40K - LASGUNS OR LASERS? RECOIL? - THE EMPERORS FLASHLIGHT? - Warhammer 40,000 Lore/History

[Music] today's video is brought to you by audible audible provides an easily accessible way to access audiobooks for its members just one of the reasons why i recommend it along with enabling you to make huge savings on the newest full-length warhammer audiobooks as an audible member you get one credit every month to use on any title across their entire premium selection but clearly credits are best spent on the longer nine hour plus premium audio books given the theme of the video i decided to select a couple of audio books to suit one is a brand new offering for 40k simply titled krieg which should be pretty self-explanatory the second and absolute classic first and only book one in the gaunt's ghost series both of these offer lashings of laz gun action and i'll share some thoughts on both at the end of the video today you can start today using audible with a free 30-day audible trial to get yourself full access to thousands of audio books originals and podcasts all you need to do is visit audible.com luton and for those in the u.s you can text luton to 500 500. [Music] arthur c clarke famously described as early as 1962 that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic this concept is also one of the fundamental narrative underpinnings for the state of human technological decay under the stewardship of the mechanicus and imperium in 40k it's also relevant in our discussion today of last guns and the continuing debate of recoil or no recoil well beyond that what even is a laz gun now thinking about our questions today while some of you may on the face of it say of course a laser weapon wouldn't have any recoil what kind of stupid question is that which seems fair enough for obvious reasons but as my recent question on the community tab highlighted a surprising amount of others say well hold on now let's consider all the evidence before we make a conclusion yet still others might say hang on even more of a minute you're worried about what recoil in your handheld space infantry laser gun that could be reasonably stacked alongside space marines and titans having the infinite ammo perks straight out of 80s action movies or you know all those practicalities of chainsaw swords this is in fact sort of the question within a question because this debate about laz gun recoil or not seems to stem from two quite specific camps of thought when it comes to people's perspectives on interpreting law one side wants to strictly apply science with no room for fictional interpretation whatsoever whereas the other simply says you're trying to apply our current understanding to weaponry that exists thousands of years in the future which is seemingly the most dirt cheap basic future ak-47 equivalent but power packs that you can throw into a fire to charge but yes let's limit its operational parameters to 20th century understanding and that's when the arguments begin well first how about we consult our astra militarum field manual the munitorum describes last weapons as firing an explosive energy blast with similar effect to a bullet or small shell interesting so not a laser well it goes on to say about power packs describing laser technology is reliable and easy to maintain and replicate okay confusing then so like a bullet but a laser if you want me to make things more confusing you should see the selection of quotes that i steadily acquired each one more contradicting than the last in scourge the heretic for example it states quote just point and squeeze don't snatch and pray to the emperor to guide your bolt it's a last weapon so there's no recoil to worry about well there you go case closed except in one of the very new narratives krieg it describes quote a virtual tidal wave of green flesh bore down on them which their guns could hardly miss she fired one-handed though hala's gun bucked with each recoil spraying out bright beams haphazardly okay so there is recoil with alaskans well hold on now in the battle for mcgrath hive it states quote the flare filled her vision and the bolt lit an eye searing stripe across the pool's surface it uplit the target's face for a moment a shaggy mess of hair snarling face that might once have been human then the las bolt connected and kinetic energy turned to searing heat so progress okay last bolts have mass hence kinetic energy hence recoil right well it's also mentioned in the gaunt's ghost series so we got that one solved we're done wait hold on in the 13th legion it says men started firing their lasgens at the approaching vines shearing through the tendrils with bolts of compressed light right okay so no mass then no mass after all you might start to get the point here i could literally go on and on and on now i'm always trying to find ways of mentally bridging reality with a fiction that i'm invested in it's a fun thing to do but it's certainly nothing i'd lose sleep over unless of course you're talking about the design of second edition assault cannons and how they make no sense at all but that's a whole other thing now i do enjoy engaging with fictional verse details as thought exercises in the sense of how much reality can we apply here the key element of that being how much because when it comes to last guns trying to make some sense has severely tested me i enjoy making reasonable assumptions but in doing so this also means that you could well end up framing something with what is essentially head canon but as i've said before i'm okay with this if it makes reasonable and contextually applicable sense in the law this is why when it comes to warhammer i stopped caring quite some time ago about the concept of spoilers because i came to see the 40k verse more as a very large puzzle with new information coming from many different directions all the time the order in which this arrives became very relevant to me i just like to know anyway middle middle middle the short version is that i try to keep clear my opinions versus sources as written which hopefully most of you already know by now so when it comes to laz guns in 40k you may need to mentally prepare yourself to take a collective deep breath step back and consider it may not actually be as simple as laser equals light equals no mass equals no recoil i know in other verses that may be true but this is 40k besides light equals no mass equals no recoil it's hardly a groundbreaking conclusion at this point nor complex to understand unless you skipped high school physics so knowing this from the outset makes lens guns no recoil the very very most obvious conclusion one could possibly make it's also been discussed already for decades yet it's one of those strange questions that won't go away it really should have been put to bed except it will not the reason why is not at all surprising and don't worry i won't be making anything like as big of a detour as we did when we're talking about the warp because at the end of the day the problems here do not apply to just one thing it merely underscores most visibly in somebody's mind that most weapons of m41 i'm sorry to say operate with a high degree of space-osity gun logic meaning don't overthink it unfortunately most of the time i say no i do want to overthink it hence why we'll take some time to explore this because it piqued my interest this week unfortunately it also ended up taking me a lot more time than i expected as i had to trawl through a metric ton of text to try and find references and descriptions i kept hoping that i was going to find a definitive conclusion so first and perhaps more importantly some of you might simply be just asking what's a laz gun laz guns are one of the imperium's core pieces of weaponry for its military not for the space marines but its ordinary human soldiers when it comes to las guns like so many things within the galaxy of m41 at face value things seem relatively clear and self-explanatory in actuality it's often not as clear as some of us might want to imagine for example while some sources will describe laz guns as laser weapons just as many others including combat descriptions describe laz guns firing these explosive energy blasts with more similarity to perhaps that of the semi-automatic firing of a standard projectile weapon but with the last gun it's in some form of energy bullet or shell whatever that means in the novel 13 to legion for example the last chances use the phrasing of lasgun bolts or las bolts quite heavily not an isolated reference the description is seen elsewhere fist of demetrius gaunt's ghost company of shadows just to mention a few many of the newer novels as well so while you find technical descriptions of laz guns early on in law sources speaking to specifically lasers these decrease over time somewhat it becomes more vague the more you go along there's generally a more considerable weight of references to lasgan fire being described also as bolts of energy or bolts of compressed light the key thing either way being this phrasing of bolts rather than a laser as well as the actual dimensions of the beam they're often describing them boring sizeable chunks or holes into targets whereas a laser beam is obviously quite something different to that more specific more to a point in the form of its energy still observations are one thing but when it comes to this talk of laser shells i'm just gonna hold my hands up i've got nothing for you there i tried to think around it but it just gave me a small headache so i'm putting laser shells or in the case of the multi-laser as seen on a camera descriptions of laser energy shells i'm putting that into the pile of law things that i don't want to think about again along with depleted deuterium landscapes as the rifle of choice for the vast bulk of imperial soldiers it needs to be easy to source and manufacture while also being debatably expendable as those carrying it although there are references where they are definitely not expendable the weapons i mean i feel heretical also speaking so flippantly about the holy tools of the imperium but it's just the reality when many deployed imperial guard may experience life expectancies measured in terms of hours not days then again some officers of the imperial guard have often said to the soldiers hey if it looks like you're gonna die chuck your weapon out the way please and you might think that that's just something i'm making up here for fun no that's actually an er that's actually in the source so from a monotorum and administration perspective you wouldn't necessarily want to be equipping your most expendable assets with high value technically complex weaponry processed using rare materials glasguns are durable as well which is a plus one in the camp of it not being a refined laser with some crystal lens focusing system glass guns can be thrown around dropped used as blunt force instruments and seemingly continue to operate just fine in fact basically everything about them screams i'm not a traditional laser as we understand as i said they're basically the far future version of an ak-47 this is often what i think the inspiration is behind last guns of course the practicalities of production are important but when it comes to how weaponry is viewed within the imperium just as bolt guns will be sanctified and worshipped as prestigious tools of the emperor for use by the starters saurotas even higher grades of imperial guard the humble laz gun is equally venerated by service members of the militarum i'll make many references throughout this video but again one of the very confusing things about landscapes is how they're described physically one specific reference that i find very jarring is the description of the weapons being stripped and oiled this is often referenced about guardsmen knowing how to strip their weapon and oil it stripping it and oiling it what moving parts are they having to oil in their concentrated light energy gun it's highly confusing landscapes exist as a truly indispensable piece of kit for frontline members of the imperial guard just as much as bulk guns would for an astartes it's simply necessary that land guns are produced on a far greater scale human infantry for the imperium should number upon hive worlds alone in the tens or even hundreds of millions when we're considering hive city garrisons as hive cities themselves can contain tens of billions of citizens you may remember my discussions about more realistic estimations of guard numbers on planets or across entire systems and sectors comparative to battles often described in the law with tens of thousands of deaths these numbers are barely a fraction of anything that would really register for the imperium a lot of conflicts described in 40k should be talking about far higher numbers to be really of a believable scale it's always confused me especially when you're talking about systems in entire sectors of the galaxy the imperial guard strength should certainly be expected to be in say billions in some of the more recent law offerings i've actually seen slight leanings toward adjusted descriptions of numbers to make well to make more believable sense frankly because having a planetary war and saying oh no we lost some thousands of guardsmen then simultaneously talking about war on a planetary scale conflicts across entire systems it's kind of weird and it's actually very jarring and undermines anybody wanting to really immerse themselves in such things but perhaps only about as jarring as laz guns having kinetic energy blaz guns often get a bad press as well for being ineffective weapons more akin to torches or flashlights more likely to just bounce off the more horrifying enemies of humanity before they devour said guardsmen considering naz guns more objectively and without the very very tired memory that exists the landscape's reliability effectiveness functionality and simplicity demonstrated in actuality to be perhaps one of the most essential elements of hardware for perhaps even the very survival of the imperium plus if we were talking about the sheer logistics it might not be too much of a stretch to suggest that no last guns may well equal no imperium or at least a very diminished imperium because the fact that alaska need not necessarily be really resupplied continuously with consumable ammunition makes it unbelievably valuable for isolated combat unfortunately though when we flip the coin of law over the descriptions of lasg and effectiveness vary wildly from cutting clean through enemies with sizeable chunks to pinpoint shots heat damage that will vaporize someone's brain but only deal surface level damage to tissue not penetrating bone bouncing off of armor or literally bisecting organic life forms descriptions of concentrated light laser energy to literal kinetic force that knocks people off their feet specific clear descriptions of last guns having no recoil to descriptions of someone using it and it definitely 100 having recoil to put it simply it's absolutely all over the place you guys know i always try my best to find a clear answer about stuff one way or the other but i'm telling you now when it comes to last guns there just isn't one it's absolutely anything goes it's just about the most inconsistent piece of tech and law that i've researched in the 40k verse there's no definitive answer that's the bottom line still if we're talking about comparable illustrative things one of the best that i've found in terms of laser rifles in my opinion is the opening for terminator 2. in fact it's always struck me as a battlefield that looks quite 40k as the ragged survivors of an apocalyptic destroyed world run through it firing their pulse laser rifles in fact the laser rifles of t2 even appear to have been pretty accurately depicted as you see them not vaporize enemies nor cut people apart take their limbs off instead we see one guy hit with several bursts the shock and power of them is enough to drop him instantly and you see them penetrate through but with very pinpoint accuracy it's definitely quite representative of how a laser rifle may well work but before we get more into that later on we were talking also about the role of laz guns in the protection and survival of the imperium and while of course you have the factions like the astartes very powerful the inquisitional zealots via the imperial navy able to deliver the emperor's holy exterminatus all these things are very specific and more importantly considerably lesser in number than the sledgehammer of the imperium the blunt force trauma of the sheer weight of human bodies that is the imperial guard space marines are elite they're capable of handling the most impossible objectives but in m41 it's rare to see them wield the sheer bulk of force able to readily defend on worlds they may in fact be unable to even reach some worlds in time to intervene and turn the tide of events many times even when marines are present superhuman as they may be the reality facing them in the form of the sheer weight of enemy numbers proved to be an insurmountable obstacle this is where the supreme power of the imperium comes in the imperial guard the true currency of the imperium and their vast galactic empire not one paid in coin but in that of human flesh the most valuable commodity in the galaxy for the imperium is that of a constant unending swell of anonymous human souls produced by hive cities and gathered through the imperial tithe the imperium has its god-like weaponry it has its trans-human soldiers it's true but often enough what makes the ultimate difference between survival and annihilation for worlds and systems throughout the galaxy are those brave souls who fight under the banner of the imperium and whose default infantry weapon is the humble laz gun now despite everything i've said before we get to the question of does a laz gun produce any recoil we really need to be considering a question i've often wondered but rarely seen people even question that being the troubling issue of is alaskan even a laser weapon to state the obvious at this point the imperium are more often than not incredibly backwards but especially so when it comes to technology therefore the idea that they may simply have mixed up terminology to describe something they fundamentally have no understanding of how it works is for me well within the parameters of the 40k verse it's also a concept not entirely without some reasonably plausible merits the imperium of man in the 41st millennium exists if i were to use an analogy as something of a comparable equivalent to that of humans who have survived a full 20th century total apocalypse where the survivors are left crawling around scratching at the ruined fragments of a formerly technologically and socially advanced complex society which is now far beyond their comprehension and within generations little more than retold stories eventually to become myth these ignorant and damaged survivors world overnight becomes one of fear pain and superstition they're left trying to comprehend generations worth of lost knowledge and advanced fabrication instead their natural abilities leave them struggling to begin even tackling basic problems leaving them suffocating under the weight of their own ignorance they have fragmented pieces of information gathered sure even some functioning and intact pieces of equipment but the words they read mean nothing now the diagrams they observe are confusing and outside of their understanding nor do they retain the knowledge resources or even the time required to begin to garner some understanding of what missing pieces are necessary to make something functional again the idea of such a society's ability to say reverse engineer advanced fabricated technology is comically misplaced because such a thing would require deduction reasoning beyond their ability but far more importantly it requires this fundamental understanding of techniques and processes based on specific technical knowledge something they would acutely lack and worse now some of their number who have diverged into superstitious beliefs even actively fight to prevent such knowledge becoming part of society's general understanding once again so the problems are not only compounded by those who are superstitious and fearful of such knowledge and what it could mean they seek to undermine all efforts of those who want to acquire this power of knowledge and this is very like the imperium because when it comes to the imperium their understanding or approach to technology far in advance of their own one of the major issues is not merely its application but of course the knowledge needed for replication the imperium and the mechanicus undoubtedly have technology and schematics that clearly they realize must be useful in some way in some cases an stc is whole enough to enable the production of a product that is applicable to a service or requirement if this is not the case though then they may encounter issues whereby they can produce a thing but they have no understanding of what it's for what it's doing powered by what or its capabilities and this within the imperium generally leads to fear fear of accidentally empowering something that they may not be able to control or lead them to their ignorant own destruction meaning some things they may not even attempt to fabricate for the fear of what it could lead to heads up it's usually something something ai still these are concepts of a much larger generalized scale and just because the last gun is a fairly standard issue piece of a kit that can be more readily produced and repaired this doesn't equate to imperial texts necessarily having very specific understandings of the science meaning how alaskan functions in terms of what it's doing and how it's firing this is a considerably specific situation for the imperium of 40k because unlike other narratives which usually rely on a brain character who knows all the science or perhaps just scavenging things which already exist thereby not requiring the actual knowledge of a thing within the imperium there is this strange grey line between acquiring knowledge and understanding it the mechanicus want to know how to produce things how to maintain them how to repair them but fundamentally acquiring the base science and therefore the ability to produce new things that is to say to creatively invent now that strays into the heretical this is why in the past an stc pattern for something could exist and be used in production for say millennia but then perhaps through damage or xenos attack these patterns are lost entirely because they never bothered to research and retain the core knowledge of the thing being produced they only know how to construct x thing as told to them by an stc pattern and once produced they focus more on the ability to keep things functional now i'm not suggesting this is universally true we believe that the mechanics certainly attempt to create say hard copies retain knowledge through their vast data stacks and in fact they have entire worlds dedicated to this purpose of just data securing as do administrator vast labyrinthine subsurface mazes of stored knowledge that may mean servitors enter and are just never seen again when it comes to filing and storing data it takes the job of data entry to a whole new level that's for sure but even copying and replicating say an stc could be seen as entirely heretical by the mechanicus because you have to remember they are very religious in their views and copying something as holy as an stc could be seen by some as a degradation of the most pure state of knowledge in case you noticed subtlety and practicality are rarely applicable in the context of the factions of m41 this is why i often believe it's important to actually immerse yourself in the world of the imperium and to effectively bring yourself down to eye level with the world we're so invested in now entirely understandably when you're talking about something like last gun law some might consider this mentality overthinking a straightforward question and sometimes that's actually true but i would say when it comes to the last gun and last weapons in general this isn't really the case mainly thanks to the wild inconsistencies in their descriptions thankfully i know that considerably more of you joining me today are on the same page and moreover love these over thought mental exercises as much as i do the state of decay that humanity has found itself in m41 has left humanity ruled over by the dystopian horror of the imperium trapped not only by its own brutality and ignorance but also compounded by its heavy-handed quasi-religious systems which mandate societal wide indoctrination and that aggressively prevent and actively advocate for the elimination if not public execution and torture of any who would seek even moderate levels of enlightenment all applied with a large brush of extreme prejudice i feel though at this point it's always worth noting that in a galaxy so vast there is room for planetary systems which are if only by degrees considerably more open-minded than others the region known as ultramar for example being one of them where you might struggle to say that things were anything close to say a democracy but certainly still more open to spoken debate than other far more brutal and oppressive realms where any kind of discussion like that it basically means execution the point i'm trying to make is that across an entire galaxy there are going to be shades of grey when it comes to how the imperium is and that also goes for how technology is used and retained so when we're thinking about the loss of knowledge subsequent limitations of just what that might mean especially whether we're discussing about something being reverse engineered this is something that i've discussed before at length because one it's interesting plus it annoys me how concepts like reverse engineering are just readily thrown around it's a lazy rationale for unlocking the keys to all knowledge essentially because reverse engineering tends to be used for mainly gaining understanding of things where we already have the base knowledge and science for it so that we could recreate or understand past processes better not so often would it be that you go to something where you don't really have any understanding of even the core concepts and then try to learn about that thing because otherwise you're getting into this analogy of somebody handing an iphone to an iron age person and saying hey reverse engineer that they'd probably be at first terrified of it maybe even start worshiping its magic powers or something which sounds familiar doesn't it because it's near enough how the imperium operates this gulf of knowledge between the modern imperium and the zenith of human understanding during the golden age should never be underestimated one of my favorite case in points being whenever they tend to encounter a.i the best of course being where an ai absolutely humiliated space marines and mechanicus aboard the spirit of eternity where the ai is having near enough a mental breakdown as it cannot cope with just how backwards and intolerable the humans of m41 have become before cutting through several ships void shields like butter and raging off so we know that the imperium and the mechanicus struggle to piece together technology especially when it originates from humanity's zenith period of technological glory known as the golden age or in terms by the imperium the dark age of technology but does that include the humble laz gun the answer is almost certainly yes because we know that lasguns are produced seemingly outside of stc production alongside those that are strictly based on stc instruction how that is possible remains unclear but generally speaking this allows us to make a reasonable deduction that at least the origins of laz guns were predating the imperium last weapons generally appear to have been continually adapted and refined over time of course within the reasonable constraints placed on all tech by the mechanicus some have optical attachments there are some with slower fire rates and more power some are even multi-barrel they can be pistols rifles carbines heavy weaponry and descriptions of their functionality as we've said a broad spectrum or to put it another way if you were betting on the imperium not being ignorant to the fundamental functionality of its own technology let me tell you that's not something i'd be rushing to put hard cash on but if you're still set on the last gun doing what it says on the tin though let's come back to that idea i had earlier we might speculate that somewhere along the line during say the small event of the complete and total collapse of galactic human civilization and its subsequently painful resurrection out of the age of strife caused a misunderstood naming convention that stuck the term in low gothic of lasgun had evolved to become the norm or even just the term of laz and laser this doesn't seem at all uncommon during the destroyed period of human civilization where people would just call things regional names and perhaps these kind of more simplistic or emotional terms might have come through in my mind this feels reasonable enough but to play devil's advocate the problem with that is that then you come back to this sticking point of things being produced by stc you would presume wouldn't you that perhaps on some stc hard copy it likely has the title of the thing you're wanting to make eg last gun underscore0046 underscore copy one also the mechanicus they're not golden age enlightened sure but at least being able to understand concepts that are taught at base levels of physics that seems surely reasonable this is often the end point though of reasonable law speculation when you realize it comes down to essentially we don't have enough information and i know it annoys people when i try to do mental gymnastics to explain away what is essentially just a misuse of the word laser but listen this is what's fun for me okay i like to keep things in fiction so what you end up with is given the available parameters of what we know what's your best plausible guess but before that an additional corner piece of a puzzle now an additional factor to consider are the descriptions of those not within the imperium itself within say the under underhive of necromunda there are of course many gangs fighting turf wars and for control of valuable trading networks as well as gun shipments narcotics and so on one of these gangs is known as the vansar and undoubtedly we will get to speaking about them more broadly but one major difference with the vansar of necromunda is that they astonishingly have considerably high levels of technology in fact the vansar run counter to much of the imperium when it comes to technology in fact they seek to unravel humanity's past and throw off the shackles of decay stagnation and ignorance believe it or not it is said that the vansar gang of necromunda have in their possession an stc the standard template construct that the mechanicus so passionately seek and that through their connections with powerful figures in necromunda have so far managed to keep this secret the activities argue contained in confined to the vast depths of a labyrinthine hive city now to be clear as i've noted before there is confusion around the term stc this is because an stc can refer to the hard copies of data sought by the imperium and mechanicus that are used to essentially print and fabricate the machines and hardware of the imperium but it can also refer to the construction and likely ai that was once long ago the core source of knowledge a humanities zenith during the dark age of technology and it is this device in some form that the vansar are believed to hold in their possession as crazy as that may seem it also appears that some stc that we recently learned may be in the possession of the leagues of votan if they do still exist they may be barely functional and heavily damaged at this point in time long past other days when an stc could be given a query of any level of complexity and immediately present a solution regardless though the stc controlled by the vansar is likely one of the most advanced and intact stc possibly in the entire galaxy the fact that it exists unbeknownst to the entire imperium is comically apt because of the inefficiency and general dysfunction of humanity's rotting empire this vansar stc though is capable still of not only storing and also producing construct templates which in and of itself is wildly powerful it also is able to manufacture new working prototypes of technology for then mass production this is basically unheard of throughout the imperium spanning the entirety of the past 10 000 years it certainly appears to have some sort of ai because occasionally the stc has to be moved to avoid detection or it used to have to be moved and being dragged out into say the ashen wastes hidden into cave systems this was seemingly made more difficult by whatever this stc is would begin reaching out searching for ways to integrate itself almost organically with power reday's communication networks and so on as it exists in m41 it has now been stationary within the under hive for so long it's believed it has become so enmeshed with the superstructure of the hive that its removal as in the past may no longer be possible meaning its detection by the imperium could mean catastrophic consequences the vansar have built their entire faction around this stc it may be assumed then that surely with this massive power source the vansar should have full control of necromunda you would presume so except the stc which they have fortified and defended so passionately is also a curse for them whilst it yields some technological wealth and the capability to retain the sdc and their secrecy it also slowly poisons them for the machine is damaged critically and continues to leech some form of dangerous poison presumably a radiation which steadily damages their blood and bone tissues their solution to this is to continually wear advanced body suits developed presumably again by the stc to mitigate this but it merely delays the inevitable eventually avantsar will be sealed wholly into their suit to await the unstoppable withering march of death upon them the vansar are a fascinating faction as in many ways they represent one tiny speck of what truly remains of humanity out of the dark age of technology they see themselves as the keepers of the truth and the secret knowledge of what humanity once was and could be again there is also more to this story while most advanced civilizations were purged and scoured by the emperor's great crusade the vansar endure hidden away in the depths of a world waiting for something their clan or gang operates with a strict hierarchy only those at the highest levels will have direct access to or even the ability to be present with the stc the vast majority of their number will likely never even be allowed into the close proximity of their ancient source of power and they are of course shielded by powerful individuals above this coupled with deliberate campaigns of misdirection and ignorance of other humans who presume that any site of their advanced tech is merely a lucky archaeotech find has helped to keep them hidden most if not all on necromunda presume that the vansar are merely adapt scavengers traders of ancient tech the truth is entirely unbelievable as interesting as this all is and i promise to discuss and consider the ins and outs of the vansar more eventually what has this got to do with our last gun considerations well quite a lot as it happens because the crux of thinking about last weapons comes down to a few things primarily what is a laser and then secondly is the imperium's description of what last weapons actually do match up with what we understand to be limitations of a laser my thought process being you can call an apple and orange as many times as you like but if it's not an orange and it doesn't peel and open to reveal segments or tastes like an orange then it's not an orange so you can call a las gun a laz rifle a laser rifle a laser gun a laser pistol until you're blue in the face but if it doesn't operate how we understand the laser to be it's not a laser weapon the point being descriptions of vansar laser weapons add to the weight of evidence that last weapons are not really lasers no matter how many times you find a statement using the word laser for example one key description that is rare to find among production of lars weapons of the imperium is something the vansar use called suppression lasers these are said to be able to deliver a high kinetic energy bolt able to knock an enemy clean from their feet they use larger power cells and other more complex construction also among vansar sources you find descriptions of focusing crystals and photonic energy cells these kind of specifics are more absent from the rest of imperial documentation and for me that is a really important fragment that you don't see elsewhere widely the other important factor here for me is that unlike the imperium the vansar are very obviously not part of the mechanicus and so their stc enable them to fabricate weaponry to a far higher quality but also most importantly a much higher understanding which is why it is presumably described in this way and that is critical [Music] so of course we finally come to the science part because when it comes to speaking about any of these laser beams or weapons they're usually so poorly defined for good reason that we'd be better off speaking about them more generally as directed energy weapons because that's what they really are and this is even mentioned in descriptions of early laz rifles used in the horus heresy it's thankfully one of the few places you find 40k last weapons phrased as directed energy weapons bless alam bly the man really knew what he was talking about last rifles were among those weapons favored by of course the solar auxiliae the elite human fighters of terror and who were often considered merely a step below the astartes now to start with the obvious as everybody loves to point out lasers are just beams of light and light has no mass meaning turning on a laser beam from a weapon is not producing any kind of chemical reaction there's no propellant force as a regular projectile firearm would recoil is caused when a gun fires the bullet moving forward pushed by propellant gases which are also moving forward with positive velocity the momentum of this must even out so this is why you get the negative velocity you feel as the recoil into the weapon equal and opposite force etc which is basically to say that momentum must always be conserved one way or another even in say a railgun as some bright sparks have pointed out at the most technical and small scale possible it may be true that a laser does create something you could determine to be recoil but we're talking about such small scale it's nothing you'd be able to feel likely nothing that would be very easy even to measure when talking about laser guns this phrasing of light beams is usually when you see dismissive comments about flashlights torches etc bear in mind though that even a torch or flashlight could theoretically cut clean through steel were it powerful enough and close enough you wouldn't feel recoil though of course overall there's a hell of a lot of mixed up thinking when it comes to laser weapons most of which comes down to bad fictional representations similarly to my bug bears about other things like time travel now very obviously light is all around us it's mostly diffused to use light is something that can cause damage you want it to be the opposite high energy and focused anybody who spent time with a magnifying glass and the sun will have learned this and that in a sense gives an idea of how powerful light can be in that if focused to a point it can cut burn and make things combust like say a laser so light it's just moving energy in the form of photons but whereas light all around us as i say is diffuse directed energy in the form of a laser has what's called coherence meaning instead of like just going in any direction it wants to a single point where all these photons are going in the same single direction this is why in theory a laser can become a weapon whereas a light bulb does not a laser can be anything up to or beyond one million times more powerful than light bulb and to create a laser you need a lasing medium i.e a source of atoms to excite and emit light on the required wavelength this could be a gas a liquid even a solid you also need an energy source to then pump these atoms into your lasing medium and then importantly you need to focus your beam using a lens and mirrors put simply a laser in the terms we're thinking of a laser weapon is about storing and then releasing energy either in a burst or pulse or a continual beam to be clear when we say burst or pulse this isn't really anything more fancy than just the laser going on and off very quickly but down to nanoseconds however there are much bigger issues than recoil as i've said and these issues consign laser weapons really as a concept far more into the realm of science fiction and endless theory crafting because whilst it's true that more laser-based tech is used today and even for some military purposes the overall concept of laser-based infantry that you see in sci-fi weapons that could just shoot and cut clean through a person we are nowhere close to that and as i've observed in my searching people who discuss regularly these kind of things actually seem to struggle to agree on how to best conceptualize this mainly due to the kind of energy levels required but there are other problematic things as well one of the basic problems with laser weapons true laser weapons is their need to focus and i don't mean focus the energy into a laser beam i mean the focal position just as when you were destroying our future ant overlords with that magnifying glass in the sun you probably notice that positioning the lens affects the ability of the magnifying glass to focus and create a concentrated spot size well it's just the same with the laser or roughly speaking anyway the point is that the science fiction concept of running around blasting a laser gun in terms of a beam is not particularly practical and that's even before you get to issues of changing out lenses keeping them clean let's say though that your laser rifle is focused to 200 meters the further or nearer your target is from that focal point is going to make it dramatically less likely that they will get a burning exploding hole cut through them which if you're also on the run on the battlefield is going to be very difficult to continually calibrate settings to that level of precision as opposed to say a standard projectile weapon where range is of course important but far less finicky than a laser rifle but maybe that's what the machine spirit of the last gun is for to calculate it for you so you just point and fire science is evolving quite rapidly when it comes to military applications of lasers the us military apparently has a whole slew of projects underway exploring lasers potential including some that fire pulses of light hitting with explosive effect which sounds quite familiar to a last gun then of course the stuff people are familiar with lasers mounted on battleships some on ground vehicles but the main problem remains this issue of focusing also unlike their fictional counterparts current lasers do not just fire and cut through a thing they also require what's known as dwell time and this is because the lasers are self-focusing they adjust to bring the target point and then the laser remains until it melts or destroys its target it may take some time to do that so it's not quite a laz cannon just yet in terms of real world applications like missiles and other usually airborne targets though it's acceptable because as long as it can be tracked in a lock maintained then it's going to presumably be effective and it must be given that they're actually building and using these things now apparently also some ultra short pulsed lasers are being tested and the problem is that as usual when it comes to lasers their power usage is extremely high numbers like 5 million megawatts and the size of a shipping container but powerful or not you're either going to be burning a hole through your target or just making them feel unpleasantly warm depending on its ability to focus properly these ultra short laser pulses seem to have an unusual property of becoming self-focusing not to mention that these laser pulses vaporize the target as they hit not the entire target but just the point at where they hit so instead of being focused to a slow burn like a laser beam they vaporize the small surface point into plasma and powerful enough to say cut through sheet metal now if we're talking about energy required for laser weapons i did a fair amount of reading scattered across the net about this kind of thing and some descriptions of theoretical laser weapons are pretty confusing and quite word salady even more so than me plus it's made worse by the fact that even when people seem to know what they're talking about they're often contradicted by others who also sound equally as confident and coherent but with completely different numbers so i think it's easier to just say people don't really know how to make an infantry scale laser gun yet now i'm sure there are many who could happily talk about energy specifics of laser pulses and what or would not be enough to do the job but it's ultimately entirely academic if you know anything about this stuff there also seems to be a debate about this issue of plasma that i mentioned just now and it being created as it vaporizes a small part at the target site of a laser pulse and that this plasma could potentially absorb the energy being delivered in subsequent pulses thus diminishing their effectiveness but then some speculate no this would burn off so quickly that by the time a next pulse hits it doesn't create plasma or hit plasma it will just burn into the target cratering it again and again and again with each pulse i.e when you fire the laser pulse it actually cuts into people and this seems to be what scientists and the military are banking on this attempting to create these pulsing self-focusing laser beams but before we get to drilling laser holes through people with direct energy bursts consider that when you pull the trigger you're firing you're pulsing and it's true that pulses are moving very fast the pulses of the laser they're moving the speed of light but what isn't moving the speed of light is what is causing the pulse that switching on off of the laser because that's what's causing it to pulse basically this is also where it becomes tricky because in order for that pulsing beam of energy to be in any way effective it's relying on each pulse hitting the same exact spot again and again now granted this laser pulse is happening in a very very small time frame of nanoseconds but nonetheless if your target was on the move combined with your ability to hold the weapon absolutely still at considerable range it's not going to be delivering maybe the full power of that pulsing shot which potentially really undermines its viability as a weapon in many ways when we look at descriptions of laz guns and how they operate they appear to sound much more like a volcanite weapon in some respects in how they're illustrated but if we're still talking about a laser weapon and you can't keep your highly focused laser on target then its pulses are going to hit diffusely and do basically nothing that's kind of a big problem especially if your target would say wearing armor as well and then you have the wavelength of the light malaysia tends to be red or green you also get blue and so on and this can mean whatever surface you're firing at could have a significant impact on the amount of energy being absorbed which is a pretty major issue as it could mean some enemies literally walk through your fire whereas some are cut to pieces just think about how a black piece of material and a white piece of material black will absorb the sun's energy more than a white piece of material which will reflect it then there's yet more science that's far more complex than i can quasi understand but basically depending on the means by which the laser is being created then the total input energy could have a significantly detrimental effect on the lifetime of the pump medium what the hell does that mean well it appears to mean as i understood it power packs for a laz gun may not be the only thing which might need regularly changing out which does bring us to the biggest issue with a laser or alaska the power packs now highly advanced or not it's going to require some godly advanced science to make lars weapons feasible because the one thing that seems generally agreed upon is that for allows weapon to truly have any hope of being effective it requires considerable energy stored now say we just assume that problem is solved then you run into another issue as the power pack itself becomes a pretty large issue consider that if a group of guardsmen took a direct grenade blast and it hit some of their power packs you'd likely see them all immediately vaporized by the powerful blast of energy released by their power pack cook-off in what might appear to be something akin to a very small nuclear explosion now i know your battery and your torch wouldn't do that or your laser pointer but for allows gun to be in any way capable of what it's supposed to do it's gonna need to be carrying a considerably large amount of power speaking of the power this also brings us to the next chain of problems you see with a laser weapon as the power pack is drained every shot is going to create a less powerful beam to be produced over time real world example laser pointers are easier to see this with than a torch because laser pointers are lasers and far faster draining of batteries there's some good youtube channels that mess around with laser pointers also don't screw around with laser pointers they're incredibly dangerous and could easily blind your others but basically as the battery is drained you will note that it doesn't just say stay at 100 strength until it stops working it steadily degrades in strength so imagine instead that you're using a laser weapon your second shot will be less powerful than the first the third less than the second and so on it's not exactly ideal is it nor is this ever illustrated fictional laser weapons are nearly always shown as functioning exactly as a projectile weapons ammunition it's good and consistent with every shot delivering a relatively consistent destructive force which is not likely how it would function unless you know future space-osity we don't understand one of the best illustrations of this was actually in the movie akira where you see canada fighting with tetsuo and where his laser gun is initially quite successful as the battery weakens and he attempts to fire it doesn't deal any damage doesn't seem to hurt him and eventually you see the beam just fail incidentally that laser weapon is probably one of the best illustrations of how a laser beam may actually work in just how the beam fires its dimensions and the fact that it needs a sizeable battery pack you even see them later trying to recharge the battery using their bikes which sounds very similar to the last gun and recharging power packs from the fire so just to punctuate this science discussion let's ask the question again strictly speaking should a laser gun cause recoil the answer is basically no because even if you're powering the laser with massive amounts of energy from your packs there's no chemical no kinetic reaction there's no recoil quite honestly though the far bigger issue is all the other far more pertinent technical problems that we've been looking at which for me are way more problematic than wondering does the weapon kick a bit when fired which many people seem happy to attribute even to some weapon discharge energy thing of some variety but i do get why people get hung up on it but laser guns and this recall issue feels more like people reaching for the low hanging fruit of fictional space gun technicalities but here's another thing for example i discovered that a million watt pulse laser when firing is going to struggle to really do anything more than superficially mark the surface of most metals whereas say the national ignition facility in the us which houses some of the most powerful lasers in the world requires entire banks of capacitors in massive storage facilities to work these power the beams which they state can deliver a combined energy of up to 1.8 mega joules and a peak power of 500 terawatts creating pressures greater than 100 tera pascals which is one billion times earth's atmospheric pressure and temperatures up to 100 million kelvins which sounds very impressive except for the fact that on further researching you'd still need something considerably more powerful than that for dealing heavy damage as per something like a last cannon in 40k why though well firstly because as powerful as all that sounds it's also focused into that tight laser beam so in order to cut through a heavily armored target with some reasonable diameter and not just a pinpoint it's gonna need to be about 10 times more powerful remembering our earlier thoughts about focusing a beam if it's lower energy you can still make it powerful by focusing it but if you want the beam to be powerful and also wide you need to seriously up the power not to mention think of what happens to energy when it's directed to a surface it dissipates in the form of heat entropy meaning that you'd also lose some percentage of your energy at that point of contact as well as potentially ionizing the air any debris and plasma at the target site could also interfere with efficiency so it's difficult to use a laser realistically for say destroying an armored target like a tank or a ship you'd need to generate power tens of times more than an entire building's worth of the largest laser facilities or you know alternatively you could just fire a powerful standard armor-piercing projector around at your target that comparatively costs pennies job done and this is where lasers or 40k last weapons only become practical really if you're in the realm of fiction whereby somehow you can generate these insane levels of power required safely to actually deal damage from an infantry-held device the only realm where laser weapons theoretically seem to make any sense for fighting say in space where any kind of interference is less likely and the ships themselves also provide enough of a platform for the storage capacity of a sizeable laser or beam weapon so this all sounds a bit bleak and fun police in making the case against the flashlight guns of 40k doesn't it well not necessarily but as i've said several times if you want laser weapons to work in any fictional verse it truly relies on you being willing to lean in on the space-occity of things like a las gun and applying a fairly strong degree of disbelief suspension which again if you're doing that for something to be merely practically usable why do you care about technical details like recall at all the blunt bottom line is you really have to either accept the nonsense of future laser guns and all their strange misunderstood descriptions or you should simply say no laser weapons still your one way to get around that is if we're considering weaponry produced by the zenith level of human tech in the golden age it seems plausible that they surely would have been capable of creating sufficiently powerful and efficient energy sources way beyond say our comprehension that such a laser weapon would have been plausible it's not the laser weapons themselves have no practical applications either it's more the way they're visibly represented that becomes problematic not to mention the wildly dangerous prospect of having your entire army running around firing powerful laser rifles in all directions let's say if all those lasers get reflected off in weird directions even at low power you don't end up blinding your own infantry or obviously worse so when it comes to lasers or laz weapons in 40k for me personally as in my opinion the right question comes down to simply this which is more important a misplaced use of the word laser or the observed functionality of the weapon in the law for me it's the latter you may disagree as we're all entitled to do so in my opinion if you bin the word laser suddenly it opens up a lot more acceptable suspension of disbelief because otherwise it just doesn't work for some reason though fictional verses are absolutely obsessed with saying laser i guess because it's cool and spacey and sounds better than directed energy weapon or why didn't they just stick to calling them last weapons but not actually say laser i think it comes down to purely how much you're willing to bend your acceptance of law descriptions and depiction versus science last weapons sit better with me if i consider that it's not strictly a laser weapon but more some kind of advanced energy weapon that is just concentrating energy into some kind of bolt thus delivering a massive amount of directed energy as you might with say many pulses from a laser but instead of firing a point focus beam or a pulse to my mind alaskan bolt delivers the same power as all of those laser pulses all at once to the target in this bolt form you still hear that hiss and crack as the weapon fires and air is ionized you get some level of recoil from however the science of zenith advanced weaponry allows as this seems to be illustrated throughout glasgow usage there are even descriptions of the internal workings of laz guns having ignition rings which apparently if not maintained will stop the weapon from functioning make of that what you will but as i noted in the beginning in terms of actual representation it's literally all over the place from the first and second editions right through to new material gaunt's ghosts as many people pointed out has several references to recoil and other lasgun specifics but one instance that i thought was noteworthy this is from oni in death quote the last rifle emptied its entire load in one disastrous cough of energy the blast threw mary down on his back the blistering ball of discharge hit rocks 20 meters away and exploded like a tube charge so the weapon firing apparently caused enough recoil to even throw somebody to the ground some references speak about last weapons being entirely survivable as well as they cauterize the wound as they hit in others they talk about las blasts melting enemies from the inside in others it describes how a rapid fire blast from a fully automatic blaz gun can cut somebody in half in another it states that a skull is enough to withstand the penetrative power of a last pistol but it's hot enough still to vaporize the brain inside and strip flesh off all of these constant contradictions make it almost impossible to draw any consistent conclusions because there seems to be no consensus already even effort to apply any sense of continuity to laz weapons and that's actually pretty unusual most weapons in 40k operate with a pretty established parameter roughly speaking so it's very odd just how all over the place last weapons were once i started looking i always knew that there were references which kind of contradicted but i was very surprised at just how much there is the descriptions of laz bolts are in fact just about the only singular thing that is universally consistent so that's what i'm clinging on to that and the fact that firing the weapon emits an audible crack or some kind of sound this is likely meant to suggest the shot is as we say ionizing the air when the energy lands it delivers a powerful explosive thermal impact enough to burn through less well-armored targets even vaporize flesh from the extreme concentrated energy but not enough to penetrate through more powerful armored units especially say ceramide now just how the weapon specifically technically works who knows golden age tech it's way above our pay grade any specific behavior such as recall suddenly seems within the full context of the technology to be really a very small almost irrelevant technical detail and who knows how it could be caused maybe it's caused by those ignition rings how the hell do we know of course if you are so inclined to really dig heels in on the fact that last guns are laser weapons pure and simple light has no mass etc it's fine you just also have to be ready to equally rationalize all the other considerable quantity of references illustrations game animations general source law about las guns and how they don't seem to behave like laser weapons in either their description impact or operation plus also how they've been consistently depicted as operating with recoil across many games for the past decade do laser weapons have recoil no do last guns have recall probably yes they do seem to have recoil don't blame me either i'm just the bloody messenger alright nice guns are referenced more in terms of some kind of direct energy projectile weapon than anything else there's a consistent use of las bolt language explosions impact energy shells i'd say more so than beams or direct pulses of energy because those are reserved for something more like the multi-laser or gatling lasers and it does seem ridiculous but when it comes to last weapons as i've noted the thing that really makes it a mess is simply the use of the word laz and laser and this is by no means something unique to 40k of course so many space verses have laser guns blasters call them what you want to the landscape comparative to our laser technology today is so far disconnected and advanced direct comparisons are difficult at best ultimately in a galaxy as horrific insane and confusing as the 40k verse worrying about technicalities like the last gun is a fun bit of a distraction but it is purely this a distraction does the krieg guardsmen question their weapon as they climb atop their trenches and charge headlong into enemy fire do any citizens of the imperium dare to wonder how the inner workings of technology function or to consider that perhaps they're not as they should be no they merely accept when it comes to things like the functionality and operation of a laz gun blaz rifle blast pistol it is perhaps best for ourselves that we just accept it for what it is a tool of the emperor of man because just like the last gun so is mankind itself and as lord primal gulemon has reminded us my father is no god it is men who do his work for him as i must now he uses people he always has [Music] so let's now talk about my next selection for audible in keeping with our last gun theme i chose two which lean in on that category reason i wanted to suggest two selections today is because both krieg and the gaunt's series offer something quite clearly different creek focuses in on very obviously the deathcore of krieg and it visualizes everything that is faceless anonymous and horrific about the imperium the polar opposite to the gaunts series which paints us a picture of far more rich individual characters that are by now their stuff of legends within the law of 40k both krieg and verstan only mentioned lasguns and their use plenty so you were able to get a solid idea of the kind of things that i've been talking about through this video today more specifically creek gives a pretty lengthy exploration of the death crawl through the eyes of other members of the imperial guard before i listen to krieg i did actually see some negative reviews but quite honestly i couldn't really have disagreed more i thought it was a thoroughly good listen maybe a little lengthy in places but i can hardly be the one to complain about scripts being too long by the end it suddenly hammers home a solid picture of just what being a kriegsman is all about gaunt's goes first and only well there's little i can say without spoiling such a legendary opening to an amazing series so i think best you just find out for yourself but as a recommendation you can't go far wrong it focuses on the region known as the sabbat worlds which many people will know and this system and the story behind it is a fascinating and particular favorite for me especially saint sabbat now obviously gaunt's is a very character driven series so if that's something you're a fan of characters that you'll follow through on a journey again can't go wrong and really it's the pilot opposite of my other selection today because whereas krieg is all about the anonymous members of the death corps gonzago's series is all about putting an individual face on guardsmen so have fun picking out the references to laz gun laz rounds laz bolts recoil kinetic force and so on kriegen first and only my two recommends for today as a final reminder if you're new to all of this you can start listening today with a free 30-day audible trial and get full access to thousands of audiobooks originals and podcasts included in the plus catalog visit audible.com luton and text it in to 500 500 for those in the us thanks for your support as always and i'll see you all in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Luetin09

Views: 778,292

Keywords: Gaming, Discuss, Channel, Future, 40K, Warhammer 40K, Imperium, Humanity, Mankind, Doom, Fall, Space Marines, Heretic, Heresy, The Emperor of Man, Lore, History, Guide, Warhammer 40000, Warp, Immaterium, Rift, War, Slaughter, Horror, Nightmare, Tabletop, Inquisition

Id: CF8ex1Fgj0Q

Length: 68min 54sec (4134 seconds)

Published: Wed May 11 2022