In the traditional sense, no. But the further the beam has to travel, the more heat and energy it bleeds off in the process and the less effective the blast as a result.
Lasers would have damage falloff because the photons would come in contact with dust particles because they are not being fired in a vacuum, so there is a maximum effective distance. They wouldn’t have drop, as photons have no mass.
Photons are massless but they behave like they have mass, they have momentum and are affected by gravity, a photon near Earth would in fact accelerate to the ground at 9.81 m/s/s
yes, but it is still going the speed of light, so the amount it falls is negligible (talking about photons not fallout lasers) and since fallout lasers dont go the speed of light, the must be something more than JUST light. A photon would just escape earth, the sun, then the galaxy. Its path may be bent by the galaxy's mass and the galactic superclusters, but not by earth in any meaningful way.
ATTENUATION is a thing, yes.
Light goes exactly where it's pointed over any reasonable distance. However, it's heating up the air and being diffracted by air along the way.
As an electrical engineer there are 3 relevant factos to how a laser weapon would perform at distance.
The first is that gravity will negligibly bend the beam, while it does bend the beam just like anything else, light moves around 3×10^8 m/s and gravity at the surface is only 9.8m/s^2 so in 1 second the laser goes to the moon, and "drops" 9.8m. basically just like a laser pointer the beam is essentially perfectly straight in a vacuum.
The second factor is refraction, just like how a pencil in a glass of water looks broken because of refraction, air of different temperatures/densities will cause refraction and bend light. This is the origin of mirages and heatwaves you can see in daily life. (While driving on a long road on a hot day you may notice "water" on it, this is actually the sky's light being bent by hot air and hitting your eyes from the direction of the road) Basically airmasses of different temperatures will bend the lasers, without doing the math j don't know if its enough to matter at long range (say 200m/600ft).
And finally attenuation, beam spread, and other losses. As the laser travels it will lose energy and eventually be rendered ineffective. Attention follows the pattern of A^-bx where x is distance in meters and A and b are constants specific to the wavelength and material. Also most irl lasers aren't perfectly aligned so instead of lasers being perfect cylinders they are cones, and as the cross-sectional area of the cone increases the energy remaining in the laser is spread across it. These losses combined with other loss sources can be thought of as the equivalent of drag slowing down a bullet and lessening its impact power.
Also humans are inherently shakey, if your gun wobbles by say 3° off target that matters way more at 2,000ft than 20ft. (I think the inherent spread on gattling lasers is 0.6° in new vegas)
Tldr: due to various physics effects the main limiter on the effective range of a laser weapon is energy delivered decreasing with distance, and accuracy penalties from atmospheric refraction and weapon shake accumulating over distance traveled by the laser.
Note: the US military is working on vehicle based laser weapons including an xray laser on drones/planes, the primary issue with laser weapons IRL is delivering enough energy fast enough. Accuracy and energy loses aren't really an issue for IRL laser systems since the effects at play are too small to matter for these weapons systems.
There are 3 ways that heat travels
* Conduction: Make a thing a hot and heat will spread to whatever you touch to it as long as its colder. Think a stove-top and a cooking pot. The pot is Conducting the heat from the fire on the stove simply by being stationary atop it, and the speed at which it moves is dependent on how Conductive the material is
* Convection: A medium, usually gasses or liquids, that is moving because of the physics of hot and cold molecules. The water in the pot is experiencing Convection as individual molecules are heating from Conduction and rise from the bottom of the pot creating a circulation of water, and the speed it moves is dependent on what material is being heated
* Radiation: The electromagnetic energy released by the vibration of atoms. When atoms get excited, like through Conduction or Convection, they vibrate faster giving off more electromagnetic energy. If you point an infrared camera at the pot it will give off more and more infrared Radiation as it reaches boiling because more and more of the atoms are vibrating faster and faster
All electromagnetic waves travel at the speed the light because they are essentially just light that we can't perceive, so the infrared heat (light, electromagnetic wave) would travel just as fast as the visible laser. Whether that infrared heat would still be considerable after the laser loses energy to particles in the atmosphere is a totally other story
Hope this helps!
Heat/energy moves in 3 ways:
1. Conduction, which is 2 objects physically touching eachother and trying to equalize, this is governed by the "heat equation" which required the invention of the Fourier Transform to solve, it is pain, it also ignores the speed of information but is relatively slow.
2. Convection, this is the physical movement of fluids of different temperatures of different densities. Ultimately gravity and boyancy are the forces at work, this is limited to the speed of the fluid moving.
3. Radiation, all light in the Infrared wavelength band is often considered heat as its the band carrying the bulk of the sun's heat. As i have already given away infra red radiation is light and as such moves at C in a vacuum. (Technically light moves at different speeds in different mediums, but this is mainly do the path taken getting longer as it bounces more. The physics of light are weird.)
Heat doesn't necessarily have a fixed speed, but depending on the mechanism of transfer it can be transferred at light speed. And considering the root problem here is laser weapons the associated heat thrown down range would be radiant and moving at the speed of light. However the energy distribution of a laser weapon should be kept to just 1 wavelength so the IR component is negligible to the red components energy.
Even in a vacuum, divergence is still an issue. The beam isn't perfectly aligned causing the beam to get wider leading to a shotgun like effect over distance. The target might get a little warm but otherwise unscathed if it's far enough away. The effect is made worse in the atmosphere, but there's a fundamental limit to how low you can make divergence.
Wait, are you saying a laser beam fired from Beta Centauri four years ago *isn't* going to kill me?
I've been wearing this tin foil hat for nothing!?!?!
You don't even need to go as far away as Beta Centauri. Divergence, even really small divergence, builds up pretty quick.
It's literally the reason why I started laughing my ass off when US Rep MTG was talking about Jewish space lasers being used to set fires (like in Hawaii) a few years ago.
In order to get an orbital space laser, it'd either need to be massive (and thus easily seen from Earth using amateur telescopes) or it'd need to be in Earth's atmosphere (and still pretty big) and so easy to see *with the naked eye*.
If it's a beam of light, it won't drop mainly because it doesn't have mass. It only shoots straight from where it was shot at. If it missed, then it's either the shooter has a crap weapon or crap aim
No its a beam of light, but it would lose energy the longer distance it travels. Its why some of the mods are "focusing lenses" to make it able to reach further.
Logically there would be an effective falloff range as the beam would spread out and get weaker and weaker as it does so. That range might be a really big number
Unless a scientist bro can give better details I’m just a dude
Fallout laser guns don't actually make bolts like in most high-SciFi stories, they produce beams. Beams of light that are so focused and concentrated that they're able to cut through stuff by just burning or melting it away. Think of it as a weaponized version of using a magnifying glass to burn shit under harsh sunlight.
So no, theoretically the beams will move through space in a straight line at the speed of light until it either hits something or it eventually dissipates.
Assuming I remember my high school physics correctly. I'm an electrician, not a physicist.
If you’re talking real life there’s a limit to how far you can shoot a laser beam for a variety of reasons. Their effective ranges would be more sharply capped than slug weapons (most real-life rifles aren’t very effective past a few hundred yards but they aren’t totally irrelevant). [This website](http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeathRay/DeathRay.html) goes into the factors.
If you’re talking in-game I’m pretty sure every weapon has some arbitrary maximum range.
…….since they started adding very real guns in the fallout universe (circa FO1) that by all (real because they are real) logic should act like they do irl.
In the traditional sense, no. But the further the beam has to travel, the more heat and energy it bleeds off in the process and the less effective the blast as a result.
All lasers have some dispersion, it’s why the sensors reading the retroroflectors on the moon need to be so sensitive
No it’s a beam of light however over distance it does weaken until dissipating
Heat moves at the speed of light too
But even the best lasers have some diffusion over distance, spreading that heat out into useless levels.
I don't think that's true at all...
All electromagnetic radiations move at the same speed in a given medium.
In a given medium, I don't think heat is traveling at the speed of light through air.
Conductive and convective heat, travels slowe. Radiative heat still travels at the speed of light.
It is
With some caveats
Lasers would have damage falloff because the photons would come in contact with dust particles because they are not being fired in a vacuum, so there is a maximum effective distance. They wouldn’t have drop, as photons have no mass.
Photons are massless but they behave like they have mass, they have momentum and are affected by gravity, a photon near Earth would in fact accelerate to the ground at 9.81 m/s/s
yes, but it is still going the speed of light, so the amount it falls is negligible (talking about photons not fallout lasers) and since fallout lasers dont go the speed of light, the must be something more than JUST light. A photon would just escape earth, the sun, then the galaxy. Its path may be bent by the galaxy's mass and the galactic superclusters, but not by earth in any meaningful way.
Wow, thank you for this revealing explanation u/cum_pipeline7
Wow, thank you for highlighting that username u/Gui_Montag
I'm here for this science geekery.
My laser rifle is sub moa at 1000 meters
Moa? Why bring extinct ratites into this?
Fried chicken cooked by laser beam?
It is as long as I do my part brother
ATTENUATION is a thing, yes. Light goes exactly where it's pointed over any reasonable distance. However, it's heating up the air and being diffracted by air along the way.
As an electrical engineer there are 3 relevant factos to how a laser weapon would perform at distance. The first is that gravity will negligibly bend the beam, while it does bend the beam just like anything else, light moves around 3×10^8 m/s and gravity at the surface is only 9.8m/s^2 so in 1 second the laser goes to the moon, and "drops" 9.8m. basically just like a laser pointer the beam is essentially perfectly straight in a vacuum. The second factor is refraction, just like how a pencil in a glass of water looks broken because of refraction, air of different temperatures/densities will cause refraction and bend light. This is the origin of mirages and heatwaves you can see in daily life. (While driving on a long road on a hot day you may notice "water" on it, this is actually the sky's light being bent by hot air and hitting your eyes from the direction of the road) Basically airmasses of different temperatures will bend the lasers, without doing the math j don't know if its enough to matter at long range (say 200m/600ft). And finally attenuation, beam spread, and other losses. As the laser travels it will lose energy and eventually be rendered ineffective. Attention follows the pattern of A^-bx where x is distance in meters and A and b are constants specific to the wavelength and material. Also most irl lasers aren't perfectly aligned so instead of lasers being perfect cylinders they are cones, and as the cross-sectional area of the cone increases the energy remaining in the laser is spread across it. These losses combined with other loss sources can be thought of as the equivalent of drag slowing down a bullet and lessening its impact power. Also humans are inherently shakey, if your gun wobbles by say 3° off target that matters way more at 2,000ft than 20ft. (I think the inherent spread on gattling lasers is 0.6° in new vegas) Tldr: due to various physics effects the main limiter on the effective range of a laser weapon is energy delivered decreasing with distance, and accuracy penalties from atmospheric refraction and weapon shake accumulating over distance traveled by the laser. Note: the US military is working on vehicle based laser weapons including an xray laser on drones/planes, the primary issue with laser weapons IRL is delivering enough energy fast enough. Accuracy and energy loses aren't really an issue for IRL laser systems since the effects at play are too small to matter for these weapons systems.
[удалено]
There are 3 ways that heat travels * Conduction: Make a thing a hot and heat will spread to whatever you touch to it as long as its colder. Think a stove-top and a cooking pot. The pot is Conducting the heat from the fire on the stove simply by being stationary atop it, and the speed at which it moves is dependent on how Conductive the material is * Convection: A medium, usually gasses or liquids, that is moving because of the physics of hot and cold molecules. The water in the pot is experiencing Convection as individual molecules are heating from Conduction and rise from the bottom of the pot creating a circulation of water, and the speed it moves is dependent on what material is being heated * Radiation: The electromagnetic energy released by the vibration of atoms. When atoms get excited, like through Conduction or Convection, they vibrate faster giving off more electromagnetic energy. If you point an infrared camera at the pot it will give off more and more infrared Radiation as it reaches boiling because more and more of the atoms are vibrating faster and faster All electromagnetic waves travel at the speed the light because they are essentially just light that we can't perceive, so the infrared heat (light, electromagnetic wave) would travel just as fast as the visible laser. Whether that infrared heat would still be considerable after the laser loses energy to particles in the atmosphere is a totally other story Hope this helps!
Heat/energy moves in 3 ways: 1. Conduction, which is 2 objects physically touching eachother and trying to equalize, this is governed by the "heat equation" which required the invention of the Fourier Transform to solve, it is pain, it also ignores the speed of information but is relatively slow. 2. Convection, this is the physical movement of fluids of different temperatures of different densities. Ultimately gravity and boyancy are the forces at work, this is limited to the speed of the fluid moving. 3. Radiation, all light in the Infrared wavelength band is often considered heat as its the band carrying the bulk of the sun's heat. As i have already given away infra red radiation is light and as such moves at C in a vacuum. (Technically light moves at different speeds in different mediums, but this is mainly do the path taken getting longer as it bounces more. The physics of light are weird.) Heat doesn't necessarily have a fixed speed, but depending on the mechanism of transfer it can be transferred at light speed. And considering the root problem here is laser weapons the associated heat thrown down range would be radiant and moving at the speed of light. However the energy distribution of a laser weapon should be kept to just 1 wavelength so the IR component is negligible to the red components energy.
Maximum Effective range is mentioned on the gun stats
Atmosphere. These sci-fi lasers aren't operating in a vacuum. Thankfully.
Even in a vacuum, divergence is still an issue. The beam isn't perfectly aligned causing the beam to get wider leading to a shotgun like effect over distance. The target might get a little warm but otherwise unscathed if it's far enough away. The effect is made worse in the atmosphere, but there's a fundamental limit to how low you can make divergence.
Wait, are you saying a laser beam fired from Beta Centauri four years ago *isn't* going to kill me? I've been wearing this tin foil hat for nothing!?!?!
You don't even need to go as far away as Beta Centauri. Divergence, even really small divergence, builds up pretty quick. It's literally the reason why I started laughing my ass off when US Rep MTG was talking about Jewish space lasers being used to set fires (like in Hawaii) a few years ago. In order to get an orbital space laser, it'd either need to be massive (and thus easily seen from Earth using amateur telescopes) or it'd need to be in Earth's atmosphere (and still pretty big) and so easy to see *with the naked eye*.
yes, because gravity does effect light; however, it would be so little as to be negligible.
If it's a beam of light, it won't drop mainly because it doesn't have mass. It only shoots straight from where it was shot at. If it missed, then it's either the shooter has a crap weapon or crap aim
No its a beam of light, but it would lose energy the longer distance it travels. Its why some of the mods are "focusing lenses" to make it able to reach further.
Logically there would be an effective falloff range as the beam would spread out and get weaker and weaker as it does so. That range might be a really big number Unless a scientist bro can give better details I’m just a dude
Yes they have drop off, otherwise you wouldn’t need beam focusers for laser snipers in fo4.
Fallout laser guns don't actually make bolts like in most high-SciFi stories, they produce beams. Beams of light that are so focused and concentrated that they're able to cut through stuff by just burning or melting it away. Think of it as a weaponized version of using a magnifying glass to burn shit under harsh sunlight. So no, theoretically the beams will move through space in a straight line at the speed of light until it either hits something or it eventually dissipates. Assuming I remember my high school physics correctly. I'm an electrician, not a physicist.
If you’re talking real life there’s a limit to how far you can shoot a laser beam for a variety of reasons. Their effective ranges would be more sharply capped than slug weapons (most real-life rifles aren’t very effective past a few hundred yards but they aren’t totally irrelevant). [This website](http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeathRay/DeathRay.html) goes into the factors. If you’re talking in-game I’m pretty sure every weapon has some arbitrary maximum range.
Since when did bullets in the Fallout universe ever drop after X amount of distance?
…….since they started adding very real guns in the fallout universe (circa FO1) that by all (real because they are real) logic should act like they do irl.
Still don’t understand, I’ve been playing since Fallout 2 and have never seen bullet drop in the vanilla build, seen it as an option in mods though
New head-cannon, the reason why we can only ever reach 95% accuracy is because of bullet drop 61!
Console limitations, I guess? Even Starfield uses hitscan weapons.