» Sun Jul 17, 2011 2:13 pm
Laser Assisted Electrical Rifle...It's an interesting name to be sure.
Laser Assisted: Does that just mean it has a targeting laser? I'm having difficulty seeing how lasers can assist anything except by pointing in a perfectly straight line. It can also burn stuff, I know, but that's less assisting and more hogging all the credit. There's enough emphasis on the phrase to make me think there's more to it though. Could be that it just makes a nice acronym. :shrug:
Electrical Rifle: Sounds like a long range taser. The only way I know to affect electricity without anything physically there, by that I mean lightning rods, condutors, etc, is with magnetic fields. So if the gun shoots lightning, would it use a system similar to the plasma weapons? I also, going by the name, do not believe it to be a pulse weapon. Pulse weapons use electromagnetic radiation to disable electronics, not actual electricity. Shooting a robot with electricity probably wouldn't do much, as it would just travel along the outer shell and into the ground or perhaps into capacitors. Sentry bots and Mr. Gutsys were field equipment for the military, they would have have defenses against lightning stikes. If there were a breach in the outer shell, the electricity might be able to get at the circuitry inside and totally fry it.
Perhaps the lasers act like "guidewires" for the magnetic field making it more accurate at longer range than the plasma rifle? I do not know how, but it's something that occured to me just now. Need to look into lasers and magnetism. To Wikipedia! (We need a dramatic pointing smiley)