Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Magic and Technology

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Stahlseele
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Post by Stahlseele »

I don't see somebody just throwing away rows and rows of weapons instead of reloading one single weapon . . just the logistics of that are stupid. Only do that if you do not have time to reload properly and there are dropped weapons with good ammounts of ammo still in them. Everything else is just stupid and videogamey.

Microwave Weaponry is already in some kind of use today, so that is another option for your martial needs right there.

I don't get the laser sword part, or do you mean using a katana as the bayonet and having the laser pointer for your shooty bit along the blade?

Spray Weapons are probably not gonna be much bigger than a flamethrower or fire extinguisher for personal use. Everything above that and you are basically looking at firehoses in size and questionable useability in combat.
Allthough, i do remember one backpack style spray weapon that basically used the super soaker technique of using highly pressurized air to create a strong blast of water at short distances. And that had quite the kick to it.

As for shields: SR actually had a tazer addon for their shields, so somebody hitting your shield would get zapped something nasty. Not much use in a ballistic shield meant to stop bullets from hitting you, but in normal police riot shields, yes, probably. Also, if you are using it as a riot shield and not as a ballistic shield where you do not want any holes in it, there is little speaking about a little hole you can point the nozzle of your pepperspray through.
Hell, if you are SPEESS MEHRINGUE you can do that with your ballistic shield as well i guess . .

Metal-Storm is basically the shoot and throw away weapon, because reloading them is a pain in the ass and the loaded barrels are both a risk and have worse logistic stats than normal magazines for your assault rifles and the such.

And if you make the gauss weapon sturdy enough, then it won't matter if you hit people with it or not. And if we are talking supermutant cyberzombies, weight and wield of a weapon becomes close to meaningless.

Gyrojet weaponry is another potential use of firepower. Basically Bolters from WH40k, small rocket propelled projectiles fired from a magazine fed weapon. If your tech is good enough, indirect fire and heat seeking projectiles could be a nasty little surprise.
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Post by Username17 »

stahlseele wrote:I don't see somebody just throwing away rows and rows of weapons instead of reloading one single weapon
I'm going to call old-style magazine and bullets weapons "guns" for the purpose of this post.

Just having a gun that has ever been used in a crime is dangerous, because bullets fired from any gun can be positively matched to the gun in question and to each other. Which means that even if the police never find your gun, just the fact that you used it in two different crimes means that the security forces have a bunch of free tags on you. They can cross reference potential persons of interest from two separate incidents and triangulate in on you. Watch Layer Cake for an example of how that can fuck you even if the crimes aren't related.

It simply doesn't make sense for a criminal to not ditch any gun after any job. All guns are inherently disposable. Not disposing of them is an insane risk that there is no reason to take as long as other guns exist - which they do.

Metalstorm weapons, lasers, spray weapons, and gauss weapons do not have that problem.

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Post by Stahlseele »

OK, in the sense of after a job is done because criminalistic forensic research yes. I thought we were still on the paramilitary combat units or still in the middle of a job.

No, metalstorm, laser, spray and gauss weapons may not have that specific problem TECHNICALLY . . THEY have the problem that somebody is going to look at two crimes comitted with any of thse and go:"not many of these around, chances are good it is the same gun and user"
Last edited by Stahlseele on Sat Aug 26, 2017 2:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Lokathor »

I guess you can always fall back on those taser darts.
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Post by Username17 »

I would argue that when Turkey imports over fifty million tonnes of tear gas every year that spray weapons are not in fact unusual at all.

But let's say for the moment that the Gauss Rifle is actually unusual. Let's say that the Gauss Rifle takes the place of the M107 Anti-Material rifle. That would mean that there would be over two thousand of them deployed with the US army plus more than twice that in civilian hands as well as roughly half that number with the Marines. Fast forward to the dissolution of the United States and we have over six thousand of these things bobbling around the black market plus however many are still being made. Which means that if you use a Gauss Rifle in two different crimes, it's a clue, but it is more than five thousand times less of a clue than using the same Colt 45 would be.

For people who care about anonymity, traditional guns are and must be disposable - to be discarded after every mission and even in the middle of missions if multiple phases are supposed to be plausibly separate incidents. Gauss rifles, lasers, metalstorm weapons, and spray weapons can be reused and even be signature character items.

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Post by Stahlseele »

Caseless ammo was made standard for a reason in SR4 i think.
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Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Username17 »

Stahlseele wrote:Caseless ammo was made standard for a reason in SR4 i think.
It was made standard because the benefits were small but significant enough that everyone always did it. Even with the tremendously high cost of ammunition that Shadowrun has always had as well as the ludicrously low ammunition burn rate of every edition, paying out a slight increase in money to get a few extra bullets into each magazine was a no-brainer. Rather than have everyone do the math every time they just made it standard.

Caseless ammunition does leave less of an evidence trail than ammunition that leaves little ammo cases lying around every time it's fired. But the bullets themselves can still be positively matched with specific firearms as long as they aren't destroyed. And since you routinely fire bullets into other people, you don't have a lot of control over that. Caseless or no, a traditional firearm still leaves a definitive connection between every crime scene they are used in.
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Post by Zaranthan »

Can't you defeat ballistic marking forensics with a barrel change?
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Post by Username17 »

Zaranthan wrote:Can't you defeat ballistic marking forensics with a barrel change?
Yes. There are some caveats where some systems of magazine loading are separately identifiable over and above the ballistic imprint of the barrel, but to the extent that an RPG is going to give a shit, the answer is yes. Swapping the barrel out for a new barrel should cut the forensic trail between anything you do before and after the barrel switch.

But in most cases, changing a barrel might as well involve getting a new gun. It's not a massive monetary savings to just have backup barrels rather than backup guns. And there just aren't a lot of places you can get a gun barrel that you couldn't also get a whole gun.

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Post by Jason »

OgreBattle wrote:What does a standard military fireteam look like in this setting of cyborgs and wizards?
Very likely enhanced infantry, able to carry more/heavier equipment over longer distances (including heavier ordonance). Also, drones.

As far as mages are concerned, I would not expect them to be embedded personel. They'd rather fly recon, provide astral support and interact with physical threats or medical assistance via summoned spirits/elementals.

Mages would thus likely be a fast response team, akin to very fast responding helicopters that can sling spells and summon spirits

At least, that's how I would use them.
Last edited by Jason on Mon Aug 28, 2017 8:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Almaz »

FrankTrollman wrote:
Zaranthan wrote:Can't you defeat ballistic marking forensics with a barrel change?
...

But in most cases, changing a barrel might as well involve getting a new gun. It's not a massive monetary savings to just have backup barrels rather than backup guns. And there just aren't a lot of places you can get a gun barrel that you couldn't also get a whole gun.

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Yeah when a gun costs a few hundred dollars and a barrel ALSO costs a few hundred dollars AND some upper receivers are actually also part of the barrel AND...

The only time a barrel swap is specifically saving all that much money is when you are buying a gun that costs not hundreds but THOUSANDS of dollars, so usually a rifle, and then a barrel swap at hundreds of dollars or a single thousand is actually now a good plan. Also black market transactions can presumably evade many more regulations in a less centralized state future, and there will be many more ways of easily making firearms suitable for temporary or even long term usage soon, so the price of firearms will definitely be lower in the future. They are complex machines but not so complex that they can not be made disposable.
Last edited by Almaz on Mon Aug 28, 2017 9:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

The other important thing is that old-school military firearms are obsolete. Militaries of the future would rather equip their soldiers with Lasers or Gauss Weapons than things that fire 5.56 NATO rounds at things.

The end result is that not only are there a flood of M-16s and AKs on the market, but the demand for such things is much lower than it would be if the US descended into Mad Maxian hellscape today.

M-16s are, for Freikorps of the future, "cheap crap" that they would use if and only if they were not using the higher quality modern equipment for some reason. There's no call to retrofit them for reuse.

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Post by Zaranthan »

Almaz wrote:The only time a barrel swap is specifically saving all that much money is when you are buying a gun that costs not hundreds but THOUSANDS of dollars, so usually a rifle, and then a barrel swap at hundreds of dollars or a single thousand is actually now a good plan.
This was my thought. If your sniper has a tricked out .50 cal sniper rifle with custom optics and whatnot, you might not want to toss all that in a dumpster just to beat some detective work.
Koumei wrote:...is the dead guy posthumously at fault for his own death and, due to the felony murder law, his own murderer?
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Post by Username17 »

Zaranthan wrote:
Almaz wrote:The only time a barrel swap is specifically saving all that much money is when you are buying a gun that costs not hundreds but THOUSANDS of dollars, so usually a rifle, and then a barrel swap at hundreds of dollars or a single thousand is actually now a good plan.
This was my thought. If your sniper has a tricked out .50 cal sniper rifle with custom optics and whatnot, you might not want to toss all that in a dumpster just to beat some detective work.
But a .50 cal sniper rifle is still outdated old tech. It would be like insisting on doing your sniping with a Springfield M1903. It still kills people of course, but there are now objectively better sniper rifles you could be using.

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Post by Zaranthan »

Ah, okay. I guess I missed the thrust of the discussion.
Koumei wrote:...is the dead guy posthumously at fault for his own death and, due to the felony murder law, his own murderer?
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Post by Almaz »

FrankTrollman wrote:The end result is that not only are there a flood of M-16s and AKs on the market, but the demand for such things is much lower than it would be if the US descended into Mad Maxian hellscape today.

M-16s are, for Freikorps of the future, "cheap crap" that they would use if and only if they were not using the higher quality modern equipment for some reason. There's no call to retrofit them for reuse.
This is like saying you can trade an AR-15/M16 for pizza. Maybe a few pizzas. Because, uh, they are already cheap, so to make them much cheaper is... yeah.

Not disagreeing, merely adding context for the rest of the discussion.
FrankTrollman wrote:But a .50 cal sniper rifle is still outdated old tech. It would be like insisting on doing your sniping with a Springfield M1903. It still kills people of course, but there are now objectively better sniper rifles you could be using.
.50BMG can remove limbs in a single shot, but in a world with abundant prosthetics and healing magic, "losing a limb" isn't so bad.
Last edited by Almaz on Tue Aug 29, 2017 11:00 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

OgreBattle wrote:What does a standard military fireteam look like in this setting of cyborgs and wizards?
The key to militarized groups, whether they be police or army, is that they are more expensive than hiring contractors. You could pay protection money to the Yakuza instead of having police, and the fact that you don't means that the riot police has capabilities that the Yakuza do not. Similarly, maintaining a regular army is much more expensive than drafting up a militia, so the regular army obvious provides value that the militia does not.

I would suggest the main factor is armor. Pretty much everyone can get their hands on 20th century firearms that can kill an unarmored person with one shot, and it's not actually that expensive or difficult to outfit people with 20th century military-grade assault rifles that can fire many of those shots in a second. Police are relevant because they have access to armored paramilitaries that can dominate forces with improvised armaments like that. Actual militaries are relevant because they have armor that lets individual soldiers face sustained fire from M-16s without taking casualties.

The 21st century soldier is indiviually expected to take on the role of a World War I tank: armor sufficient to shrug off small arms fire, weaponry sufficient to threaten emplaced positions, and all terrain mobility sufficient to take the battle to places without functioning transportation infrastructure. This because insurgent factions can get up tomorrow and convert any shopping mall or holotheater into a World War I sniper nest with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment and a few suicidally fervent mujahideen.

So basically the fire team is composed of people who have power armor that is capable of pretty much shrugging off 5.56 rounds and also allows each soldier to carry sufficient firepower to at least seriously threaten other people who are wearing similar armor.

The police are equipped with unpowered armor that lets them take a burst of 5.56 rounds without being killed and have access to shields and heavy armor enough that they can either storm a barricade defended by people with old military machine guns or hold a line in the street while they are being fired upon with M-16s from the rooftops.

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Post by Morat »

FrankTrollman wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:What does a standard military fireteam look like in this setting of cyborgs and wizards?
...

So basically the fire team is composed of people who have power armor that is capable of pretty much shrugging off 5.56 rounds and also allows each soldier to carry sufficient firepower to at least seriously threaten other people who are wearing similar armor.

The police are equipped with unpowered armor that lets them take a burst of 5.56 rounds without being killed and have access to shields and heavy armor enough that they can either storm a barricade defended by people with old military machine guns or hold a line in the street while they are being fired upon with M-16s from the rooftops.

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Yeah, nowadays it would be skill, training, and discipline. But in an age where all of that can get installed by chip, who cares?

Which means we're sort of back at the late medieval era, expensive armor is good enough that those wearing it mostly ignore blows from anything that's not a specialized anti-armor weapon. Except moreso, because 2070s suits would be much better at dispersing impact without transferring it to the wearer.

And a lot of protection in combat comes from your opponent having to worry about being hurt. Your fire keeps their heads down, so they only get inaccurate potshots. But if they're in serious armor and your bullets do nothing, then they can just take as long as they want to get the shot. "WWI tank with human mobility" is just death on legs to anything that can't crack it open. Even that, with obsolete weapons..."I've got three shots with this giant heavy RPG to hit a guy ducking and running, assuming his armor doesn't just zap the rocket". Good luck with that.

The other thing about this setup is that traditional artillery is also pretty obsolete. If it can stop 2017 rifle rounds, then very few shell fragments are going to do much. There are guided anti-armor submunition shells now, but even assuming lasers aren't good enough to just KO all incoming shells, 150 years of explosive shells causing 80% of casualties in war is over.
Last edited by Morat on Fri Sep 01, 2017 2:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by maglag »

FrankTrollman wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:What does a standard military fireteam look like in this setting of cyborgs and wizards?
The key to militarized groups, whether they be police or army, is that they are more expensive than hiring contractors. You could pay protection money to the Yakuza instead of having police, and the fact that you don't means that the riot police has capabilities that the Yakuza do not. Similarly, maintaining a regular army is much more expensive than drafting up a militia, so the regular army obvious provides value that the militia does not.

I would suggest the main factor is armor. Pretty much everyone can get their hands on 20th century firearms that can kill an unarmored person with one shot, and it's not actually that expensive or difficult to outfit people with 20th century military-grade assault rifles that can fire many of those shots in a second. Police are relevant because they have access to armored paramilitaries that can dominate forces with improvised armaments like that. Actual militaries are relevant because they have armor that lets individual soldiers face sustained fire from M-16s without taking casualties.

The 21st century soldier is indiviually expected to take on the role of a World War I tank: armor sufficient to shrug off small arms fire, weaponry sufficient to threaten emplaced positions, and all terrain mobility sufficient to take the battle to places without functioning transportation infrastructure. This because insurgent factions can get up tomorrow and convert any shopping mall or holotheater into a World War I sniper nest with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment and a few suicidally fervent mujahideen.

So basically the fire team is composed of people who have power armor that is capable of pretty much shrugging off 5.56 rounds and also allows each soldier to carry sufficient firepower to at least seriously threaten other people who are wearing similar armor.

The police are equipped with unpowered armor that lets them take a burst of 5.56 rounds without being killed and have access to shields and heavy armor enough that they can either storm a barricade defended by people with old military machine guns or hold a line in the street while they are being fired upon with M-16s from the rooftops.

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Then main question is, how well do those armors deal with improvised explosives?

Because as current time terrorrists show, explosions is easy. Technically you can put your soldiers in fancy multi-layer kevlar armor and have them ride APCs, but then they take the wrong turn on the street and hope you weren't needing those legs.

There's a reason modern militaries are really focused on stealth tech and anti-stealth tech. Destroying something is by default easier than making it last, and "destroy it" tech progression has been steadily outpacing "endure it" technology for the last centuries. So the main focus nowadays is spotting up and blowing up the enemy before they do the same to you. Look at drones too. Their armor isn't anything special, but excellent spotting and range capacity get shit done.

So I would expect future military squads to have networks of scout drones or/and really fancy scanners along super powered rifles that can punch through multiple building walls. But if the terrorrists with the explosive belt gets close enough, the fanciest armor money can buy will at best keep you as a comatose body rather than a dead pile of meat. Mobility boosters like jetpacks and grappling hooks would be pretty important too, since it's always harder to hit something that's moving all over the place. Maybe some predator-style holo-camouphlage.
Last edited by maglag on Sat Sep 02, 2017 10:39 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Current terrorists have shown that they kind of suck at bomb making. The Manchester bombers couldn't get their bombs to go off remotely, and they ended up having one of their chucklefucks run up to a crowd of people and set it off himself - dying in the process. The other bombs failed and the casualty totals were quite low. 22 dead in an environment that couldn't be more target rich. For comparison: the Sandy Hook terrorist attack with handheld firearms killed 26 people in an environment that was considerably less target rich. For an example of what you can manage with a terrorist attack on a crowded music venue with firearms, the Orlando Nightclub attacker managed to kill 49 people with a semi-automatic rifle and a pistol.

The fuckups who did the San Bernadino attack managed to kill 14 people with guns before trying to get their bomb to go off, failed to kill anybody with their bombs, and fled the scene. That's not atypical. IEDs get all the fancy press, but you actually have to be fairly accomplished and educated to make bombs that are militarily useful.

The ceiling on a bomb attack is obviously very high. The Omagh bombing by the Real IRA killed 29 people. The Oklahoma City Bombing by "militias" killed 168. But the reality is that these kinds of weapons are hard to deploy. Just shooting people is generally way more effective.

That being said, military power armor is probably sufficient that nearby car bombs just knock you over and hurt a lot.

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Post by Mord »

Whitey domestic terrorists might not be any good at bombs, but the folks over in Afghanistan have been doing a bang-up job with explosives. From 2005-2014, IEDs constituted at least 25% and at most 60% of fatalities inflicted on coalition forces.

It's really apples and oranges, even when we're talking about the same hardware, to try to consider military and police applications in one fell swoop. Are your cyberpunk insurgents more like mujahideen or more like these chucklefucks?
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Post by Username17 »

Mord wrote:From 2005-2014, IEDs constituted at least 25% and at most 60% of fatalities inflicted on coalition forces.
This is true. If you're up against people with body armor that makes traditional assault rifles more of a nusance then you had better figure out a way to attack your opponent while they are out of armor, use bigger weapons, or fucking go home. The Afghanis have tried all three options at various points, with varying degrees of success.

While explosives remain the best of the 20th century weapons for dealing with armored opponents, you still have to get the explosion quite close to the target if you want to do much more than knock them down. As such, rocket-hammers and thermite swords are not unreasonable weapons for insurgents to use. You need to get these combustibles right up into the face of the soldiers you are fighting, which means that putting them at the end of a handle and smacking them with them is about as good as non-military delivery systems go.

Meanwhile, since Wizards are going to be balanced against cyber ninjas, @men, and heavy armor fighters, the offensive output of a lightning bolt spell is going to be comparable to a plasma lance or a gauss rifle. Which means that cults are going to be able to field military grade firepower on their spellcasters even if the rest of the cultists are reduced to running at the fireteams and trying to hug them with suicide vests.

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Post by OgreBattle »

Is there technobabble to explain how the future armor is super good?

Been browsing https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/ ... ur_to_use/

'liquid metal' body armor is a neat idea: http://science.howstuffworks.com/ffw3.htm
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Post by Jason »

FrankTrollman wrote:The other important thing is that old-school military firearms are obsolete. Militaries of the future would rather equip their soldiers with Lasers or Gauss Weapons than things that fire 5.56 NATO rounds at things.
Wouldn't that require lasers and gauss rifles to be just as robust and reliable as conventional firearms? I am looking at field stripping and field repair here.
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Post by maglag »

Jason wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:The other important thing is that old-school military firearms are obsolete. Militaries of the future would rather equip their soldiers with Lasers or Gauss Weapons than things that fire 5.56 NATO rounds at things.
Wouldn't that require lasers and gauss rifles to be just as robust and reliable as conventional firearms? I am looking at field stripping and field repair here.
As Frank pointed out, a laser isn't that complicated of a system when you get down to it plus you don't need any moving parts so less wear and tear. With no smoke/residues being produced, there is no need to open it up for cleaning after a day's work either. A Gauss would be less robust and reliable, but then they would probably be used more as the squad's special weapon like a flamethrower or rocket launcher.

I'm more worried about power source. The main reason why portable (or even vehicle-mounted) gauss/laser weapons aren't viable right now is that you need a lot of power to make them killy, and you simply can't carry that amount of power in anything smaller than a big ship with our current tech.

So if you can mass-produce batteries small/light/powerful enough to feed a personal laser/gauss gun, that's kinda of an engineer's wet dream for solving a bunch of other current limitations and allowing numerous new kinds of gadgets.
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