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Celebrating the Sci-fi Ray Gun
brumgrunt submitted the latest Den of Geek compilation story: this week it's the the science fiction ray guns. From Han Solo's blaster to the Forbidden Planet, there's a lot of nostalgia to get your pew pew out.
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I think the Han solo weapon looks more like a mauser than a Luger.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Can't find the original article but I recall reading the BSG creators did feasibility studies on bullets or rayguns for the series and came up with laser powered handguns just not being as effective as bullets.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
If we're going to be talking about the celebration of ray guns, someone should really mention James Alan Gardner's Hugo and Nebula nominated short story, "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" which can be read online here. Since TFA didn't do it, i guess that someone has to be me.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I love Star Trek, a lot. I'm sure I fit every possible stereotype of a Trek nerd, including ones that are contradictory. But there was one thing that always, always bugged me about Star Trek, even as a kid.
Phasers are essentially inferior to contemporary firearms. For starters, they are actually slower than bullets. You cannot dodge a bullet (in real life, anyway). But there are several examples of the Enterprise crew dodging phaser/disrupter blasts in TNG. Granted, it's possible to retcon this by saying it's some sort of charged plasma that doesn't travel at the speed of light blah blah. But my point is not that it doesn't travel at light speed (which is obvious) but that it's actually SLOWER than a bullet. Which raises the question, why on Earth (or in the Alpha Quadrant, for that matter) would they use essentially inferior technology? If our present day firearms are superior to phasers, why the switch? It defies all logic.
And don't even get me started on the horrible scene in Star Trek: First Contact where the Borg have adapted to Picard's phaser so he lures them into the holodeck and mows them down with a tommy gun. So, 1940s machine gun > 24th century phaser. And they don't keep a stash of machine guns in a weapon's locker? Hell, they can't even replicate a few dozen? Sigh.
Really, it's easier to suspend disbelief about Warp Drive even though that violates everything we know about relativity and modern physics than it is to accept the concept of the phaser replacing the superior firepower we already have in this century.
Anyway, angry Trek nerd rant mode off. Sorry about that.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
The most important fact in this whole article of fiction.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
No mention at all of Lensman, the root node of Space Opera, and the classic DeLameter? Or even the Stendish, a combined semiportable energy weapon/firearm? Pah!
The Kill-O-Zap gun is a long, silver mean-looking device, the designers of which decided to make it totally clear that it had a right end, and a wrong end, and if that meant sticking blacked and evil-looking devices and prongs all over the wrong end, so be it.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Big difference is it takes years of training to be able to use a longbow effectively, whereas anyone could aim and operate a musket effectively.
The weapons at the time were cannon and musket. Muskets were iron, hard to make, heavy to carry, hard to operate, dangerous to the user (they could explode), had a horrific rate of fire, noisy, created a lot of smoke to obscure the battleplace, etc. Ben Franklin, I think it was, argued for the longbow as it could be manufactured anywhere, was light, safer to operate, had a massive rate of fire, was silent, and just as deadly as the musket - the ideal weapon for the Americans.
The problem is, Longbows require extensive training to fire effectively. Firearms allowed you to get away with cheaper, less well trained troops.
When I was a teen, I read a science fiction novel which contained a nifty subplot involving a ray gun.
I believe the novel was The Secret of the Martian Moons by Donald A. Wallheim.
Our hero, a young spaceman from Earth, is crewman on the first spaceship from Earth to land on one of the moons of Mars. He is involved with the humanoid aliens who live there. He is pretty sure there is something odd going on, and he doesn't entirely trust them. A faction of these aliens gives him a ray gun, and tells him that it is a harmless stunner, and it is vitally important that he use it to stun some person (I think the person was an alien but I'm not even certain). Because he is suspicious of them, he wonders whether the ray gun might not be as advertised; perhaps it is a lethal weapon. Perhaps, even, it emits some sort of horrible radiation that would kill the user. So, when the moment of truth comes, he doesn't pull the trigger; instead he throws the ray gun with great force against the head of his target, knocking the target out. Later it is revealed that the gun is a convincing prop, not a working ray gun at all; and the faction he didn't trust was setting him up to fail. But instead he succeeded, throwing their evil plans into disarray. Moral: don't trifle with spacemen from Earth.
If anyone else has read this and can confirm any details, or if this is from some other book, please post a follow-up here. I would actually like to get a copy of this book and re-read it. It probably isn't as good as I remember, but I still want to re-read it.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely