Yes, but if they can make the weapons themselves sturdy enough to not fly into a million pieces when you shoot them, then why can't they make the tanks sturdy enough to resist weapons hundreds of times more powerful than those?

What pissed me off about Vanquish was that there was NO DEDICATED MELEE WEAPON!

That analogy is false. Computers can be miniaturized, all the way down to the Beckenstein bound. Firearms cannot, and it's all due to simple Newtonian physics. Even extremely powerful weapons like the Lahti L-39 quickly became obsolete during WWII as tank-makers packed more and more armor onto their hulls. An L-39…

Not all AKs are equal. The receiver is built from a stamped piece of sheet metal, making them incredibly easy to manufacture. For all we know, the AK that blew up was built in a mud hut from scrap steel and sold for a few dollars.

Oh my god, somebody else remembers that game! :D

Sure, some sort of graphene composite might be able to handle tremendous mechanical stresses, but what about the wiring and circuitry between the capacitor banks and the railgun itself? How would it carry a current of over a couple hundred megajoules without exploding and yet remain portable?

Railguns have a couple advantages over ATGMs; the projectile cannot be defeated by countermeasures like Active Protection Systems (Trophy, Quick Kill, etc.), and the time between fire and impact is almost instantaneous, improving accuracy and decreasing the time it takes to eliminate a threat and proceed to the next…

I think people sometimes forget that science fiction is supposed to be about, well, you know... science. Besides, you don't need to violate the laws of physics to create an incredibly impressive weapon.

Don't even get me started on the non-Newtonian flight mechanics of spacecraft in fiction. We'd be here all day. For the record, you need reaction mass to change your velocity, and there's no such thing as a "top speed" for a spacecraft, since there is essentially no friction in space. You are limited only by your…

Another video, showing the capacitor banks. They're the blue box-things mounted on those steel racks. At the beginning, various projectiles are shown.

Okay, how about this? This is the most powerful railgun in the world. It has a muzzle energy of 33 megajoules. Look at the size of it. Look at the size of the power cables leading into it. Try and imagine the monstrous current that they have to carry. The capacitor banks alone take up an area the size of a small…

An electrolaser based on the LIPC principle effectively creates a tiny, artificial lightning bolt, like the lightning gun from UT '03. Electrolasers are different from most directed-energy weapon technologies, in that you can actually build one that works. In principle, it would be quite similar to a taser without…

Bolters actually fire 19mm rocket-propelled projectiles with a small initial boost, so there's no reason why the recoil should kill anyone. In fact, with how heavy they are, they should be completely recoil-free, just like the Gyrojet pistol that they're based on.

I've said it before and I'll say it again; if it's powerful enough to kill the user with recoil/radiant heat alone, it is also powerful enough to turn itself into shrapnel the very first time you pull the trigger. There are limits to what you can do with the elements in the periodic table. The guns that we use today…

No, I've never really considered joining the military. That job requires a sort of monomaniacal discipline, endurance, consistency and unfettered zeal that I lack. They don't want people who can swing chunks of metal faster than the eye can see once or twice before losing interest. They want people who can make their…

X3:TC? That game was my bitch. I profiled it for my Saitek X52 Pro and went around using my HOTAS setup to dominate everything in my way.

Of course it's not a game. If I sense that my life is in danger, I'm going to take immediate action to rectify it. I'm not going to just stand around in plain open sight and surrender to an armed opponent. I'm going to wait for the right chance to strike undetected, and then lash out like a rattlesnake. Your whole…

It's a fuel injector, just like the kind found in your car, only it's for an engine that weighs about ten times as much as your car and puts out 5000 horsepower. When the plunger is compressed by the cam lobes, it shoots a spray of Diesel oil at about 3000 psi.

I'm 5'6" and 216 pounds of solid muscle. Here's me hitting a milk carton and a plastic Sterilite tote with that EMD fuel injector I was talking about a few comment threads down (because someone said I couldn't swing a four-pound piece of steel faster than someone can dodge). I was using about 50% of my strength,…

I've got two of 'em. One of them's an original 1391401 model, but it's in the other room hooked up to a different desktop computer. The other one is a Unicomp Customizer 104 reproduction of a model M, but it's much lighter because the steel backplate is thinner. The keyboard I'm typing on right now is a Metadot Das…