Shooting out walls and windows

[StellarRat]

So, StellarRat, is that what you want? Would you prefer building walls to behave like wood and bullets to pass through them instead of cause damage? If you do, fair enough. How then would you like lasers to treat buildings? If all walls are wood, then lasers and plasma, which work through the transferral of heat should set it on fire, right? That'd be fun. A stray alien shot hitting a building wall, then setting the whole damn place on fire, turning everything into a smoking wreck. Every map.

EDIT: Or we can say that bullets pass through walls. Lasers and plasma can't. Or we can up the armour value of walls, so bullets can't hurt them. Sound good?

Well, in an ideal world we would model the differences between the types of building construction, however, unless that's possible, I'd say the best compromise is bullets don't hurt walls and don't stop aka they go through and can kill things inside even if you can't see them, but everything else stops AND damages the wall (lasers, plasma, explosives, etc...) I suppose if there is a fire mechanism then it ought apply especially to lasers and plasma. Most people don't know that military lasers actually don't burn clean holes through things. That would require a long exposure and extremely precise aiming. A "real" weapon type laser dumps a ton of energy onto a target in microseconds and it causes such violent heating that it's basically a surface explosion on the target from the instantly vaporized material. It's NOT a nice clean hole burned in something. Edited June 22, 2012 by StellarRat

[spinaljack]

Real life laser weapons don't exist because the atmosphere dissipates so much of the energy that it becomes useless at medium-long range. In space though that'd work.

[StellarRat]

Real life laser weapons don't exist because the atmosphere dissipates so much of the energy that it becomes useless at medium-long range. In space though that'd work.

Well, you can still hurt stuff MILES away. Take a look at this article:

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/04/08/navy-showboats-destructive-new-laser-gun/

The bigger problem is trying a make a laser man-portable powerful enough to finish the job instantly.

[spinaljack]

The problem being that the more energy you put into the laser the greater the amount of energy is lost in the atmosphere, it's exponentially less efficient the bigger the laser is. The other alternate method to put more energy on your target quicker is to have a great many small lasers all point at the same spot similar to Archimedes death ray.

Of course if all you want to do is burn a hole into a plane's fuel tank then lasers can do that so long as you keep it on the same spot long enough.

Edited June 24, 2012 by spinaljack