Realism vs. imagination vs. fantasy.

Introduction

From lasers to lightsabers, and phasers to plasma, the armouries of the future offer a wider set of technologies than today. But I know the question that’s on your mind: how realistic are these weapons? Could they every exist? Why don’t they now?

I know it’s on your mind, because otherwise you wouldn’t be here. I wrote some articles on science fiction weapons a while back, and a few more in recent weeks. I’m collating them here for reference and to give a longer-form deep dive experience for readers who might not be familiar with the back catalogue.

I’m taking a thematic approach today, with film, TV, and game examples thrown in as we go along. I’ve drawn particularly heavily from both Warhammer 40,000 and Unreal Tournament since these are two franchises which took up an inordinate amount of my youth.

I’ll start with laser weapons, where definitions are fluid, physics is ignored, and destructive potential is underestimated by filmmakers.

Then I’ll move on to melee weapons, those futuristic artifacts which simultaneously point past the limits of our understanding and harken back to the age of chivalry.

Finally I’ll talk about projectile weapons, from the vanilla (e.g. bolters in Warhammer 40,000) to the exotic (e.g. a railgun which fires bouncing razor disks).

Before we dive in, let’s settle on some definitions. What do I mean by “science fiction”?

This is perhaps a bit arbitrary, since many science fiction tropes (I’m looking at you, Star Wars‘s Jedi and The Force) can be just like magic. It’s not a clear dividing line, but the difference for me is the focus on technology as a way of driving the plot rather than as a prop. Yes, it’s subtle, but I get to make the rules. If people are interested, we could do a whole deep-dive into the Marvel Cinematic Universe some day. Let me know!

Let’s get into it. Just a reminder, if you haven’t already, to please subscribe to the weekly blog using the button below. Thanks, and enjoy.

Laser (and laser-ish) weapons

In this section I’ll be looking at “lasers” in the broadest sense of understanding, basically anything that goes “pew” and/or fires a beam of light at a target. As we’ll see, some of these weapons aren’t actual lasers, at least in fan canon, but I’m going to group them all in as “laser-adjacent” weapons, under the justification that, if they aren’t lasers, then they probably should be, or at least most of their properties should be similar to those of lasers.

Technical critiques of laser weapons

What’s wrong with bullets?

Pre-World War 2 weapons technology is more effective than most science fiction weapons. Don’t believe me? This is the M2 Browning .50 cal / 12.7 mm heavy machine gun:

It fires 40 grams / one and a bit ounces of copper-coated lead out the business end at a speed of nearly a kilometre per second, engaging targets nearly two kilometres away. And it does this eight times per second. It dates from the early 1930s and is still in use worldwide. If you are lucky enough to live in the good ol’ US of A, you can probably fire one of these at your local range¹

This is the E-web heavy repeating blaster from Star Wars:

It can fire a bolt of energy at a target up to 750 m away, and do a fair bit of harm, I guess (Star Wars fandom weapons specifications are detailed, but not that detailed). It fires at about the same rate as the M2 Browning, but the blaster bolts travel about thirty times slower².

In other words, the futuristic³ science fiction weapon is only a fraction as effective as the 1930s weapon which is still in use today. Never mind Jedi powers and lightsabers: the Rebel alliance could have had far more success breaking into a museum and looting some firearms. How can the fearsome fighting forces of the future come to rely on such ineffective weapons? Maybe gunpowder was never discovered in the Star Wars galaxy (after all, it is far, far away). But this seems like a stretch given their other technological achievements (like faster-than-light travel). The target effect of a .50 cal bullet is pretty impressive too, making mincemeat of up to three plates of body armour. Stormtroopers wouldn’t stand a chance.

Firearms will work in space, too, and on any planet or moon that our heroes find themselves on. What’s so great about firearms? Well, unlike laser or plasma/blaster weapons, which need to carry around big hulking power packs, firearms carry all of their incredible potential energy wrapped up in a little chemical package inside the cartridge.

The only downside of projectile firearms is their speed, which will quickly be a limitation as distances between ships become significant, as they very much will in space. Despite this, filmmakers favour the laser, the phaser, and the particle beam.

Stop getting lasers wrong!

By definition, lasers travel at the speed of light: the cosmic speed limit. Therefore they will get you around the problem of distance. Some films and games get this aspect of laser weapons right:

Many others don’t:

We could include the aforementioned Star Wars blasters in the above category of offenders, but some clever retconning by the Star Wars fandom⁴ has confirmed that these fire plasma bolts powered by compressed Tibanna gas, a substance that is found and mined on the planet Bespin—of Cloud City fame.

So the extensive Star Wars and Star Trek fandom can successfully explain why blasters don’t act like lasers, but can’t explain why both sides would choose to use such terrible weapons. Star Wars aside, though, it’s clear that weapons designers of the future have managed to do the improbable (and the inadvisable): slowing down lasers and particle beams to a fraction of their normal speed. This, of course, is in no way sensible. Remember, you’re trying to hit a target. Light speed is good for that.

The other big problem here is that we can see the laser beams, but these should only be visible if they’re interacting with something. Remember in Metal Gear Solid when you had to smoke the otherwise pointless pack of cigarettes to show up the alarm lasers? It’s the same principle here. Those laser beams in Moonraker shouldn’t be visible, because there’s nothing in space for the beam of light to interact with. Moreover, by interacting with smoke or sand or dust, the laser is giving up some of its power en-route to the target.

Finally, I’ve never seen anyone on screen shoot a laser straight through a window, but this of course should be possible, unless the window is made from a special glass that blocks certain wavelengths of light (which would also mean, of course, that normal light of that colour wouldn’t get through):

Big lasers can make big problems

Superweapons play an important part in lots of science fiction stories, because they usually play out on the grand scale of star systems and galaxies. Probably the most iconic example is the Death Star’s superlaser⁵ from Star Wars⁶, seen here obliterating the planet Alderaan:

The Star Wars fandom makes a valiant attempt to rationalise this destructive capability, and has even calculated the power output of this laser to be 240 million million million million million⁷ Watts. Since it’s just a beam of light, it presumably destroys its target by instantly heating it and vaporising it⁸.

This superweapon is actually one of the more realistic applications of lasers in science fiction. Assuming you can get a laser that powerful (which is, of course, a massive “if”: the number described above is a million times more than our own sun’s power output, but this is a story where we believe in hyperspace travel and Jedi masters, after all), then the Death Star and its superlaser are realistic. Even the time lag you see between the laser leaving the Death Star and hitting Alderaan can be explained by the massive distances involved. I’ll even excuse the green shimmer of visible laser light, since it’s travelling such huge distances and outputting so much power that the very very few particles in the way between the Death Star and Alderaan get vaporised in a spectacular burst of green light, which is what we see.

Far less forgivable and understandable is the execrable “Starkiller Base” from the Star Wars sequel trilogy:

This seems to be a laser/pillar of fire that can travel instantly across the galaxy (lightspeed be damned!) and obliterate several planets at once:

I’ve written about this before, so I won’t labour the point here, but it breaks all bounds of credibility and pushes this film (as with the whole sequel trilogy, unfortunately) away from science fiction and more towards the realm of magic and fantasy (see my taxonomy at the top of this article).

Military lasers are a real thing

Lasers are, of course, a real thing, with real scientific, industrial, and even military uses. Armies, navies, and air forces use lasers to:

• Find the range to a target, by shining an invisible laser beam at it and measuring the time it takes to reflect back to the source
• Designate targets for smart bombs and missiles, by shining an invisible laser beam at the target, which pulses with a certain code. The munition then looks for that tell-tale pattern of light and homes in on it
• Help aim weapons in close-quarters⁹ fighting by shining a visible light which reflects off the target and is seen by the firer (and everybody else). This can also be done with an invisible laser (see below) and used in conjunction with night-vision goggles which can pick up on the infrared light).

Normally such lasers are invisible. Not only can you not see the beam (as explained above, any laser beam is invisible apart from the effect it has on particles it interacts with along the way), but the light itself is in the infrared spectrum, i.e. at a lower frequency and longer wavelength than our eyes are capable of seeing. This makes sense, when you think about the uses: you don’t want the enemy noticing beams of laser light bouncing back off their tanks or bridges which you’re planning to blow up¹⁰.

Ah yes, you say, but that doesn’t really count, does it? What about real lasers, like we see in the films? Lasers which can kill people? Well, there’s certainly plenty of money being thrown at research in this area. So-called “directed energy weapons” are not just on the drawing board, but are operational and being used today. Here’s just one example, the US Navy’s LaWS, which was deployed ten years ago and has already been replaced by a more powerful laser:

Many of these prototype laser weapons platforms are deployed on ships, and a big reason for that is their size and power requirements. Nothing short of a nuclear reactor is going to give the oomph that these weapons need. Their primary purported uses are for targeting small, fast targets, such as small boats, aircraft, and inbound hypersonic missiles. The LaWS laser has a maximum power output of 30 kilowatts, so it’s still about a million million million million million times weaker than the Death Star, which is probably a good thing.

As for particle beams, the other type of directed energy weapon seen in science fiction, these also exist in real life, and have even (unwittingly) caused injuries, but tend to be a bit unwieldy. For example, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN weighs 14,000 tonnes, draws 200 megawatts¹¹ of power, and takes up about 20 km of subterranean real estate, so there’s still some way to go in terms of miniaturisation:

We deserve better lasers

As seen from the examples above, lasers (or laser-adjacent weapons, such as particle beams or plasma weapons) are to go-to weapon for futuristic, space-faring heroes and villains in science fiction. It’s easy to understand why this is the case: just when science fiction was exploding as a popular genre, lasers were the cutting edge¹² of scientific progress, along with atomic weapons. The latter are less popular (but not entirely absent from science fiction: I might cover them in a later post), probably due to Cold War and modern sensibilities putting nuclear weapons into a different, more taboo category of weapon, as well as their lack of utility in on-screen, small-scale battles. Lasers have remained popular, however, even as the trope has branched out into particle weapons, plasma weapons, and other “adjacent” types of gun.

But why do directors and screenwriters get them so wrong? I think there are three big reasons, all of which are understandable and forgivable, as these things usually are:

1. Familiarity. Science fiction wants to explore the speculative, but it doesn’t want to go too far, especially in TV and films. Big set-piece battles are a popular feature of science fiction and space opera, but also of war movies. Tank battles, aerial dogfights, and ground assaults have their own familiar tropes on screen, and the audience probably doesn’t want something too unfamiliar, even when you swap the plains of Kursk for space or the beaches of Normandy for the ice-fields of Hoth. For this reason, screenwriters and directors keep a comfortable level of similarity between real and speculative weapons. Often, they just put some papier-mâché cladding onto real replica guns to give the right level of science fictionality. All of this means that the weapons can’t be too powerful and have to act a little bit like real-life weapons.
2. Visual understanding. Directors want the audience to “get” what’s going on. If you read the science fiction of Iain M. Banks or Alistair Reynolds, to pick just two examples, you get excellent descriptions of what weapons and warfare of the future might look like. As books, these work very well, but I doubt they would transfer onto the screen, at least not easily. Making lasers and phasers and blasters travel slowly and with bright colours really helps the audience see what’s going on. It’s like how rifle barrels flash brightly and bullets spark off the ground in movies: it’s just a visual aid, it’s not very realistic. You can also colour the fire differently to denote who is shooting. To come back to Star Wars, although both sides predominantly used red blaster bolts, George Lucas supposedly used a convention in the original films where the rebels fired from left to right on the screen and the Empire from right to left. I’ve watched a few clips to try to disprove this but it seems to hold up for the most part.
3. Sanitisation. Science fiction often (though by no means always) targets younger viewers. As a result, there’s less tolerance for blood and guts and gore. Lasers and laser-adjacent weapons give filmmakers an easy way to dispose of baddies on screen without an excess of visible injury. Phasers in Star Trek often make the target just disappear: no gore at all! In reality, such weapons would be far more powerful and far more bloody (which I’ll cover below).

The second and third reasons above also explain why characters in science fiction don’t use modern-day gunpowder technology. It would be harder to visually mark what’s going on and would make for much bloodier outcomes¹³, which would result in tighter film ratings.

While I obviously understand the reasons behind how we got to where we are with lasers, I still think that filmmakers have been missing opportunities to really explore the realm of what’s possible with this type of weapon. Dune is a recent example which shows how silent, swift, and deadly lasers can be as a weapon of war:

Military implications of lasers

In this section we’re looking at the military implications of laser weapons: how do they affect military tactics, military operations, and military strategy? We will examine this both in the context of unrealistic Hollywood versions of laser weapons (which are pretty bad), and realistic, effective lasers (which would be much better). And just as a reminder of what I’m talking about:

The official definition we landed on above was that a laser is “anything that goes ‘pew’ and/or fires a beam of light at a target” (this is in the dictionary now).

Weapons don’t have to be balanced…

There’s a myth, which I think comes primarily from table-top games such as Warhammer 40,000 (more on that below), but also computer games, that weapons need to be “balanced” for gameplay purposes. This makes sense in a game, where you want to keep it competitive, but unfortunately real life is not fair like this. Armies with futuristic laser weapons would not be on an even footing with lower-technology aliens. We’ve seen enough of this in the real-life history of colonialism. Insurgencies in real life do not involve plucky bands of amateur freedom fighters making fools of the established occupation forces, à la Ewoks vs. Empire in Return of the Jedi:

An insurgency is a bloody, bitter, uphill battle where the occupation forces can inflict devastating damage on the rebels, but also suffer from a “death of a thousand cuts” at the hands of their enemy. Especially where there’s a steep technology gradient, one side will suffer the bulk of the civilian and insurgent casualties while the other side suffers disproportionately fewer military casualties. We can see this effect in real-life, live, in the news every day, or in recent history. Insurgents win not by defeating the incumbent force on the field of battle, but by sapping their will to continue committing lives to the cause.

There’s simply no way that the technologically-advanced Empire would have suffered such a defeat against literal sticks and stones, especially given how strategically important the planet Endor was to them. Another example of this is in Dune, where Paul Atreides defeats the occupation and imperial forces in open battle with his band of desert fighters:

I won’t go into huge detail here on this trope, but if you’re interested in reading more about why small bands of tough fighters from a lower technological rung don’t usually win against more “civilised” opponents, I’d suggest reading The Fremen Mirage series by Brett Devereaux. Suffice to say that increased levels of economic and technological prowess confer a huge advantage, but Hollywood writers try to blunt this effect and balance the scales by making science fiction weapons, such as lasers, quite useless.

…and lasers shouldn’t be sugar-coated

Laser weapons in Hollywood never seem to cause horrible injuries. This is partially a design decision by producers to avoid more restrictive ratings on their films. It’s worth taking a few minutes, however, to look at the human effects of lasers. Content warning: the quote below is quite gruesome

When the beam struck my eye I heard a distinct popping sound, caused by a laser induced explosion at the back of my eyeball. My vision was obscured almost immediately by streams of blood floating in the vitreous humor, and by what appeared to be particulate matter suspended in the vitreous humor. It was like viewing the world through a round fishbowl full of glycerol into which a quart of blood and a handful of black pepper have been partially mixed. There was local pain within a few minutes of the accident, but it did not become excruciating. The most immediate response after such an accident is horror. As a Vietnam Veteran, I have seen several terrible scenes of human carnage, but none affected me more than viewing the world through my blood-filled eyeball.

—Dr. C. David Decker, quoted here

This is a level of violence which we don’t usually see in science fiction, but it’s at the milder end of what combat with lasers would actually entail. The Vienna Protocol on Inhumane Weapons, adopted in 1995, prohibits the employment of: “laser weapons specifically designed as their sole combat function, or as one of their functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective devices.” However, we should not take this to assume that futuristic militaries would avoid using lasers to blind their enemies, for two big reasons:

• Countries today have rarely let international conventions limit their use of certain weapons. Usually the people pushing to limit the use of chemical weapons, cluster munitions, nuclear weapons, etc., are those states without the capability to develop them or the pressing need to use them.
• The “rules” prohibit the use of lasers designed to target the eye: there’s nothing against lasers which target optical sensors in general, and the eye is just another type of optical sensor.

When we do see lasers in science fiction, we rarely see the damage they would do to human bodies. There are some exceptions. The damage could be mild, as in The Andromeda Strain:

…or comically gruesome, as in Mars Attacks!:

Other laser-adjacent weapons would have similarly gruesome effects: the “plasma” fired by the blasters in Star Wars would burn and melt flesh, the particle beam phasers in Star Trek would punch holes right through the target. Instead, we see this:

Note in the clip above we see Riker “dialling up” the power of the weapon. This brings us on to another tactical aspect of laser weapons which we’ll discuss in the next section.

The myth of the all-purpose weapon

The Empire/First Order using planet-killing superweapons is like the Soviet Union or the USA using nukes in Afghanistan. You don’t need to use nukes when you’re so much stronger than your foe, and all you end up doing is destroying the populations and resources you need to control to gain overall victory.

In the military, there’s a whole spectrum of weapon and ammunition types that used to be called “non-lethal” and then went through a few identity changes, including “anti-riot” and “crowd control” before settling on the current favoured moniker, “less than lethal” (LTL). As the name suggests, LTL ammunition is designed to be ouchie, but not deadly, but doesn’t always get that balance right. Why? Because targets (i.e. people) are different, and firers are imperfect. If the ammunition has no effect on the target, then it’s a failure, just as much as if it kills the target. This level of uncertainty means that there’s always a lethal risk with LTL ammunition. There’s no reason that science fiction weapons would be any less variable:

From a technical point of view, it’s difficult enough to explain how a single beam of very fast particles from a small handheld pistol can run the gamut from temporary incapacitation to complete disintegration. From a tactical point of view, it’s utter madness.

Using the same weapon for both purposes is a massive red flag. In the military, special weapons are used for LTL ammunition. Otherwise, you run the twin risks of going into a deadly battle firing LTL ammunition by mistake, or going into a crowd control situation spraying hot lead by mistake. Both of these are very bad ideas, but it’s clearly not something that Starfleet Command has considered.

Space is not a battlefield, and lasers have limitations

Real lasers could be good in space, even better than projectile weapons. Hollywood lasers, less so. As we discussed above, laser beams (or plasma beams, or particle beams) on screen usually travel much slower than bullets. However bad they would be on the battlefield, they would be far more useless in space, so let’s put them aside and talk about real lasers for a while.

Hollywood likes to show space battles as a sort of dogfight, mirroring how aerial battles used to work in the real world. Coming back to Return of the Jedi, we see a smorgasbord of big and small ships chasing each other in circles while firing colour-coded beams:

However, even modern air-to-air combat doesn’t look like this anymore, with faster interception speeds and heat-seeking missiles removing the necessity and opportunity to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and… dodge around the enemy:

A battle in space¹⁴ would be a very boring spectacle, with ships travelling very fast relative to one another, too fast to see on screen. However, lasers might be useful as close-range weapons which ships fire at each other when they get close enough. There is a sweet spot where they will be effective:

Far more effective would be to fire projectiles on interception arcs with the target, or even place them in the predicted path of the target: at space combat speeds, any collision will result in very high relative speeds and a lot of damage to the target. But lasers look cooler!

What are you trying to achieve with your fancy laser?

All weapons have (or, at least, ought to have) a strategic purpose. For example:

Weapon	Tactical Purpose	Operational Purpose	Strategic Purpose
Rifle	Suppress the enemy	Allow friendly forces to advance and gain ground	Hold territory, defeat enemy forces
Artillery	–	Degrade enemy positions, supply lines, and infrastructure	Defeat enemy forces
Nuclear missiles	–	–	Deterrence, destruction of enemy’s economy, infrastructure, and population

Science fiction laser superweapons should be no different. There needs to be a strategic purpose to these weapons, or else what’s the point of investing so many resources in building the things?

The James Bond franchise gets this right in Die Another Day: the supervillain’s laser was built with a specific purpose: to sweep the Korean DMZ and initiate all the landmines there, clearing a path for a North Korean invasion of the South¹⁵.

It also doubles as a useful way of trying to kill Bond, although the baddies do the usual thing (see also Dune above) of tracking right behind the target instead of, you know, hitting it.

The lasers that the aliens use in Independence Day have immense destructive capabilities (although it makes the funkiest explosions, as I’ve written about before):

The aliens use this as a “shock and awe” tactic to inflict a massive psychological defeat on humanity as a prelude to wiping us out. If genocide is the goal, then there’s probably a more strategic way of achieving this: slow-moving laser explosions might not be the best method.

The Death Star superlaser from Star Wars makes even less sense. We already mentioned the ludicrous energy requirements needed to blow up planets, but leaving aside the technical aspects of the weapon, I have some issues with how the Empire employ it. Like all empires, we must presume that their power comes from controlling the resources and populations of the many planets and star systems in the galaxy. In that sense, blowing up a planet is like cutting off a part of your body. You could argue that this is a sacrifice the Empire are willing to make pour encourager les autres, to set an example for all the other rebels. Maybe, but if so, it’s a singularly ineffective strategy, because it doesn’t seem to make one iota of difference to the Rebel Alliance’s resolve. The crew of the Death Star could have destroyed a city or two on Alderaan with their superweapon and probably achieved the surrender of the planet (although watch out for those sneaky computer viruses, don’t get caught out like the aliens in Independence Day).

Moving on to the super-duper laser¹⁶ from The Force Awakens, this makes zero sense from a strategic point of view. There’s no ultimatum, no negotiation, no demand that the space-Nazis make of the Resistance¹⁷. Unless their goal is to progressively destroy all the planets in the galaxy, and therefore their own power base, then this weapon is pretty useless, at least how they use it.

Conclusion: A means to an end

In Hollywood science fiction, lasers are more important as signifiers of futuristic tech than they are as useful weapons. This is usually understandable: we (the audience) are lazy, and want to see situations which are familiar but slightly exotic. Replacing firearms with “pew pew” lasers achieves this.

It’s not realistic, however, even if the logic behind it is understandable. Real-life weapons are only a means to an end, after all, and war is simply “the continuation of policy with other means.” (Clausewitz). Sometimes science fiction writers take this seriously, a brilliant example of which is the Lazy Guns from the late, great Iain M. Banks’s Against a Dark Background. These weapons destroy whatever the target puts in its sights, but often using the most spectacularly improbable sequences of events. Point it at a person, and it might shoot a laser beam, or it might cause a wild animal to suddenly appear and attack. Point at a city and it will be suddenly hit by an asteroid, or a nuclear reactor will explode. I would love to see a film adaptation of these Lazy Guns.

As usual, I’ll finish this section with a challenge to screenwriters: please give us science fiction where the battle tactics actually reflect the futuristic weapons used. I’d queue up to see powerful lasers punching holes in armour and burning flesh, causing panic in the squad as they desperately try to locate the direction of fire. I want to watch ships strafing each other with powerful blasts of laser fire as they pass by in a flash. And I’d be intrigued to see the implications of blinding lasers on ships’ sensors as well as the eyes of the crew on the bridge. Not that I’m overly keen to see gruesome injuries like those described above, but I would appreciate a more mature and realistic depiction of these weapons.

Melee weapons

Even when filling them with laser guns, intelligent robots, and faster-than-light travel, writers of science fiction worlds can’t resist sprinkling in some hand-to-hand combat weapons. Let’s talk about two of the most notorious in this section: lightsabers from Star Wars and chainswords from Warhammer 40,000.

Lightsabers

The lightsaber¹⁸ made its first appearance in the first ever Star Wars film back in 1977. From then…

…until its overuse in later instalments of the series…

…the lightsaber is a defining aspect of the franchise and of the Jedi (and Sith, or “dark” Jedi) Knights. It’s even used to great effect by pirates, despite Cartman’s objections in South Park:

The lightsaber is a sword with a “retractable”/disappearing blade which is made from a bright, hot, substance which can cut through almost anything. We’re going to look firstly at the technical aspects of the technology: does it make sense? Then we’ll look at how it’s used in Star Wars, and determine whether it is actually a useful weapon.

Technical teardown: science fiction or magic?

I would love to believe in the plausibility of lightsabers, since they are undoubtedly one of the coolest science fiction weapons out there: they cut through anything¹⁹, they deflect blaster fire, and they make a cool sound as the blade swings. Unfortunately they don’t make a lot of sense from a technical point of view.

I’m borrowing heavily from this Nautilus article on the science of Star Wars weaponry: would highly recommend reading it. In short, lightsabers are either light-based or plasma-based weapons. Each option has some evidence in favour, and some against:

On the balance of evidence, I would lean toward plasma (especially given that Star Wars blasters are also deemed to be plasma weapons), but this raises additional questions.

The most important, for me, is that lightsabers never seem to run out of energy, despite outputting enormous amounts of power. We’re told that a kyber crystal²⁰ sits at the heart of each lightsaber. Some sources claim that the crystal powers the weapon, others that the crystal is a focusing mechanism for a different power source within the hilt, e.g. the “Diatium power cell” shown in the diagram below:

We also know that lightsabers last a long time: generations. Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope calculations (which you can feel free to skim over and read the headlines, if calculations are not your thing):

So 24 kW, or the power of a large home heating system, might not seem very impressive. But remember that a house’s boiler is fed by a constant stream of electricity or fossil fuels (how can I forget, says you, when you get a bill every month for it). The lightsaber is a self-contained system. Let’s do another calculation (yay?) to see how much energy we need:

We’re getting there! Now we just need to find some materials that give us an energy density of 20 million MJ per kilo, and we can start building us some lightsabers. What are our options?

Ah, we don’t have very many great options. We need something that has 20 million MJ/kg and 95 million MJ/litre, and the graph tops out at 150 and 40, respectively. So we’re more than a little bit off the chart. Luckily, we do have a nuclear option: the nuclear option. As xkcd taught us, we just need to make a big enough graph and then we can see the potential of nuclear fuel:

This will work! Uranium gives us 76 million MJ/kg, and we need 20, so we’ll get nearly four generations of use out of one lightsaber if we assume it’s undergoing a similar type of nuclear reaction in extreme miniature inside the lightsaber.

There’s one problem with this, of course (there are many problems, but I’m being generous). Carrying around a miniature nuclear reactor on your belt is an even bigger temptation to disaster than inadvertently activating it (as we’ll discuss below). One must assume that damaging the lightsaber hilt (such as in a lightsaber duel) would destroy whatever containment the power source is using and would trigger a rapid energy release. What would happen if all that energy was unleashed in one go? Twenty million megajoules also happens to be the energy stored in 500 tonnes of TNT (a high explosive). Luckily for us, this is exactly the amount of TNT that was detonated in Operation Sailor Hat, an experiment designed to simulate the effects of a nuclear explosion (after the world more or less agreed that doing actual nuclear explosions for these tests was a bad idea):

And here’s what the ensuing explosion looks like:

All of this suggests a better use for these Diatium power cells: just use them as a nuclear superweapon instead of powering a fancy sword. Because, as we’ll discuss next, a lightsaber is not a useful fighting weapon.

Tactical considerations: this isn’t the weapon you’re looking for

Let’s dispense with the notion that the lightsaber is a useful weapon. It is not. It is more of a liability to the wielder and of limited utility against the enemy.

Let’s examine the effects of a lightsaber on the poor Jedi who needs to wield it (even discounting the mini-nuke risk we discussed above). Firstly, the way it’s held on a belt when inactive poses a massive risk which always makes me cringe. A single button activates the weapon, so the user is only ever a careless brush away from severing their leg or gonads with an unexpected beam of plasma.

Carrying a lightsaber like this is akin to keeping a fully automatic Uzi in your pocket with ammunition loaded and cocked, no safety catch, and the trigger guard removed. And I’m not saying that people don’t do that, but they suffer the consequences: accidental or negligent gunshots happen tragically often due to unsecured ways of storing the weapon. But for the Jedi, a highly trained military force, this level of risk should be unacceptable. And don’t even get me started on the increased level of risk posed in dual-wielding lightsabers or carrying a double-ended one:

When ignited (activated? Unsheathed?), the lightsaber makes a loud and distinctive sound and shines brightly to all potential targets. “Look, everyone,” it says. “A Jedi is here. Right over here, in fact.” A beam of plasma at 10,000 degrees Celsius is a giant beacon summoning all the attention toward the poor Jedi. At the same time, the sudden flash of light will blind said Jedi to everything else around them:

The heat is another problem, one even worse than the visual impairment. A metre-long column of plasma at 10,000 degrees will be very uncomfortable for the wielder, especially when they habitually go without any kind of personal protective equipment. This would be an even bigger problem in lightsaber duels. To quote Nautilus:

Expecting some free-floating plasma to clash with some other free-floating plasma is like … expecting soup to clash with other soup

In lightsaber duels, instead of the sparks and static noises we get when two blades meet, we should instead expect showers of plasma which will fall indiscriminately on each combatant, burning holes in them.

As a weapon, therefore, a lightsaber would pose serious dangers to the user. Surely, though, this can be justified by the effect it has on the enemy?

Unfortunately not. Lightsabers are very fancy swords, but they are still swords: if you don’t want to be sliced apart by one, then don’t be within two or three metres of a Jedi. It really is as simple as that²¹. Okay, so they can deflect blaster bolts back at the firer:

This is only plausible when the enemy are up close and personal, in which case (as we see) it’s as easy to just hack them to bits. We discussed previously how blasters are much worse than firearms because they travel so slowly and are highly visible: I’d love to see Jedi trying to deflect a hail of bullets in the same way.

I suppose the reason they can do this is their Force abilities, but this is purely a defensive measure: it’s a bit like Neo’s bullet-dodging abilities in The Matrix. Below are just a few ways that you can defeat a Jedi with a lightsaber:

• Rapid fire blaster bolts aimed at different parts of the Jedi: the lightsaber can move quickly, but it can’t be in two places at the same time. Aim for the bottom of the legs and the head at the same time.
• Exploding projectiles: Use a proximity fuze so that the sneaky Jedi can’t destroy the warhead with the lightsaber
• Flamethrowers
• Lasers: Jedi might be fast, but they’re not speed-of-light fast

If the Jedi need to have a cool melee weapon to show off their strength and agility, then some sort of bladed staff would be just as (in)effective, and without many of the significant downsides of lightsabers.

Star Wars isn’t the only science fiction franchise preoccupied with hand-to-hand combat. Dune features extensive hand-to-hand combat between elite space knights. The rationale for this is the personal shield units which soldiers normally wear and which protect them from fast-moving projectiles, but are useless against slower threats such as swords and knives²². Then there’s Warhammer 40,000 (more on which in the next section), which abounds with “power” swords, hammers, maces, and other melee weapons which are augmented with an energy field:

Conclusion: Lightsabers are a status symbol

Lightsabers undoubtedly have a “wow” factor as weapons. I’m not sure I’d fully agree with Obi-Wan when he called them “an elegant weapon, for a more civilised age.” I’m not sure what’s elegant about a mini nuke spitting out hot plasma which may well blind and burn the user while slicing holes into anyone unfortunate enough to getting within swinging range.

Not only are they inelegant, though, but the technical challenges in getting them to work would be substantially greater than shown in the films. From powering it to not burning or blinding yourself, the lightsaber is more of a threat to the user than it is to most opponents. Why does it exist, so, in our long-ago, far away galaxy? There are two big reasons:

The first, as always with these movie critiques, is that screen storytellers have very good reasons for including lightsabers: they’re very cool. From their appearance, to their sound, to their merciless effect on every material aside from “lightsaber”, they are a defining feature of the Star Wars canon. They mark who the good guys and the main bad guys are, and they give us some excellent one-on-one duels which you simply wouldn’t get with ranged weapons. So I’m glad I like in a world which can dream up a lightsaber, while being equally glad I live in a world where they are practically impossible.

The second, more coherent and canonical reason to defend the use of lightsabers is as a status symbol. Jedi Knights are galaxy-roaming warrior-monks whose goal (outside of the events of the films) is to keep the peace. Violence is supposed to be a last resort for a Jedi Knight. In this context, it makes sense that their primary weapon is a little bit useless. It’s not envisaged to be used overmuch. If a Jedi is lightsabering his or her way through a situation, something has gone terribly wrong.

In this sense, the lightsaber is like a pistol or a ceremonial sword in a modern-day military. I’ve written before how a pistol (at least in the military) is less useful as a weapon and more useful as a signifier of rank or purpose, e.g. that the bearer is an officer. The lightsaber is the Jedi Knight’s status signifier: anyone dangling one off their belt is a serious person, with serious powers and (more importantly) the might of the Jedi Order and the Old Republic behind them. It won’t do to cross them.

Chainswords

Picking up on the theme of Warhammer 40,000 discussed above, this section is focusing (as the title above suggests) on chainswords. These are apparently the standard melee weapon in the 41st millennium for humans and aliens alike (click on images for links):

A chainsword is exactly what is sounds like: a sword which functions like a chainsaw, with a rotating set of toothed blades. If, at this point, you’re completely lost, then it might be worth taking a beat to cover what Warhammer 40,000 is.

What is Warhammer 40,000?

Warhammer 40,000 (40K) is first and foremost a tabletop wargame. Players buy (at extortionate prices) little figurines, paint them to a very high standard, and then do battle with their friends using a rulebook and pair of dice.

The game has spawned books (my favourite is the Ciaphas Cain series by Sandy Mitchell. Think Flashman in space), video games, and an Amazon Prime short as part of their Secret Level series.

The picture above contains many of 40K’s salient elements: augmented space marines, psychic warriors, people with tubes coming out of them, lots of killing, and armour embellished with religious iconography. 40K is considered to be the progenitor of the “grimdark” genre of science fiction, or “everything is shit and getting worse.” The term “grimdark” comes from 40K’s tagline:

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

In short, some of the weapons are a bit over-the-top, but that’s completely okay, because 40K as a concept is completely over the top. This, after all, is the good guy:

The chainsword stands apart for being especially impractical, ridiculous, and cool. So much so that I felt it deserved its own section. I’m going to spend the following ~2,000 words ripping on the concept, but that’s only because I’m safe in my own house and not out there on the fringes of the galaxy, ripping through a Tyranid swarm with my very own chainsword. In short, I’m jealous, and pedantry is my only recourse.

I’ll start off by talking about power and torque and why there’s no way that anyone—well, maybe apart from the Astartes—who could actually wield the thing in a useful way.

Then I’ll discuss the threat that a proper-functioning chainsword would pose to the person using it. I’ll go into some of the hand-wavey science fiction which is sometimes used to justify weapons like this, before giving my Military Realism verdict on the weapon.

Power and torque pose problems

Chainsaws are not known for being light and agile power tools. There’s no reason a chainsword should be any different.

Let’s talk about the power requirements first. Spinning up a chain of cutting teeth takes a lot of power. For a 3rd millennium chainsaw, this might weigh anything from 3 kg to 9 kg. Electric chainsaws are on the lighter end of the scale, gasoline powered ones on the heavier end.

And guess which type is used by humans of the 41st millennium? It’s the latter. Tanks have big belching diesel promethium engines, and chainswords are powered by miniature versions of the same.

Okay, let’s say you handwave the need for a big engine by saying it’s powered by some unknown, alien, lightweight but energy-dense battery. Or perhaps it uses nuclear fuel or some other exotic material. Obviously, this doesn’t let humans such as Space Marines and Imperial Guard off the hook. Or Orks, for that matter. It is, however, plausible for the Eldar chainsword warriors.

The problem is that even with a light power source, you still have a chain of somewhat heavy teeth spinning around very fast. Chains and teeth are heavy, for one thing, but they also exert a torque as they spin.

The moving mass of the chains and teeth will try to rotate the entire sword in the user’s hand. The fact that the blade (or “bar,” in chainsaw terminology) is long means that this torque is magnified. Remember, torque is force times distance.

It would take a strong grip to hold that rotating mass steady. Again, this might be something that Space Marines can do without breaking a sweat, but un-augmented humans?

Apparently it’s so not a problem for commissars that they can wield a large handgun as well as a heavy chainsword.

Ah, yes, the pistol: that famously accurate weapon, especially with one-handed use. Combine it with a chainsword so you can do two things very badly.

If weights on the order of 3 to 9 kg don’t seem like a lot, then I’d ask you to do a quick experiment. Take a metre (yard) long section of scaffolding pole²³ and hold it vertically. Then hold it up at an angle of 45 degrees. Then hold it out horizontally.

How hard was that? Now imagine that it’s got a rotating chain and is trying to wrench your wrist around.

Sure, the Astartes (Space Marines) could conceivably do this without breaking a sweat, but for lesser mortals this would not be possible.

And even if it was, would you want to wield a chainsword? It would pose a far greater threat to you than you to any enemy. Let’s discuss that next.

The user is in more danger than the enemy

There are more than a few similarities between the chainswords in 40K and Star Wars‘s lightsabers, as discussed above. Surprise surprise, the danger to the user is among them.

Let’s get one critique out of the way, because it’s such an open goal. Melee weapons have very limited utility in a world of cheap and accurate ranged weapons. The universe of 40K, for all its obvious flaws, still has quite a few highly effective ranged weapons to choose from. Don’t bring a knife (or even a sword, or even a chainsword) to a gun fight:

That aside, let’s examine some of the practical effects of using a chainsword in a melee-heavy engagement. The first comes down to fighting technique. You shouldn’t use this like you would a normal sword.

You don’t swing a chainsaw like an axe: the whole point of the buzzing rotary teeth is that they do the kinetic energy bit for you. By the same token, there’s no point in swinging a chainsword in big wide arcs, because it’s adding nothing to the damage of the blow while leaving you open to a counterthrust. Again, this is just like the lightsaber. Someone tell this berserker Space Marine that he’s wasting his energy:

If you ever watch videos of lumberjacks felling or slicing trees²⁴, pay attention to how much control they exert over the blade. There’s very good reason for this. A phenomenon called “kickback” has the gruesome potential to bring the saw blade up and into your face if it’s not controlled properly.

Whereas you can educate a sawyer to not use the tip of the saw, it’s much harder to enforce this kind of practice in the heat of combat, with an enemy who’s trying to kill you while also avoiding being chopped up by his own sword.

Even if you can avoid kickback, you still need to worry about any part of the blade coming into contact with your limbs, armour, trailing bits of cloak or scroll, or buddies.

Not to mention the bits of enemy and the teeth of the sword itself which will become dislodged through wear and tear until they’re launched at high speeds right into your face.

At this point you might be tempted to bring in some science fiction handwaving and talk about monomolecular blade edges. These solve some of the problems I’ve discussed above, but only at the cost of bringing in far, far more. Let’s discuss them next.

Monomolecular cutting teeth solve some problems, bring many more

Some sources²⁵ try to explain away the practical problems of chainswords by talking about their “monomolecular” cutting edges.

This usually doesn’t apply to the bog-standard human versions, but rather to the xeno versions or, if human, the fancier (i.e. Space Marine) ones.

A monomolecular blade is, as the name suggests, a blade that’s so sharp that its edge is only one molecule thick. That’s quite sharp! For context, the sharpest edge we 3rd millennium humans have managed is about 3 nanometers, which is about 24 (iron) atoms thick.

Not quite there, but not a million miles off, I hear you say. But there’s a problem. Assume you could sharpen a steel edge to be a single atom thick. The resulting material, at least on that edge, wouldn’t be steel anymore. Steel is a mass of jumbled-up crystals of iron and carbon²⁶. Without the carbon it’s just pure iron, which is very soft: not a suitable blade material.

You couldn’t sharpen a steel blade to be this thin, because the material would chip and break and separate at the level of boundaries between these crystals (called “grains” in steel).

So steel is out: sorry Imperial Guard, Orks, and other users of chainswords who are lower down the tech tree. What about exotic super-materials in the lore? Things like diamantine or adamantium?

The problem here is that materials science is unforgiving. Swords need to balance two demands. They need to be hard and they need to be tough. What’s the difference? I thought you’d never ask.

• A hard material like diamond, glass, tungsten carbide, or some steels resists deformation. Hard materials are great for cutting other, softer materials.
• A tough material like aluminium, polycarbonate, or some steels absorbs energy without fracturing. Tough materials are great for structural uses.

Some steels are harder, some are softer, some are tougher, some are more brittle, but most of them strike a decent compromise between the two. It’s why steels are so popular. A steel sword needs to be both hard and tough. Sometimes this is accomplished by getting a compromise recipe throughout the blade, other times with fancy dual-material blades where the tough but softer material is in the core, with the edge made from harder, more brittle material.

The point of this aside is just to say that there’s no magic material which is perfectly strong and tough, so the idea of making a monomolecular blade for sword fighting is far-fetched.

If we did manage to make a monomolecular blade (or tooth in a chainsword), then the resulting weapon would be even more of a liability to the user. It would also completely obviate the need for a rotating chain mechanism.

But it would make a cool weapon even cooler. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that the whole point?

Conclusion: The triumph of the cool

Space Marines are famously clad in ceramite “power” armour which stops most attacks and interfaces with their body to enhance their movements. Terminator armour is heavier still and with even greater integration with the superman within.

Total coverage with super or über-super armour is one of the defining characteristics of Space Marines.

Except when it’s not.

If you didn’t spot the glaring omission from the squad above, it’s the helmet on the squad leader. You know, the single most important piece of armour which protects the single most important part of the single most important Marine.

Soldiers not wearing helmets is ridiculous, but we give these guys a pass because it looks cool as hell.

Chainswords are the same. Utterly impractical, impossible to wield, and presenting more danger to the user, they are not a good weapon. There’s no way that that changes in the next 38,000 years either. Really, I’ll wait just to be proven right.

Be that as it may, they are hella cool. And, with Warhammer 40,000 (as with most good science fiction), isn’t that the most important thing?

Projectile weapons

The firearms of Warhammer 40,000

I’m going to start this section with bolters and other firearm-adjacent tech from Warhammer 40,000. I’ll call these “tradguns,” because they’re like the firearms we know and love. Then I’ll move on to laser guns, throwing back to the section above but kept in here with the rest of the 40K firearms, as they are at the core of the human tech’s offensive weaponry. I’ll mention plasma weapons, powerful but dangerous to the firer.

Bolters and other tradguns

The standard issue weapon for Space Marines in 40K is the bolter, or bolt gun. This is what we 20th century humans might call a “gun,” although the 400th century version has some important differences.

The Space Marine standard pattern bolter fires a .75-inch calibre round²⁷. That sounds big. It is big. Here’s what weapons that fire a .50 cal round look like, with humans for scale:

These are not small weapons. A .75 cal round is 50% wider across the base than a .50 cal round. That means it’s more than three times bigger²⁸ and heavier than a .50 cal round. Below is a 20 mm anti-materiel sniper rifle. Three quarters of an inch (.75 cal) is just over 19 mm, so the rifle below is not a million miles off what a .75 cal boltgun might look like.

Remember to add a big heavy mechanism at the back for semi-automatic fire and a 10+ round magazine and you’re getting closer to what a bolter ought to look like. It’s a good thing Space Marines are big.

Aside from their ridiculous size, the other notable thing about 40K bolters is how powerful their ammunition is. Let’s take a look at the standard bolt. Bear in mind that, scaled from a .50 cal, this baby should weigh over 140 grammes (~5 ounces in old money).

There’s a lot going on with this round. Let’s start with the rocket propellant at the back. Now, while it’s true that some modern firearm projectiles are rocket assisted, those firearms are large artillery howitzers which fire projectiles that measure at least 155 mm across the base.

But rocket propulsion for a rifle or pistol round? That’s a bit much, along with the many other components packed into that package. They explain in the 40K wiki that it uses a “soft launch” system, with a small propelling charge to get the shell out of the barrel before the rocket motor ignites. This would wreak havoc with accuracy, but we’ll come back to that later.

All this could make sense in the lore of the game. Bear in mind that the denizens of 40K have lost their technological know-how. Perhaps their mastery of materials and machinery has deteriorated to the point that they can’t build firearms to withstand the high pressures (thousands of bar, tens of thousands of psi) we’re used to in our guns.

In this case it might make sense to have an underpowered gun but make up for its lack of oomph by sticking a mini rocket motor on the base of each round. This might also explain why the rounds are full of explosive components. If their weapons can’t propel them to a high speed, and that dinky rocket motor isn’t going to do much more, then you’d better pack that round full of explodey goodness to inflict maximum damage on the enemy.

This, in turn, would explain why they go with the comically large calibre of .75 inch. What we’re looking at here is less like a high-powered rifle and more like an underslung rifle grenade launcher.

I mentioned accuracy further up. A low-velocity, large diameter projectile is not going to be accurate. Luckily for mankind, their military forces also possess laser weapon technology. Surely that gives the accuracy improvement we’re looking for. Right?

Lasguns

Laser guns (or “lasguns” in 40K lore) are the standard issue weapon for the Imperial Guard. These are the normal human soldiery of mankind in the 41st millennium, as opposed to the genetically and cybernetically enhanced Space Marine freaks.

Lasguns follow the normal pattern laser weapon characteristics you see in science fiction which we discussed above. In short, this means that they shoot discrete “bolts” of laser light at a finite speed toward the target.

This, of course, is not how lasers work in real life (see previous section on lasers). The beam would instantly²⁹ reach the target. Even if it was firing in pulses (due to power limitations, for example), each pulse would instantly reach its destination and keep heating it for as long as the pulse lasted.

Because you remove the bullet time-of-flight factor as well as the effects of gravity on ballistic trajectories, a laser weapon would be far more accurate than any projectile weapon. Its accuracy is limited only by the firer’s ability to hold it straight and steady.

Is this reflected in gameplay? Not exactly. Not at all, in fact. Weapon accuracy is purely a function of the firer, with the Space Marine supermen having more than 30% greater chance of hitting the enemy than their plodding base-human allies. This is despite the fact the Space Marines are using a sanctified grenade launcher and the Guardsmen a sophisticated laser.

Complex weapon mechanics not reflected in gameplay: this is a theme we will come back to. In the meantime, let’s look at a different type of weapon.

Plasma weapons

If you want something futuristic (no bolters, thank you) but don’t want the glorified flashlight which we discussed above, then you might want to consider a plasma weapon.

Plasma Guns use hydrogen as a fuel source and contain a miniature fusion reaction inside (it’s the blue glow, you see?). The fusion core turns the hydrogen into plasma, and a magnetic field accelerates it toward the target, with predictably impressive results upon impact. A plasma weapon can melt through armour and reduce even tough opponents and monsters to ash.

The technologically challenging bit is how the “bolt” of plasma keeps together from the weapon to the target, rather than simply exploding in the unconfined free air. Let’s leave that to one side, for a moment, and focus instead on the risky business of supercharging your plasma weapon.

The game’s rules allow you to “supercharge,” increasing the already impressive attack strength by nearly 15%. The risk is a 17% chance that the plasma weapon will overheat and suffer a catastrophic failure, turning itself and anyone carrying it into a pile of glowing goo.

This might seem tempting during gameplay, but I don’t think any soldier would willingly pull the trigger on a weapon that had a 1/6 chance of killing them. That’s like playing a round of Russian Roulette alongside each shot. Jack Reacher (TV version) might like those odds, but most folk don’t.

Before moving on from 40K “weapons which make things hot,” I wanted to mention the Meltagun. These anti-tank weapons focus a beam of intense heat at vehicular armour, reducing it to slag.

The weapon engineer in me can’t help but sigh at the Meltagun. It seems to be based on the myth that the high explosive anti-tank (HEAT) weapons of today’s world melt armour. As I’ve explained previously, they do nothing of the sort.

Those quibbles aside, the Meltagun and Plasma Gun definitely gain enough cool points to outweigh the minor inconsistencies in physics which they rely on for their proper functioning. That’s probably true of the game as a whole.

Conclusion: The game can’t handle these weapons

The stories and art behind Warhammer 40K are extensive and impressive, with plenty of opportunity to go down a rabbit hole of in-world lore.

I used to dabble in Warhammer 40K. I loved building the figurines and painstakingly painted them (although I wasn’t great at it). I really enjoyed modifying the standard models to create little action dioramas. I always thought the game itself was only passable. Perhaps it’s because I could never build an impressive enough army, or perhaps it’s because I was never a great tactician and I always hated losing games. Either way, it often left me frustrated.

I absolutely loved the aesthetic and tone and backstory of 40K, however. I still do. Researching this article brought back many fond memories as well as dozens of little rabbit holes for me to get lost in. I used to enjoy reading a “codex” from cover to cover, devouring the bits of worldbuilding and incredible artwork which broke up the tables of attributes and rules for that particular faction.

I chose the Eldar faction (nowadays known as Aeldari). They’re 40K’s analogue to elves and are notoriously fragile in battle, of use only to a good tactician. No wonder I didn’t like the game.

I always felt that the mechanics of the game weren’t sufficient to accommodate the depth of the lore. I’d read about Space Marines having two hearts and being twice the size of a normal man and having super-armour and brutal training and generic engineering and… And they get +1 Toughness as a result. Big whoop. Eldar weapons employ technology beyond the comprehension of mere man… and have the same effect as a firearm.

I think D&D has the right idea in using a 20-sided die for most rolls. It gives the designer more granularity in how they design the weapons, armour, and other items in the game. With lore this strong, I would love to see more complex combat mechanics to reflect the imagination of this world.

Then again, any increase in complexity would detract from the game’s accessibility. It was nice to be able to pick up the rules in an afternoon and then get lost in the game’s endless possibilities. What tactical coups I could pull off, if only I could afford that shiny new model. It’s a brilliant business model, to be fair.

I have to put my hand up and admit that it’s years since I’ve played 40K, and the rules have evolved through several iterations since then. I understand that today’s Space Marines are much harder to kill, for example. That definitely accords with what we’re told in the background material. I would hope and assume that they rebalance the “points” accordingly. Another great aspect of 40K was (and presumably still is) its points system which allows players to build armies of equivalent strength. Just like in real life, of course.

Unreal Tournament flak cannon vs. plain old shotgun

In this section I’ll turn my beady eyes on the Flak Cannon from Unreal Tournament (UT). This weapon was a particular favourite of mine, probably due to my lack of aiming skills. I’ll discuss how it works in the game, and why it wouldn’t work in real life. I’ll then move on to talk about shotguns and shotgun-adjacent weapons in games more generally, and compare their popularity in games to their real-life role.

You mean you’ve never heard of Unreal Tournament?

If, unlike me, you didn’t fritter away the best years of your youth in front of CRT³⁰ screens playing high-octane shoot-em-ups, then maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about here. Thankfully it won’t take too long to bring you up to speed. Unreal Tournament (UT) is a game where you shoot people with exotic weapons in exotic locations. That’s about all there is to know. Okay, there’s some variation in game types (team deathmatch, capture the flag, etc.), but the plain old deathmatch³¹ is where it’s at. There’s also the barest bones of a story bolted on, but, honestly, nobody is there for the character arcs. Here’s what it looks like in action:

The flak cannon is my all-time favourite UT weapon…

Unreal Tournament‘s most underrated weapon, in my opinion, is the humble Flak Cannon. It’s underrated because it sits below the rocket launcher in order of “switch” priority: if you’re carrying a flak cannon and pick up³² a rocket launcher, the game will automatically switch over. This might suit some rocket-preferring weirdo UT players, but it usually results in me panicking, spinning the mouse wheel the wrong way to end up with the utterly useless impact hammer³³ before getting “gibbed” by my ruthless opponent whom I would have easily dispatched with the flak cannon.

And why would I have easily dispatched them? For starters, the flak cannon is coded “shotgun” and, as everyone who plays first-person shooters knows, shotguns are among the most forgiving weapons if your reflexes and hand-eye coordination are lacking. If you fall into this category, then you have two options when it comes to shooters:

The Flak Cannon is UT’s version of a shotgun, but it has some crucial differences:

Primary fire from this weapon gives the expected shotgun buckshot effect: a spray of fragmentation which spreads out in a cone, giving a lethal effect at close range without the need for pinpoint accuracy. Just like buckshot, however, the fragments slow down and disperse quickly, so the effective range is limited.

Secondary fire lofts an intact shell slowly toward the target, which explodes in a burst of shrapnel³⁴. This gives the flak cannon a much-needed ranged capability (medium range, at least. This is never good for long ranges), redressing what is usually the downside of video game shotguns. This makes the flak cannon unusually powerful, like being able to choose “rock” and “paper” at the same time. Here it is in action, courtesy of PC Gamer, who share my enthusiasm for “the greatest gun in PC gaming”:

Even though it’s my favourite weapon, I must admit that the flak cannon leaves a lot to be desired in the realism department. That’s right, stand by: I’m going to tell you how Unreal Tournament does not give an accurate depiction of how actual weapons work.

…but it doesn’t make much sense

The flak cannon’s primary and secondary modes of fire would each be semi-plausible in isolation. Together, they don’t make sense. Let’s break down how it might work.

The primary mode of fire is like a shotgun. This means you need a thin cartridge filled with fragmentation, and a low explosive propellant charge to accelerate these fragments down the barrel of the gun:

The secondary mode of fire is like a grenade launcher: the shell is sent at fairly low speed toward the target, where it then explodes and showers the area with fragments. This means you need a small low explosive propellant charge, a thick shell casing, a high explosive bursting charge, and a fuze of some kind. This is a very different type of ammunition:

The second type of ammo requires less “oomph” at the start (the propellant charges are smaller and the weapon itself can be lighter because there’s less recoil), but has a lot more internal complexity and engineering to deliver death when it reaches the target.

These are definitely not interchangeable. If you tried launching the first type of ammo toward the target without breaking it up first, then you’d get an unimpressive “thud”, since there’s no high explosive charge to break apart the casing and spread the fragments. Maybe the force of impact would split the casing open, but then all you’d get is a few fragments bouncing around. It might make the enemy trip, if they didn’t watch their footing.

On the other hand, if you tried to be clever and program the fuze on the second type of ammo to detonate early and give you a shotgun effect, then this would go very badly for you as the firer. Firstly, you’re getting a high explosive detonation mere inches from your face, which is never a good idea. Then you’d get the inevitable bits of shell casing and pre-formed fragments coming back toward you³⁵, blinding or otherwise maiming you. Not a great idea.

What if we used different ammunition types? What if the Flak Cannon’s magazine is cleverly subdivided into two, with a ready supply of each type of ammo? There are two problems with this. The first (the smaller problem) is that the game’s animations make it very clear that a new shell is loaded into the breech immediately after the last one is fired (in other words, it’s an automatic weapon). This means that you can’t choose which type of ammunition you’re going to fire, because the weapon already has the round loaded and ready to go:

The bigger problem has to do with the weapon’s design. As we saw above with our shotgun vs. grenade cross-sections, the shotgun needs a big heavy breech to keep the shotgun shell and all the hot gases facing forward, i.e. the correct direction. A grenade launcher, because it shoots a much slower projectile, needs much less propellant and consequently a lighter breech block and therefore a lighter weapon (see also our discussion of Warhammer 40K bolters above). So, you wouldn’t use the same weapon to fire both ammunition types, because this makes no sense from a design point of view. You’re either carrying something that’s far too lightweight and flimsy to fire a shotgun shell, or a majorly over-engineered behemoth for lobbing a few grenades.

There’s a much bigger problem here, however, and it’s an issue regardless which type of fire we’re talking about. As you can see in the animation above, the round is loaded into the barrel, and then we can see the back of it until it fires. The only thing holding the round in place is what looks like a series of circumferential pins. There’s no way that a few flimsy pins and the brass of the back of the shell casing would be strong enough to keep the propellant gases from bursting through and ruining the firer’s day. This takes the concept of “firing from an open breech” to a whole new and absurd level. It makes for a cool firing/loading animation, but it would never work in reality.

Speaking of reality, let’s look at the popularity of shotguns in other shooters and how this compares to the real world, or at least the military.

Shotguns are popular in video games, and sometimes in real combat

Shotguns are a popular weapon in first-person shooters. This is mainly because of their very forgiving nature for novice players, as mentioned above. A second reason comes with newer games (newer than Unreal Tournament, at least, which isn’t hard) and ragdoll physics engines. Shotguns were given improbably high stopping power and so would physically blow the enemy away³⁶ in a very satisfying manner, as seen in some of these examples:

Combat shotguns do have a place in the modern-day military, but it’s a limited role. They’re used to break open door locks during urban warfare³⁷ and occasionally as an offensive weapon in similar operations where ranges are limited and the enemy might appear right in front of you at any moment. Trench warfare, particularly during WW1, was another use case for shotguns.

By and large, though, shotguns are a niche rather than an everyday weapon for militaries. They have limited utility at range and shotgun ammunition is much heavier than rifle ammunition: a 12-gauge³⁸ round is nearly four times heavier than a 5.56 x 45 mm standard rifle round. And ammunition weight is important, because soldiers use quite a lot of it. This, in turn, is because they spend a lot of time hunkered down behind cover firing at the enemy. We mentioned this in the blog when we spoke about fire and manoeuvre. Modern tactics mean you need to be able to pin the enemy down with long-range accurate fire so that your buddies can move into a position to assault. And while the shotgun may be pretty good at the “assault” bit, it’s pretty useless at the “suppression” bit, unless you’re firing and manoeuvring at point blank range (and even then, it will be pretty bad because of the limitations in how much ammunition you can carry).

In the real world of combat, the advantages of the shotgun are usually outweighed by its disadvantages.

Conclusion: Real weapons have tradeoffs

I mentioned above that Unreal Tournament‘s Flak Cannon was like being able to play two “rock, paper, scissors” options against your opponent’s one. It won’t guarantee you a win every time, but it stacks the deck seriously in your favour. The only place the Flak Cannon falls down is in long-range fire. In a game like UT, however, where most maps feature tight corridors and lots of right angles, this weapon is almost always perfect:

It’s also a perfect accessory for the manic speed which characterises a typical UT deathmatch. You can rack up your double, triple, mega, and even M-M-M-MONSTER kill streaks with a dozen or so shells, a sneak approach, and the right angles.

This weapon is glorious because it deliberately casts aside the trade-offs that are normally strictly enforced in shooters. Ranged weapons are slower to reload, rapid-fire weapons cause less damage, more powerful weapons have smaller ammunition loads, etc. The Flak Cannon laughs at your conventions as it spits high explosive grenades and shotgun shells from the same orifice, in contravention of all known norms of gun design and quite possibly some laws of physics. It’s a science fiction classic. What’s not to love?

Weapons which shoot blades #1: The Ripper

I want to finish with two similar weapons: the Ripper from Unreal Tournament and the Eldar Shuriken Catapult from 40K. Let’s start with the first one, which is like a cross between an angle grinder, a crossbow, and a grenade launcher:

This was never my first choice of weapon in the game (for one thing, it was usually hard to find), but it is one of the most imaginative and furthest removed from anything in real-life. As we’ll see below, there are good reasons for this. I enjoyed the novelty of bouncing spinning blades off the walls to try to decapitate the enemy, all the time knowing that they could come back in my direction. It wasn’t practical, but it was great fun, as you can see in the clips below (guess which one is the 1999 game and which is the 2024 TV series):

We’ll cover the practicalities of this weapon in the first section. Suffice to say, there are issues. In the second section, we’ll look at the secondary fire mode for the Ripper, which makes the discs explode on impact. Finally, we’ll evaluate the Ripper alongside more <ahem> traditional weapons, look at some other similar science fiction offerings, and compare with any real-world equivalents.

Spinning blades are cool, but not practical

To start, let’s look at why the Ripper wouldn’t be able to do the cool things it does in the game. In other words, why you would not be able to launch a spinning blade with sniper accuracy to sever an opponent’s head and/or bounce menacingly off the walls.

There are three boring reasons for this:

• Boring Reason #1: The Magnus effect

A spinning object creates an asymmetric lift force which pulls at right angles to its axis of rotation. Veritasium has a great video on it (including its practical uses), but see here how it dramatically alters the path of a basketball dropped off a dam:

In the case of the Ripper, the Magnus force will pull the saw blade away from the point of aim, which will make it hard to hit anything further than a few metres away:

We can quantify this effect by making some basic assumptions about the size and speed of the razor blade and using an online calculator. For a blade 30 cm (12″) in diameter, 5 mm (0.2″) thick, and weighing 500 g spinning at 50 revs per second (3000 rpm) and launched at 100 m/s (328 fps), the force would be 27 N (6 pounds of force). This is significant, and would lead to an error of 0.5 m (a person width) at 20 m range, over 1 m at 30 m range, and 14 m at 100 m range. Unless you get used to launching beautiful arced shots, you’re not going to hit anything with these blades.

The Magnus effect has real-life implications for external ballistics, and needs to be taken into account for firing artillery rounds. Speaking of ballistics, there’s another problem with the Ripper…

• Boring Reason #2: No spin-stabilisation

Most bullets nowadays are spin-stabilised. I’ll cover this in my upcoming external ballistics lecture entertaining article, but, in short, spinning a projectile about its axis of travel means it’s resistant to forces which push it away, thereby improving accuracy. The Ripper doesn’t have this, so it’s very susceptible to any force which pushes it off its point of aim. Including the Magnus force, as mentioned above.

Combine reason #1 and reason #2 and it’s clear that the Ripper’s razor blades are spinning the wrong way. I think it’s time for another Good Idea, Bad Idea³⁹:

Okay, so we forget about sniper-like accuracy. What about bouncing the blades off the walls?

• Boring Reason #3: Real walls break

Real walls aren’t made of adamantium, so a spinning razor blade will do damage to its structure. Yes, I know damage physics isn’t modelled in the game. No walls in this universe are breakable, whether they’re made from brick, concrete, steel, or stained glass:

The problem (and here I’m really nitpicking) is that I can’t accept that the blades ricochet smoothly and repeatedly off all these materials, but slice through heavy armour to cause damage to the enemy. Surely it should bounce off those hardened plates, unless you get the lucky neck shot.

Okay, I hear you say. That’s enough midwit complaining, but I understand that this is a game. We can’t model every intricacy of materials science and external ballistics, so I’ll accept a bit of artistic licence, thank you very much. 

Well, you’re not wrong. Games can be silly, especially shooters. I haven’t given out about the Bio Rifle (yet), and that’s even sillier. Let’s take the game designers at face value, then, and evaluate the Ripper on its supposed effects. Unfortunately, it still comes up short.

Serious reason #1: It’s a weapon designer’s nightmare

The Ripper has a spinning sawblade in an open “barrel,” a railgun-type propulsion system, and a munition that’s part blade, part explosive (more on this below). This weapon is cumbersome, it would be a nightmare to power, and it would pose more of a threat to the firer than to the enemy:

If we had to classify the Ripper from a military standpoint, it would be a short-lived indiscriminate area-denial weapon which the operator needs to deploy manually. In other words, a landmine which you need to fire yourself, or mustard gas which you spray from a can.

Explosive discs create more problems than they solve

I said I’d deal with the secondary fire before we finished. The Ripper’s alternate ammo also sends spinning saws toward the enemy, but this time the blades explode on impact. Let’s dissect that idea. 

For starters, it isn’t completely impossible, because, as we all know by now, explosives don’t just “go off” on a whim. They need an impetus from a fuze and a small, more sensitive explosive. So you could pack the disk with high explosives and include a selectable fuze:

• Fuze off/inactive: primary fire mode, disk blades only
• Fuze activated: secondary fire mode, with exploding disk

So, kudos for including explosives which sometimes don’t explode. This is progress⁴⁰. You could even have a centrifugal fuze which initiates when the blade’s spin drops below a certain threshold (i.e. when it hits something). This is an initiation mechanism for some launched grenades in real life.

This is where the problems start, however. Take a look again at the original Ripper, and note how thin the blade is:

It’s going to be hard to pack a decent amount of explosives in there, especially given that the blade must taper out to an edge and consist of at least some solid cutting material. Now we also need to fit a fuze right in the middle (for balance, it can’t be off-centre), along with all the necessary widgets and gadgets for arming. You’ll have a lot of small, expensive moving parts, and very little space for explosives.

This is important, and a serious failing. If you’ve been paying attention here, you’ll know that fragments are the real killers from explosive ammo. Let’s take a look at how fragments are formed during a munition’s detonation:

Most of the explosive power will go into creating fragments from the thin bit of case around the top and bottom of the explosive fill. But there’s not much steel to work with here, because we’ve had to use all our space for explosives⁴¹, so the fragments are small and light and few. When the detonation wave reaches the edges, finally it has some big fragments (the actual blade) to work with. At this stage, lots of the explosive energy has already gone up and down, so there’s only a small bit left to go “out” and accelerate the fragments of blade. Even then, they only create a single expanding ring of fragment death, rather than the cylinder, cone, or cloud which gives maximum target effect.

In summary, the explosive secondary fire of the Ripper is a giant waste of engineering complexity. Razor blades are a terrible way to deliver explosive energy, complementing its inaccurate and dangerous primary fire.

Conclusion: Just use bullets

I once had a lecturer describe the design journey of caseless ammunition. He said “Every problem which the designers encountered would have been solved if they switched to using a case.” A similar thing is at play here with razor blade ammunition. Every problem, from accuracy, to safety, to explosive fill and fragmentation ability, would be solved if you made it into a bullet shape. There’s a reason ammunition design has trended toward a single universal shape.

In real life, designers stick to the boring but tried-and-tested bullet shape. The one exception I could find is this magnificent (but entirely useless) example built by Joerg Sprave at the Slingshot Channel:

My point here, of course, is not to dump on one of the greatest games of all time. Deathmatch wouldn’t be what it is without the arsenal of exotic weapons we see in Unreal Tournament and similar games. Some of them are semi-plausible and based on real-life weapons, and others are completely out there, but no less enjoyable for that. UT is not alone: there are other games which lean in to bladed weapons such as Warhammer 40,000’s Shuriken Catapult. Let’s discuss that next.

Weapons which shoot blades #2: Shuriken Catapults

Like a gun, but crappier.

Shuriken weapons are how the Eldar/Aeldari/Space Elves make war in the forty-first millennium. These are, to put it mildly… not good. They’re bad weapons. They’re bad for fighting, as I’ll explain in the article below.

For this section I’m going to start by describing how these weapons are supposed to work. This, to give them their due, is pretty damn cool. Then I’ll talk about how they actually work as weapons. Because it’s me you’re dealing with, I’m going to break it down by ballistic phase:

• Internal ballistics, i.e. what happens in the “gun” barrel;
• External ballistics, i.e. what happens in flight;
• Terminal ballistics, i.e. what happens when it hits armour; and
• Wound ballistics, i.e. what happens when it hits flesh.

If these concepts are new to you, then you might want to check out my Military Realism Report on ballistics: movie myths vs. reality.

I’ll conclude this section by asking whether the game’s mechanics do justice to the promise of these weapons—a theme we’ve discussed before.

The Shuriken Catapult fires little disks of death

The Shuriken Catapult is the basic weapon of the Aeldari grunt Guardian as he defends his craftworld from the uncultured alien hordes destroying the galaxy.

The Shuriken Catapult fires very sharp disks of very crappy material at very high speed and in very great quantities. The sharpness of these disks and the rate of fire are the unique selling points for the Shuriken Catapult, which is purported to deal a hail of terrifying death upon the enemy.

It’s said to make a “singing” sound when it fires, which is a nice touch and makes sense. With no explosive charge in the weapon, there’s no “bang,” but the acceleration field itself and the sound of the blade accelerating would conceivably make a high-pitched hum.

Yes, the Shuriken Catapult is a rapid-fire version of the “Ripper” in Unreal Tournament. Fans of the blog might recall a piece I did last year about the Ripper. My main takeaway was that this weapon was hella cool and theatrical, but woefully impractical in any military situation. I don’t want to prejudge the outcome of my investigations here, but I feel like the Shuriken Catapult will have some of the same drawbacks.

Before we get into that, I’d like to note that there are some inconsistencies between sources. This is reasonable and actually quite forgivable when we’re talking about the deep lore behind a tabletop game. I’ll try to point these out when I’m dumping on the science, just so you know which absurd worldbuilding claim I’m getting worked up about.

It’s no gun, despite its appearance

The Shuriken Catapult is the middle child in the Eldar Shuriken family:

It’s “coded” gun, just like pistol and cannon are coded pistol (surprise surprise) and machinegun, respectively. Look at these conehead warriors, doing gun stuff with them:

Let’s talk for a minute about the magazine (not the “clip,” you’ve been warned several times about that, I’ll not hear any of that nonsense on this blog). Here’s where we see some of the inconsistencies I mentioned above:

If the discs are really just a molecule⁴² thick (they’re not, but let’s humour them for a second) then the ammunition supply is practically infinite. Even if we beef up the disks to be as thick as a razor, then we still get a million or so rounds out before we need a reload. So, there’s no need for a human-style ammo magazine sticking out of the weapon, since all the required material could be kept inside.

Next, we need to dissect why the Shuriken Catapult has a gun barrel. The purpose of a firearm’s barrel is to trap propellant gases and give the bullet sufficient distance to accelerate under the pressure of these gases. As a secondary effect it causes the bullet to spin.

For the Shuriken Catapult, the acceleration happens via a “gravitic accelerator” before the barrel flare portion. The blades spin, but around the wrong axis for the barrel to be playing any part. What, then, is the barrel for?

The Aeldari, who are nobody’s fools, must have made a conscious decision to design their ancient weapons in a way that mimicked those up-and-coming humans and their firearms.

Shurikens fly with difficulty

You might recall that in the last section I pooh-poohed the idea (oft repeated in the lore) that the shurikens are a single molecule thick. It’s just as well, because this would be a bad idea on several fronts.

A projectile that thin has a mass which is, to all intents and purposes, zero. Meanwhile, it’s got a very non-zero surface area which, as soon as it catches even a whiff of air, will cause the projectile to stop dead and fall to the ground. It would be like trying to fire disks of clingfilm⁴³ at the enemy.

So, let’s give it the sharpness of a razor blade (about 0.1 microns, or 0.0001 millimetres). This ties in with some of the lore, where shurikens are described as having a monomolecular edge and seem to have a real, discernible thickness.

You might remember that this didn’t work out well for the Ripper. It’s even worse for our elven shurikens, I’m sorry to say. These thin spinning disks are too light and thin to travel usefully through the air. The slightest imbalance in airflows will catch their large flat areas and completely overturn whatever stability they have as a result of spin.

The only way these make sense are as reasonably thick disks (a few millimetres) with an edge sharpened to a single molecule. But then you lose the 1000+ disk magazine capacity. More importantly, you lose the coolest aspect of these weapons. Boo!

Okay, let’s drive on and look at what happens when these not-so-monomolecular blades reach their targets.

Thin disks can work against some types of armour…

If the blades truly were monomolecular and somehow could survive travelling through the air to the target, and somehow could maintain their strength when they reach the target, then they would wreak absolute havoc. Who can forget the ultra-thin cutting filaments which take apart a cargo ship in 3 Body Problem? Warning: the clip below is extremely graphic.

The comparison is awkward because those cuts were achieved by combining a force (a change in momentum due to the ship’s velocity) and a very narrow cutting surface. This concentrated the force and minimised friction.

A monomolecular spinning disk would have almost no momentum because it’s so light. However, it’s still concentrating that force on a small area, so the local stresses could be huge. Would it make an effective cut before failing structurally? Perhaps, but remember that it would never get through all that air first.

The most effective model for terminal ballistic effect, you won’t be surprised to hear, is a similar one to what we discussed in the last section. A narrow, possibly monomolecular cutting surface, widening out to a blade with meaningful thickness. This, in turn, gives it weight to concentrate force onto a cut and the internal strength to maintain its structure during this impact.

The bad news, from the Aeldari point of view, is that it’s most definitely not a silver bullet (or any kind of bullet) against all armour types. If we want something to be good at penetrating armour, it needs to have several different qualities, of which sharpness is only one:

The very sharp throwing disk would be great against armours made from composite materials such as Kevlar, because its sharp edges would get between the thin fibres of the material and push them aside, letting the rest of the projectile through.

It wouldn’t be great against metallic armour, since these tend to fail in a ductile fashion⁴⁴, with the steel in the target moving aside due to the high stresses and absorbing kinetic energy as it shuffles around to a new place. The sharp edge helps by keeping the initial contact area and friction low, but as the shuriken enters the hole it gets progressively thicker, requiring more material to be pushed out of the way.

It would be worse still against ceramics or other high hardness armours, where the target material might cause the sharp (but weak—remember, this is plastic) shuriken to deform and lose its sharpness and therefore its only benefit.

There’s a reason we don’t use thin disks against armour, never mind thin, light, and weak disks.

…without leaving much energy in the target

Assuming we do get through that armour plating, somehow, it’s time to interact with the soft bag of jelly behind it. Make no mistake, the Shuriken Catapult is designed to slice through human and other alien flesh with ease, instilling terror as well as grievous bodily harm on its victims. Surely things will start to look up from here?

Unfortunately, and you may have seen this coming, but no. Granted, the spinning plastic shuriken does at last find a target which it can penetrate with ease. Its sharpness parts the weak target material (which is basically water) and allows the disk to pass easily though.

And that’s the problem right there. Remember that the point of wound ballistics is to dump as much of the penetrator’s energy into the target as possible. That’s why hollow-point ammunition is so effective: the nose mushrooms out on impact, turning a modestly aerodynamic shape into a flat pancake which tears open the recipient’s insides, creating permanent damage as well as a large “temporary cavity” due to the pressure of the interaction:

9mm hollow point bullet fired into a block of ballistic gel
by ingifs

A thin shuriken disk has none of this. It’s designed to slice with a minimum of friction. The fact that it thickens toward the centre, as discussed above, means that friction does increase, but not nearly enough to cause optimal wounding.

The only saving grace the Shuriken Cannon has is that it fires lots of these little bastards, so the hope is that at least one or two will sever a major blood vessel before passing through and dumping their energy elsewhere.

Conclusion: The game doesn’t do this weapon justice… or does it?

I started this post intending it to be a tribute to the Shuriken Catapult and a lament at how poorly the game’s rules serve it. To remind you, I’m still grounded in the 3rd Edition rules of yesteryear, and I understand it’s gotten a little bit better since then. But I can’t forget how this weapon was little better than a peashooter against the Space Marines, Orks, and even Imperial Guard who wished harm upon my brave Eldar warriors.

As I dove into the analysis, however, I was forced to a slightly different conclusion. Let’s recap on how our Shuriken Catapult behaved in each of the ballistics domains:

As I said at the top, it’s not… good. Not good at all. It makes you wonder whether the original rule-writers really did know what they were doing when they modelled this as the 41st millennium equivalent of a spud gun. Which only leaves the question of why a race of advanced, ancient, and wise Space Elves would use these as their primary mode of doing combat?

We can only assume that this is some form of collective racial flagellation. The Aeldari are a civilisation in decline, forever living lives of ascetic discipline to atone for their historically decadent ways. It was these decadent ways that led to their original fall, as well as the birth of the Chaos god Slaanesh. Perhaps the Shuriken Catapult is one more method they have for punishing themselves after that monumental fuckup.

Conclusion

What have we learned about science fiction weapons in movies, video, and table-top games? A few themes keep rearing up:

• Futuristic isn’t always better. We think of lasers, plasmas, and advanced materials as being naturally better weapons. In fact, the modern firearm is a brutally optimised way to deposit lethal energy in your target. Military forces may use propellant-based firearms for some time yet.
• Think about tactics. Many science fiction weapons are a solution in search of a problem. There’s no plausible combat scenario that requires razor-sharp blades ricocheting at neck height but not discriminating between friendly and enemy lines.
• Melee is dumb… Whether it’s lightsabers or chainswords, many depictions of the future think that individual warriors will be doing battle “mano a mano” with handheld weapons. They’re futuristic because the blade is made of light or has spinning teeth, but otherwise this could be a knight out of the pre-gunpowder age. This is silly, but we let it go.
• …but cool is king. This is the reason that all is forgiven. Whether it’s the swoosh or a lightsaber or the “pew” of a laser gun, these weapons allow our heroes and heroines to wow us with their physical strength and agility.

What do you think? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Cover picture: Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace, 20th Century Fox (1999)

1. Yes, I’m very jealous. ↩︎
2. The source linked above makes for interesting reading (interesting if you’re a pedant like me) with a long discourse on blaster bolt speed and a link to a YouTuber who actually measured the speed of various blaster weapons in Stars Wars: Battlefront video game. ↩︎
3. I know Star Wars is set “a long time ago,” but you get what I mean. ↩︎
4. I should mention that the Star Trek fandom likewise explains that a “phaser” actually fires a beam of “nadion particles”, so it’s also a particle weapon. ↩︎
5. In Star Wars canon, it goes (in increasing order of destructive power): Laser -> Laser cannon -> Turbolaser (which has nothing to to with spinning machinery) -> Superlaser ↩︎
6. The name of the film is Star Wars, and I’m sticking to that. I’m not a purist and don’t have anything in particular against the prequel trilogy (I greatly enjoyed them as a youngster, and they are far better, at least, than the sequel trilogy), but I also don’t like how Lucas changed the name of the film subsequently to Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope. ↩︎
7. 2.4 x 10³² ↩︎
8. So we can do a bit of a sense check here on the number above. The energy required to heat something up is the mass of the target, multiplied by its heat capacity, multiplied by the required rise in temperature. Let’s assume that Alderaan is the same size as Earth (it’s classed as a “terrestrial” planet), which is 6 x 10²⁴ kg. The heat capacity of rock (Google) is (very roughly speaking) 1000 J/kg.K. And let’s assume that we want to raise the temperature of the planet by about ten thousand degrees. This means that the energy we need is 6 x 10³¹ Joules, which the 2.4 x 10³² Watt laser can output in a quarter of a second. It checks out! ↩︎
9. These laser sights are only effective at close range, and would be unlikely to be used by snipers at long distances, despite what we often see in movies. This is because light travels in a straight line, whereas a bullet, being subject to gravity, travels in a parabolic arc from the barrel to the target. ↩︎
10. Of course, the enemy know this too, and most likely have infra-red detectors on their tanks so that the tank knows when it’s being “lasered”. Some modern types even respond instantly to detecting a laser by loading a round and traversing the main gun to point back in the direction of the laser source, so that all the gunner or commander needs to do is confirm the target and fire to take out the threat. ↩︎
11. Still a million million million million times weaker than the Death Star. ↩︎
12. Sorry. ↩︎
13. Although they can be non-gory even with firearms, e.g. by using lots more big and fiery explosions which knock people over, and never actually showing bullets hitting their targets. Or, if you’re Sergio Leone, by shooting guns out of people’s hands. ↩︎
14. As opposed to a “battlespace”, which means “battlefield” but signals that the speaker is a military nerd who is proud of the fact that they realise space has three dimensions. ↩︎
15. Let’s conveniently ignore the fact that there are far more practical ways to achieve this aim, such as using munitions specifically designed to clear lanes through minefields. These are extremely cool: you fire a rocket across the minefield which drags a thick rope made of explosives. When the rope lands, the explosive detonates and clears several metres either side of it. ↩︎
16. Clearly the technical term. ↩︎
17. As an aside, did anyone else think it was very lazy writing to go from Return of the Jedi and the supposed defeat of the Galactic Empire into The Force Awakens, with an even stronger “First Order” and even weaker “Resistance” still reprising their roles from the original trilogy? It’s like the entire culmination of the original trilogy was for nothing. ↩︎
18. My text editor insists this is not a word, but offers “lightsabre”, “lightsabers”, and “lightsabres” as acceptable alternatives. Go figure. ↩︎
19. Except other lightsaber. ↩︎
20. Not Khyber, as autocorrect tries to tell me. You’d have to assume the filmmakers were inspired by the real-life example of the armour-penetrating Khyber knife, or Pesh-kabz, of Afghanistan fame. ↩︎
21. There was a great PC game years ago called Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast, where you could throw your lightsaber like a boomerang, greatly expanding the range of attack possible. To my knowledge, however, this type of attack only happens once in the films, in Return of the Jedi, but it’s a straight thrown and pickup, not a boomerang. ↩︎
22. As a technology, this is pretty baffling. It’s presumably a design choice, but why would you limit the shields to a certain speed of attack? Why not block swords and knives? ↩︎
23. Please don’t actually do this, unless you happen to have scaffolding poles lying around your house, or you work on a site. Whatever you do, don’t go taking apart some scaffolding just because some guy on the internet told you to. ↩︎
24. I don’t know what you do for fun, and I don’t judge. ↩︎
25. Which is a fancy way to describe a bunch of open-source fan-generated lore. ↩︎
26. Crystals containing iron and carbon atoms latticed together, rather than crystals of pure iron mixed with crystals of pure carbon. This is something else. ↩︎
27. Unless otherwise stated, I’m taking all weapon details from the Warhammer 40k wiki on Fandom. ↩︎
28. 1.5 (width) x 1.5 (length) x 1.5 (depth). ↩︎
29. Not quite instantly. The beam would travel at 300,000 km/second. For all battlefield purposes, this is instantaneous. It’s roughly 300,000 times faster than a bullet. ↩︎
30. For any younger readers, this was an innovative and sadly disappeared technology which allowed screens to be three-dimensional. Not in terms of the graphics (they were awful), but in terms of the physical real world: these screens were as deep as they were wide and tall. ↩︎
31. Don’t you love how Wikipedia has a page on this? There’s a whole rabbit hole to descend here. ↩︎
32. By which I mean “walk on top of”. When you’ve carried rifles, machine guns, or even rocket launchers up and down mountains, you’ll always raise an eyebrow at how quickly your video game character can switch between different weapons, and how many of these things they can carry. ↩︎
33. The default UT weapon. I’ve never once managed to use it effectively. Bots are quite good at it though, which probably tells you all you need to know about my skill level. ↩︎
34. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a difference between “shrapnel” and “fragmentation”, but we won’t fall out over it. ↩︎
35. In theory, you could engineer it so that the explosive was behind the fragments and accelerated them forward, but you would always get some fragments travelling back the way. Besides, this setup would reduce the grenade’s effectiveness when lobbed. ↩︎
36. Fun and all as ragdoll physics is, this is one of those areas where I need to be a thing-ruiner again. While it’s true that shotguns pack a punch, they won’t send the target cartwheeling backwards upon being hit. Our old friend Isaac Newton has come again to ruin our fun, this time with the laws of conservation of momentum. In short, if the projectile hitting the target causes it to fly backward, then the projectile leaving the barrel ought to send a similarly sized firer sprawling in the other direction. ↩︎
37. Also known as “FIBUA”, or “Fighting In Built-Up Areas”, showing that the military has an acronym for truly everything. We also have “FIWAF” (Fighting In Woods And Forests,” and, when we’re on leave in the local town, “FIPAC”, or “Fighting In Pubs And Chippers.” ↩︎
38. Brief aside on how we measure shotgun calibres. “12-gauge” means that the barrel is the same diameter as a lead ball weighing 1/12 of a pound. That’s why 20-gauge is a narrower barrel (because the equivalent notional lead ball is only 1/20 lb) and an 8-gauge is wider. ↩︎
39. With credit to my former comrade-in-arms who used to sprinkle these gems liberally in ammunition safety lectures. You know who you are. ↩︎
40. Or at least it was, in 1999. Not that anyone else took note: exploding barrels remain a staple of the medium to this day. ↩︎
41. And we can’t fix this by making the case thicker, because this would take away from the explosive space, which in turn would impart less energy to the fragments. You lose either way. ↩︎
42. I’m deliberately not getting into the question of a “molecule of what?” We saw above how this was complex enough for steels, but this shuriken feedstock is supposed to be something called “plasti-crystal”. Plastics (or polymers) are made up of long chains of repeating structures. These chains are called “monomers” and tangle together to form polymers. The repeating chains can have a crystalline structure (think hard, brittle, opaque plastics), an amorphous (random, disordered) structure (think softer, tougher, transparent plastics), or be somewhere in between. What does a single molecule thickness of “plasti-crystal” look like? Hard to know, but let’s err on the side of generosity and say it’s a big molecule, about a nanometre (millionth of a millimetre) in diameter. ↩︎
43. Saran Wrap, to all my freedom-loving readers. ↩︎
44. At least at the low engagement velocities we’re talking about here. If you want to read more about this, take a look at my ballistics Realism Report here. ↩︎