Plasma Guns

[warellis]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Doesn't that still make the vast majority of damage come from the magically enforced pressures rather than the heat of the plasma itself?
That seems like it would defeat the purpose of the plasma gun concept.

Do magnetic bubbles, often the means of containment for plasma bolts in lots of sci-fi, prevent heat from escaping well?

Plasma weapons in sci-fi often use both heat and kinetic impact to kill generally, mostly by burning a hole straight through their targets.

[GodBeastX]

What if you rethink the problem and not call it a ball containing plasma, but a ball with the materials needed to superheat into a plasma?

A ball of hydrogen that is suddenly a plasma on impact for example.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by GodBeastX

What if you rethink the problem and not call it a ball containing plasma, but a ball with the materials needed to superheat into a plasma?

A ball of hydrogen that is suddenly a plasma on impact for example.

Yep. Take your superscience containment field (which will not be "magnetic" in anything like a real world use of that term) and fill it with a mild plasma. Then have the field collapse and superheat the plasma upon impact with a solid body.

Virtually all the energy was in the containment field at the start rather than the plasma but after the energetic collapse the plasma is what delivers it to the target.

This would make something like the "Plasma Guns" in UT. For the ones with the most powerful containment fields use a deuterium plasma and you can have a micro-fusion event on impact.

That would be for a simple spherical containment field with an imploding collapse. If you made your field spindle shaped and the front end deformed and ruptured upon impact with the rest of the field trying to force all the plasma out the hole in the front as it collapsed you'd have a directional plasma jet rather than an omnidrectional explosive one. This could justify pretty much any armor divisor you wanted to use.

Fill your narrow spindle shaped containment fields with a gas that fluoresces brightly like neon and you've got something very like a Star Wars "blaster".

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by GodBeastX

What if you rethink the problem and not call it a ball containing plasma, but a ball with the materials needed to superheat into a plasma?

Well, the problem there is that most such balls will be solid (it's basically an explosive bullet), which may not feel much like a 'plasma gun'.

[Minuteman37]

I find the plasma catalyzing shell interesting, but really I'm trying to use "self-contained" plasma for lore reasons and explore the ramifications of weaponry and other technologies utilizing it.

I know I'm not giving you guys a lot to work with and I'm sorry about that, but I just don't know what the maximum pressure or ionization would be. I've never had a physics class and a lot of this is above my pay grade so to speak.


One thought I did have is that becouse you'd need very powerful gauss technology to fling this bubble at your targets, the plasma needs to be more destructive then a purely kinetic slug thrower, or chemically explosive payload for a given size of gauss gun. So with our 20mm bubble we'd be looking to beat 18.5mm HEMP round found at TL10.

Also I imagine the storage length of the plasma bubble is inversely proportional to the energy and pressure of the plasma.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

I find the plasma catalyzing shell interesting, but really I'm trying to use "self-contained" plasma for lore reasons and explore the ramifications of weaponry and other technologies utilizing it.

I know I'm not giving you guys a lot to work with and I'm sorry about that, but I just don't know what the maximum pressure or ionization would be. I've never had a physics class and a lot of this is above my pay grade so to speak.

The short answer to this is that it's almost totally dependent on the technobabble being invoked, so you should just make up numbers.

[AlexanderHowl]

It is magic though, so just come up with a pseudoscientific explanation and run with it. The damage table in Spaceships though will give you the approximate damage levels at each energy level, so I would suggest just picking an energy level for your weapons and have fun (for example, a 100 kJ plasma cannon would do 20d (2) burn exp damage).

[warellis]

What about hitting the target with a superconducting toroid that, when it hits and breaks up, arcs electricity between the fragments and flash converts them into plasma?

[AlexanderHowl]

Other than the fact that the superconductor would destabilize into plasma as soon as it interacts with the atmosphere due to friction heating? Just call it superscience, add in some technobabble, and have fun because there is no way that it can function by our current understanding of plasma physics. The closest approximation in reality would be pulse x-ray lasers from UT, as they create crushing explosive damage with a (3) armor divisor.

[starslayer]

I think a major issue here is that: If you are using tremendous heat and pressure in order to bottle the plasma then what's doing the damage is the equalization of that heat and pressure (so there is no point in it being plasma- previously mentioned molten carbon or metallic hydrogen would achieve similar goals.

I'm going to propose a change to your magic bubbles. Instead of rupturing when their surface tension is released, they attach, stick, and discharge at @~300 PSI.

This basically turns them into 'stick on plasma cutters' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cutting ) or arc gougers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_carbon_arc_cutting ) where some of the interesting properties of plasma become a thing