I spent more hours than I care to admit yesterday studying laser guns, why they mostly suck compared to normal guns, and how one might design a less-awful laser gun given 10-20 years of better tech progression.
Discussion
In my book draft, some guy needs a laser rifle for a specific purpose, and the guy giving it to him is like āthese are pieces of shit man for reasons x y and zā but the other guy explains why he needs it anyway. And then I had to figure out what the gunās details realistically are.
Love this! Esoteric details in fiction can be so much fun
I also dabble in lasers. 
I'm not just playing Fallout, I'm studying lazurrrrrs
Are you leaning to space opera or more of a hard SF novel? I think there was something in the Lensman series, which is a bit of both, describing laser weapon issues. Iāll look it up.
Neither. Near-term on-earth sci fi. Canāt call it āhardā per se since some characters have telekinesis. Psionic abilities have always kind of been the sci fi version of magic, although in this world they are bound by conservation of energy and other details even though the underlying mechanism itself canāt necessarily be explained in rigorous hard sense.
Cool, I'm definitely reading it. Is this near-term future on a bitcoin standard, by the way? Is there any good SF writing out there with bitcoin playing an integral role? I havenāt been able to find any.
Iām drafting a short story currently where Bitcoin and the bitcoin network is so ubiquitous that people barely know theyāre using it or how it came about.
I thought about it and decided that bitcoin exists in the story but is like the size of gold at that point. Really big and common, but major fiat currencies still exist so far. Because the military industrial complex exists in the story, and hasnāt been de-fanged of its seigniorage yet.
Iām surprised that there hasn't been any substantial fiction predicting the possibilities and future applications of bitcoin. I feel itās an incredible building block for an imagined future on which to overlay a story. Something like Iain M Banksā The Culture.
Be sure to add your own visionary concept of what laser guns could be irrespective of current technology.
It may eventually serve as a futuristic prototype for potential capabilities we havenāt thought of yet prompting new ideas and proof of concept.
IMO laser guns and railguns have the same basic problem: gunpowder is way more energy-dense than batteries
Maybe if you had some sort of mini nuclear reactor in the gun you could make such weapons work
Fundays Sundays :)
What do you know that the rest of us donāt? š
You obviously think the world will continue to exist, but that weāll want to have laser guns.
How worried should we be?
This makes me want to talk about how smart of a military-industrial-complex art project the original Halo Combat Evolved was before Microsoft flushed the Halo series down the toilet.
Everything was based on concepts from consulting actual military R&D experts.
They set up this really interesting fictional conflict where the smaller side (humanity) gets a fighting chance by using ballistic weaponry for concentration of force, while the larger side (space alien empire) uses lasers and stuff for efficiency.
It makes sense, the larger side could have gotten that big after empire-building behavior caused them to be limited by the laws of thermodynamics (can't get out more energy than you put in) so they decided to shift focus from firepower to efficiency, saving resources and mass for more people and vehicles and other equipment while continuing to spread as far as possible throughout the galaxy.
Meanwhile, Earthlings are depicted as having overcome our greed and developed a tactical advantage by focusing on defense instead of offense, equipping ourselves with enough traditional weaponry to compete with a seemingly superior force. It's an inspiring vision, especially since it has a stamp of approval from the war criminals that run the world today, while it's a depiction of humanity overcoming today's bullshit, and surviving because of it.
Follow-up thought: it's really cool how a lot of this boils down to basic mathematical laws.
You could simply say the big alien empire uses photons as their projectiles because they have far lighter weight than other projectiles, allowing them to be transported further for expansionism.
Meanwhile, more mass is known to directly make a projectile more effective, and the humans can afford to invest in the extra mass to use ballistic projectiles in our defensive sphere of influence.
God himself has a simple equation for all of this, but humans get a glimpse at the concept through artistic creativity.
TOOK MY KIDS TO THE DENTIST AND THEY USED AN X-RAY GUN....
Yeah. Still just Laser cannons that really are at all effective.
I hope you checked Atomic Rockets. I lot of work has done there for SF writers.