No hurting. :)

PPC bolts move much faster than guass rifle projectiles, but not at light speed. PPC stands for "Particle Projection Cannon" and it fires charged particles at high speed. Like the lightning bolt it is based on (which is composed largely of electrons) the particles being projected by the cannon have mass, and no object (no matter how small) that has a nonzero rest mass can attain light speed. They can just come darn close to it. :)

If I remember correctly, the lightning bolt is acualy the 'after effect'(noted, not at all long after:)) of the highly charged particles being tosses through the air quite quickly.
Just an interesting tid-bit.:)

All lasers are pulse lasers. The only difference between normal lasers and pulse lasers as we know them is the rate of pulsation.

A normal laser pulses pretty slowly, but in the BT context would still only last for a fraction of a second. From what I understand, real 'combat' lasers (inasmuch as they exist at all) keep their beams on-target for a few seconds before the target is destroyed.

A pulse laser pulses very rapidly, and does have some special benefit in real physics, although it's been a while since I read this and I can't remember what it is.

Neither game got it right. The beams should be invisible, and the weapon should fire instantly (with the weapon discharge lasting for less than a second). There should be no discernable difference between the two types as far as how they look/act. The difference should be in the damage/heat output.

The beams may be visible- if the power output of the laser is high enough, it causes the air to ionize-voila, visible laser beam.

The easiest way to disqualify the speed of light idea for the PPCs and GRs is that little annoyance of every action has an equal but opposite reaction.

A light speed GR slug at one eighth of a ton over say a 5m barrel length would come very close to sending the offending (launching) mech into orbit (if it maintained integrity) at escape velocity. Since the mechs in all of the novels were not entering orbit when they fired their GRs I'd have to say the slug were substantially slower than lightspeed.

The PPC has a similar though lesser problem, even though the electrons weigh considerably less the acceleration necessary to project them to light speed would definitely be detrimental to the mech.

In the real world I'd be surprised to see the slug go much passed standard bullet speeds (~1500m/s) because of the stress placed on the structure of the mech. Since the books don't say that the mechs had to brace to fire the recoil couldn't be too high or the mech would topple.

Anyway back to the pulse laser question. Both are wrong. In the Blood of Kerensky Trilogy when Phelan was first introduced to pulse lasers they were desribed as releasing a "flurry" of darts. While that description leaves much to be desired physics wise (because they would not be distinguishable individually to the human eye.) it would seem to indicate something akin to a gatlig gun type rate of fire before recharging.
::Pull Trigger::Ten thousand microbursts::Recharge
Even such affects as the temperature dependance of the index of refraction for air would prevent the darts from hitting exactly the same spot so the diffusion of superheated armor would have practically nill effect on the damage itself only the damage related to a standard laser which would have to send its beam through the cloud as the armor vaporized.

If you take the dashed nature of the pulse laser beam in MW3 to be laser microbursts hitting the target then it would be the most accurate to the book desriptions of the weapon but don't expect any kind of consensus.

-and the Warrior Trillogy doesn't count, because Stackpole is notorious for technical discrepancies.;)

facinating discusion people. and i have to say this to the wing nut who insists that a railgun, massdriver, particle accelerator can push an 1/8 tone mass to light speeds. wich cartel are you getting you smack from?

i've done a fair amoutn of research on REAL WORLD weapons of this type. the US goverment is infact working on a main battle tank class railgun. unfortuneatly the powersorce for this big bad beasie does not leave room for a crew..and is horribly ineficent. that and they deny it's existance. but i digress.

fact of the matter is, such weapons can only reach the super sonic, or hyper sonic velocities. these are the TRUE armor piercing rounds of the future. nothing is going to stop a mass traveling at that speed because newtons laws of motion are going to rip the poor mech that gets in it's way a new bum...

The navy is also *working* on three new types of vessels armed with rail-guns.

BTW - There is no possible way that a rail-gun could propel a slug to the speed of light. According to current theories, to achieve such speeds an object would itself have to be changed into energy - ala a wormhole or other such occurence.

(For those who want to know, the warp drives used in Star Trek distort real space around a ship and allow it to travel faster through this distortion field - imagine running down one of those moving walkways in air ports, or down an escalator. The ships did not have some kind of magical engine that allowed it to move at the speed of light. The more powerful the warp drive, the greater the distortion field (or warp field), the fast the ship can travel through the field using its own coventional engines. Besides this route to getting to the speed of light, the only other way is to create a wormhole by *punching* through time/space - ala Stargate, or the Kearny-Fuchida(sp?) drives.)

For those of you unclear as to what a Gauss Rifle is, take a look at this:
Gauss on an ICE

Fluff wise, the Gauss slug is accelerated to hypersonic speeds (~Mach 5), which is something on the order of 1.5 kilometers per second. This is only a minute fraction of the speed of light, which is 300,000 kilometers per second (~7.5 times around the world in 1 second), yet still takes an enormous amount of energy (~120MJ).


As for PPCs, fluff wise, they sound like lightning guns. A lightning strike in nature is nothing more than the movement of electrons and positive ions. Note that a lightning strike is instantaneous and not in straight line. Because of the latter, PPCs would make dangerous weapons because the actual bolt of electrical energy would be attracted to any metallic objects, meaning there would be a greater chance of friendly fire.


And for the difference between pulse lasers and regular continuous beam lasers, pulse lasers just emit non-continuous bursts of light. By this definition, a continuous beam laser that is switched on and then off is considered a pulse laser. The duration of the pulse can be anything from hours and minutes to picoseconds. Fluff wise, a pulse laser is essentially a laser machine gun.


And you know what else is funny? In clear air (no dust particles), you cannot "see" a laser, no matter how intense, unless you were shot in the eye. Even if it was a very intense laser, you still wouldn't see the beam from the side. You could actually see chain lightning instead if it were focused a little! What happens is the electric field in the laser beam is so intense that it ionizes air molecules, creating arcing. This arcing heats up the air and can turn the local air into a focusing lens because the refractive properties of air depend on the temperature. If this happens and the laser beam is focused again, the local electric field strength is high enough to ionize the air around it again, and the process can repeat itself again and again.

the person who has been most on target and explanition is proto-x, although buck and a couple of other have been too, protos explination is the most true to what CBT lasers are. if i had time i would pull out a source book, but i dont, so i cant. but i will later...

Wow, we went from Pulse Lasers to Gauss Rifles and PPCs. where is the talk of LRMs and Streaks and Autocannons? ^_^

well, lrms, streaks, and autocannons are easier to explain :p

but on the PPC note, i belive that yes, the lightning bolt is an after effect from the target being saturated by cations. the heat causes ionization in the air and passes electrons from anions (left from the formation and projection of the above cations) along the trail of the PPC, thus, electricity.

Honestly laser is light and thus it moves light speed unlike often shown in movies and like were they move sublight speed. I consider MW3's pulse lasers close to real thing becouse they are like normal lasers(ray of light) that just reload faster.

As Wrath has already mentioned all lasers are pulse lasers.

What defines a real world "pulse" laser is that it pulses very very quickly compared to a "normal" laser.

The normal laser keeps its beam on the target for a few seconds delivering heat energy and melting/vaporizing the target.

The pulse laser is basically a stroboscope (sp?) light on speed. Instead of delivering heat energy the pulse laser delivers impact energy. While each "burst" only delivers little energy they happen in such a rapid succession that the target has no time to recover and is literally "punched through".

So the Battletech pulse lasers are in fact just normal lasers that take a short break for the line of fire to clear.

Interesting side notes:
The US missile defense system is testing normal lasers that explode the missiles before impact.
France and Germany on the other are testing pulse lasers that smash the missiles guiding system.

Pulse lasers are considered as an alternative propulsion system to lift space craft off the planet.
The craft gets a laser resistant underside and a pulse laser placed on the ground directly under it. With each "impact" from the laser the craft is pushed towards space.

how can that work bewulf, when the light from the "pulse" pushing the craft, has pretty much no mass? And equal and opposite reaction...nothing pushing up, means that somthing is coming down.

Now I can see them doing what your saying using magnetics, but that's a whole different realm all together.