Tactical use of Laser Rifles/Carbines

[Golan2072]

How are man-portable laser weapons employed in the (TL 8 to 12) battlefield?

I will supply their advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:
1) Long-range accuracy
2) High damage
3) Good penetration against all armors except for Ablat, Reflec and Battle-Dress
4) Completely silent and not very visible (leaves only a thin thread of ionised air)
5) Recoil-less (and thus perfect for Zero-G combat)
6) Reloading is cheap if you have ship's fusionplants and there is no need for carrying ammo crates
7) Leaves no evidence behind except for the impact wound

Disadvantages:
1) Easily countered by Ablat or Reflec armor
2) Might be obstructed by smoke/extreme atmospheric conditions/aerosols
3) Heavy backpack battery required
4) Somewhat expensive and higher TL in comparison to projectile weapons

 

[veltyen]

You forgot:

Advantages:
8) Speed of attack ("projectile")
9) Target designation (dual use)

Number 8 gives an option of trying to snapfire at launching missiles (personal or vehicle mounted) with a chance of intercept.

Disadvantages:
5) Reputation for being finicky/delicate

In most cases a ACR, Assault Rifle or Gauss Rifle is a better choice as a standard sidearm.

Derived from the list I can see Laser weaponry used by snipers, scouts, dedicated forward observers as a primary weapon, and extensive use elsewhere as an auxillary and support weapon.

For example, a well equiped TL10 army platoon may have a couple of attached Laser Rifle support (or marksman) positions and a handful of Laser carbines as auxillary weapons. At higher TL's officers may carry a laser sidearm rather then a projectile one.

A less well equiped unit may have the occasional laser weapon in the line.

Except in rare circumstances I don't see large divisions being exclusively laser armed, as it does leave them very vulnerable to reflec armored opponents.

 

[Theo D Lite]

Just a thought, I seem to recall that STRIKER stated that at TL-13+ (I think) lasers became x-ray and therefore were totally invisible and unaffected by atmospheric conditions (smoke, heat haze refration etc) and prismatic aerosols.

However I agree with Veltyen that it would be a weapon mixed in with conventional projectile weapons rather than used exclusively.

 

[Golan2072]

By the way (as I don't have the book right next to me), what is the shots-per-kg ratio for laser power packs? IIRC it's 100 shots for the rifle in a 6kg (?) power pack, that is circa 16 shots per kg. Is it any better or worse than that of slug-throwing rifles of similar TLs?

 

[mike wightman]

Here's a table I've used in the past, hope it helps:
</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Weapon pp mass shots damage
TL8 carbine 3kg 50 4D
TL9 rifle 4kg 100 5D
TL9 pistol 1kg 50 3D?
TL13 carbine 2kg 200 6D?
TL13 rifle 4kg 200 8D?
TL13 pistol 1kg 200 4D?
PGMP12 3kg 40 10D
PGMP13 7kg inf. 12D
PGMP14 1.6/0.09kg inf. 12D
FGMP14 9kg inf. 16D
FGMP15 2/0.11kg inf. 16D</pre>[/QUOTE]

 

[Chaos]

Don´t the more modern armor types (at least Combat Armor) incorporate something like Reflec? I think it would be strange if a TL-14 suit of Combat Armor is useless against lasers.


Disadvantages:
6) No full-auto/burst fire

That is a serious disadvantage IMHO; I don´t know the combat system in the other Traveller rules, but in T20, the possibility of getting a to-hit-bonus via burst fire is very useful especially against armored targets, and against big creatures with lots of Lifeblood.

A Gauss Rifle causes 6d12 points of Lifeblood damage against an unarmored opponent with a 10 shot burst; a Laser Rifle causes 3d10 points with a single shot.
Against an enemy in Combat Armor, the Gauss Rifle does 1d12-3 points (IIRC), and the Laser Rifle does 1d10-6.

 

[mike wightman]

There are examples of autofiring laser smallarms in Traveller canon - in TNE's RCES Equipment Guide and T4's Emperor's Arsenal to be exact

They're easy enough to convert to CT and/or T20.

 

[Todg]

Originally posted by Employee 2-4601:
How are man-portable laser weapons employed in the (TL 8 to 12) battlefield?

I will supply their advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:
1) Long-range accuracy

The long range accuracy of lasers is a totally moot point. Small arms are already more accurate than the user is able to exploit. The number one cause of misses is errors in weapon alignment. and a more intrinsically accurate weapon won't fix this.

Lasers will eliminate the need to compensate for ballistic arc and wind drift, and zero time-of-flight will eliminate the need to lead targets.

 

[Golan2072]

Originally posted by Chaos:
Disadvantages:
6) No full-auto/burst fire

That is a serious disadvantage IMHO; I don´t know the combat system in the other Traveller rules, but in T20, the possibility of getting a to-hit-bonus via burst fire is very useful especially against armored targets, and against big creatures with lots of Lifeblood.

I'm thinking about creating the stats for three new CT laser weapons: Gatling Laser (TL9), which would be a multi-barreled squad-weapon achieving an autofire-equivalnet ROF by firing six (?) barrels one after another; Rapid Pulse Assault Laser (RPAL)(TL10 or TL11), a Laser Rifle firing far more pulses per minute to acheive an autofire-level ROF; and Continuuus(sp?)-Beam Laser (CBL)(TL13 or TL14), emmiting a continuus (sp?) laser beam for the duration of a whole combat turn rather than fire the usual pulses, achieving similar (or even better?) results to Autofire.

 

[Chaos]

I created a Laser SMG (actually a multibarrel pistol) and a Laser Minigun (multibarrel rifle) for T20:

Look here

So actually my complaint is only valid for official material. OTOH these two weapons are a relatively crude solution.

 

[MrMorden]

I wrote in a thread months ago about the possibility of a chemically-powered laser carbine.

This would essentially be a weapon that uses a cartridge like a firearm, but with no bullet. On firing, the energy from the cartridge heat/recoil/pressure is converted to electricity, which then fires a laser.

This is a weapon that is much smaller than a traditional battery-powered laser, and ammo can be manufactured on any TL5+ world. In fact, by replacing the upper action, most firearms could be converted to laser weapons in just a few minutes. This is an advantage to special ops units and the like, which might have a need occasionally for such specialized weapons.

IMTU such weapons are not quite as powerful as their battery-powered counterparts (1d instead of 2d in T20). However, they are well suited to autofire applications; any automatic firing action such as an autorifle, assault rifle, ACR, or SMG can be used to make such a weapon. Use the burst rules for the weapon type. Range increment will be a little lower, because they do have slight recoil (but not nearly as much as something pushing a slug) unlike battery lasers.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

You mean like the ones in TNE/FF&S?

 

[MrMorden]

Originally posted by Andrew Boulton:
You mean like the ones in TNE/FF&S?

Hmm, I wasn't aware that these existed there, I'll have to dig out my copy of TNE. really I read through the basic TNE rules and then just decided they suck and tossed them aside.

Parallel evolution, I guess.

 

[Scott Martin]

Not really paralell evolution: Excimer lasers are (at this TL anyway) a much better source for high energy excited states.

Of course the byproducts tend to be corrosive and toxic, but you can't have everything

FF&S (1 and 2) both have autofire capable laser weapons, and their maximum effective range tends to be limited by "user error" as noted by Corejob above.

"reflective" materials in the Real World (tm) are actually much less effective than CT suggests. you can find a thread on real world effectiveness of reflective coatings in the "Fleet" discussion. The summarized version is that the effectiveness is based on how much energy the material can *radiate* (reflection is part of that) but when you're pumping in high energies in fractions of a second you tend to pit surfaces rather nastily, which reduces their reflective abilities, further pitting them etc.

Scott Martin

 

[Maladominus]

Originally posted by Employee 2-4601:
I'm thinking about creating the stats for three new CT laser weapons: Gatling Laser (TL9), which would be a multi-barreled squad-weapon achieving an autofire-equivalnet ROF by firing six (?) barrels one after another

I like this idea. Make it a tripod-mountable or pintel-mountable vehicle weapon also... and you've got a winner of a heavy weapon that I would love to adopt in my own CT campaign.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

They're called CLC - Chemical Laser Cartridge. TNE p354, FF&Sp131.

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by Maladominus:
I like this idea. Make it a tripod-mountable or pintel-mountable vehicle weapon also... and you've got a winner of a heavy weapon that I would love to adopt in my own CT campaign.

Have a look at far-trader's version, which can be found half way down this thread:

http://www.travellerrpg.com/cgi-bin/Trav/CotI/Discuss/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=9;t=000239;p=1

 

[iaincoleman]

There is no reflec armour IMTU, because I don't believe in it. Reflective surfaces only eflect a fraction of the light that is incident upon them. Even the most highly reflective astronomical mirrors are only about 90%-ish reflective. Even a small fraction of the power in a combat laser wil be enough to degrade the reflective surface to the point of uselessness. I can believe in ablat, but reflec is just silly.

The real killer for lasers is the development of anti-laser aerosols, at just about the TL when you would expect lasers to become standard infantry weapons. This rules them out as standrard battlefield weapons, thugh they will still be used for sniping, mine clearance and other specialised tasks.

There is an obvious advantage in using lasers in a zero-G setting. However, this is to some extent mitigated by the fact that zero-G combat is likely to take place in a highly controlled environment. Specifically, anti-laser aerosols are likely to form a standard part of a spacescraft's defence system, and would likely be triggered as standard procedure in the case of a probable boarding action.

 

[Golan2072]

By the way, what is a laser rifle's/carbine's/pistol's output? If I'd know it, I might be able to speculate on battery sizes for additional laser weapons based on Striker or LBB8 (I'll assume that one shot lasts one second in regard of the Striker batteries).

 

[The Hinterworlds Rambler]

My favorite use is to burn tiny holes into those that want to try to break off a little. If we're talking space stuff, I'll take the laser, thanks!