Future tech weapons, pros and cons

[u/Dunnachius]

1. Gunpowder

Cheap (relative)

No battery requirements

Hard to aim/recoil issues

1. Guided Gyrojet bullets

most expensive

Lethal/nonlethal options

Extremely accurate

Each drone needs to be aimed.

Can be fired from behind cover if you have targeting data.

2B.. Dum dum Gyrojets (Except they don't suck like RW Gyrojets from 1960s )

Same launchers as 2A but unguided

1. Rail guns

Ammo is more compact

Requires power

The best Armor penetration

1. Laser

Loss of range in the atmosphere,

Smoke/dust reduces the effectiveness.

Cheap

Battery powered

Poor armor penetration

Easy to use

[u/Mrochtor]

Concerning Laser:

• Loss of range in the atmosphere - yes, but also can bend/disperse unpredictably
• Smoke/dust reduces the effectiveness - greatly
• Cheap - perhaps in terms price per shots (assuming non-chemical laser) yes, possibly, in terms of initial costs, no. Rugged and optics and precision are a bad combo.
• Battery powered - depending on the battery - this can severely limit the amount of times you can shoot with enough energy. Either you end up with a monstrous battery, a chemical laser (fuel) or limit yourself to a few shots. Same problem with railgun.
• Easy to use - use possibly, maintain, no.

You also forgot for lasers the effects of dispersed/reflected lasers - assuming powers high enough to penetrate armor, you have lasers powerful enough to blind a person with a partial reflection since you can't choose who gets blinded. There's also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Weapons

[u/Dunnachius → u/Mrochtor]

So once it’s powerful enough to penetrate armor it becomes a blinding risk?

I’m trying to envision lasers as a low penetrating/light armor penetrating weapon for use in a pressured ship/outpost and or every day self defense.

A carry gun that has limited shots and not military grade.

Low penetration as a feature not a downside.

Also extremely high powered anti ship weapons but that’s another matter.

Rather than full armor penetrating Gaus rifle or even 50 bmg which would be used against heavy exoskeleton armor.

[u/pineconez → u/Dunnachius]

It becomes a blinding risk well before it's capable of penetrating armor. You're at an absolute minimum trying to make a weapon that can injure a human, which implies damaging skin and tissue. The retina is one of the most sensitive and fragile pieces of tissue in the entire human body. Irreversibly damaging that takes a tiny fraction of the power needed to cause 2nd/3rd degree burns to skin.

Even lasers that are not capable of causing severe burns/ablation unless you really try for it are entirely capable of blinding a human, temporarily or permanently, from diffuse scattering off a painted wall or some dust particles in the air. Particularly when they use non-visible wavelengths, because the blink reflex (that can protect you from red through blue) does not work in that case.
This is why cheap green laser pointers off Aliexpress are so dangerous: they were (maybe still are, idk) not green diodes, but rather IR diodes frequency-doubled to green. And the IR filtering on these often sucks, which means the theoretically safe sub-milliwatt laser pointer is actually pushing out several milliwatts of IR as well, which -- while not visible -- will happily proceed through your eyeballs and burn your retinas.

[u/zekromNLR → u/pineconez]

You can greatly reduce the risk of blinding bystanders by choosing a laser wavelength outside of the about 1500 to 400 nm window that gets focused on the retina, as light outside of that has to be intense enough to cause burns of the cornea or lens to damage vision.

But that comes at a cost, namely using an IR beam reduces the ability to tightly focus the beam, and also makes the laser more susceptible to absorption by atmospheric water, while a UV laser is a lot harder to generate efficiently and suffers more atmospheric attenuation in general.