Comment Re:It seems to me... (Score 1) 470
Likewise, perhaps *we* can't focus a laser today, but that's not an inherent limitation of lasers even by today's known physics,
Errr, diffraction?
That's pretty fundamental for lasers, as long as they continue to consist of electromagnetic waves.
We could get away from it with particle beams - but that's substituting one wavelength for a shorter wavelength. And your particle beams have to be neutral, otherwise they'd disperse rapidly by electrostatic repulsion. And if the particles are not joined to each other then they're still going to disperse. So you're back to projectiles. It may or may not matter if they're solid or liquid if you can get your rail gun velocity high enough, but until then
Could we get around diffraction limits in future? Well, slim possibilities of using the negative refractive indices of metamaterials. But I've got a sneaking suspicion that you'll need to get the beam focussed to a particular range
You might find that the long term use of beamed energy weapons is restricted to pulsed and shaped beams of high-intensity microwaves intended to fuck up transmission and reception of communications, where the beam sources are controlled in phase to generate the damaging effects at a chosen range. Non-trivial weapons, but not a death ray.