What's Your Favorite Fictional Laser Weapon?
I want to hear from Laser War readers.
Every science fiction hero gets the laser weapon they deserve.
In Star Wars, Han Solo had his BlasTech Industries DL-44 blaster, a sidearm that looked as janky and well-worn as the Millennium Falcon. The phasers in Star Trek, by contrast, are sleek and efficient weapons of focused destruction to match the utopian future that franchise creator Gene Roddenberry envisioned. Even astronaut John Crichton’s pulse pistol in Farscape, my personal favorite, reflects the militaristic part of the galaxy that a wormhole dropped him into during the series’ pilot episode. Lasers aren’t just science fiction’s weapon of choice — they’re a Rorschach test for visions of the future.1
To that end, I’ve been asking directed energy professionals the same closing question as part of a semi-regular interview series, and now I’m posing it to Laser Wars readers in a survey. What’s your favorite fictional laser weapon and why?
Take the survey below and your responses could be used in a future edition of Laser Wars:
“It’s not X, it’s Y” is a typical tell for AI-generated writing, but I swear to God this bad line is completely original