Behold! The far distant future year of 1997, when every well-dressed woman will be accessorized with a laser gun.
"Wait a minute, this is the future. Where are all the phaser guns?"
— Simon Phoenix, Demolition Man
Much of classic, and occasionally modern, sci-fi is obsessed with the concept that in the future, the predominant weapon will be some form of Ray Gun. Even if the work is set mere 20 Minutes into the Future, laser weapons will be invented or introduced by aliens, scientists, spies or supervillains.
The reasons for this may be manifold.
- In universes set in a softer science fiction, a Hand Wave often explains energy based EVERYTHING is superior to everything older by default, or at least believed to be so until Rock Beats Laser.
- Energy beams technically may pack very high energies. Improving a laser is mostly a matter of finding an adequately powerful and compact energy source, the lack of which is the primary obstacle to developing laser weapons in Real Life, while kinetic weapons are far harder to scale up. If such a source is found, laser weapons may simply outclass the impact of a kinetic one.
- From a practical standpoint, energy weapons running off a battery or a reactor have Bottomless Magazines, or, at least, may be recharged expediently in the field between firefights.note
- Focused light travels at the speed of light, and even more exotic particle bursts are significantly faster than an actual projectile, eliminating the need for leading the target, wind correction, any form of ballistics and recoil compensation. In Real Life, the US Navy is already working on laser point defence because normal bullet-based CIWS can't track antiship missiles reliably. Now imagine the difficulties doing so at realistic space fighting ranges... (The energy beam is still likely to be an easily dodgeable, Painfully Slow Projectile when portrayed on screen, though.)
- Deflector Shields may exist in the setting that render the target immune to conventional firearms but not energy weapons. (The opposite may occur just as often, however, depending on the setting.)
- Energy weapons are Family-Friendly Firearms even when in-universe they are more generally deadly than kinetic weapons. As such, they may be freely portrayed in children-oriented shows because they either can be set to stun the target or, at the very least, don't leave a messy corpse behind. This is not as stupid as it seems, and there is some work being done to implement less-than-lethal energy weapons. Original efforts were aimed at a Pulsed Energy Projectile that would vaporize a portion of the target to knock it out. Instead, PEPs appears to have been retooled as an anti-UAV weapon, while the focus is now on laser-induced neurostimulation (Agony Beam). And no, there are no technical limitations on having it as a secondary mode on a lethal pulse laser.
This trope has two variants (note that these are not mutually exclusive):
- Ubiquitous Lasers: Ray Guns are everywhere. They may not be the only type of weapon, and kinetic weapons might even still exist, but they are hardly used.
- Overpowered Lasers: Ray Guns may not be ubiquitous, but they trump every other kind of weapon. Perhaps only the rich can afford them, or only the government has the technology. Whatever the case, all other weapon types are considered inferior.
Typical portrayals include Slow Laser and Wave-Motion Gun.
Contrast Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In Future Boy Conan, mounted energy weapons seemed to have been commonplace just before the apocalypse. The Triangle Tower's defense turrets and the Gigan aircraft's cannons all run purely on electricity; Lepka being so eager to use them despite Industria's dire energy shortages really shows his priorities. Weapons on older vehicles (i.e., Industria's only plane and gunboat) and all small arms are conventional firearms.
- Gundam:
- The general trend of the franchise is that beam weapons become more dominant the larger the class. Small arms are always ballistic, battleship cannons always energy, and mobile suits use a mix of both. Narrowing the focus to mobile suit weapons, beam weapons are generally more powerful, though it varies whether they have significant drawbacks or are just plain better.
- In the original Mobile Suit Gundam, the Gundam and Guncannon using beam rifles is one of several advances they have over existing mobile suits (though originally they had very limited "ammo" and could only be recharged back at base — later advances included the ability to reload them during combat). The luna titanium armor used by them and the mass-produced GM is incredibly resistant to ballistic weapons, putting Zeon on the backfoot as they only gradually develop their own beam weapons over the course of the series. The Universal Century setting would be dominated by beam weapons from Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam onward, with the occasional rocket or a tech advancement (such as I-field barrier or anti-beam coating) giving slug-throwers a minor comeback.
- Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: The nigh-unstoppable Gundams mostly use energy weapons, both ranged and melee, contrast with the conventional rifles wielded by early-series grunt units like the Leo and Aries. The exception is the Gundam Heavyarms, which uses ballistic rounds and missiles in enormous volume. Both unique and mass-produced suits developed mid-series would skew toward beam rifles.
- The latest technology in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED is Phase Shift Armor, which is pretty much immune to everything but beam weapons. Gundams have both, wildly outclassing most other suits.
- Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury: The contemporary mobile suits used by the Spacian military and tested in Asticassia almost exclusively use beam weapons. By contrast, the older suits used by the Earthian separatists Dawn of Fold all use ballistic and solid melee weapons, except for a pair of Gundams they were given by Spacians as deniable assets. It's not clear how much this comes from the combat advantages versus "physical ordnance" being banned for fear of space debris. Either side will still use conventional explosives when battling in-atmosphere.
Comic Books
- Buck Rogers has the 20th century hero wake up centuries in the future and packing a ray gun.
- The Marvel Universe has the future looking very ray gun, as time-travellers such as Kang and Scarlet Centurion make use of exotic energy weapons while the less far-future Cable has his weapon of choice being a plasma rifle.
- The Metabarons: While there are Bushitaka practitioners who stick to bow and arrows and some individuals occasionally use guns that aren't too different from what's available in the 20th/21st century, the main weapon are lasers and "cogan" weaponry - these are Plasma Cannon-type guns that shoot their bolt of "lazed" plasma (perhaps that means on a laser carrier beam?). The Metabaron himself has built-in laser projectors of incredible power, among his suite of bionics.
Fan Works
- Adventures of a Line Hopper: As first established in Something, everybody in the 39th century are using energy weapons because the knowledge of how to build projectile ones are lost in the "electromagnetic storm of 3269".
Films — Live-Action
- In Black Panther (2018), the Wakandans are essentially a far-future civilization stuck in the 21st century. So appropriately instead of assault rifles as standard issue for their armies, they have spears...spears that shoot energy bolts!
- Dune: Part Two: The Fremen's military wing, the Fedaykin made extensive use of Lasguns. This is understandable, during one raid against a Harkonnen spice harvester Chani used a rocket launcher. The weapon only did minor damage against vehicles other than unshielded ornithopters, it took a long time to reload and used a team of two - a loader and a shooter. In contrast the Fedaykin had Lasguns of similar size, but a single beam can destroy massive vehicles, it could keep up a steady rate of fire and only required a single warrior to operate. The only weapons that rivaled the lasgun were individual rockets and artillery shells from Harkonnen spaceships.
- In Star Wars, virtually all projectile weapons are some sort of Ray Gun. Lightsabers are also a main focus of the universe. Ancillary materials such as the visual dictionaries explain that this is partly because commonplace body armor works beautifully against kinetic penetrators like bullets (turns out stormtrooper armor isn't completely useless after all). Kinetic weapons do exist (they are referred to as slugthrowers
) and they are mostly seen as primitive, but they do have a few advantages over blasters in some situations. In addition, while standard laser cannons can't match the power of a concussion missile/proton torpedo — both are 4 times more powerful, in turn torpedoes and missiles can't match the power of the turbo laser and super laser on a capital ship. Torpedoes and missiles have pretty much topped out and don't get much more powerful when made bigger (except in non-canon works) while the super laser (originally on the Deathstar and then sucessfully miniaturized on a super star destroyer) can blow up planets.
- When the T-800 does some weapon shopping in The Terminator, he has to settle for a nine-millimeter Uzi instead of the "phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range" he would have wanted. In the future where he comes from, even all the humans seem to use only energy weapons (it's not hard to guess why, given how easily cyborgs can tank most small-arms ammunition).
Gamebooks
- Be an Interplanetary Spy had one early book where your agent is given a very impressive piece of technology - a high-tech glove which was a Swiss-Army Weapon where the main weapon was a laser blaster. Other books had your agent use less violent ordnance or not be equipped at all.
- Choose Your Own Adventure had the book Space Patrol where your interstellar lawman carried a laser pistol in addition to his Armor of Invincibility.
- In Freeway Fighter, because it's only 20 Minutes in the Future of a post-apocalypse world, there's only one instance of an energy weapon. And it's so rare, that your protagonist has no idea what that "strange-looking weapon" is. It turns out it's a laser rifle and even though it's very new technology, there's a really good reason that humanity developed something like it. In a gamebook where your Weaponized Car can shrug off multiple machine gun rounds, the occasional grenade, and even survive getting doused in burning petrol or having a stone pillar dropped on it. But getting hit by that laser rifle will instantly slice through your car's heavy armor and rip you to shreds. The only thing that compares to that in the book, is getting hit by an anti-vehicle rocket.
- In The Rings of Kether, the technology hasn't yet reached the point of using personal energy weapons (people use blasters which are guns similar to a Warhammer 40,000 bolter) but robots and spaceships are capable of mounting lasers and other early energy weapons.
- Space Assassin: The commonly found Assault Blaster may or may not be an Energy Weapon but the electric lash you can buy certainly is. With various alien races in this book, you can encounter one extraterrestrial guard with a Disintegrator Ray and the final enemy Cyrus will try to enter a Waldo so he can use its industrial laser on you.
- In the Star Challenge series, you're character is essentially a space cop and so you carry a pulsar which can either stun or inflict heavy damage on an enemy (the 2nd setting is reserved for non-living targets like robots).
- In Starship Traveller, phasers are One-Hit Kill if they successfully hit making ranged combat in the book very lethal. One particular encounter may have your away team battling "primitive" aliens carrying rocket staffs. An explosive rocket to the chest is survivable if you have the Medical Officer with you, in contrast every fight with an enemy carrying an energy weapon is instant death for either side.
Literature
- In Armor, the predominant weapons are energy-based for humans and the Ants. Humans have their potent Blazer guns and even their bombs use Blazer blasts, while the Ants shot up plasteel-armored humans with their powerful Heat Rays.
- Doomsday Warrior is a 1980s post-apocalypse series about 21st century USA rebelling against its conquest by the Soviet Union. Despite losing to the nuclear war, America still retains a significant scientific and industrial base so technology still advances with American troops issued the next generation Liberator assault rifle. But in a nod to Gamma World, a faction of friendly mutant scientists were found and they created powerful Black Beam weapons for their fellow Americans in small amounts. Finally the turning point in the war was the discovery of an alien starship that housed large caches of laser weapons.
- In Dune, the predominant ranged weapons are lasguns. But due to widespread use of personal deflector shields (at least, among the aristocracy) which generate a fusion reaction when hit with lasers, killing both the shooter and the target in spectacular fashion, and because shields are able to effectively block anything moving at speed, projectile weapons are basically useless — any bullet or arrow going fast enough to cause damage will just bounce off. Therefore, most soldiers use swords, using techniques designed to get the blade in just slowly enough to get through a shield. The exception is on Arrakis, because sandworms really don't like shields.
- Played straight and subverted in Ender's Game. The zero-gravity training fights in Battle School require the students to use guns that shoot a beam at other students that freezes their armor in place. The warships at first seem to use a Ray Gun, but the weapon turns out to actually be a laser that on contact propagates a field, decomposing all the matter it touches. This weapon allows Ender to destroy the Formic homeworld, by creating such a reaction that consumes the planet.
- In the Foundation Series, nuclear laser blasters are the end-all personal weapon, and ubiquitous among Foundation traders and soldiers. There are personal Deflector Shields, but Foundation-built nuclear blasters can penetrate them, whereas blasters built by the former Empire or post-Empire successor states cannot penetrate Foundation shields.
- Partly averted in The History of the Galaxy. Lasers are used on par with Magnetic Weapons by Mini-Mecha and warships. Handheld weapons, however, are either Magnetic Weapons or old-fashioned guns. Except by Insects, whose drones carry heavy handheld laser emitters. The most common use is on the LDL-55 autonomous walkers, whose primary (and only) weapon is a 200-megawatt laser.
- The aliens in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy generally have ray guns of some type.
- In Honor Harrington, mass drivers are the rule for small arms (though there are Plasma Cannon for heavier firepower), but lasers are dominant when weapons are ship-based. The gamma ray lasers are the heaviest hitter while the missiles in this setting are really just X-ray laser projectors mounted on homing rockets.
- The Polity does feature particle beam pulse weaponry as being the heavy hitter for weapons including at the small arms level, and lasers are also quite popular as small arms.
- In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy is killed in 1976 (which, at the time of the book's writing, was the future) by an assassin with a laser gun.
- In The Sun Eater, while kinetic weapons still have their uses especially rail guns as well as nukes and antimatter missiles, human troops predominantly use energy weapons plus the Lost Technology weapons that are warp reality and capable of Star Killing — these are mostly energy weapons. Besides hitting harder, energy weapons are effective against Royce Shields, the Dune-style force fields that'll stop mass drivers (let alone 20th-21st century-style firearms) with ease. Heavy machine guns are relegated to cannon-fodder human partisans and automated turrets for repelling unshielded Cielcin boarders.
- Takeshi Kovacs: While large bore conventional firearms and Magnetic Weapons are a bit more commonplace as Boring, but Practical guns that are usually effective enough in most situations, without drawing the attention that an energy weapon draws, the Altered Carbon universe has particle blasters as a fairly common and highly respected weapon. Not only do they hit instantly, they can be adjusted from simply stunning a target to punching holes through armored vehicles as well as having an adjustable bore so the beam could go from pencil-thin to putting a hole the diameter of an adult hand. Particle Blasters also have a lot of intimidation value as they can easily inflict Permadeath. Even a burst from an automation might not hit a person's cortical stack, but a wide-bore beam sweep targeting the head will easily vaporize the stack - making revival to another body impossible.
- Lasers are the only types of personal weapons mentioned in Veniss Underground. There might be kinetic weapons in one side-story, but it's really vague.
Live-Action TV
- Battlestar Galactica: Played straight in the original, where both Colonials and Cylons used lasers (lasers are powerful and easily cut through Cylon armor which easily stop bullets as shown in one episode with a lost Cylon in a Wild West planet). Averted in the remake, where nukes and traditional firearms that utilize bullets are used instead.
- Doctor Who: Using a traditional firearm will usually just get the user killed as almost anything that isn't human is Immune to Bullets. It's a sign of technological superiority when a species uses energy weapons (with the more advanced the species, the more powerful the weapon). It even shows up for humanity, future humans in 20 Minutes in the Future settings still use puny traditional firearms while centuries or millennia in the future they use lasers or ray guns.
- Averted in Firefly with characters using traditional firearms, and ship-to-ship combat often involving grappling and boarding. A few laser weapons exist (see Awesome, but Impractical) but are a pain to maintain.
- SeaQuest DSV: While conventional firearms are still in use, especially for newly formed developing nations, the more advanced factions including the crew of the seaQuest carry pulse rifles which fire powerful green laser beams.
- Played with in the Stargate-verse.
- Most advanced offworld cultures use energy weapons of some form or another, in contrast to the firearms preferred by the SGC. While the latter are usually superior as weapons of war, the Tau'ri did develop a fondness for the versatility of the Goa'uld zat'nik'tel, a weapon that reliably stuns on the first shot and kills on the second. By later episodes it largely replaced the Beretta M9 as their sidearm of choice.
- Energy weapons are also shown to be superior in space combat: the railguns initially used on Tau'ri vessels are good for point defense but prove to be of little use against Wraith capital ships and have no effect whatsoever against Ori motherships, whereas Ori Wave Motion Guns can one-shot a fully shielded Ha'tak and destroy a Daedalus-class with two hits. The Asgard plasma beams fitted to the Odyssey in the Stargate SG-1 finale "Unending" are similarly effective against Ori ships and are equally useful against Asuran vessels.
- Star Trek:
- Both handheld weapons that shoot a beam and large phasers (Phasers are almost solely the province of Starfleet, but this does not mean that kinetic weapons are any more common amongst other spacefaring cultures — others just use other energy weapons, the most common being disruptors) that fire from the ships are used. You can probably count the number of kinetic weapons seen throughout the franchise on one hand. Of course, this is primarily because Star Trek's phasers function both as tools and weapons, being able to heat up objects or cut materials with a relatively high level of precision, and can range from giving a mild stun to completely vaporizing an enemy, and can even be set up as an emergency explosive, all things firearms are incapable of doing.
- Kinetic weapons are very common, and generally seen in use in all lower-tech-level cultures shown. These are at least as likely to be bows and arrows as firearms, however, but there were lots of firearms as well.
Pinball
- Laser War is about a futuristic firefight between three armies armed with Ray Guns shooting Frickin' Laser Beams.
Tabletop Games
- BattleTech:
- Energy weapons are commonly weapons used by many mechs, they usually come as either Lasers or Particle Projector Cannons. They are very powerful and can blast holes through mechs, but they require cool downs otherwise they would overheat and explode.
- Interestingly, lasers don't deal a tremendous amount of damage compared to other weapon types. Large-caliber autocannon and gauss rifles, in particular, pack a bigger punch than even the biggest lasers, shot for shot, and they generate less heat. However, they have a limited stock of ammunition, and once it's depleted, a gun or missile launcher is worthless. Lasers or PPCs, though, will keep on running throughout a battle.
- Infantry-scale lasers are superior to their ballistic counterparts, as their damage type is either poorly resisted by common armor types (flak armor, for example) or the armor that does resist lasers well, can't resist anything else (laser-ablative). The sticking point is cost; a single laser pistol costs the same as nine assault rifles, with enough left over to buy an entire ammo box. As a result, most armies bet on their soldiers facing projectile weapons instead of the much less common laser weapons, and the cycle of powerful-but-rare lasers continues.
- Car Wars uses lasers that are relatively expensive and limited in ammunition by requiring "laser batteries"; they tend to be more accurate than ballistic weapons but otherwise unremarkable in terms of weight/size/damage output ratios. Early remarks in the rules regarding lasers being abandoned by the military as ineffective against armor were later justified in that, versus military grade metal armor, standard vehicle mounted lasers are useless — being unable to penetrate a typical tank even after several maximum damage hits. Tanks themselves tend to use large bore kinetic weapons and missiles to engage each other.
- In Dropzone Commander, even the least ultra-tech faction, the United Colonies of Mankind, happily spent immense amounts of resources to develop and field a comparatively weak laser cannon. The reason is that all factions have an active point defense system, the missile halo, that will completely chunk missiles and even cannon shells fired from a rail gun are highly ineffective with the missile halo in place. However, all energy weapons bypass the missile halo with ease and even the weakest laser weapon is as strong as a typical rail gun, with other more advanced factions capable of fielding deadlier energy weapons.
- Eclipse Phase has "laser pulsers", which have a "stun" mode that acts like a flashbang on the target.
- Fading Suns: Because of the immense decline in humanity's tech and industrial base due to religion, much of humanity has reverted to Medieval or Dark Ages tech levels kinetic weapons are standard from bows and crossbows for most people to 20th/21st century rifles for most armed forces. While there are some ultra-tech kinetic weapons like the Furystorm Chaingun, the apex firepower belongs to Energy Weapons from lasers to plasma-based blasters and meson weaponry.
- Gamma World has most of the weapons of The Future being energy weapons, ranging from the stereotypical laser pistol to such exotic ones as the Black Beam Emitter, Rover Rifle, and the Disintegrators. More traditional firearms are available, but these just can't rival an energy weapon for power.
- Gurps had some changes in how certain energy weapons function depending on edition, but typically the earliest energy weapons are laser guns and they may or may not be as damaging as a conventional firearms with a larger bore. However the more advanced the technology level, the less likely kinetic-based weapons show up,
- In Paranoia, Troubleshooters are routinely armed with laser pistols, while "slugthrowers" require higher security clearance. (Most citizens aren't cleared for real weapons at all, though some have realized that soft drinks that explode when shaken hard enough are sort of like grenades.)
- The Technology Guide in Pathfinder has a wide variety of energy weapons, from the standard laser and plasma rifles to more exotic energy types like EMP, sonic, gravitons, radiation, etc. Others skirt the trope using particle beams or nanites. Given that Golarion is otherwise a typical medieval fantasy setting, most of these weapons originate from off-world.
- Starship Troopers: The Roleplaying Game has the Mobile Infantry just a step back in technology compared to the video game Starship Troopers: Terran Ascendancy. The Morita Smart Rifle is still the king of the battlefield, with the only personal energy weapon being the Trench Sweeper — an underslung laser weapon attachment for the Morita. However, energy weapons have a growing place as a vehicle or Powered Armor weapon and the Mobile Infantry has lasers and plasma to provide heavy firepower that isn't a nuke or other high explosive (energy weapons and high-end bombs ignore a Bug's Damage Reduction).
- Stars Without Number:
- The standard weapon of the TL4 infantryman is usually the laser rifle. Magnetic Weapons do more damage per shot, but the standard laser rifle is more accurate, can fire in burst mode, and most importantly, ammunition in the form of energy cells is more compact and rechargeable, simplifying logistics.
- At Tech Level 5, kinetic personal weapons don't exist; standard weaponry at that tech level involves firing gravity waves and spatial disruptions.
- Laser weapons in Traveller do greater damage and have more ammunition than slugthrowers, but are considerably more expensive and bulkier. The power packs are usually backpack or at least belt-mounted.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- The Imperial Guard is primarily armed with lasguns, which translates into being far and away one of the most common weapons in any armed forces in the galaxy. The reasoning being that they are easy to manufacture in large quantities, incredibly reliable and low maintenance seeing as they have no moving parts, and the power packs simplify logistics as they can be recharged practically anywhere that there's a power source. (The Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer specifically recommends, that in a bind, charging them by leaving them out in the sun instead of sticking them in your campfire: the latter charges them faster but reduces the battery life). It should be noted that the Imperial Guard's lasguns are pretty much the weakest weapon in the setting (hence their fanon slogan of "Defending the galaxy with T-shirts and flashlights"), despite being roughly on par as the modern assault rifle. The more powerful hellguns are harder to come by and usually reserved for stormtrooper units. Lascannons on the other hand, are extremely effective anti-vehicle weapons.
- Note that the lasgun's weakness is more of a demonstration of how powerful the standard military forces out there are by comparison to rank-and-file guardsmen. In a sub-setting like Necromunda, which concerns itself with urban combat between gangs in a Wretched Hive, the armor and lasguns of the Imperial Guard are extremely powerful compared to the common "stubbers" (conventional firearms). Just the bad luck of the Badass Normals in the Guard to be born into a universe where Bio-Augmentation and Powered Armor are de rigeur and where the basic weapon of at least three other armies (Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, and Orks) is a full-auto miniature rocket launcher.
- Originally the weapon of choice of the Astartes was not the bolter, but the Volkite Charger, a kind of literal Martian ray gun which was just as devastating as Tau plasma weaponry and even more effective against armoured targets. However as the Great Crusade wore on and the legions expanded, supply couldn't keep up with demand; the classic boltgun was weaker, but cheaper and easier to manufacture and more of a tactical weapon due to its ability to accept different types of shell. The bolter won out and volkite weapons were relegated to special weapon status, like melta and plasma guns. After the Horus Heresy, the knowledge to create volkite weapons was believed lost forever, with the Mechanicus clinging to their few working examples.
- The Adeptus Custodes never incorporated Volkite weaponry into their forces, despite sharing the Astartes usage of bolter weapons. For a common energy weapon, the Custodes would instead turn to Adrathic weaponry which were Disintegrator Ray technology similar to weapons used by the Dark Eldar.
- Humanity in the Dark Age of Technology had energy weapons such as the Voidclaw in the Imperium Nihilus books, that makes the Nova Cannon railgun and Exterminatus-class projectile weapons such as planet-busting atomics and cyclonic torpedoes look puny.
- The Tau Empire also arms its basic infantry with energy weapons, but unlike the Imperial Guard they have arguably the deadliest infantry weapons in the setting. The weakest Tau guns fire droplets of superheated plasma that are very accurate at long range and capable of taking out light armored vehicles. Meanwhile, Necron gauss flayers also seem to be energy weapons (specifically, they shoot something similar to sickly green lightning), and can take out tanks.
- The Tau also use lasers for devastating attacks, but not through the laser itself: they use markerlights as designators to fire a missile from a nearby missile tank even if the tank is nowhere nearby.
- The Asuryani also use energy based weapons, bright lances are laser weapons which can pierce through the toughest armor, and starcannons which fire plasma. The Swooping Hawks make use of a handheld laser weapon analogous to the standard-issue lasgun of the Militarum, but of course, their ones are better.
- The Tau rail gun is the deadliest contemporary weapon mounted on a standard vehicle, though energy weapons such as Laser Destroyers and Neutron Lasers rival them in power. But it's the energy weapons that come out on top when it comes to super-heavy vehicles and Titans. Also in fluff, the deadliest weapon in the setting are the Talismans of Vaul which annihilate star systems with its dimension-shearing energy weapon and there are other unique energy weapons that aren't too far off.
Video Games
- Alien Shooter has energy weapons as an emergent but widely accepted technology. They pack greater punch than their kinetic weapon counterparts and often have other advantages (though standard firearms are far more common due to the head start with some of the guns dating to the Cold War era).
- Block Tank Wars 2 by Cube Software has its 3rd most expensive tank being a medium tank with a unique, large, radar dish-shaped main gun that fires an extremely powerful laser. This beam has fantastic DPS and short reload times, it's so effective that it's the only weapon that can't be upgraded for game balance purposes. The two tanks after the laser tank are a pair of super-heavy tanks that opt to use a battery of more conventional weapons (machine gun and missile launchers) in addition to their main weapons - twin heavy cannons and twin gatling autocannons respectively. The only reason these two super-heavy tanks don't have lasers is that they'd be too overpowered for the game.
- C-12: Final Resistance is set in a future where Earth is countering an Alien Invasion with cyborg soldiers. Future ballistic firearms are really good, but they just can't match the firepower of laser rifle that a human corporation recently put into service, and they're certainly no match for the alien's Plasma Cannon technology.
- Command & Conquer:
- Command & Conquer: Generals:
- The US superweapon is the Particle Cannon, which fires a ginormous laser into orbit, bounces it off a satellite, and onto whatever the commander wants dead in particular.
- In the first game, the Paladin tank is an optional unit that uses a laser to destroy some incoming missiles.
- In the expansion, the US gets the Avenger Humvee, a Support Unit that can't attack but has all kinds of different lasers: a targeting laser, an anti-missile laser, and extremely powerful Anti-Air lasers.
- One US general gets lasers as his theme, gaining a Laser Tank (higher damage, but slower rate of fire), Laser Turrets and a cheaper Avenger. The downside is that he can't build artillery and every tank he builds costs power, so if the enemy takes out enough power buildings, he's a sitting duck.
- In the Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series, the Brotherhood of Nod have plenty of laser weapons in their arsenal. GDI mostly have some sonic weapons and the Ion Cannon as a superweapon, and the Scrin have plenty of laser weapons that are a near match to Nod. In game, the energy weapons have superior firepower compared to standard guns and cannons and in the final game, lasers are the best weapon for taking down units with the heaviest armour especially the MCV.
- Command & Conquer: Generals:
- Contra: It's the 27th century and when Team Contra wants to take down a tough enemy like a boss, they go with a laser gun. When later games in the series more readily embraced the future setting, newer energy weapons became available. Traditional firearms have their place, but if power at a fast pace is needed, then go with an energy weapon.
- The various Doom games have among their higher tier guns in the arsenal, various Energy Weapons including the infamous BFG-9000.
- Earth 2150: Projectile weapons have their place but are heavily marginalized by the various energy weapons of the 3 factions, including the ED's lasers. Besides having a Bottomless Magazine and being unaffected by armor, energy weapons do far more damage than heavy rockets or 120mm shells.
- Subverted in Fallout: lasers are one of the many weapons the player can acquire, but the Brotherhood of Steel wants to confiscate them as they deem the rest of the world unworthy of using high tech weapons. They're also the subject of significant penalties compared to many other weapon types: in Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, they deal good damage, but most high-end types of armors are extremely resistant to laser damage compared to other weapons of similar damage level. In Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, most laser weapons are just pretty weak compared to other weapons.
- In the games, lasers fire very fast, but don't do very much damage, while plasma weapons fire slower (and have a slower projectile speed in 3 and New Vegas), but hit much harder.
- In the lore, the U.S. military was in the process to switching over to laser weapons as the standard small arms when the Great War happened. The G.I. laser weapons are the AER series rifles and AEP series pistols seen in Fallout 3 and beyond.
- Halo:
- 26th century humanity mostly still uses ballistic weapons, but energy weapons aren't unknown. The only handheld laser weapon they have is the Spartan Laser (introduced in Halo 3), which is Awesome, but Impractical against infantry, since it only has five shots, is difficult to aim, and tremendously expensive to build (it works wonders against tanks, though). However, humanity has been able to develop reasonably reliable lasers for some of its more advanced vehicles and ships, like some types of ONI Prowlers, Halo 4's Pelican gunship, various experimental prototypes seen in Halo 5: Guardians, and the Condor gunship in Halo Wars 2.
- The Covenant's most common smalls arms are plasma weapons or particles beams, and they also field ship-mounted pulse lasers and energy projectors.
- Forerunner Sentinels and Monitors fire lasers.
- The Forerunner Promethean robots are primarily armed with weapons that fire Hard Light and other exotic energies.
- In Heavy Barrel, you start off with the default machine gun which ain't too bad if you're just fighting mooks. Amongst the upgrades you can find is the ultimate weapon, Heavy Barrel. This is a rapid-fire, area-hitting energy gun that will One-Hit Kill almost any enemy and those tough enough to survive the first single hit will face More Dakka from the rest of the blasts.
- In Homeworld, even railguns the size of a frigate-class warship don't quite match the firepower of plasma bombs and ion beams. It becomes a turning point in the game, when the Higaarans gain ion beam technology. The Bentusi have even more powerful versions of these weapons and justifiably don't use anything else.
- Mass Effect:
- The series is an example of the "overpowered lasers" subtype. Though the vast majority of the weapons in the setting work by using mass effect fields to accelerate slugs to small fractions of the speed of light, warships also carry GARDIAN lasers that are primarily used for point-defense against fighters and missiles. At knife-fight range they also get used to great effect against other warships since they pass right through kinetic barriers. Tacticians in-universe have theorized that a mass-produced directed-energy weapon would force a massive shift in military doctrine since all current defense technology is designed to fend off kinetic weapons.note
- The Precursors, Protheans, have such a beam weapon you can use in Mass Effect 3, but it was developed to avoid logistics issues, similar to the Warhammer 40,000 example above. Said weapon relies on Overheating instead of ammo, but while it is very good against armor, it technically doesn't ignore shields, the same as the Collector Assassin heavy weapon based on it seen in Mass Effect 2 (mostly a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation for the sake of Competitive Balance). Both are particle beams, rather than true lasers.
- Though not a true laser, the "magneto-hydrodynamic" weapons (also known as "Thanix" cannons) fire a bright red coherent beam that slices through just about anything in seconds. A perfect example of "overpowered lasers", since they're originally a Reaper technology, and even when they are reverse-engineered by turian and human forces in the second and third games they're fairly rare. A single frigate-grade Thanix Cannon is one of the costliest upgrades in Mass Effect 2 and acts as the Normandy's Infinity +1 Sword, while in Mass Effect 3 a single ship with Thanix munitions can add as much as 20% to a fleet's War Assets rating. Thanix weapons are hybrid energy-kinetic weapons, firing a stream of molten metal that does part of its damage by kinetic force and the other part by thermal action.
- While ultra-tech ballistic cannons such as the nanite-based Nephtech-cannon rule the battlefield in Metal Saga, energy weapons have a respected place in the arsenal. They're the only weapons that can take advantage of elemental weaknesses and for characters outside of a tank, energy weapons are usually the most damaging infantry weapons.
- Parodied in Metal Slug 7 when an army of future Rebels use time travel to assist Morden in the present. Their vehicles turn out to be the exact same WWII/Korean War-era designs, but now they shoot laser beams.
- In Level 8's (formerly Chillingo) Modern Command, your futuristic MCA anti-terrorist force starts off using a fire-base that's not much different than what we have today. When the enemy starts using units with force fields, the usual point-defense guns don't cut it anymore. When your base upgrades itself, they replace those with plasma guns and lasers. You'll also have to rely on developing targeting laser turrets to burn through force fields, so your conventional missiles and autocannons can get through — until you eventually research energized ammo (as a bonus those laser designators are so strong, they can blow up tanks in a short time and can be upgraded to inflict status effects). Your ultimate weapon is a targeting laser linked to an orbital ion cannon and that'll rip through any enemy. Finally, your lasers can guide your missiles making them far more accurate, to the point where you can use a laser to guide surface-only missiles to blow up enemy aircraft.
- Played with in Phantasy Star Online where beam weapons (made from Photons) are the norm and sufficiently powerful. However, there are some kinetic weapons available such as Katanas, Zanba and the Yasminkov gun series, most of which are as powerful as their photon counterparts (though this can be explained by many of them being technologically advanced replicas and Legendary Weapons).
- PRAGMATA: After Capcom's arcade days, their games that involve The Future such as Dino Crisis 2 and Lost Planet',' heavily emphasized firearms that aren't much different than what we have today. Breaking that trend, Pragmata'' ditches the heavy machine guns in favor of powerful weapons that provide a light show such as the Photon Laser and Lim Cannon.
- In Raptor: Call of the Shadows, if your jet isn't shooting beams of light halfway through the game, then it's a dead duck. By far the strongest weapons in the game are the Death Ray and the even mightier Twin Laser, while the Laser Turret is an extremely useful auto-targetting weapon. The only kinetic weapons that have any relevance are the Reaver Twin Machine Guns and Micro-Missiles, and only because they will fire simultaneously with your lasers.
- StarCraft:
- StarCraft I: Terrans use lasers in their aircraft: the Wraith has a rather weak one for ground assault, while the Battlecruiser has a stronger one against air and ground targets. The Ghost's laser is only used to designate a target for a nuclear strike.
- StarCraft II: One mission prominently features a giant rotary laser drill that can be repurposed to destroy enemies quickly.
- In Starship Troopers: Terran Ascendancy, human technology has advanced significantly so the Mobile Infantry have PRISM LightRifles as the Energy Weapon alternative to the still in-use Morita Smart Rifle, the rapid-fire Plasma Gun and the heavy weapons — the SOLARIS Cannon and Plasma Cannon with each of these examples packing more damage per shot than their kinetic counterparts. Additionally, the Mobile Infantry have an energy-based sidearm when a soldier is desperately out of ammo.
- Uprising: Survivor RPG from VARARIUM is set on a Cyberpunk Earth during an Alien Invasion / Zombie Apocalypse. Human weapon technology has reached the point of even a basic SMG and AK rifle get the iPad look. Going further than that, humans have also been designing potent energy weapons including Lasers (which have a high DPS and incredible delivery speed). There are still very good projectile weapons but the end game is pretty much about energy weapons.
- The sequel Stand & Fight takes it up a notch with combination Elemental Weapons that can be introduced to your arsenal. So now your energy guns can be made to freeze, burn, poison or do any combo of the 3 to your enemies.
- The X series has particle beams of one form or another as by far the most prevalent weapon in the setting, possibly because they're cheaper to operate since you don't have to stock ammunition and either have a very constant rate of fire plus hitscan or else they have a pretty substantial damage per hit - making them the most practical weapons. Kinetic weapons have the advantage of not having to feed off of the ship's reactor, which can be overwhelmed by firing energy weapons too fast, so the only limiting factor is how many boxes of ammo one has shoved in the cargo hold. Additionally kinetic weapon types have their own quirks. Gauss guns have a high rate of hit scan fire plus their weird crystalline shells bypass shields but they do pitiful individual damage and burn thru ammo quickly. Meanwhile missiles have great hitting power, but take time to achieve lock-on for guided missiles, are slow to reach enemies and can be shot down plus they are expensive per shot.
- X-COM arms the aliens with plasma weapons to deadly effect. XCOM scientists are eventually able to reverse-engineer the weapons to arm your soldiers, but the intermediary step between ballistic weapons and plasma is lasers, which represent a vast improvement over projectile weapons.
- In the original game, UFO: Enemy Unknown, lasers can be researched immediately at the beginning, without acquiring a single alien artifact. In a subversion, while they are more powerful, more accurate and have better ammunition reserves (i.e. infinite) over projectile weapons, they are also subject to overengineering: the Heavy Laser is universally terrible (lower accuracy, higher weight, insignificant damage improvement, more time units needed to shoot, no auto-shot, etc.) compared to the laser rifle.
- The final tier of weaponry in XCOM 2 is "beam weapons", that are technically plasma-based but behave exactly like lasers. ADVENT's alien troops use these as well, while the hybrid troopers are stuck with magnetic rifles.
- X-COM: Apocalypse zigzags the trope: plasma and laser weapons are commonly available at the beginning of the game, having been developed and standardized since the first and second alien wars. However, they are expensive and struggle with More Dakka, firing much slower than the basic kinetic projectile weapon, which is a light machine gun. They are more powerful, shot-for-shot, but some of the aliens move fast enough that shooting a lot of weaker shots is more important than a single powerful shot and a lot of the early alien foot soldiers are vulnerable to kinetic damage, as they are unarmored.
- Zombie Waves: The game is pretty much set some time in The Future, while you start off with 20th century guns, you will steadily begin collecting a growing arsenal with the final weapon you can get without paying diamonds or real cash, the Pulse Laser Cannon - which is the only S-rank gun you can earn through effort. The final weapon you can get by spending diamonds is the Railgun. This S-rank gun is more of a particle accelerator that occasionally fires a weaponized EMP pulse. This pulse will generate an electric field that can induce lightning strikes. If you spend real money the S-rank weapons are Magitek hybrid projectile/elemental energy weapons.