Is is just me? Been no illustrations for SR lasers since what second edition? Glad to see them brought back in Arsenal but still now idea how they've evolved in look or size?

Heard German CC had illustrations for 3rd ed any links to art?

I don't know about officially, but un-officially, I always think of the PHaSR.

Thought about using phaser pic for the sonic weapon.

How do they come up with such corny names? Try reading it out loud. Hilarious.

Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response

I don't want to be stimulated by this... thing

They need something that would use Phaser as an acronym.

...I beleive Fields of Fire had the Ares MP Laser illustrated and Rigger 3 had a pic of the Firelance vehicular laser.

...frickkin' Drop Bears with frikkin' Lasers on their heads

I want to say the Ares MP Laser debuted in the original Street Samurai Catalogue, but my copy is at least 8' away and I'm waaay too lazy to go get it this early in the morning. I think the Firelance was in FoF, and FoF was one of the last books to do the "one item per page" catalogue style that does seem a little wasteful but I always kind of liked. But it too is 8' away and I'm not going to look it up.

Yea MP debuted in SS and updated in FoF with first sign of vehicle version in FoF as well. Now dont quote me but remember someone saying redline was in german Canon Companion? (illustrations I'm meaning)

yeah, 1st Ed had a laser with a back pack in the Street Samurai Catalogue.. 3rd ed had a scaled down version with a belt pack good for 20 shots and Fields of Fire has a vehical mounted weapon. I don't know of anyone who really used those more than once for 'cool' look I mean a mossberg is much easier to use and damn cheaper than a laser.

Could always dig out old books for reference for MP's. But wish had somthing for redline, done ton of searches no sign of any links to german art.

(Regular Koala,eye laser, cyber fangs and set up as bio drone, but not nearly as good as drop bears with redlines.)

in our german version of canon companion(Arsenal 2060) there are pictures of 3 Laser Weapons.
Ares MP Laser, Ares Heavy MP Laser and Ares Redline
Germany Delivers
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2278/225235...4fc534f_b_d.jpg

The Ares MP Laser III is originally from Fields of Fire, BTW.

by the way . . what would stop someone from carrying the firelance around with say, a strength of 16?
should be enough to carry the weapon and the energy-packs for one or two shots neh? O.o
especially now, if powered-armor stacks with "natural" strength . .

Not a lot.

I'm just happy to see lasers finally drop into the range of "cheap enough to think about using." Had a character built in SR3 who had a Redline, but never got a chance to use him. This time around, I'm making a point of going for it

the notions of laser weapons is rather silly to me, plasma rifles i can buy.. but using fraggin light beams?
the best industrial lasers today can 'cut' (actually it melts the metal) 25cm of armored steel, after that it simply cannot get hot enough, mind this is when the beams origin is like 2cm from the metal it self. even if it worked it would be more like a long range blowtorch than a starwars pew pew lasergun, Highly concentrated plasma slugs is the future!

"Plasma" weapons are stupid. Gases expand. Superheated gasses expand very quickly. You'll end up with a huge gun that requires a giant battery pack and has a range of less than a foot.

Lasers are the best weapon in a long-distance aircraft/cruise missile war. Their speed means that they can be used to reliably intercept missile in a way that other missiles and projectiles cannot. Weapon lasers aren't industrial lasers. They are substantially more powerful. A laser's destructive potential is totally dependent on the amount of energy put into it. With sufficient energy output a laser can heat steel fast enough to cause it to explode into a cloud of vapor (who needs to melt steel when you can boil it). The most powerful laser in the world, located at a Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, has a 1.5 1.25 petawatt (1,500,000,000,000,000 1,250,000,000,000,000 joules per second) output. Needless to say, the destructive potential of a quintillion watt beam of light is insurmountable. To put it in perspective, those industrial cutting lasers have a 3000 watt output. Certainly, a weapon that is five-four-hundred-billion times as powerful will be able to do a bit more damage.
Of course, the absurdly powerful laser at Lawrence Livermore is also absurdly huge and can only be fired for a very short time. But, that is only an extreme example. Modern anti-missile lasers are still substantially more powerful than their industrial equivalents, with many megawatts of output compared to only 3 kilowatts at the most. The real problem is ammunition. The THEL uses a reaction between deuterium gas and fluorine free radicals to produce the laser light. This requires a very large amount of both chemicals which are used up fairly quickly. The result is an ammunition mass which makes it more practical for mounting in modified cargo jets or permanent ground installations.

In Shadowrun, lasers appear to be primarily electrically powered, which makes sense. The most primitive laser is basically a light bulb with a focusing lens (one can use the sun to set things on fire with a good lens). All one would need to do to make a man-portable kilowatt laser is to make a LED that is strong enough to take in and output a thousand watts, a lens to focus it, a power source with a kilowatt output.

Also lasers can go phew phew. It is a rather simply thing to pulse them rather than use a continuous beam. On off on off on off on off/

The real problem with lasers is attenuation, scatter, and divergence. The former two only occur in an atmosphere and can be mitigated by using certain wavelength where are not prone to scatter or attenuation. The last is a problem is space as well and can be mitigated by focusing the beam more tightly, but only to a point; it does provide an upper limit to effective laser range without increasing power output.

Edited to correct some numbers

then there's things like reflection to consider . .

About the pulse thing, you will still not see that typical star wars effect right?
Laser is on: moves at SoL, reaches target at once
Laser is off: beam ends at SoL you dont actually see a laserbeam going into the target
or am I entirely wrong?
starwars pew pews : http://youtube.com/watch?v=uYd1r5TR_1g

Depending on the wavelength of the laser, its power output, and the composition of the atmosphere, there may be a plasma bloom due to superheating of ambient gases and there may be one at the point of impact with the target, but that is mostly correct. With an anti-personel laser of sufficient power to vaporize flesh, you'd just see a glowing chunk explode off of the target, possibly leaving a rather large hole due to lateral expansion of the vaporized flesh.
This is what you see with the lasers used in blemish removal surgery, for example, the top layers of skin get vaporized by a very short laser pulse, destroying the blemish but leaving the underlying skin unharmed.The process looks pretty cool. A more powerful laser designed to destroy all layers of skin could produce enough gases to cause serious internal injury as they expand.

Thank you Hyzmarca, I enjoyed that technical discussion of lasers.

I find it amusing that reflective hull is actually included as a vehicle upgrade in Arsenal. How often is that going to come into a campaign? I can see it on military aircraft that might go up against ships or laser AA batteries, but seriously... At least they don't have three whole chapters on miltech-only stuff like Rigger 3 did

Careful riggers will use it.

(You may change careful with paranoid, wise or expecting-the-unexpected)

Thanks for that. Learned stuff.

Canon/Non-Canon Laser pictures:

http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e31/Shiny_coin/SK_Prototype_Rifle_by_biometal79.jpg]a laser://http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e...l79.jpg]a laser

laser

http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e31/Shiny_coin/srwaffen01av1.jpg]another laser://http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e...g]another laser

Guess what this is?

I should also point out that the deuterium-fluoride laser creates fluorine free radicals by burning ethylene in hydrogen fluoride, which requires the laser to have a large combustion chamber.

Edit: And here is a series of THEL pictures from Northrop Grumman
http://www.st.northropgrumman.com/media/pr...otogallery.html

In the picture below, you can see the plasma bloom where the laser is striking the missile.
http://www.st.northropgrumman.com/media/Si...image/lar13.jpg

Thanks everybody!

Frequency of the output light is very important to how well the energy is absorbed by the target; it doesn't matter how many pentawatts you pump into something if it reflects 100% of the radiation, or absorbs zero. Then beam diameter: square root reduction of watt power versus damage area. And most electrical methods of beam generation produce Wattage at a 20% beam to 80% waste ratio, making them very hot and very wasteful - which is why the missile killers use chemical reactions, ram jet turbines, or equivalently limiting resonators. Then you get dirt or mud on your output coupler, or misalignment of the chamber, and the weapon is reduced to slag.

IMO, man-portable laser weapons are a joke.

One must assume that Sixth World weapons designers have created extremely efficient and robust infrared LEDs.

And really good batteries.

If we have nerps, then we have everything.

As for wielding the Firelance, it's been my understanding that vehicle weapons don't come with the hardware necessary for metahumans to wield them as personal weapons (no grips, triggers, etc.) because they're designed to be integrated into weapon mounts. Though they took out the requirement for mod kits in 4th, in 3rd, you had to take all that stuff off, and tweak some other things (switching them to belt/hopper feed, for instance) to turn personal weapons into mountable guns - which indicates that not being able to wield them is the default state for weapons designed to be mounted.

yeah so? O.o
it's what smartlink and DNI are there for *g*