travists wrote:Had some time and did some digging. Don't like Wikipedia?
How about
Wired Magazine?
They're good. Left funnies in place and tagged the thing "Science!" so it can be found. 'Course, it links to rumorpedia all over.
Well, yeah. Remember SDI? Explaining to the people who vote on the value of Pi
why developing beam technologies and suchlike looks like a good idea is hard, so show them some Lucas and funny pictures, it works.
It's just that snake oil and vacuum oil aren't the same thing.
travists wrote: The project is real enough, the physics is relatively sound, especially in the vacuum of space.
Uh, there's no physics at all. Just "toroids" and trekky in-jokes. Conversely, if someone achieved anything both stable and controllable, there wouldn't be "wildly different theories of ball lightning", etc.
The physics of the matter looks very simple: "if plasma was
that easy to stabilize, no one would try to jump through the loops with z-pinch and much more complicated solutions".
That is, generating short-living ball lightning -like glows in a dustless can is one thing, but trying to do with plasma anything bigger and more complex than a torch or arc is a long story, and it's full of "almost working" Tokamaks and their precursors. Because anything that remotely looks stable and/or moving plasma physics forward, is tried for climbing Kardashev's scale.
In other words, clinging for old and tested confinement concepts is a rather vicious physics in-joke: obviously, "tested" here means "didn't
quite do it once we fired this up for real" - the moment it isn't so, heavy water will be the most used fuel in the world. Currently the holy grail is where it was 50 years ago: very close, only one "little" plasma instability away.
I suspect this inspired Nanoplague, BTW - the blasted thing looks almost like it mocks everyone intentionally.
Something more sneaky, probably involving juggling with plasma waves (and that's a long story in itself) - maybe. Not an electrified vortex cannon - or anything else gas-based, at any rate.
travists wrote: I do not recall seeing any balls fired by energy guns in the game. Its all rays and line segments. Something more than just color to differentiate guns would be nice.
Bolts
are funny-shaped, they just tend to move fast and be seen more or less along the main axis.