Golrar, on 23 April 2014 - 10:54 PM, said:
OK, I'll be the voice of science here: you don't need a barrel for any laser. I'd prefer to see hoses sticking out the side of arm mounted lasers. And the focal lens doesn't always have to be bigger. What makes a laser beefier is the color spectrum. Further along the spectrum, longer the distance and power. A larger focal lens would just make the beam broader, and thus making it less powerful as it would be diffused across a larger area. Now if ER lasers did more damage, I would agree with the purple. But perhaps the ER version should have a tighter beam and a little darker? You are gaining distance while keeping power, so maybe a slight violet tinge to the blue.
Be careful to check your facts.
A wider lens or mirror on your laser
will allow you to improve your damage output, and it can also help to increase effective range.
For a given surface area of lens/mirror you can only pour in a certain amount of energy before it overheats and stops working, because the optics aren't 100% efficient at transmitting light. This means you can't just double the power you're putting into the laser to get twice the firepower because it'll melt.
However, because lasers fire coherent light (or other forms of radiation), you can bend them, split them, and focus them with lenses and mirrors just like a camera does. If you spread the beam out, there's the same amount of energy in total but it's spread over a wider area, which means there's less energy hitting the optics per unit area, so it's cooler.
Or, if you're interested in damage, it means you can put more energy through the optics before they melt.
However, just because you've made the beam path inside the laser wider doesn't mean you're diffusing that beam across the target! We just used lenses to spread the beam out, so why can't we use them to focus the beam in again? At the business end of the weapon you'd still have it spread out, so your main lens is fine, but if you focus the beam down to a tiny point at the target's end you have all the energy concentrated into a small area and it slices through. Each part of your laser lens is effectively "focus firing" at a single point on the target.
Bigger lenses also increase your effective range (i.e. at what ranges you can focus your beam, since lasers are line-of-sight range) for the same reasons that big camera lenses can focus on more distant objects.
Increasing the frequency of the beam (i.e. changing the frequency towards the blue/ultraviolet end of the spectrum) would increase your ability to focus on distant targets, but at your average Battletech laser combat range I don't think it would be much of a difference relative to just building a larger lens.
If Battletech and MWO had 'realistic' laser designs they'd all look like they have huge satellite dishes and dinner-plate-size lenses all over them, with very short barrel lengths because laser beams can be reflected around however you like unlike bullets.
Back vaguely on-topic:
Based on both the above and common sense, I'd say accurate models of the different sizes of laser would indeed be different sizes, probably more width-wise than length-wise, and it would make sense aesthetically (pretty models!), technically (bigger lasers are physically bigger), and tactically (I can look at a 'mech and see it's got large lasers fitted on its arms but not its torso).
Presumably, since ER large lasers output the same amount of damage as a normal large laser, they simply have bigger optics which lets them focus more accurately at a distance whilst applying the same amount of energy on the target, so they'd follow the logical progression of being bigger than large lasers. The extra heat generation is produced by magic.
As a final note:
Golrar, on 23 April 2014 - 10:54 PM, said:
Yes, I know this is a game, but a game based off of some distant future science, that still lives within our laws of physics.
It really doesn't. In the Battletech universe, the laws of physics magically change when you give your vehicles legs and arms to make them much tougher than conventional vehicles using the same technology. Equipment gets larger when you reduce its weight. Weapons which should be able to reach into orbit have trouble hitting targets a hundred metres away. Battletech is designed as a wargame first and foremost; the game's physics and lore have to ensure that it's balanced enough to be playable as such.
TL;DR: Yes, please, lasers should have different models because it's pretty and physics says so.
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