You’re one those gun puritans aren’t you? Can’t have any power based weapon despite the fact they are starting to replace ballistic weapons when it comes to defense oh btw they fire faster than normal guns literally infinite being its light its also more cost effective in reality too being you only you only have to build 1 thing once and not thousands and thousands of smaller things the btw would use more resources because lead, copper, brass, steel, and any other metals/powder to fire has to come from somewhere so your point still doesn’t apply because if you’re gonna make the argument “well where would they get the resources from?” well where are they getting the bullets from? Where are they gettting the artillery from where’s all the fuel coming from? How about where all the isotopes for the apocalypse machines come from? You see what a fine slippery slope your argument is?
Also one more thing being you talked about it earlier but they are also pretty small now being we’re strapping them to the tops of MRAPS with guns as well its about the size of one of those old fat screen computer monitors now imagine we give it to an AI which has already succeeded in making nuclear batteries to power its robots and it’d be able to make that system much smaller.
Alright i’m sorry i’m getting overly heated for no reason i don’t mean to talk down to you i just want some cool new stuff in the game that can keep it alive for much longer and funded cause this was such an original idea and i’ve had fun playing it for hundreds of hours especially when i was in school.
Don’t take my rambling seriously it all comes from a good place i just hope this game either keeps getting better or at least ends with a good bang. I’m sorry if i’ve upset you in anyway.
Part of why people resist the idea of lasers so much, I think, is because of a misunderstanding or a lack of details on how the damage would be done. Depending on the system, the technology, the range, the target, a laser is not necessarily a “point at the target, the target is immediately dead” sort of thing. The heating, burning through, or cutting is only effectively “immediate” in extremely high-end systems, and at very limited range (within an atmosphere)—and those systems were typically very large, very heavy, at the time and up until very recently, if not still…
Think more like a heat ray, or even a flamethrower. You train the laser on the target, hold it on target, and damage is done over time. The laser has to dump energy into the target, has to heat it up, before it can burn through it. The damage wouldn’t be immediate, but rather over time. If the target moves out of the beam, heating stops, burning or cutting is diminished or prevented.
In-game, if done more or less correctly, a laser could be more or less just a pinpoint-accurate long-range equivalent to a flamethrower. If we keep moving, varying course and speed evasively, the machine has trouble keeping the weapon on target and the weapon’s effectiveness is decreased.
The sort of anti-missile or anti-artillery lasers that have been toyed with from the 1970s to today all have what is called a “dwell time” associated with them. This is, as I’ve been trying to get at, the length of time which the target must be lased before the target is compromised—the time it takes for damage to be done. The system onboard the Boeing YAL-1, the ABL, a variation on the idea from 2002~2014, is claimed to have had a required “dwell time” of 3~5 seconds. For reference, that laser was carried by a modified Boeing 747 jet airliner. The heart of the system weighed more than 36,000 pounds and was about the size of six SUVs—which explains why it needed something like a 747 as a house. And that was only for part of the system—there was more. I don’t expect a system from 1989 would be quite so good.
But there are the crazy advancements already seen in-game, those were worth pointing out, so good on you for that—the fuel cells, and the Apocalypse class developments. A Harvester or Tank-based system, an alternative weapon to the linear accelerator cannon, shouldn’t be considered an impossibility within the lore of the game, I think…
Take the Harvester, repurpose it from a resource-gatherer to a siege machine, remove the drill and the fuel/resource storage tanks/bins, mount the laser system on the centerline where the drill was, fuel cells/batteries to run it in place of the resource recovery components, and you have a walking laser. Something to encounter in revamped Base Defense missions, maybe? Or as part of other new story-related “defend the objective” missions, like the Ringfort and Bjorntunet were? Might not even be intended for anti-personnel use against the player, but if we stand still long enough…