DoPo said:
I just assumed whatever they used to fuel the guns would be charged up again, so they wouldn't need that many extra "clips" to go around. Dunno, two or three per person seems logical, and they need those same two-three for the entire time they would serve in the military. As opposed to going through rounds and magazines all the time. Way less space and hassle required to transport laser weapons.
This is really the problem - the Star Wars universe offers no real information on blasters, at least in the movies. Questions of logistics are impossible to answer when we have no information on things like how heavy the weapons are, the difficulty of production of weapons and ammunition, how ammunition is handled and the like. As such, any attempt to demonstrate their superiority on these grounds is impossible. Moreover, any data that does exist is useless due to the aforementioned use of numbers that are
insane. In the star wars universe, light fighter weaponry is a weapon of mass destruction and yet a demonstration of the power of these weapons always falls far short of what we are told about them. Turbolaser batteries are often in the gigawatt range and deliver more energy in a pulse than the total power grid of the modern world can provide in that span of time yet small vessels can often shrug off a hit or two. This ignores that that energy delivery is so enormous that anything hit is subjected to forces normally found in the heart of stars.
Thus, any attempt to demonstrate the superiority of such things is pointless. They rely on magic with no basis in reality. They are
obviously going to be superior. When light structures can withstand being bombarded with energy sufficient to induce nuclear fusion with little more than a small char mark the notion of using bullets seems rather quaint. Yet, paradoxically, the Star Wars universe uses projectile weapons that are inferior to energy weapons by orders of magnitude to great effect. Thus we have a contradiction inherent in the fiction such that projectiles are both vastly inferior and yet superior simultaneously.
DoPo said:
Let me put it this way - with the abundance of battle droids that are used in warfare in the Star Wars universe, would you want to go there and shoot tiny holes in them? That's if you get to penetrate their exterior. Or would you rather go for a weapon that can burn a hole in metal?
A blaster fires bursts of particles, effectively meaning they are little more than "hot" bullets. Blaster weaponry offers no obvious advantage over firearms as secondary effects of such a weapon are at best similar to the secondary effects of a number of modern weapon systems. High Explosive Anti-Tank rounds often rely on plasma as the final kill mechanism for example and yet there exist plenty of weapons systems that are expected to engage equally heavy armor systems that rely purely on chunks of heavy metal being propelled by an explosion.
To put this in another way, commonly available armor piercing weapon systems that can be carried and fired by people can penetrate greater than a quarter inch of steel. Heavier weapons can do far more damage. Heavy Machine Guns and anti-material weapons can often penetrate greater than an inch of armor plate and these weapons are entirely man portable. There are dozens of light anti-armor weapons in use around the world that can defeat several inches of armor. Given that battle droids rely on relatively light armor systems and further considering that blasters also rely upon kinetic energy to deal most of their damage it is reasonably safe to say that there exist plenty of projectile options that are perfectly capable of dealing equivalent damage to such a platform.
The only place I see problems is that there are simply weapons in the star wars universe that are obviously superior. The weapon system used by the Republic Commando in one of the Old Republic Trailers is roughly equivalent to modern grenade machine guns yet is light enough to be carried by a single man. The equivalent modern weapon is man portable but still requires being placed in a fixed position to employ.
DoPo said:
One can assume that they moved past the need to protect from kinetic projectiles. It's, after all, another technology hundreds of years old. Also - robots.
As I said above, there is no indication that infantry weapons in the star wars universe offer any real advantage over firearms. It is only in special cases of heavy weapons that we see the superiority of blasters as we often see heavy weapons being deployed in a light enough package to be used by a single infantry soldier on the move.
DoPo said:
They take up more space than the ammunition you'd need for laser weapons.
Again, there is no indication that this is true within the movies or the games and I'm not particularly willing to dig through various technical sourcebooks for information.
DoPo said:
Planets with different gravity would have a different bullet drop, bullets are they are also affected by wind. Put simply - the same weapon would have vastly different performance depending on the environment. As opposed to point and shoot and your shot going only ever straight.
Blasters would be affected by all of that
plus you'd have to take into account magnetic fields. They do fire masses of charged particles after all - thus why they can be deflected by a light sabre.
DoPo said:
Mass Effect has projectiles going at relativistic speeds. Star Wars (as far as I know) doesn't have that technology. Funnily, lasers shots move even slower. Normal everyday ammo which we have would generally be either be made to go through armour or not be very effective against it.
Kinetic Energy is an easy quantity to calculate: it is equivalent to .5*mass*velocity^2. The existence of heavy blasters indicates they are familiar with using magnetic fields to propel projectiles meaning the use of heavy ferrous slugs in high caliber weapon systems is perfectly possible. Consider, for example, the mass drivers used by various ships in Empire at War - capital ships essentially use the same weapons systems found on Mass Effect Dreadnoughts.
DoPo said:
Given the wide variety of species present, one would assume that some types of bullets would kill some of them even faster, or, maybe not do much damage to them. As opposed to point and shoot. I'd assume that the Star Wars rifles have some sort of dial or something to adjust the force of the shot - at least I would have made one, so you'll be able to use the weapon in more circumstances.
If you simply mean that a light rifle round, say a 5.56x45 NATO would be relatively ineffective against something massive like a rancor, then you'd be right. Of course, the same is true of equivalent blaster weapons so there does not seem to be any advantage. A light blaster weapon and a light bullet weapon seem to have similar shortfalls. We don't often see Republic Troops taking out AT-AT's with personal weapons for example much the same as we don't see many soldiers take down Main Battle Tanks with rifle fire.
I suppose the point is simply this: yes, projectiles have shortcomings. But in the Star Wars universe, those are not often terribly significant given that the blaster weapons favored have similar failings. It is only in the case of heavy weaponry that we see any demonstration of superiority over modern weapon systems as it seems it is possible to lighten the very heavy end of man-portable weapons sufficiently that they can be employed by a single soldier outside of a fixed position. Yet even in this case, the overwhelming popularity of personal deflector shielding is such that simple kinetic projectiles would often be superior since they are notable not affected by the technology. On foot then it becomes a question of situation - without enormous improvements not obvious to observation in games or movies, blasters do not offer any particular advantage outside of heavy man-portable weapons. Larger weapon systems found on ships on the other hand confer tremendous advantage to the turbo-laser and proton-torpedo yet the existence and brutal effectiveness of mass drivers when properly employed introduces contradiction such that it is again difficult to determine where the energy weapon offers advantage.
