British Engineers Design Anti-Pirate Laser

[Charli]

Ah if there's one thing we British do right. It's the fucking Navy.

Now with space lasers.

 

[Worgen]

and this is why pirates are better then ninjas, do you see anyone making an anti ninja laser?

You would have to find a Ninja before you could worrying about firing a laser at it, and you don't find Ninjas they find you.

with how invisible ninjas are you are probably killing loads of them just by shooting the thing, havent you heard of inverse proportion ninja theory?

 

[Agayek]

Up the wattage a bit and let them cut the boats in half. That would discourage the pirates pretty well too...

Unfortunately, we lack the technology to do that at this point. We can use lasers to cut, but we can't keep them properly focused over long enough distances to be relevant in combat.

That said, I don't get why they don't just start equipping merchant ships with military grade hardware. Throw a couple .50 machine gun emplacements with overlapping fields of fire and you basically can't be boarded.

 

[Agayek]

Also- their wasting thousands on a useless laser, they can't invest in researching attaching floaties to gas nades?

Why gas grenades?

Why not strap them to real grenades?

Hell, we should set up every merchant vessel so that they are fully capable of a Macross Missile Massacre [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacrossMissileMassacre].

There's absolutely no reason to bring the survival of the pirates into consideration. At all. They chose to bring lethal weaponry to bear so they could steal what is not theirs. Their survival should thus be completely disregarded.

 

[The Harkinator]

AM A FIRIN MAH LAZER!

Now they are blinded. Their RPGs are worthless now they take a -5 to Perception. Explosives skill has fallen.

But seriously this is an OK tactic. Next is to make a LAZER SO POWERFULZ IT CUTS TEH BOAT IN HALFS. A blinded terrorist who is easy pickings for return fire is more likely to surrender

 

[Cpu46]

I don't know how effective this will be.

"Ah no, they're slightly irritating us! Curses, foiled again!"

Temporary blinding > Slightly irritating

I see this as a great non lethal countermeasure. If your in a boat you are not going to keep going towards the blinding green sun that just appeared where the boat was and you certainly are not going to fire the expensive explosive ordinance blindly either. Add this to that sonic cannon that they made for the same purpose a while back and you've got yourself a truly incapacitating force.