Thread by @BretDevereaux

One of my sci-fi pet peeves? Weapons that fire like a magic spell that either happens or it doesn't; Star Trek's phasers are a frequent offender.

What I mean is the sort where 'oh no, we fired our techtech beam, but they had their techtech shield up, so it did *nothing.*" 1/13

Actual weapons nearly all work by delivering some amount of energy to a target; there are some exceptions (chemical and biological weapons come to mind), but a sword, a javelin, a rifle and a nuclear bomb all work by delivering energy, either as kinetic energy or heat. 2/13

Even if those weapons fail to defeat a target's defensive systems (armor, whatever), they still delivered the energy, which, thermodynamics being what they are, had to go somewhere. It might degrade armor, or knock the target around a bit, or cause collateral damage. 3/13

Mostly when you see something that appears to be totally and completely immune to a given weapon, that has to do with huge differences in energy delivery.

A solid sword strike might deliver something like 120J to a target. A musket might deliver something like 900J. 4/13

A modern infantry rifle is something like twice that, c. 1600J. An M795 artillery shell with a 10.8kg TNT charge delivers some 45,187,200J, if I did my unit conversions right.

So the potential here for variation in scale is pretty huge. 5/13

But a lot of sci-fi weapons do not function this way, they work like spells in Harry Potter: you say the magic words (fire phasers!) and some bright lights happen and the other guy is inflicted with the 'phaser curse' (mostly he gets thrown across the room)... 6/13

...unless he had the magical counterspell against phasers, in which case nothing happens and Worf reports 'No effect, Captain!' and everyone immediately assumes there is no point in, say, trying again or at higher power. 7/13

More frustrating is that later, a minor tweak in the Phaser-Spell may cause it to penetrate their anti-Phaser counter-spell and inflict the phaser curse normally! 8/13

But this is never because they, say, radically increased the impact energy of the phasers (or aimed around armor), its that they made some modest tweak to how they delivered the energy (still a bright colorful beam of light hitting the shields) so that now it works. 9/13

And all of that only really makes sense if the phasers aren't delivering energy at all, but causing a magic effect at the other end of the beam - as I put it, the 'phaser curse' that makes the bridge shake and things on your ship explode (mostly computer consoles?). 10/13

With real weapons there is no mild tweak to, say, a sword that will allow it to defeat a tank from the outside.

But put that 1kg sword in a railgun and launch it at 4km/s and your 8,000,000J impact might seriously bother someone!

Its the energy that matters. 10/13

I think the 'magic phaser' trope goes in the same bucket as rock-paper-scissors tactics (where one unit type perfectly and completely counters another) in that it encourages thinking of these exchanges as neat and binary when they are, in fact, messy and complex. 11/13

Only in video games and Star Trek do you get that kind of 'your phasers don't work on us' battle. In the real world, even in very lopsided fights, the 'winners' take losses, both in people and equipment - the enemy is bound to deliver at least some of their energy too.

end/13