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Lemmy World Rules

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In the Dune universe, why not use laser weapons as bombs? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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In the Dune universe, when a laser weapons hits a shield, both are destroyed in a nuclear explosion reaction.

So instead of building nuclear weapons, wouldn’t it be easier to tie a timer and a “parachute” to a laser gun and drop it from orbit onto your enemy’s city?

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The Landsraad has a sort of Mutually Assured Destruction pact. Any house that uses atomic weapons against another house would be immediately destroyed by all other houses. Paul uses atomics to breach the Shield Wall technically against a feature of the planet, not house Harkonnen, so there's still political subtlety there.

Lasgun-shield interaction is indistinguishable from atomic weapons.

So deployment of this kind of weapon will ensure your own annihilation.

From memory, the lasgun-shield explosion is unpredictable and proportional to the size of the shield. So, a personal shield could produce a relatively small explosion, a house shield would produce a cataclysmic explosion.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Also sometimes the explosion would be on the side of the laser, not the shield. So you could shoot one down from space and end up blowing your ship up and not having anything bad happen to the shield side on the planet

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Or anywhere along the beam IIRC.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Yea I think so. Basically it's just unreliable af. Now that I think of it, it seems that Dune 2 got rid of the part where they do that. I seem to recall Duncan or someone in the first book purposely doing this?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Yes, the energy of the explosion is a function of the total energy between the output of the laser and the shield, specifically the shield energy being pointed at the laser origin. That's why they randomly hid some maximum powered, monodirectional shields facing up when they fled the attack. So that even the relatively weak personal shields would still have a large impact. In general use, the shield energy is being projected in all directions, so the amount facing the laser origin is very small. IIRC, an average powered lasgun hitting a personal shield creates an explosion that can range between roughly an HE hand grenade and an HE naval shell. They only went up like nukes because the Harkonen were using the lasguns at max energy, and the shields were tweaked abnormally. And as another comment says, the actual point of the explosion is at a random point along the beam.