifle. An artillery battery with kinetic howitzers and plasma mortars.
please can sombody tell me what "the lunar war " 0:29 is as i cant seem to find any actual stuff on it and i would really like to watch some stuff on it
I feel the Stellaris way probably does the setting well. Energy is good against armour and hull. Kinetic is good against shields (and occasionally hulls). Though, reflective mirror like armour/hull and strong deflector shields might be special cases.
I think the simplest answer is that all weapons are energy weapons. All weapons take some form of energy and convert it into some kind of force. That, however, isn't really the point. The best way I would explain it is that kinetic weapons use the energy given to impart that energy as a physical force. Energy weapons take the energy with them and transfer that energy into the target.
Even AP tank rounds today turn into a type of plasma when they hit the target, reshaping into a shaped charge that imparts the energy into the tank armor which cracks it open from the inside.
@shorewall That is a good point. I am not an expert on this. However, I would still say that it is a kinetic weapon. An example I can think of is getting hit in the eye. Whether it's a fist or firecracker, it still is a physical force. Whereas a laser transfers its energy.
A great argument of "it depends on the situation" is the anime Mobile Suit Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans where beams weapons were considered relics of the past due to Nanolaminate armor which attenuates beam damage. So all weapons from ships and mobile suits in that setting use kinetic weapons
If you can pick up and hold the projectile with your hands at room temp, it is a kinetic weapon. You can hold a bullet before loading it into a gun. You cannot hold plasma or a laser beam in your hands.
One thing I've been curious about is how to handle debris and projectile pollution in space battles. As of today a few missing screws and bolts in orbit can cause some serious trouble, gatling cannons and exploding fleets I can only imagine would pose a similar, albeit scaled up, problem. It's easy enough to hand-wave in Sci-Fi as it's hard to imagine a proper space-faring civilization that hasn't passively dealt with the issue of debris and errant projectiles, but I feel like it would be a fun aspect to explore. The only setting I know of that spent considerable time on this topic was the anime Planetes. If anyone has some sci-fi recommendations on the topic of debris pollution I'd love to have them.
Favorite Exotic ship set of weapons systems was Macross from anime. Like most anime big ships it had a massive big gun for a main cannon that fired (in the American Version) protocolture for a common big gun but the thing that I am pointing out is the defense system was ultimately a weapon system as well. It had two modes one that was little w light squares and the other was the Barrior system. This Barrier system was maybe the biggest weapon in the series. When engaged, it could take insane amounts of damage from a fleet of targets and absorb it all BUT If it took to much it over loaded returning all of it own power and that fired into it by the enemy fleet. It blew it blows up like a bomb big enough to whip out fleets. Favorite single weapon on Andromeda was the Black hole guns - yes the bad guys shot mini black holes at targets (mind you their main ship was a mini- solar system.
In the expanse the laser shown was on the behemoth, which used to be a colony ship that was supposed to use the laser for intersetellar communication, In the situation it was used in it was the only functional weapon due to the ring station slow effect.
Oni and Mandalore mentioned? Well, thankfully it's on his big Google Doc of games he's aware of, and apparently it's been recorded for quite a while. The video might be out by the end of the year, assuming Mandy has no more trouble with storms, house-moving, horses, wereyeens, witches, etc.
I really like the vibes of kinetic and energy being more/less effective against certain armor types, like in Halo where plasma weapons are better against shields but kinetics are better against soft targets. Can add an extra layer of complexity to the tactics, especially when there is a significant difference between a weapon type being countered vs not countered.
Is it possible for you guys to talk about the wave-motion engine and gun from Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato? I'd really love to see that if you can, thanks
3:39 Using CoaDE to illustrate "Lasers are longer ranged" is really funny to me, because my experience was that they were the short range option: kinetics don't suffer diffusion losses - they'll always hit with the same impact! Lasers are more accurate, which is great for point defense, but they take time to do damage so they work a lot better when fleets are in similar orbits and can sit and fire at each other. Meanwhile, kinetics benefit from getting into a retro orbit so you blast past each other at the sum of your orbital speeds, unloading your kinetics in advance (and then burning to the side to dodge!). Definitely doesn't result in the pirouettes that the Expanse has, though that may be more to do with engine tech. Hard to do those fancy maneuvers when you max out at tenths of a gravity.
CoaDE has some big limitations in the armor modeling. Specifically, you could only ablate a specific thickness of armor per second. So in the game optimal armor vs lasers was aerogell, while in reality aerogell would be less effective than smoke vs cutting intensity lasers. Also meant there was a hard-cap on the useful intensity of lasers. Afik it capped at 1/100'th to 1/1000'the the intensity of commercial laser cutters.
lasers for point defense and kinetics for offense seems like a great mix. Missiles have a great advantage is space because they can plot a path to their target, and the lasers that travel very fast and deliver lots of heat are great for defense.
With energy weapons, you also have to deal with all the excess heat. A laser powerful enough to damage and/or destroy an enemy ship 10,000 km away would require extensive heat management, such as extensive heat sinks and radiators.
Everything has to deal with excess heat. Presently, lasers convert a larger proportion of their input energy into it than electric cannons, but future technology could change that. A really efficient laser would be scary.
@@DecidedlyNinja That's also a point I've heard for regular brass casings over plastic or caseless ammo. The brass casing acts as a heat sink that is ejected from the gun.
I would add that you could also interestingly reverse this by using a laser to "cook" a ship with worse heat management, overheating its systems and forcing its crew to surrender without having to kill them.
@@RorikH Yea, this is an under appreciated strategic use of lasers. It has the added benefit that you don't need a tight focus to get an effect. So a laser used as a "cooker" has MUCH longer range than when used as a cutting beam. This will be great for cleaning up after a battle and as a way for settlements to police the space around them.
Actually realistically speaking lasers wouldn't have glowing lines in space (only at the origin point and end point) while a kinetic weapon with tracers will look very much like your stereotypical sci-fi energy weapon.
In the book Mote In God's Eye the setting's force fields were so absurdly powerful that kinetic space weapons get barely a reference and most space battles become about overloading the enemy's force fields through a concentrated laser barrage. If you max out the force field's absorption rate the excess energy has to travel SOMEWHERE and cooks through the hull of the ship, causing power surges and 'burn throughs. While you don't see any happen in the story I thought was a very clever explanation/justification for the ubiquitous exploding control panels you see in most space operas.
Surprised they didn’t dump the excess energy into their fancy coffee machines to brew it nice and hot. (At least, I seem to recall “ship’s coffee” being a thing.)
8:41 ironically, using kinetic weapons opens a slight plot hole in BSG. Even if they resupplied ammunition at Ragnar at the beginning of the series, it still bothers me that it never came up as a plot point that they should save ammo where ever possible, because they have no opportunity to restock (well, except if the Pegasus left behind most of their ammo before foolishly wasting itself). I think there is some throwaway line in the briefing before the attack on the Cylon colony, where Adama mentions throwing rocks if they run out of shells, but that is all I can remember in that regard. They wasted a bit of potential by not introducing ammo as a finite resource, which the colonials would have to manage. For example, the holy wall of flak is one of the best things to come out of BSG, but they somehow failed to consider its huge requirements for ammunition, which would be a huge downside in real life, severely limiting its effectiveness to protect the fleet in a multi-year conflict without the possibility to resupply.
The whole vibes thing really works in Stargate. The Tau’ri use kinetic weapons for most of the series and it keeps it feeling like it takes place “today”
Logistics is another consideration. In Star Wars specifically, blasters are the norm because you can get 500+ shots from a single gas magazine, whereas you only get what, 30 rounds for twice the weight with a ballistic weapon? It's just way easier to transport and recharge what are essentially batteries, than it is to carry around tiny capsules of EXPLOSIVES, which could cook off if the ammo storage gets hit.
the trade off was that space wizards could almost always deflect your bolts back at you (which gets you killed anyway), hence why Mandalorian's used kinetics whenever they had the opportunity to. can't deflect molten buckshot flying into you after they've passed through the the glorified glowstick.
Modern surface warships are currently trying to move from kinetic to laser point defense due to the threat that a swarm of low cost low speed missiles or drones could force a ship to expend all of its PDW ammunition prior to sending in a hypersonic anti-ship missile one the ship can no longer defend itself.
I appreciate that some settings make shields for one and not the other. Borg in Trek adapt faster to phasers than to guns or melee attacks, for example.
fun thought for a laser point defense system. For a laser to work you need 2 major things, an emitter and an energy sources. In theory, you do not need them next to each other. So you could have a massive energy source say, with your core engine or near it, and cables taking that energy to emitters. The defense emitters could therefore be a lot smaller and scattered all over the hull of your ship. You wouldn't have clear defense turrets shooting but an occasional unsuspecting panel on the ship shoot at a missile. This thought would work for a point defense and not for a 'main weapon'.
One problem with energy weapons is that of focusing. Any "beam" will spread over distance, the rate of spread is reduced by really good focus. So long range laser fire (in space, planetary uses don't get to this level of detail) Another problem with any direct fire weapon used in space is vibration isolation. over a couple light seconds (Earth to moon ranges) even a small vibration can throw off your aim. Assuming you have good enough fire control to hit a moving, randomly evading target at that range anyway.
A fun thing to do can be to have different factions use different types of weapons and then use that as a starting point to build up how their ships are different. For Example: Faction A is more technologically advanced and makes extensive use of Proton Accelerator Canons. Meanwhile, the less advanced Faction B uses mostly railguns and coilguns. Because they both fight each other (because sci-fi) A optimizes their shields to counter solid objects, while B optimizes theirs to counter particle beams. As a result of this, the few old Faction A ships still in service that couldn't fit the Proton Canons for whatever reason are a huge threat to B because B's shields aren't meant to stop big lumps of metal. Adding onto that, Because B's shields are bad at stopping solid objects, they have much more extensive point defense and countermeasure systems to protect them against Missiles, while A has much lighter defenses because their shields protect them. This then leads to A making little use of offensive strike craft because B's point defenses are so thick that A's pilots have such high loss rates as to make them non-viable for offensive use, allowing them to focus on low numbers of technologically superior short-range interceptors for fleet defense to defend them against B's strike craft attempting to exploit A's poor point defenses. Eventually leading to both sides all but forgoing strike craft to focus on those big spectacle battleship battles sci-fi loves.
I think Kenetic is well kenetic energy, basically things that slam or smash something Whilst energy is thermal or electric energy, it burns or melts things. Also kinetic usually has a “round” that can be singled out as one round one shot. Whilst energy weapons are usually a fuel or power pack that each shot is part of a fuel/charge.
I think an analogy can be made comparing kinetic and energy weapons with hammers and lances. It would seem that kinetic projectiles does a better job at smashing into stuff and causing a great deal of structural damage across a larger surface area. Whereas energy weapons, when used properly, are better suited at penetrating deep into the target.
So, right now the meta is energy since it's better to run armor instead of shields, given that it has more HP, doesn't cost power and doesn't get bypassed by missiles. The increased alloy costs can be a deterrent though. What doesn't help is that late game most MP battleships will run kinetic artillery which has insane DPS and will absolutely smash your shields. IIRC they have as much DPS against hull as T3 plasma does, and it's not far off when against armor. Though you have to make sure you keep some PD destroyers or a couple carrier battleships with guardian PD in case the enemy runs torpedo cruisers or even stealth frigates if he is a madlad
Kinetic to me refers to conventional weapons such as bullets, missiles, nukes, and railgun-related projectiles. Anything that is physically possible to touch and hold before firing them. Energy to me refers to weapons that convert from one type of matter to another before reaching the target (or sometimes before even leaving the weapon) such as photons, superheated plasma, and sonic shockwaves (see LRAD used by riot police). Anything that doesn't technically exist in its final form before the trigger is pulled or may not be in a completely solid form.
EVE Online has a pretty coherent damage type system - kinetics cover chemically-propelled shells (Explosive/Kinetic damage mostly, with some EM and Thermal mixed in, depending on the payload), energy weapons cover beam lasers (ElectroMagnetic with some Thermal damage mixed in), launchers cover guided missiles and rockets (can deal either of the 4 damage types exclusively), and hybrids cover particle accelerators and plasma guns (they deal a mix of thermal and kinetic damage)
For me I prefer ion and emp based weapons. Fry the electronics and you eliminate the enemies capacity for damage and escape. This I feel was best shown with the malevolence in star wars and if say the Death star had these as a replusar based weapon to emp in a 360 degree it could easily have defended itself better than just tie fighters and ISD
In a setting where heat management was more of a concern, a large semi-diffuse laser could also work, as you could just overheat your opponent's ship until they basically had to shut everything off to cool down.
Depends on the power of the laser being fired. Though a stronger laser would require more power and more extensive heat management. So there would be a trade off.
Yup, that range limitation is why I prefer lasers as point defense and kinetics (rail- and coilguns) as actual long range anti-ship guns (plus missiles which are longest range but they are subject to point defense so there is that).
@@gokbay3057 lasers lose effectiveness with range, plasma dissipates, missiles can lose lock (space is unfathomably vast) but kinetics will still hit with the same force that fired it. so a brilliant use of kinetic weapons is to calculate how long it will take to hit/ target an enemy world, compensate for travel time & stellar drift & boom you have an interstellar world ender. kinetics in space are just as scary if not scarier then nukes, because their destructive potential is not reduced by neither time nor distance. (only gravity) meaning a single projectile could end civilizations if it hits a planet hard enough after drifting through the void for who knows how long. because issac newton is the deadliest thing in space.
I always liked it when there was a rock-paper-scissors sort of interaction with the protection onion. You could have laser/high energy weapons that are really good at burning through most physical armour. To defend against that you can have especially thermal resistant ablative armour. However that particular armour isn't very good at stopping kinetic projectiles, etc.. So which weapon is more effective depends entire on which kind of defenses you want to defeat and vice versa. And do you go all in one or the other, making them highly effective in their specific role but essentially useless against their counter, or do you mix up different technologies to form a weaker composite loadout that offers some effective against both at the expense of not being as good?
I think the right term is "Beam Weapon". Kinetic is still energy. Thus, kinetic weapon can still be said to be energy weapon, loosely. So, calling it beam weapon solves a lot of confusion.
I always liked weapons that combine the two and fire energy-charged physical projectiles. Basically, shoot physical bullets, but surround them with an energy envelope, either plasmoid, radiation of some kind, heck even just really really hot incendiary/tracer material. The energy envelope helps with target penetration at the lower muzzle velocities, and an additional energy-based charge could be delivered on impact too. I don't know why it's not done more in sci-fi. It even accounts for most "energy weapons" shooting projectiles that move slower than the kinetic weapons!
I've started playing around with kinetic only builds in Starsector, oh boy, with a couple range and fire rate upgrades, I've found nothing that can stand in my way. Shreds open shields and armour like they're made of paper.
There is no clear boundary between energy vs kinetic weapons but what matters is energy/mass ratio, which is higher the closer the projectile is to the speed of light until it is technically infinite for photons since they have energy but no mass. TBH massless projectiles (or very low mass projectiles accelerated close to the speed of light) have a lot of downsides but for spacecraft they have the all important upside of not weighing anything (although obviously the weapon itself does) and on a spacecraft every ounce counts and in any form of combat ammunition always gets expended several times faster than you expect.
Honestly I think space combat would be a lot like submarine warfare, where sensors are usually strictly passive to prevent detection. This would give kinetic weapons, especially of the dumb gun projectile variety, a potential range advantage over something like a laser, which eventually becomes ineffective due to diffraction. If a gun fires a round a good distance away using an enemy ships known vector, what are the odds that the enemy would actually detect the projectile?
Any ship designed for long time cruising in interplanetary space would need to be designed to be able to detect and avoid fast moving objects that might cross its path, like meteorites. There is no reason why a projectile fired from a hostile ship would be any different.
The heat signature from internal heat which has to be shed to keep systems and crew from overheating is not hide-able. Propulsion systems emissions would also be detectable.
Particle beam weapons in a magnetic field ( such as produced by most planets ) would be very tricky to aim, as the magnetic field would distort the beam if the particles had an electric charge and how are you going to accelerate them if they don't ? What's more, the beam bending would vary depending on the angle of the beam relative to the magnetic field, which would also vary if you were moving.
New diversionary tactic: Fire electron beams at a planet in order to create a cool Aurora Borealis (or Australis) that will cause all enemies to go outside and look, then sneak into their bases while they're taking photographs.
Actually, even in space lasers would have shorter effective ranges than kinetics for the simple fact that lasers diffract, kinetics do not. So, if you can accelerate and disperse a large enough field of projectiles in your target's general direction and heading, you will intercept and damage them, while the only way to counter diffraction is more power and more exotic focusing materials, the former of which would likely cause your ship to become larger to both shield the crew and radiate the excess heat, thus becoming an easier target for clouds of projectiles.
Personally, I like it when people get creative with their scifi technology. If it's missiles, glow or whatever. Like that time, someone created a "gun" that fired hard light holograms that turned off when they weren't needed. Or had a coating of plasma that improved the range of their missiles. Etc. My favorite would have to be the energy weapons from Lexx odd little sheets of doom that. Great video 👍🏻
In the whole "Directed Energy VS Kinetics" debate I assume we are discussing single target weaponry, ignoring punch-through. Nukes and the like are AoE weaponry and fall under the broad vague term of "munition". Personally I distinguish DE and Kinetic by one being transfer of thermal energy and the other kinetic. I personally prefer kinetic type weaponry as they feel "chunky". With regard to DE weapons I prefer the cutting laser trope where it's and instant beam that burns and cuts cleanly. The whole "laser bolts" thing just never makes sense and feels like kinetics with extra steps.
In my little Sci-Fi setting, I actually have combinations of both. One side has Beam Weapons as well as preferring physical rounds, with the ammo essentially being the batteries for the Beam Weapons - detonating in an explosion of Beam energy after easily slipping past the Anti-Beam Fields... The other side has weapons that can fire a combination of physical and plasma projectiles. Designed primarily like a physical round weapon, the barrel in front of the firing chamber doubles as the plasma chamber, a barrier field protecting the firing chamber and any rounds in there. This allows for tactical flexibility on the battlefield, switching between between the 2 in a second or two. Not to mention being able to load a variety of ammo types with the physical rounds...
You could have ships with both, or even fleets that employ ships that use solely kinetic or directed energy for different roles. Ships using kinetic weapons could be best for engaging targets at close range or bombarding targets that are stationary/slow moving. Meanwhile directed energy ships could be best for engaging targets at long ranges and for sniping at vital points on targets to cripple them.
Choose whatever and lean fully into it. But split protection from both evenly. It's cool to be able to specialise to counter your adversary, but in political landscape "adversary" is usually a list of 50 other states with different approaches and doctrines. So pick whatever get you to repeatables future tech the fastest 😅
On the topic of definition, first I would say nukes fall under the category of explosives, which I would say is an entirely distinct category of non-directed weapons, while kinetics and energy weapons are highly directional. On defining kinetic vs energy, I would ask "does it knock you back?" Kinetic weapons primarily rely on momentum to transfer the damage dealing energy while energy weapons primarily utilize kinetic energy in some form. That energy can be in the form of photons, high KE (ie high temp) matter in plasma, or relativistic velocity, small mass, particles in particle cannons. None of these categories need to transfer appreciable amounts of momentum to transfer large amounts of damaging energy, and that is how we can distinguish them from the classic slug thrower kinetic category.
I kinda prefer the vibes of "kinetic" railguns and particle beams. tbh this is heavily influenced by the game From the Depths, PACs and cannons feel so much more impactful. Lasers slowly burn through, kinetics SLAM into the enemy and tear chunks off is my thinking.
Certain forms of beam weapons (like ion beams, etc.) have mass. Then there's things like plasma weapons, which definitely also has mass. I'd agree if we said that the matter has to be either solid or liquid (ie., be held contiguously together), and that the majority of its energy delivered on target is kinetic in nature. Explosive shells and the like (including nukes) are in neither category, IMHO.
After having played EVE, it seems more like the damage output type becomes more of a necessary point. From a base standpoint damage is damage long as there is no immunity. Damage will add up eventually but if you have a weapon with a damage type that defeats a particular defense then you have greater efficiency. So a whole big depends on the setting just like it was mentioned. That aside I love the wide variety of clips used as examples!
haha you and your Nebulous Moment. Thank you for highlighting my favorite game btw! Also if you ever need to listen to the fun Nebulous Pirate Radio I got that on my channel.
No comment on whether or not the works we're talking are either kid-friendly or aren't kid-friendly? If the former, the execs will force you to do only energy weapons, while the latter should allow kinetics with energys. I think railguns are more expensive than missiles due to the experimental taxations involved. 7:21: If only the game is not abandonware. Regardless, would like to see the cycles of guilt for Oni be explored. 8:26: Good old anime bubbly explosions.
Naval PPCs are pretty great as well (And I have always hated how Battletech autocannons worked backwards in relation to their size and range. Though Gauss Rifles are pretty cool even if they explode when hit).
One point in favor of kinetic weapons that I don't see brought up a lot is that they are a lot more resilient to incoming damage. If your carrying vessel is expected to take a lot of hits, you may not want something that requires delicate lenses or emitter surfaces that don't take kindly to shrapnel, where a big slab of metal firing solid projectiles is going to shrug a lot of that off
The real fun part about messing with energy weapons is when you start looking to making weapons with the different types of particles and the effects that could possibly have on the output of said weapon, like the difference between photons and tachyons.
This is why when talking about lasers and beams in general they add "directed" to "energy weapon", because without it, "energy weapon" is too broad a term.
@@peasant8246 Even then Flame throwers still fit. Since it's still directed, just wider spread and lower range than a laser. Flame Throwers being a "low tech" energy weapon is a kinda fun idea to consider, in my opinion. Especially if you start thinking of possible implementations in Scifi settings.
Halo taught me that you need both: energy weapons are more efficient against shields and kinetic are more efficient against armor. Although in Stellaris it's the other way around.
In a more realistic scenario, it would come to witch type of weapon against which type of defense. Eg, lasers are bad against mirrowed armor; kinectics are bad against deflector shields, etc.
Using both is my favorite style.
There are many reasons you need both.
As you maybe shields are weak to one but armor weak to the other. Have different countermeasures that can negate one or the other. Even just have some environments screw with one or the other is
My general preference is kinetics (well, electro-magnetic accelaration. Though I can accept straight up ballistics as CIWS as well) as main anti-ship guns and lasers as point defense (plus missiles for both roles) (somewhat influenced by Children of a Dead Earth)
But depending on your tech level and what technologies you have in your setting you can easily justify whichever is used or even both being used simultenously as anti-ship weapons because they have different strengths (especially if you have shields and one is better against shields and other against armour as you mention and is the case a lot of the time).
@@gokbay3057 there's also social and doctrinal concerns, such as how the tug-of-war between offense and defense played out for the culture that made the weapons. For the Halo example, the Covenant had a religious reason for their preference for energy weapons. Given that we can just make things up in fiction, I think using "soft" factors to justify a group's use of a weapon and then presenting a counter-example of a group that came to the opposite conclusion in the same setting is one of the more alluring ideas.
I've never played Stellaris. How does it work there?
In wise words of The Road to El Dorado: Both. Both is good.
Also, kinda sad that people always forget about using gravity catapults as propelling method for kinteci weapons.
people using gravity generators to propel blocks and use it as a gravity gun of sorts is a thing in the game Space Engineers
I did a double-take because I genuinely thought this said 'gravy catapults'.
The Eldar's shuriken weapons in Warhammer 40k use gravity manipulation to launch their projectiles, which are; as the name implies; disks with monomolecular edges.
The Asguard in Stargate wished they'd kept Slug Throwers instead of abandoning them for a Pure Energy Weapons Doctrine once they started dealing with the Replicators...
😄😁😆😅😂🤣
It's really ironic that artificial gravity is everywhere in sci-fi, except to be used in any way except to keep things stuck to the 'ground.'
I mean, imagine a mothership that fires extremely powerful lasers or railgun rounds, and a forward observation ship that uses artificial gravity to bend the shot closer to the target to increase accuracy? Or gravity missiles that turn ships into micro-black holes for a few microseconds. Sci-fi authors always seems to want to invent something completely exotic rather than simply applying their existing technology to do the same thing.
A something to consider, weapons that require large amounts of electricity might still have the risk for something like magazine explosions even if there are no chemical propellants or explosive shells to worry about. Capacitors and high power batteries can react violently to being damaged, catching fire, shooting jets of molten material, or just straight up exploding, and that's with relatively low power devices today. Scale that up the energy requirements of something like a laser weapon and overloaded phaser pistols acting like grenades in star trek seems pretty reasonable. This applies to other methods of energy storage too, flywheel storage systems can rip themselves into a spray of shrapnel or send heavy metal disks bouncing around if damaged the right way and superconducting loop storage can straight up vaporize itself if the cooling fails while the loop is charged up.
Really good point. One thing that's still an advantage is most of those types of failures would release the energy of one shot, as opposed to a magazine explosion which can release the energy of every shot you could take, nearly at once.
@@wyrmh0le not necessarily just the energy of one shot, as you can absolutely charge up a capacitor bank for multiple shots AND the energy required to power a shot is greater than the amount of energy that shot delivers to the target, ESPECIALLY with lasers
@@wyrmh0leIf I have a rifle-ish raingun that, say, is capable of launching hundreds to thousands of bullets per minute at sci-fi-worthy velocities, it would obviously need to have somewhere it could either store, or produce, all the requisite energy. All the energy that is in normal bullet propellants, in fact... It's a lot of juice.
Take something like modern lithium batteries. They don't even come close to having the requisite energy density, and you've surely seen how volatile they can be under some (very specific) circumstances. Something that is much more powerful, well, it's not guaranteed, but it follows that there's a good chance that the handwavium can go kaboom.
@@mnxs I ran into this when trying to figure out how a character's railgun pistol could work in one of my stories after I'd tweaked the setting as a whole to be more "realistic." I realized that the energy density requirements for the battery and capacitor system of a pistol-sized anti-materiel weapon would not only be well beyond the capabilities of the setting, but it would also effectively have the explosive potential of multiple hand grenades at once if it ever blew a fuse.
So my character got a "normal" gun instead, which honestly felt better anyway. "Over-engineered hand-held artillery piece that only a cybernetically-enhanced individual can effectively use" ended up being way more fun to write than "handwavy sci-fi brick that makes cool noises when it shoots."
A more recent example of this is the Railgun in Helldivers 2. It has a safe mode and unsafe mode. In unsafe mode you can very much charge for more penetration power but charge it to long and it explodes killing you and destroying the weapon so you can't pick it back up when you respawn like other support weapons.
One of my favorite examples of Energy vs. Kinetic weaponry is found in the Space Battleship Yamato. It's primary armament is Positron Shock Cannons, which as the name implies, fires high energy positron beams.
However, in certain cases, the Yamato's guns can also fire Type 3 shells, which can be fired even with the engine off (which supplies energy for the energy beam attacks). This flexibility is a good compromise I believe.
Yamato, Hasshin!
They'd need to factor in gravity as a variable when plotting firing solutions since you won't get a ballistic arc in a zero g environment
I love the impact sounds of the shells in Yamato.
Loved the scene where enemies tried to attack Yamato while they where in subspace while traveling through the hyperspace gates. Due to the Law of the subspace -laser beams- energy weapons couldn't effectively be use since they just simply dissipated and forced them to charge their mega weapon the Desslar gun. Meanwhile Yamato immediately started to lob physical cannon shells back at them at full effect and managed to destroy them before they even could fully charge up.
@@gegeji6442their not lasers 💀 both Garmillas and Earth fires some variant of a Positron beam
Depends on the vibes you want in your setting.
KEW is good against Jedi.
Bullets turn to molten metal.
😈
I was going to say depends on your tech level but that is also true.
@@hellacoorinna9995 "Jedis can block lasers? Okay, have fun with this buckshot."
Like say the setting uses mainly kinetic and energy weapons were just made and are currently in the prototype phase.
As an example, I'm deeply fascinated by Steel Battleships. Yellow Sea, Tsushima, and Jutland are fascinating naval Battles and I would love to see that sort of Warfare translated into space.
It wouldn't be a setting where missiles would work well. The justification could simply be that the combination of electronic warfare and point defense have made missiles impractical or something like that. Instead, Warfare is dominated by powerful batteries of kinetic energy weapons.
The vibes very much work better in a soft sci-fi story where technology is closer to magic.
If we want to stick to realism, I think it all comes down to two questions:
- Over what distance can laser beams be focussed effectively, without overheating?
- Over what distance will kinetic projectiles be able to reach their target before they can be dodged or intercepted? (To which velocities can kinetic projectiles be accelerated?)
In the void of space, range is everything and stealth is basically impossible, so whatever weapon type will have the longest reach will render the other one obsolete. I personally think lasers are more plausible, but it’s hard to say.
I agree about everything except when it comes to stealth. If you're soft sci-fi then you can have cloaking, or any kind of crazy tech, and then if you're hard sci-fi you can have conventional stealth, with a hull that absorbs as much radiation as possible with internal heatsinks. The second one works in that setting because also in hard sci-fi you'll reinforce the vastness of space, where even radar/ lidar and optical sensor systems have an unbelievable amount of vacuum to scan.
I kinda disagree with the notion stealth is impossible in space, I definitly think we could see techniques used to lower the crossection, or infrared radiation or whatever of the ship. Kinda like modern stealth you don't make the plane invisible you just make it seem smaller, and even a tiny reduction in radar crossection in the vastness of space could mean a lot.
@@sam23696Kinda like the Anubis-class Stealth Frigate in The Expanse, right?
Also lasers in space probably would be very stealthy, because you just cant see beam before it hits and when it hits you wont be able to determine position of shooter from it
@@nicolasheredia956 That's a good example
I like how in LOGH, the weapons of their ships are so powerful they can effectively send a beam volley across a solar system, so to compensate they simply build massive fleets and fight via attrition
LOGH?
@@armorhide406Legend of the Galactic Heroes
An important note about kinetic weapons (guns, missiles, and guided shells in between) is that they become more effective in damage, range (based on difficulty to evade), and difficulty to intercept as the closure rate between the two ships increases. This means that a ship with slow weapons going up against a ship with fast weapons (especially beams) should aim to approach at the highest possible speed and will be in trouble if it fails to destroy the enemy before closest point of approach. Unfortunately, when both ships use the same weapons, neither one can gain a relative advantage this way, so it's harder to come up with interesting maneuvers.
This principle also makes chasing a fleeing target a riskier proposition than it might be otherwise, since the pursuing vessel would be actively accelerating into any incoming fire, increasing its effectiveness. I've been working on a setting for a while that features a trio of highly-specialized cruisers that are designed to exploit the living hell out of that principle, sacrificing effectiveness against lighter craft for the sake of having incredibly powerful reverse thrust and a fixed gravity-boosted rail cannon normally found turreted on dreadnoughts. The idea behind them was they'd be able to keep ahead of any ship in their own weight class even with the ship flying backwards to keep the main gun on target. The theory works, but the incredible cost of the ships combined with their need for a robust picket screen means the production run is limited to just three ships.
@@griffinfaulkner3514 An even more specialized design only has powerful thrust in one direction (forward) and just has the gun mounted backwards. That has difficulty chasing down fleeing enemies, though.
@DecidedlyNinja The whole design was incredibly focused on shredding apart more conventional cruisers, so being able to run down fleeing enemies with extreme prejudice is extremely important. Most of the reverse thrust would be accomplished with literal thrust reversers (think Saab J-37 Viggen), so you wind up with a ship that's obscenely fast in more conventional flight regimes for its mass. For reference, the top-down profile of the ships somewhat resembles the Concorde, since shield effectiveness is directly proportional to angle of impact. The whole ship almost has a blended wing design, with the furthest outboard and rearward sections of the "wings" housing the radiator panels, and the tail protrusion housing the dampers that keep the spinal railgun from literally ripping the ship in half. The railgun itself is a whole other can of worms, but I could probably write a 60+ page design history of these things, but I digress. Suffice to say, the only conventional thing about the ships in-setting is their FTL system.
@@DecidedlyNinja halo has really good examples of this with the keys loop, taking the tech advantage of shielding out of the question by ramming a ship and hiding a nuke to emp other ships, ramming is a tactic the unsc navy uses whenever possible at least in the early war because one ship of similar weight can decimate one of any tonnage where without the tactic it would take at least 3 ships of similar tonnage take out a single covenant ship while also likely losing 2-3 of the 3 ships in the process and 3-1 isn’t even a guaranteed victory it’s an even playing field
@@epicassassin8502 I'm not talking about ramming at all (and at the speed the book implies, really both ships should have been vaporized by the collision), but I can see that battle as an example anyway. Iroquois successfully employed the slowest weapon of the engagement (a drifting nuke) by launching it at a high closure rate. However, it only worked because Iroquois was able to simply sidestep with emergency thrusters the also somewhat slow plasma torpedoes; otherwise, charging straight at them at flank speed would have been the fastest way to die. In the Nylund space battles, those emergency thrusters proved to be quite an excellent defense, somewhat undercutting the theme of human technical inferiority.
"You can't use indirect fire with lasers." Crosshair pulls out a handful of coin-size mirrors and smirks.
Time to combine kinetic projector, mirrors and laser together for trick shots.
+ ULTRARICCOSHOT
ULTRAKILL
⸻⸻⸻⸻
+ULTRARICOSHOT x2
+INTERRUPTION
+EXPLODED
+EXPLODED
+FRIENDLY FIRE
+INSTAKILL
+HEADSHOT
+TRIPLE KILL
Planetside 2 did this in a cool and fun way. TR had normal bullets. NC had gauss rifles. VS had energy weapons. Which I feel is a great way to help differentiate between the factions.
Didn't even realize that NC had gauss rifles but i suppose it does explain the damage and firerate
Loyalty until death. Strength in Unity!
Mobile Suit Gundam Iron Blooded Orphans was an interesting subversion of expectations when it came out. Energy weapons were a staple of the series up to that point, so it was a surprise that they weren't used for most of IBO's run, and one did show up, it was a big deal.
Let me first admit that I haven't come around watching IBO (yet?), but counterpoint: in the original MSG the fact that the Gundam was carrying a beamweapons was a major plot point, and a socalled 'big deal'.
the reverse in witch from mercury where physical weapon are against the "space geneva convention" due to kessler syndrome
@@Martel_Clips And the Dawn of Fold, the Earth-rights terrorist group, uses them anyways because they likely don't have the industrial capacity to produce beam weapons.
The reason not many mobile suits in GIBO have energy weapons is that all the MS have very high resistance paint/armor. They are basically worthless so they changed to melee weapons. Even kinetics were only useful for shipping off armor. sm
@@Tuning3434 True, but as the original series progressed, more and more units came out with beam weapons, and the main character in the show always had one. IBO was focused on mostly brute force melee weapons (just giant chunks of metal being thrown around) to give it a more "primitive" feel, even though it's all giant robots in space. The later addition of beam weapons was like bringing sniper rifles to a medieval battle.
Never thought I'd see Forgotten Weapons here. That rules, haha.
I mean, he has reviewed a few electromagnetic accelerator guns.
Gun Jesus has shown up in a number of these videos.
I must admit that I'm a sucker for conventional kinetic and/or explosive weapons, even in science fiction.
Guns, cannons, missiles, bombs, torpedoes, it's not just about the damage they deal, but the physical factors involved in using them. If you've ever seen a submarine movie where you have scenes of the crew loading torpedoes into their tubes, if you've ever seen the broadside guns in Revenge of the Sith spit out those massive shells accompanied by awesome sound effects, if you've ever played Halo 2 and heard the MAC gun on Cairo Station spooling up to fire from right below the barrel, and if you've ever seen Galactica absolutely fill the black of space with heavy cannon rounds and tracers from point-defense turrets, then you know the sheer satisfaction ballistic weapons can have in any setting.
Sure, energy weapons might be more practical or effective, and definitely more creative in many examples of sci-fi franchises... but they'll never be as COOL as the good ol' gun.
Booooring, we got plenty of that with modern media, the future has no need for primitive weapons.
The future is energy 😎
@@theploot8230 hey fuck you pal seeing a gundam dodge a gorillion missiles will never get old
and besides, kinetic weapons will never be primitive, launch it subluminal velocities and you have a weap that can burn your ass harder than any laser
Shame we never see any metalstorm inspired guns/cannons
"If a gun doesn't solve your problem, use more gun!"-Some random mechanic dude
Love the Mandalore reference, and yes I agree.
He would, buts he's currently stuck in Cablea's cycles of hunting
I like how in Dune, lasguns are extremely powerful, but noone typically uses them because most things are shielded making them kind of a kamikaze weapon. Yet, for the same reason, shields are inherently risky because if someone really wanted to kill you, a lasgun would insure destruction. It also makes things interesting since shields don't work well on Arrakis, so lasguns can be used, but there's still that risk.
Weren't lasguns weak and ineffective in Dune and only changed to powerful in movies?
I remember from books that even before shields during war with robots, ships and infantry had kinetic weapons. Even cymeks didn't care about lasers. And during early shield trials they had to look for a lasgun in a museum.
@Sicarius888 You could be right, it's been a while since I've read the books, but I thought I remember them being decently strong
If i remember correctly they Were great against other unarmored human infantry but virtually useless against Omnius' basic Ground units early on in the human/machine war
@@Sicarius888No, they worked just fine, but when Holzmann shields were invented and their little side effect discovered, they were deemed too risky to use and fell out of use in favor of edged weapons and slow-moving slug-chuckers. (The side effect being the random chance of an explosion nearly nuclear in scale at a random point between the gunner and the target.)
@@BobYork-x5lMeh, that’s the fanfic.
For me it depends on the feel of the faction and what the weapon type says about said faction, add to that the effect the weapon will have and you have a lot of options to play with.
Want a factions grounded in reality?, give them chemically propelled guns and leave it at that, with the occasional laser weapon (as was done with BSG and the Expanse).
Want a faction to fell high tech? Give them particle/plasma/ion weapons and a sleek look.
Want a faction to feel brutish? Give them large weapons, that fire obscenely large rounds for their given size and make the weapon effect feel more like an impact, than a cut.
Want your faction to feel mysterious? Give them weapons that are so out of the realm of the possible that they feel like magic or that they create things that we consider impossible.
Intent and effect are essential to developing the feel of the setting and the factions within.
The 40K Orks would feel very different if all their weapons where shiny and efficient, similarly the Shadows wouldn't work if their weapons weren't so brutally efficient and terrifying, all of this matters when creating our sci-fi setting.
side note, capacitors [used in magnetic accelerators or energy weapons] can explosively discharge if damaged, so you still have an "ammo explosion" possibility
I love how most of these comparison thought pieces end with "they're both/all good, use what YOU want." It's an important thing to keep in mind.
It's funny when people realize that lasers aren't supposed to be visible bright beams of light and instead are more like the ones in The Lunar War, that you can only see them if you're the target
In a story I'm working on there will be beam based weapons but the visible light is just for aiming as the weapons are still prototypes and the actual beam that hits is invisible.
Not necessarily they can still be made visible because they are ultraviolet or infrared lights which with certain optic systems can be made visible. Three however, when it comes to the amount of colors of lasers that are in cipher films, yes, you're right, there are not that many.
@@airplanecat not sure if you are commenting off mine or not but if you are the reason the prototype lasers in my book are visible is to provent accidents in testing and during exparaments so they know where the beat should be hitting if its not and to provent anyone from accidently dystroying something with the invisible beam. or anyone walking into it.
the final version will be invisible save for maybe a red or green dote laser like in real life.
Using a laser to entertain the cats, we can see the "beam" by it partially reflecting off dust in the air. Perhaps in the given sci-fi setting, even if the laser is not visible light, what is being seen is small particles and debris intercepting the beam being superheated to plasma. Similarly, a "smoke" screen or flack cloud would act as a particle screen to disperse the beam and dissipate the laser's energy.
yes but taking this into consideration, in the vacuum of space the only particles that would make the laser visible would be the parts been destroyed by the weapon, that could be launched creating a small area around the point of impact where the laser would be visible.
IIrc, in MS Gundam: The Witch from Mercury kinetic weapons are considered some form of war crime, due to physical ammunition that would just go on indefinetely when used in space. Which I found a very interesting consideration I didn't remember seeing elsewhere, except, as I type this, I remembered some NPCs talking about it in Mass Effect. An officer scolding a recruit due to some error in his target calculations, and the consequences of a very heavy slug of metal accelerated to near light speed.
It would be only a concern near planets or space stations, because space is so vast, that bullet will hit most likely nothing.
@@YiFan-q6f Problem is that it will eventually hit *something*, which might be anything from a black hole to a diplomatic forum planet on the other side the next galaxy.
We've had self-destructive ammunition for AA cannons for decades.
My definition for an energy weapon: If you need to load any kind of ammo (Excluding power packs) it isn't an energy weapon. If you can hook it straight up to a reactor to fire it with nothing required except power, it's an energy weapon.
Does that make chemical lasers not energy weapons?
@PaintedBirds Honestly, kinda 😂
To be fair, they're kind of honourary energy weapons, as you can achieve a similar effect with enough raw power; it's just a different way of powering the beam, so the chemicals come under the same heading as replaceable power packs.
@@Paradukes ok, I see that. I feel like a better divide would be how it packs a punch. Is it using solely the speed of the projectile? Or is the mass also important? Any solid projectile weapon is using the projectile's mass and shape to its advantage, even if it's also going really fast. However plasma, lasers, and nukes all rely on the energy of the weapon. Ultimately this is just like classifying ships, where there will always be edge cases, and everyone has their own definition, and actually separating out these types is almost entirely subjective
@@PaintedBirdswhere would flamethrowers fall under that definition, would they be classified as directed energy weapons?
@@jasonpereira4024 I would say so, and I feel like logically that works.
I’m old enough to remember when everything was an energy weapon. Some were kinetic energy weapons while other were directed energy weapons.
Spacedock. Many years ago, a brilliant Irish author Anne McCaffrey wrote several groundbreaking novels. The one I would bring to your attention is The City Who Fought. If you've never encountered her work, that alone would be full of brilliant things for you to explore. The reason I am mentioning it, is because during one scene one of the bad guys, a genetic freak show version of Humans with a Nazi background, called High Clan Kolnari demonstrate one of their weapons. Something that would normally be a crew-served for a normal human, is a rifle for one of the Kolnari foot-soldiers. A deuterium pallet with a spent Uranium Sabot core loaded into a magnetic constrictor/accelerator coil-gun which can apparently punch through an armored Hull with ease. And they're are on a space station at the time!
Okay! I was not expecting to find so many fans of such of an exceptional author. Do any of you recall the Brain/Brawn ships or the Talents or the Dragons?
@@Cauin450 Grew up on Dragons, Fire-lizards, and the Brain/brawn ones. But she had a lot more of the dragon books over the years
Had a bit of a culture shock moment there, with the idea that there are people who haven't read Anne McCaffrey.
@@greensteve9307 was a shock to me to, her novels are available free on TH-cam!
I ran into this energy / kinetic weapon problem and came up with an elegant solution. In my game, weapons (armaments) are split into delivery systems, rather then damage types; projectiles (ballistic, gauss, casimir, etc., any unguided missile), beam (laser, plasma, ion, etc., a stream of energy) and munitions (mines, torpedoes, missiles etc., any guided missile or bomb). There's a good mechanical reason for this. Projectiles, based on their velocity, have drift and aren't 100% accurate. Projectile damage is relative to distance and velocity, the further away or close-in you fire, the less likely you are to hit the target, making them an ideal medium range weapon. Beams on the other hand are relatively instantaneous and are 100% accurate, however distance diffracts / reduces damage, so long range does damage, but is sub-optimal, but short range ramps damage up, making them an ideal weapon for short range combat against faster or smaller targets. Munitions are staged and guided with near 100% accuracy unless being jammed or disrupted, making them ideal for long range combat, but useless at short range combat (dead / arming zone).
Being a game, players build around these limitations to maximise their ship's effectiveness while having access to many different damage types and not being restricted / shoe horned into a specific damage or weapon type.
I feel like this is the best solution. I've always thought it was silly when I saw people claim, "x is the best for space combat and makes all other weapons obsolete." They never seeem to consider the downsides of their preferred system or the advantages of the dismissed systems.
This channel is so goated for always showing what the clips are from
I can easily see some sort of Arms Control Treaty in place that limits the scale of kinetic weapons on ships. After all, an energy weapon becomes less dangerous with distance from diffusion/dispersion if it misses, but that railgun slug stays lethal UNTIL it hits something.
To paraphrase that famous bit of dialogue from Mass Effect, 'Isaac Newton is the deadliest somvabith in the universe'.
If you shoot your bullets fast enough, they'll escape the solar system so you don't have to worry about them. They won't hit anything for a very, very long time, and it'll most likely be a star. Worse is what happens when you hit: you just create even more projectiles!
@@DecidedlyNinja YOU DO NOT "EYEBALL IT"!!
I am more of a missile guy who prefer missiles that could swap between energy and kinetic damage types.
Lets you pick whether to be kinetic or energy based. Very smart.
@@SargeRho dragonfire or semibreve I could use.
Missels run out of ammo and can intercepted so i see clear disetwamted
@@---jx3ql kinetics also run out of ammo which is why my ship is a missile printer which has flux but I am way less exposed.
@@addisonchow9798 Yeah, I think missiles are better since they can be both kinetic and energy weapons.
I like the idea of wrapping plasma around a MAC shell, or an Alterran drone from Stargate - that one is a missile with an energy field around it as well - Yeah, best of both worlds!
an energy field could be used to counter a shield if the energy type/harmonics align, the solid internal shot could then pass through utterly unaffected and deliver its full force to the target either raw kinetics or the spaceship version of a high explosive round
I mean, canonically Projectile Weapons in Mass Effect have near unlimited ammo. They have a chunk of metal, and a "shaver" to shave a few dust bits off and then uses mass effect fields to accelerate these specks so fast they hit with the same punch as a much larger projectile moving much slower. In Mass Effect 2, 3 and Andromeda, you're not replacing the ammo block, you're replacing a heat sink which allows the weapon to be fire sooner rather than having to let it cool off (like you did in 1)
The pistol in the game Ultrakill works on the same principle- firing near microscopic flecks of metal at high speeds to deal large damage. It has effectively unlimited ammo, and even when it does run out it can be reloaded simply by chipping a small sliver of metal off of the gun's casing and using it as ammo.
It never made much sense, though. A tiny metal flake of a presumably irregular shape going Mach Jesus through air without either veering off course and quickly slowing to uselessness or disintegrating and very quickly slowing to uselessness is not plausible. Maybe they could use force fields to create a tunnel of vacuum for the bullet, but that's never mentioned and would suggest that the technology exists to make holes from a distance without using projectiles at all.
@DecidedlyNinja the metal flashes to something like a plasma at the sped its fired at.
@@DecidedlyNinja As far as the irregular shape goes, I've headcanoned for a while now that the real way to do the ammo-block concept would be to have essentially a bunch of pre-formed projectiles held together with a binder rather than a solid chunk of metal. This way it's less paint chip, more tiny bullet with actual aerodynamic ballistics. This would be easier to engineer too, since you don't essentially need to micro-fabricate your ammo on demand at machine gun speeds. Instead you just need to laser off some glue. This would also make the in-universe ammo mods make a bit more sense.
@Grimmance Depends on the the metal. Lead, yeah that probably vaporizes, but something like tungsten might hold up for instance.
@@DecidedlyNinja Lest I'm mistaken, the guns use the same technology as the Mass Relays so whatever the shape of the shaving, it's being propelled at faster than the speed of light so it'll hit the target before it has the chance to veer off or slow down.
I think you missed something very important. "Kinetic" is often used not for the weapon but for the warhead action on target. In other words, I would consider kinetic warheads to be distinct from explosive warheads. Where you put other types of warheads, such as chemical or biological or communications, etc. Kinetic and explosive warheads can be propelled by laser ablation too, making lasers as much a propulsion system (or comms system) as a weapons system.
I think a useful, if arbitrary, distinction between Directed Energy Beam weapons could be the size of the interacting element. If it's an atom, sub-atomic particle, or photon, then it's directed energy. I'd probably include Mascons in the Beam category, which I'd consider the same as or equivalent to Directed Energy. If it's a non-explosive bullet or shell, then it's kinetic. If it's a warhead that relies on some sort of internal release of energy (mechanical, chemical, nuclear, etc.), then it could be a third class. I'm not sure what is the best name for that class or category.
Thoughts?
My favourite weapon mix was described in the Honorverse.
Missiles with Nuke or X-ray Laser head for long range (5+ million km range); and Grazers, over powered beam weapons for short range (≤1000 km). The tactics were mostly trying to get past electronic and regular counter-measures, or slipping around the wedges (the stressed gravity bands that propelled the vessels), as nothing can get though the wedge.
I’ve always been a fan of having a mix between kinetic and energy-based weaponry on sci-fi warships.
Think a battleship with a primary armament of heavy railgun batteries, plus a trio of heavy energy beam cannons, plus a spinal-mounted superheavy particle lance, a secondary armament of coilguns, missile batteries, and pulse lasers, and a point-defense armament consisting of anti-missile lasers, CWIS-style chainguns, flak batteries, and some interceptor missiles.
Or maybe a bomber carrying missiles or guided gravity bombs for precision targeting, and a plasma weapon for general carpet bombing.
Or a fighter that uses missiles for long-range engagements, and a kind of nucleon shotgun for closer range.
For ground combat, think a tank with a beam cannon and a coaxial machine gun. A soldier’s primary weapon being an automatic plasma gun, and their anti-tank weapon being a missile launcher of some kind. A sniper hitting their target from 5 or 6 kilometers away with a laser rifle. An artillery battery with kinetic howitzers and plasma mortars.
please can sombody tell me what "the lunar war " 0:29 is as i cant seem to find any actual stuff on it and i would really like to watch some stuff on it
The Lunar War channel here on TH-cam. I just got it in my recommended.
But it has only like 3 Videos around a minute in length 😢
Where is the cool footage shown in spacedocks video?
I like psychological weapons.
How to defeat a space battleship using psychological warfare? Uploading a bunch of creepy pastas into their system?
@@produto_pirateado Nebula's cursed. Turn the ship around.
@@produto_pirateadoYou show them you have their families
@@produto_pirateado I’d say the Tyranid way or the Reaper way, with varying levels
@@rommdan2716underrated strategy lmao
I feel the Stellaris way probably does the setting well.
Energy is good against armour and hull.
Kinetic is good against shields (and occasionally hulls).
Though, reflective mirror like armour/hull and strong deflector shields might be special cases.
I think the simplest answer is that all weapons are energy weapons. All weapons take some form of energy and convert it into some kind of force. That, however, isn't really the point. The best way I would explain it is that kinetic weapons use the energy given to impart that energy as a physical force. Energy weapons take the energy with them and transfer that energy into the target.
KEW v DEW
Even AP tank rounds today turn into a type of plasma when they hit the target, reshaping into a shaped charge that imparts the energy into the tank armor which cracks it open from the inside.
@shorewall That is a good point. I am not an expert on this. However, I would still say that it is a kinetic weapon. An example I can think of is getting hit in the eye. Whether it's a fist or firecracker, it still is a physical force. Whereas a laser transfers its energy.
Using plasma to power a railgun like the expanse is pretty realistic as their are pros to it than a normal railgun
A great argument of "it depends on the situation" is the anime Mobile Suit Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans where beams weapons were considered relics of the past due to Nanolaminate armor which attenuates beam damage. So all weapons from ships and mobile suits in that setting use kinetic weapons
If you can pick up and hold the projectile with your hands at room temp, it is a kinetic weapon. You can hold a bullet before loading it into a gun. You cannot hold plasma or a laser beam in your hands.
lmao this is actually brilliant
One thing I've been curious about is how to handle debris and projectile pollution in space battles. As of today a few missing screws and bolts in orbit can cause some serious trouble, gatling cannons and exploding fleets I can only imagine would pose a similar, albeit scaled up, problem. It's easy enough to hand-wave in Sci-Fi as it's hard to imagine a proper space-faring civilization that hasn't passively dealt with the issue of debris and errant projectiles, but I feel like it would be a fun aspect to explore. The only setting I know of that spent considerable time on this topic was the anime Planetes.
If anyone has some sci-fi recommendations on the topic of debris pollution I'd love to have them.
Favorite Exotic ship set of weapons systems was Macross from anime. Like most anime big ships it had a massive big gun for a main cannon that fired (in the American Version) protocolture for a common big gun but the thing that I am pointing out is the defense system was ultimately a weapon system as well. It had two modes one that was little w light squares and the other was the Barrior system. This Barrier system was maybe the biggest weapon in the series. When engaged, it could take insane amounts of damage from a fleet of targets and absorb it all BUT If it took to much it over loaded returning all of it own power and that fired into it by the enemy fleet. It blew it blows up like a bomb big enough to whip out fleets.
Favorite single weapon on Andromeda was the Black hole guns - yes the bad guys shot mini black holes at targets (mind you their main ship was a mini- solar system.
In the expanse the laser shown was on the behemoth, which used to be a colony ship that was supposed to use the laser for intersetellar communication, In the situation it was used in it was the only functional weapon due to the ring station slow effect.
Oni and Mandalore mentioned? Well, thankfully it's on his big Google Doc of games he's aware of, and apparently it's been recorded for quite a while. The video might be out by the end of the year, assuming Mandy has no more trouble with storms, house-moving, horses, wereyeens, witches, etc.
I really like the vibes of kinetic and energy being more/less effective against certain armor types, like in Halo where plasma weapons are better against shields but kinetics are better against soft targets. Can add an extra layer of complexity to the tactics, especially when there is a significant difference between a weapon type being countered vs not countered.
Is it possible for you guys to talk about the wave-motion engine and gun from Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato? I'd really love to see that if you can, thanks
3:39 Using CoaDE to illustrate "Lasers are longer ranged" is really funny to me, because my experience was that they were the short range option: kinetics don't suffer diffusion losses - they'll always hit with the same impact! Lasers are more accurate, which is great for point defense, but they take time to do damage so they work a lot better when fleets are in similar orbits and can sit and fire at each other. Meanwhile, kinetics benefit from getting into a retro orbit so you blast past each other at the sum of your orbital speeds, unloading your kinetics in advance (and then burning to the side to dodge!). Definitely doesn't result in the pirouettes that the Expanse has, though that may be more to do with engine tech. Hard to do those fancy maneuvers when you max out at tenths of a gravity.
CoaDE has some big limitations in the armor modeling. Specifically, you could only ablate a specific thickness of armor per second. So in the game optimal armor vs lasers was aerogell, while in reality aerogell would be less effective than smoke vs cutting intensity lasers. Also meant there was a hard-cap on the useful intensity of lasers. Afik it capped at 1/100'th to 1/1000'the the intensity of commercial laser cutters.
lasers for point defense and kinetics for offense seems like a great mix. Missiles have a great advantage is space because they can plot a path to their target, and the lasers that travel very fast and deliver lots of heat are great for defense.
With energy weapons, you also have to deal with all the excess heat. A laser powerful enough to damage and/or destroy an enemy ship 10,000 km away would require extensive heat management, such as extensive heat sinks and radiators.
Everything has to deal with excess heat. Presently, lasers convert a larger proportion of their input energy into it than electric cannons, but future technology could change that. A really efficient laser would be scary.
@@DecidedlyNinja That's also a point I've heard for regular brass casings over plastic or caseless ammo. The brass casing acts as a heat sink that is ejected from the gun.
I would add that you could also interestingly reverse this by using a laser to "cook" a ship with worse heat management, overheating its systems and forcing its crew to surrender without having to kill them.
@@RorikH Yea, this is an under appreciated strategic use of lasers. It has the added benefit that you don't need a tight focus to get an effect. So a laser used as a "cooker" has MUCH longer range than when used as a cutting beam. This will be great for cleaning up after a battle and as a way for settlements to police the space around them.
Energy weapons make pretty light and go zip zip fwoo fwoo so I like them better
But Kinetics go BTHooooom BTHooooom, they are neat too!
@@loginlost_horizon6327 They don't do that, hard sci fi space has no sound, dummy
Thing about the kinetic weapons is that you have a finite amount of them on a ship. But you always have more energy that you can use.
@@nicholase82 The also don't glow pretty and do pew pew
Actually realistically speaking lasers wouldn't have glowing lines in space (only at the origin point and end point) while a kinetic weapon with tracers will look very much like your stereotypical sci-fi energy weapon.
In the book Mote In God's Eye the setting's force fields were so absurdly powerful that kinetic space weapons get barely a reference and most space battles become about overloading the enemy's force fields through a concentrated laser barrage. If you max out the force field's absorption rate the excess energy has to travel SOMEWHERE and cooks through the hull of the ship, causing power surges and 'burn throughs. While you don't see any happen in the story I thought was a very clever explanation/justification for the ubiquitous exploding control panels you see in most space operas.
Also had a nice narrative element that the fields changed colour to indicate increasing energy load. When they're violet, it's bad news.
Surprised they didn’t dump the excess energy into their fancy coffee machines to brew it nice and hot. (At least, I seem to recall “ship’s coffee” being a thing.)
8:41 ironically, using kinetic weapons opens a slight plot hole in BSG. Even if they resupplied ammunition at Ragnar at the beginning of the series, it still bothers me that it never came up as a plot point that they should save ammo where ever possible, because they have no opportunity to restock (well, except if the Pegasus left behind most of their ammo before foolishly wasting itself).
I think there is some throwaway line in the briefing before the attack on the Cylon colony, where Adama mentions throwing rocks if they run out of shells, but that is all I can remember in that regard. They wasted a bit of potential by not introducing ammo as a finite resource, which the colonials would have to manage. For example, the holy wall of flak is one of the best things to come out of BSG, but they somehow failed to consider its huge requirements for ammunition, which would be a huge downside in real life, severely limiting its effectiveness to protect the fleet in a multi-year conflict without the possibility to resupply.
They do start manufacturing their own ammunition, but it doesn’t go very well and I’m not convinced it would actually be enough.
TH-cam, recommend me the video of demonstrating Jack and Sam demonstrating a P90 to the Jaffa again!
The whole vibes thing really works in Stargate. The Tau’ri use kinetic weapons for most of the series and it keeps it feeling like it takes place “today”
Logistics is another consideration. In Star Wars specifically, blasters are the norm because you can get 500+ shots from a single gas magazine, whereas you only get what, 30 rounds for twice the weight with a ballistic weapon? It's just way easier to transport and recharge what are essentially batteries, than it is to carry around tiny capsules of EXPLOSIVES, which could cook off if the ammo storage gets hit.
the trade off was that space wizards could almost always deflect your bolts back at you (which gets you killed anyway), hence why Mandalorian's used kinetics whenever they had the opportunity to.
can't deflect molten buckshot flying into you after they've passed through the the glorified glowstick.
Modern surface warships are currently trying to move from kinetic to laser point defense due to the threat that a swarm of low cost low speed missiles or drones could force a ship to expend all of its PDW ammunition prior to sending in a hypersonic anti-ship missile one the ship can no longer defend itself.
I appreciate that some settings make shields for one and not the other. Borg in Trek adapt faster to phasers than to guns or melee attacks, for example.
fun thought for a laser point defense system. For a laser to work you need 2 major things, an emitter and an energy sources. In theory, you do not need them next to each other. So you could have a massive energy source say, with your core engine or near it, and cables taking that energy to emitters. The defense emitters could therefore be a lot smaller and scattered all over the hull of your ship. You wouldn't have clear defense turrets shooting but an occasional unsuspecting panel on the ship shoot at a missile. This thought would work for a point defense and not for a 'main weapon'.
Yes this is the right way of looking at things.
I was thinking about this the other day, but I'm a big fan of the kinetic-heavy space combat environments like BSG and The Expanse
One problem with energy weapons is that of focusing. Any "beam" will spread over distance, the rate of spread is reduced by really good focus. So long range laser fire (in space, planetary uses don't get to this level of detail)
Another problem with any direct fire weapon used in space is vibration isolation. over a couple light seconds (Earth to moon ranges) even a small vibration can throw off your aim. Assuming you have good enough fire control to hit a moving, randomly evading target at that range anyway.
As with any weapon system decision, Who are you fighting and How are you fighting?
A fun thing to do can be to have different factions use different types of weapons and then use that as a starting point to build up how their ships are different.
For Example: Faction A is more technologically advanced and makes extensive use of Proton Accelerator Canons. Meanwhile, the less advanced Faction B uses mostly railguns and coilguns. Because they both fight each other (because sci-fi) A optimizes their shields to counter solid objects, while B optimizes theirs to counter particle beams.
As a result of this, the few old Faction A ships still in service that couldn't fit the Proton Canons for whatever reason are a huge threat to B because B's shields aren't meant to stop big lumps of metal.
Adding onto that, Because B's shields are bad at stopping solid objects, they have much more extensive point defense and countermeasure systems to protect them against Missiles, while A has much lighter defenses because their shields protect them.
This then leads to A making little use of offensive strike craft because B's point defenses are so thick that A's pilots have such high loss rates as to make them non-viable for offensive use, allowing them to focus on low numbers of technologically superior short-range interceptors for fleet defense to defend them against B's strike craft attempting to exploit A's poor point defenses. Eventually leading to both sides all but forgoing strike craft to focus on those big spectacle battleship battles sci-fi loves.
I think Kenetic is well kenetic energy, basically things that slam or smash something
Whilst energy is thermal or electric energy, it burns or melts things.
Also kinetic usually has a “round” that can be singled out as one round one shot.
Whilst energy weapons are usually a fuel or power pack that each shot is part of a fuel/charge.
All say this...
Kinetic keeps going and going and going.
"Once you pull that trigger someone, somewhere, sometime is going to have a very bad day."
Depends on what the enemy has, armor or shield.
If it's Unbidden, use kinetic weapons and If it's the Prethoryn Scourge, use energy weapons.
I think an analogy can be made comparing kinetic and energy weapons with hammers and lances. It would seem that kinetic projectiles does a better job at smashing into stuff and causing a great deal of structural damage across a larger surface area. Whereas energy weapons, when used properly, are better suited at penetrating deep into the target.
So, right now the meta is energy since it's better to run armor instead of shields, given that it has more HP, doesn't cost power and doesn't get bypassed by missiles. The increased alloy costs can be a deterrent though. What doesn't help is that late game most MP battleships will run kinetic artillery which has insane DPS and will absolutely smash your shields. IIRC they have as much DPS against hull as T3 plasma does, and it's not far off when against armor. Though you have to make sure you keep some PD destroyers or a couple carrier battleships with guardian PD in case the enemy runs torpedo cruisers or even stealth frigates if he is a madlad
Kinetic to me refers to conventional weapons such as bullets, missiles, nukes, and railgun-related projectiles.
Anything that is physically possible to touch and hold before firing them.
Energy to me refers to weapons that convert from one type of matter to another before reaching the target (or sometimes before even leaving the weapon) such as photons, superheated plasma, and sonic shockwaves (see LRAD used by riot police).
Anything that doesn't technically exist in its final form before the trigger is pulled or may not be in a completely solid form.
Space Battleship Yamato : why not both?
That anime is the true definition of there is no such thing as overkill.
That anime is the true definition of there is no such thing as overkill.
EVE Online has a pretty coherent damage type system - kinetics cover chemically-propelled shells (Explosive/Kinetic damage mostly, with some EM and Thermal mixed in, depending on the payload), energy weapons cover beam lasers (ElectroMagnetic with some Thermal damage mixed in), launchers cover guided missiles and rockets (can deal either of the 4 damage types exclusively), and hybrids cover particle accelerators and plasma guns (they deal a mix of thermal and kinetic damage)
For me I prefer ion and emp based weapons. Fry the electronics and you eliminate the enemies capacity for damage and escape. This I feel was best shown with the malevolence in star wars and if say the Death star had these as a replusar based weapon to emp in a 360 degree it could easily have defended itself better than just tie fighters and ISD
In a setting where heat management was more of a concern, a large semi-diffuse laser could also work, as you could just overheat your opponent's ship until they basically had to shut everything off to cool down.
You can kind of do this with X-rays and other penetrating radiation in real life. The caveat is that it also kills people.
OMG I used to play Oni as a kid and I have NEVER expected it to be referenced anywhere!
Thermal bloom. Lazers are subject to thermal blooming which will limit their range.
Depends on the power of the laser being fired. Though a stronger laser would require more power and more extensive heat management. So there would be a trade off.
Yup, that range limitation is why I prefer lasers as point defense and kinetics (rail- and coilguns) as actual long range anti-ship guns (plus missiles which are longest range but they are subject to point defense so there is that).
@@gokbay3057 lasers lose effectiveness with range, plasma dissipates, missiles can lose lock (space is unfathomably vast) but kinetics will still hit with the same force that fired it.
so a brilliant use of kinetic weapons is to calculate how long it will take to hit/ target an enemy world, compensate for travel time & stellar drift & boom you have an interstellar world ender.
kinetics in space are just as scary if not scarier then nukes, because their destructive potential is not reduced by neither time nor distance. (only gravity)
meaning a single projectile could end civilizations if it hits a planet hard enough after drifting through the void for who knows how long.
because issac newton is the deadliest thing in space.
I always liked it when there was a rock-paper-scissors sort of interaction with the protection onion.
You could have laser/high energy weapons that are really good at burning through most physical armour. To defend against that you can have especially thermal resistant ablative armour. However that particular armour isn't very good at stopping kinetic projectiles, etc.. So which weapon is more effective depends entire on which kind of defenses you want to defeat and vice versa.
And do you go all in one or the other, making them highly effective in their specific role but essentially useless against their counter, or do you mix up different technologies to form a weaker composite loadout that offers some effective against both at the expense of not being as good?
I think the right term is "Beam Weapon". Kinetic is still energy. Thus, kinetic weapon can still be said to be energy weapon, loosely. So, calling it beam weapon solves a lot of confusion.
I always liked weapons that combine the two and fire energy-charged physical projectiles. Basically, shoot physical bullets, but surround them with an energy envelope, either plasmoid, radiation of some kind, heck even just really really hot incendiary/tracer material. The energy envelope helps with target penetration at the lower muzzle velocities, and an additional energy-based charge could be delivered on impact too.
I don't know why it's not done more in sci-fi. It even accounts for most "energy weapons" shooting projectiles that move slower than the kinetic weapons!
I've started playing around with kinetic only builds in Starsector, oh boy, with a couple range and fire rate upgrades, I've found nothing that can stand in my way. Shreds open shields and armour like they're made of paper.
There is no clear boundary between energy vs kinetic weapons but what matters is energy/mass ratio, which is higher the closer the projectile is to the speed of light until it is technically infinite for photons since they have energy but no mass. TBH massless projectiles (or very low mass projectiles accelerated close to the speed of light) have a lot of downsides but for spacecraft they have the all important upside of not weighing anything (although obviously the weapon itself does) and on a spacecraft every ounce counts and in any form of combat ammunition always gets expended several times faster than you expect.
Honestly I think space combat would be a lot like submarine warfare, where sensors are usually strictly passive to prevent detection. This would give kinetic weapons, especially of the dumb gun projectile variety, a potential range advantage over something like a laser, which eventually becomes ineffective due to diffraction. If a gun fires a round a good distance away using an enemy ships known vector, what are the odds that the enemy would actually detect the projectile?
Any ship designed for long time cruising in interplanetary space would need to be designed to be able to detect and avoid fast moving objects that might cross its path, like meteorites. There is no reason why a projectile fired from a hostile ship would be any different.
The heat signature from internal heat which has to be shed to keep systems and crew from overheating is not hide-able. Propulsion systems emissions would also be detectable.
There is no stealth in Space.
Particle beam weapons in a magnetic field ( such as produced by most planets ) would be very tricky to aim, as the magnetic field would distort the beam if the particles had an electric charge and how are you going to accelerate them if they don't ? What's more, the beam bending would vary depending on the angle of the beam relative to the magnetic field, which would also vary if you were moving.
New diversionary tactic: Fire electron beams at a planet in order to create a cool Aurora Borealis (or Australis) that will cause all enemies to go outside and look, then sneak into their bases while they're taking photographs.
Actually, even in space lasers would have shorter effective ranges than kinetics for the simple fact that lasers diffract, kinetics do not. So, if you can accelerate and disperse a large enough field of projectiles in your target's general direction and heading, you will intercept and damage them, while the only way to counter diffraction is more power and more exotic focusing materials, the former of which would likely cause your ship to become larger to both shield the crew and radiate the excess heat, thus becoming an easier target for clouds of projectiles.
Personally, I like it when people get creative with their scifi technology. If it's missiles, glow or whatever.
Like that time, someone created a "gun" that fired hard light holograms that turned off when they weren't needed. Or had a coating of plasma that improved the range of their missiles. Etc.
My favorite would have to be the energy weapons from Lexx odd little sheets of doom that.
Great video 👍🏻
4:33 Ramiel melting mountains fanclub
In the whole "Directed Energy VS Kinetics" debate I assume we are discussing single target weaponry, ignoring punch-through. Nukes and the like are AoE weaponry and fall under the broad vague term of "munition".
Personally I distinguish DE and Kinetic by one being transfer of thermal energy and the other kinetic. I personally prefer kinetic type weaponry as they feel "chunky". With regard to DE weapons I prefer the cutting laser trope where it's and instant beam that burns and cuts cleanly. The whole "laser bolts" thing just never makes sense and feels like kinetics with extra steps.
I like the kind where the enemy knows he's been hit and that it's going to hurt a lot --- oh, sorry I am in the wrong chat
In my little Sci-Fi setting, I actually have combinations of both. One side has Beam Weapons as well as preferring physical rounds, with the ammo essentially being the batteries for the Beam Weapons - detonating in an explosion of Beam energy after easily slipping past the Anti-Beam Fields...
The other side has weapons that can fire a combination of physical and plasma projectiles. Designed primarily like a physical round weapon, the barrel in front of the firing chamber doubles as the plasma chamber, a barrier field protecting the firing chamber and any rounds in there. This allows for tactical flexibility on the battlefield, switching between between the 2 in a second or two. Not to mention being able to load a variety of ammo types with the physical rounds...
Energy weapons are definitely less effective against plot armour.
The same goes for the round count with kinetic weapons.
You could have ships with both, or even fleets that employ ships that use solely kinetic or directed energy for different roles. Ships using kinetic weapons could be best for engaging targets at close range or bombarding targets that are stationary/slow moving. Meanwhile directed energy ships could be best for engaging targets at long ranges and for sniping at vital points on targets to cripple them.
Choose whatever and lean fully into it. But split protection from both evenly. It's cool to be able to specialise to counter your adversary, but in political landscape "adversary" is usually a list of 50 other states with different approaches and doctrines. So pick whatever get you to repeatables future tech the fastest 😅
On the topic of definition, first I would say nukes fall under the category of explosives, which I would say is an entirely distinct category of non-directed weapons, while kinetics and energy weapons are highly directional.
On defining kinetic vs energy, I would ask "does it knock you back?"
Kinetic weapons primarily rely on momentum to transfer the damage dealing energy while energy weapons primarily utilize kinetic energy in some form. That energy can be in the form of photons, high KE (ie high temp) matter in plasma, or relativistic velocity, small mass, particles in particle cannons. None of these categories need to transfer appreciable amounts of momentum to transfer large amounts of damaging energy, and that is how we can distinguish them from the classic slug thrower kinetic category.
I kinda prefer the vibes of "kinetic" railguns and particle beams.
tbh this is heavily influenced by the game From the Depths, PACs and cannons feel so much more impactful.
Lasers slowly burn through, kinetics SLAM into the enemy and tear chunks off is my thinking.
a pulse laser uses a drilling mechanism and blows chunks off the target as well
@@blobbymcblobbyface6666 I'm thinking entirely in terms of vibes lol.
railgun broadside evokes just enough of the short lived battleship era.
Most of my lasers in FTD are designed to fire in bursts and charge up in between. Gives them more of that sense of impact.
@@DecidedlyNinja Nah the sound effects just sorta blow.
This is the best video I've seen your team produce yet.
Here’s my definition: if the impactor has mass, it’s a kinetic weapon. If the impactor is massless, it’s an energy weapon. Simple definition.
Certain forms of beam weapons (like ion beams, etc.) have mass. Then there's things like plasma weapons, which definitely also has mass.
I'd agree if we said that the matter has to be either solid or liquid (ie., be held contiguously together), and that the majority of its energy delivered on target is kinetic in nature.
Explosive shells and the like (including nukes) are in neither category, IMHO.
Doesn't work. Everything has mass. Particle beams have mass. Even photons have mass.
Both? Both! Both is good!
After having played EVE, it seems more like the damage output type becomes more of a necessary point. From a base standpoint damage is damage long as there is no immunity. Damage will add up eventually but if you have a weapon with a damage type that defeats a particular defense then you have greater efficiency. So a whole big depends on the setting just like it was mentioned.
That aside I love the wide variety of clips used as examples!
haha you and your Nebulous Moment. Thank you for highlighting my favorite game btw! Also if you ever need to listen to the fun Nebulous Pirate Radio I got that on my channel.
No comment on whether or not the works we're talking are either kid-friendly or aren't kid-friendly? If the former, the execs will force you to do only energy weapons, while the latter should allow kinetics with energys.
I think railguns are more expensive than missiles due to the experimental taxations involved.
7:21: If only the game is not abandonware. Regardless, would like to see the cycles of guilt for Oni be explored.
8:26: Good old anime bubbly explosions.
Big fan of the MechWarrior PPC my self.
Naval PPCs are pretty great as well (And I have always hated how Battletech autocannons worked backwards in relation to their size and range. Though Gauss Rifles are pretty cool even if they explode when hit).
One point in favor of kinetic weapons that I don't see brought up a lot is that they are a lot more resilient to incoming damage. If your carrying vessel is expected to take a lot of hits, you may not want something that requires delicate lenses or emitter surfaces that don't take kindly to shrapnel, where a big slab of metal firing solid projectiles is going to shrug a lot of that off
Finally this is something i think about a lot
The real fun part about messing with energy weapons is when you start looking to making weapons with the different types of particles and the effects that could possibly have on the output of said weapon, like the difference between photons and tachyons.
Random thought, flame throwers could probably be considered an Energy Weapon. Since most of it's damage is caused by a chemical-based energy reaction
This is why when talking about lasers and beams in general they add "directed" to "energy weapon", because without it, "energy weapon" is too broad a term.
@@peasant8246 Even then Flame throwers still fit. Since it's still directed, just wider spread and lower range than a laser.
Flame Throwers being a "low tech" energy weapon is a kinda fun idea to consider, in my opinion. Especially if you start thinking of possible implementations in Scifi settings.
@@ShadowEclipex No, it doesnt "fit". You are talking out of your ass, bro.
@@peasant8246 Sure it does fit, Idk what you are on about.
It's a weapon which can be directed and it's primary damage is caused by an energy.