Ships & Modules

I'm just wondering how we all feel about the subject. Some of the Laser modules have a clear recoil animation when firing. As far as my understanding of recoil goes, it occurs from the force of the item leaving the weapon as it fires. With something like light being fired, how realistic is it to have a recoil animation? I personally am against it, and would love others opinions and knowledge on the subject.

Awesome response, thank you.

This can also be taken a bit farther in that, masers and phasers are not actually just lasers, but are in fact (if you follow general Sci-Fi lore as a guide point) actually lasers that are augmented with other things like microwave generators and pulsing magnetic stack coils. These additional parts basically convert a pure laser into a weapon that instead of the laser basically just burning a hole in its target, it carries magnetic or microwave radiation with it to the target, thus using these extra forces like a plasma torch, cutting a hole with the heat from the laser photons super heating, but also from the kinetic and electromagnetic energy of the magnetic waves and the explosive force of the microwave radition... of course this sounds a bit funky even as I write it... anyone with a nuclear physics degree care to clear it up a bit with some actual science?

In star trek vs star wars cat fights in sto I always loved to point out that SW lasers have recoil so they cant be lasers. Got them all wound up. Then I got banned for role playing an EVE spy with a cyno looking for hotdrop targets...

stoicfaux, the Empress in the lore of the Amarr religion it's always been the Empress.

And to be honest, I have never seen my lasers having a recoil effect. But to be fair, I am usually more concerned about other things than my guns doing some fancy things.

Maybe OP can be a little more specific?

If you look at the turrent animation in the information tab, it will show an animation that those turrets do as soon as you come out of warp.

They added that when they made the new turret graphics a while back. So on any turret or missile boat the turrets or launchers go from 'offline' to 'ready' mode the moment the 'Warp drive active' notification goes away.

Did you mean that or did you zoom in on your boat in a mission?

Not to be rude but let's keep real world physics at a grey area or I will bring up antimatter again

Action = Reaction

In fact one commonly proposed engine technology to achieve travel at substantial proportions of c is the photon gun.



Star Wars Blasters are plasma weapons, the lasers are still lasers. Though what exactly a Turbolaser is is another matter...

Not sure where that's coming from... the cannon has been mucked around a lot over the years (and particularly since Disney).

My understanding is that Star Wars lasers are a distinct technology - the use of Blasters of ships and fighters basically disappeared with the early marks of the Z95, probably because the instability of the containment field led to drastic losses in effectiveness even at what would now be termed short range for Ship-to-Ship.

I always enjoy these science/physics based discussions. We argue these finer points as to if they are reasonable or not and yet we travel at warp speed from everywhere to everywhere and never question it. AND I think there are more ships inside Jita 4-4 than it can actually hold - no one ever gets upset over that.

+1 i have thought this many a time, same goes for dixi and amarr,
hek is fine as is i.e. a ****hole.

To expand upon this, a Medium Beam Laser uses 7.22 GJ of energy to fire. Assuming 100% efficiency, the resulting beam of light would carry roughly 24 kg m/s of momentum, about the same as a liter of water moving at 55 mph. Decreases in efficiency would yield corresponding decreases in momentum, with the best modern lasers working at 30% efficiency.

So yes, lasers as powerful as those in eve would produce noticeable recoil.