Talk:Flux Rifle/@comment-178.204.51.50-20130718060824/@comment-70.74.181.10-20130720194928

Not if it's a pulse laser. They rip and tear!

From "How to Build a Laser Deathray" - A laser can emit a pulse of light so intense that it causes matter it is incident upon to violently explode. A single pulse can carve a crater out of the surface. If the pulse is fast enough and its energy is large enough, the subsequent blast can cause damage similar to that of the detonation of a high explosive. Alternately, the laser can emit a very rapid burst of pulses, so fast that they land on top of each other. Each pulse enters into the hole dug out by its predecessors, allowing the blaster to drill deeply to reach vital components or organs.

It is likely that to acheive this performance, each pulse will have to be less than a nanosecond in duration. Some modern lasers can emit pulses that are picoseconds or femptoseconds in duration, so this is not a technological limit. The energy density of matter irradiated by these pulses can be higher than the fissioning core of an exploding nuclear weapon, or the fusioning core of a sun. This energy is so high that no matter held together by chemical bonds can withstand it.