Melding Beam Weapons and Guns

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Willy

It has a reason why in many nations, including mine the output of laser pointers is capped, some of them go in the 5 Watt range or higher, the time of exposure for eye damage is extremely short.
Depending how close you are it´s less than 1/10 of a second.
The distance to to the laser is also important.
Of course you need to differ between short time blindness, and lasting crippling injuries.

just randomly looking found https://www.ceenta.com/news-blog/can...nter-blind-you

10 seconds is mentioned between1 and 5 milliwatts, so the 1/10 second (that's 1/100 the time) I'm guessing is near 5 watts, which would be 1000x the power?

One mitigating factor would probably be a blink reflex: you just naturally tend to close your eye (or even raise an arm to block your face) when a bright light is shone in it.

Requiring 1/10 a second sounds like you could blind a maximum of 10 eyes in a single second, so RoF 10: but probably less since you're not immediately going from one eye to the next: you're "missing shots" in your ROF as you put the laser on intermediary places...

An alternative to ROF 10 though (which assumes a single shot will blind) would be doing something like ROF 100 and then saying TEN shots is needed to blind.

Damage somehow accrues and must build up quickly I would assume? Or would taking 0.01 second increments an hour/day apart eventually lead to the blinding damage 0.1 second would induce?

[Willy]

Originally Posted by Plane

One mitigating factor would probably be a blink reflex: you just naturally tend to close your eye (or even raise an arm to block your face) when a bright light is shone in it.

blinking your eyes is very fast, but the lid wouldn´t protect most of it, if the source e.g laser is strong enough, you need more between the retina and the light source to be safe. It´s like looking at the sun with closed eyes which will blind you to after longer exposure. Even some LED Flashlights are strong enough to damage your eyes.

Originally Posted by Plane

Damage somehow accrues and must build up quickly I would assume? Or would taking 0.01 second increments an hour/day apart eventually lead to the blinding damage 0.1 second would induce?

I think not, I worked once in a company that did a lot of welding, everyone who got " verblitzt " e.g. had sparks in his vision when looking at something, was strongly discouraged to weld further until healed, mostly next day was enough to avoid lasting damage. According to a master there, little damage would build up over time. Just imagine you scratch yourself a the same point over and over again, it will take time but you will hurt there. Therefore any unhealed damage would add to the next damage. According to my version of wiki it takes less than 250 ms to blink. This means if 0,1 seconds are enough as I understand your calculation this people would be blind, before the blink reflex could safe them. Also according to the same source in 10 - 20 % of all testpersons, the blink reflex isn´t triggered by lightsources. I think pain will do, but then it´s to late anyway.

[Voren]

Originally Posted by Anders

I'm thinking of melding the two skills. Currently Guns (Pistol) and Beam Weapons (Pistol) default to each other at -4. Which means that you can use your gun's laser sight on someone with full skill, but move the laser downstairs and amp it up and you are suddenly at -4 to skill. That sounds weird, and GURPS has too many skills anyway. What do you think?

I think this sounds fine, with the usual TL/specialization/familiarity adjustments - provided the general operation of the beam weapon is similar to a gun. Star Wars blaster pistol to Glock? Sure. Glock to Zoltarian Gravitic Degluonator (forelimb mounted, vibration activated) not so much. Even a canonical treatment of a Star Trek TNG hand phaser would seem to justify a different skill, or perhaps a unique specialization (how do they aim? By guess?).