Lasers
General
All Austral plasma weapons are technically laser weapons that use a laser to spark their plasma. The following section applies to pure-laser weapons that do not intentionally bloom through a medium such as water.
The traditional trade-off introduced by pure-laser weapons is range and lethality for power-consumption. These tools lose their cutting power rapidly in atmosphere due to absorption, and when they hit a target they generally only impart local thermal damage – wounds to extremities will be rather survivable, and there will be no ‘chain-reaction’ water blooming to send plasma/steam into the body in most cases.
But the reduced power consumption introduces numerous benefits, ensuring that pure-laser weapons remain a common tool in the modern Austral armory. These devices can be miniaturized to a degree that makes them very suitable as both compact tools in a roll alongside the traditional army knife and hidden weapons useful for the spy. Proliferation of laser weapons concealed within rings and other jewelry pieces, nail attachments, pens, and utensils is a continuing security concern, and the low energy density requirement encourages DIY laser manufacture as an additional issue (whereas manufacture of lethal plasma weapons is more easily controlled). Furthermore, the low power consumption allows most of these tools/weapons to be entirely independent of wireless power transfer (WPT) with a small modification. A human operator with a piezo unit in their shoe can easily keep their laser charged indefinitely just by walking, and a host of other energy harvesting options are available.
Nearly all handheld laser weapons (pure or plasma) make use of a liquid crystal (LC) lasing medium that comes in a variety of recipes, the most useful being highly classified. LCs were favored in contrast to inorganic crystal lasing materials that are too fragile for the stresses of extended combat, even though the most powerful lasers ever made do use solid lasing media; the LC medium can be shaken and vibrated with minimal change in performance, and the optical system in nearly all devices is itself fluidic and similarly difficult to damage, in contrast to primitive glass optics.
In recent history, it is believed that LCs might be vulnerable to manipulation by external fields, which reorientate the domains in the media and compromise their lasing ability. This is at least one of the ways that the Inrisus compromise Austral weapons. Tamper-proofed weapons with alternative media and other design changes are in development.
Specialized lasers
Dark lasers
A class of weapons intended to be undetectable is important to establish in an age of rapid and precise counter-response. Many potential targets both within and outside the Unity are capable of locating a shooter even at a considerable distance if they are not immediately killed. More archaic solutions have involved drone-mounted mirrors, which introduces the significant complication of making stealthed drones. (Outside of trying to confuse an enemy about the origins of a shot, these drones can be used to make protected areas accessible to weapons, or accessible to WPT).
To most monitors, the firing of a modern dark laser weapon will be misinterpreted as a commonplace natural event – a gamma ray or x-ray burst, or the secondary effects of a cosmic ray – as the weapon mimes their wavelengths and durations, usually being either grasers or xasers. To encourage this confusion, non-lethal emissions may be released as well as the actual killing shot to allow for ‘confirmation’ by multiple enemy detectors.
Defensive monitoring systems must be programmed to avoid false alarms caused by such astronomical events, and as sensors improved this unintentional astronomy caused an increase in false alarms rates that contributed to several embarrassing incidents for the Telemachy. The statistical measures put in place to screen out natural radiation spikes continue to be exploited to this day by actors with dark laser weapons both inside and outside the Unity.
Both grasers and xasers suffer from low range in atmosphere, and long-range dark lasers are perceived as a debilitating technological gap in the Austral armory. Given the current development of sensor technology long-range stealth shots generally must be projectiles.
Grasers
Gamma ray lasers (grasers) have been brought to the field very recently, their adoption accelerated by the prospect of conflict against the Inrisus. Plasma weapons, even modern TPW, are generally not successful against the Inrisus even if they are untampered and functional; the ‘tissue’ in the immediate column of the shot can be incinerated, but there is no propagating bloom to destroy the rest of the creature even in a direct hit to the center, and Inrisus bodies have no vital areas to shoot. No good explanation for this bloom failure exists, and even the enhanced bodies of the Auravelus are as vulnerable to TPW as any baseline. It is theorized that the Inrisus have ‘structured’ their internal water in micro-tubes or otherwise altered its surface tension and boiling point with surfactants or other impurities, but since Inrisus biomass will self-destruct to avoid sampling Austral scientists can only speculate.
Due to their myriad issues as a new weapons technology, the general consensus of Austral military engineers is that graser weapons are 99 percent unnecessary. Overall they must suffer from at least one of the following three significant drawbacks: being slow-to-fire, easily detectable, or as mobile as a boulder.
Among all Austral laser weapons grasers have a unique problem: the lasing medium’s efficiency is temperature-dependent and so they cannot be fired cold. Grasers must be warmed up first, with the smallest devices requiring tens of seconds and the largest requiring minutes. They can be kept permanently warm (~400 K), which is important for making the larger grasers practical as weapons, though this introduces the second drawback: their detectability as high-power, hot weapons is significant, even with civilian technology. Addressing this issue arrives at the third drawback: while it is possible to conceal a hot graser weapon which can be ready to fire at all times, the amount of shielding required to hide it effectively to any modern enemy with thermal and radiological sensors will probably render the gun immobile, or mobile only on a large platform.
For all their flaws they are extremely powerful, able to vaporize all personal armor and practically all vehicle armor, furthermore irradiating their targets to cripple or kill even the most resilient synthetic biology/nanotechnology. The ray’s phenomenal killing power is restricted to a low range on the ground due to atmospheric absorption even in ideal circumstances. (As such, they will one day be an important feature of space warfare and fortifications on the Moon(s), where range is only limited by tracking accuracy and can extend to hundreds of kilometers; their weight will also be far less important in this environment.)
The most powerful laser weapon used by the Unity is a kind of graser, able to melt through mountains and lethally irradiate bunkers, and conceivably sweep an area of an Inrisus group; it is expensive, as the element technetium is essential as an emitter and component to the lasing medium, which is a highly radioactive and complex solid crystal. In addition to the medium being more fragile as a solid, it furthermore ‘ages’ with each firing and needs to be gradually replaced. The very smallest graser is employed as a dark laser, handheld and stealthy at the price of being unable to fire immediately; it furthermore can only be kept fire-ready for minutes or else it will quickly become detectable, producing an inconvenient time window in which the stealthed shot must be taken.
Xasers
The xaser (x-ray laser) is another damaging, low-range weapon. It is not capable of irradiating an area to the point of being effective against resilient bio/nanotech, though most natural living systems are at risk – as such, xasers have a controversial history, as they are perceived as being an ideal tool for an anti-baseline bigot, and they featured prominently in the Auravelus armory among other selective radiological and neurotoxic weapons.
In modern times the xaser is a defunct tool mostly relegated to sniping unprotected targets, its larger prospects eliminated by the forces of economics and public paranoia. From a direct engineering perspective xasers appear very suitable as conventional lower-power arms, as they suffer from none of the extreme temperature/detectability/weight issues that debilitate grasers. Expense and aging of the lasing medium are furthermore not significant, and their low range is slightly longer (while their destructive power is inferior to the graser). However, cheap anti-xaser mirror armor has killed most of the usefulness these weapons once held. The exaggerated perception of these weapons as tools of genocide inspired concentrated research in this particular mirroring technology, now known as gilt, which is now scarcely more expensive than aluminum foil and can be sandwiched inside multi-layer armor. As the gilt is ‘gold’ in appearance it is in fact a commonplace decoration.
Tamper-proofed lasers
Abandoning the LC lasing medium is the first of several strategies for making a laser weapon resilient to external tampering, predominantly the tampering that Inrisus perform to disable Austral devices. Carbon dioxide lasers that lase in the ultraviolet range are somewhat inferior to equivalent LC in cutting power, and other gas recipes to induce intentional blooming for plasma weapons have been explored. With proper encapsulation gas lasers can be as resilient to the stresses of combat as LC-based lasers, and gas-media plasma weapons have been developed. Their efficiency and lethality is inferior, and there are still other ways to compromise the weapon.
