Science Fiction

13658 readers

7 users here now

Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction

December book club canceled. Short stories instead!

We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.

Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.

Lemmy World Rules

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Tenthrow@lemmy.world

In the Dune universe, why not use laser weapons as bombs? (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by sudo42@lemmy.world to c/sciencefiction@lemmy.world

51 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In the Dune universe, when a laser weapons hits a shield, both are destroyed in a nuclear explosion reaction.

So instead of building nuclear weapons, wouldn’t it be easier to tie a timer and a “parachute” to a laser gun and drop it from orbit onto your enemy’s city?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 17 points 7 months ago (2 children)

The Landsraad has a sort of Mutually Assured Destruction pact. Any house that uses atomic weapons against another house would be immediately destroyed by all other houses. Paul uses atomics to breach the Shield Wall technically against a feature of the planet, not house Harkonnen, so there's still political subtlety there.

Lasgun-shield interaction is indistinguishable from atomic weapons.

So deployment of this kind of weapon will ensure your own annihilation.

From memory, the lasgun-shield explosion is unpredictable and proportional to the size of the shield. So, a personal shield could produce a relatively small explosion, a house shield would produce a cataclysmic explosion.

[–] FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Also sometimes the explosion would be on the side of the laser, not the shield. So you could shoot one down from space and end up blowing your ship up and not having anything bad happen to the shield side on the planet

[–] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Or anywhere along the beam IIRC.

[–] FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Yea I think so. Basically it's just unreliable af. Now that I think of it, it seems that Dune 2 got rid of the part where they do that. I seem to recall Duncan or someone in the first book purposely doing this?

[–] AEsheron@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago

Yes, the energy of the explosion is a function of the total energy between the output of the laser and the shield, specifically the shield energy being pointed at the laser origin. That's why they randomly hid some maximum powered, monodirectional shields facing up when they fled the attack. So that even the relatively weak personal shields would still have a large impact. In general use, the shield energy is being projected in all directions, so the amount facing the laser origin is very small. IIRC, an average powered lasgun hitting a personal shield creates an explosion that can range between roughly an HE hand grenade and an HE naval shell. They only went up like nukes because the Harkonen were using the lasguns at max energy, and the shields were tweaked abnormally. And as another comment says, the actual point of the explosion is at a random point along the beam.