Author notes

317 - Grind

El Cid

on May 8, 2020

This page was originally very different, but I really didn't like how it turned out, so I ended up splitting it into two pages and adding some filler panels to flesh it out. The end result is visually an improvement in my opinion, but as you can see, it didn't lend itself to much dialogue.





When I was a kid, like I guess in 3rd Grade or so, I remember the teacher asked the class what we wanted to be when we grow up. I said I wanted to be an optometrist. The reason for this, I said without an iota of embarrassment, was because in the future they'll have laser guns, and I'd heard those are bad for people's eyes. I was a dumb kid.

So it's the future now, and we still don't have laser guns. The Knights Templar are keeping all the laser guns stashed away in the same storage unit where they hid all our flying cars. So what happened? Why don't we have them yet? Is it because the technology is not attainable, or… are they just pointless?



So what would a real laser gun be like? Well, it probably wouldn't fire a continuous beam of light. Not only would that drain its power super fast, but it's also not very effective. When a laser beam hits you, it rapidly heats up the immediate area it contacts, causing a small explosion as it instantaneously vaporizes all the water in your body tissues. This creates a small cloud of vapor and gore, which will scatter the laser beam, causing it to lose effect if it's continuously firing. Instead, it would be most effective if it fires in rapid pulses. That way it can dig out chunks of the target with repeat hits with (hopefully) a minimum of beam dispersal. This all sounds really cool but, as you can imagine, it's probably not all that effective against a moving human target who's not going to stand there and let you chip away at him with your death ray. And that's the first major downfall of a realistic laser weapon versus a standard ballistic firearm: Lasers are capable of serious damage, but they take time to do that damage, whereas a bullet delivers its punch all at once.

So, if we could build such a device, what would be the advantages? The biggest advantage often touted for laser weapons is that they have an “infinite magazine.” That is, while a gunpowder firearm has a limited number of bullets, a laser weapon can just keep on firing so long as it has an energy source. But that energy source is the problem: Man-stopping lasers will require kilowatts of energy, which means while you may not be constantly reloading a magazine, you will be constantly replacing the batteries, which is basically the same thing. So it's not an infinite magazine, and realistically you'd probably be swapping out batteries every few shots if you're using it at full power, at least with any near future battery tech.



So, lasers are probably not all that efficient compared to the alternative, and that's not even getting into how they compare to normal firearms in terms of ruggedness, or ease of maintenance, or that they generate so much waste heat which needs to be dealt with. But that's not to say they're completely useless. The fact that a handheld laser likely won't do lethal damage from just a single quick burst may be an advantage in some circumstances. You could hit a bad guy with a warning burst, just enough for them to feel the discomfort and see their clothing get singed, and that might be enough to get them to stop doing whatever bad guy things they're doing. And if they don't take the hint, you could turn it up to full power and burn their face off. The other, less savory aspect of laser weapons is that they really can be absolutely devastating to unprotected eyes. Even some modern laser pointers are powerful enough to permanently blind a person, so it's not hard at all to imagine a powerful weaponized laser pointer built for explicitly this purpose. In the unpublished mini comic I've been working on, Jetta carries a small laser baton which she uses to zap baddies in the face to blind them. I think it may be misguided to think of lasers as a replacement for kinetic projectile weapons, but they could still have a whole range of special applications which regular firearms are not particularly useful for.