- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Chewy Gumball
Maybe the covenant have developed the technology to keep the plasma in a projectile like form? This is a technologically superior coalition here. Anything could be possible.
The miraculously self sustaining containment field neccessary to hold that plasma blob together would need to be several thousand times stonger than steel if that weapon is indeed shooting real plasma blobs that are able to fly in a straight line in atmosphere.
This begs the obvious question; if their shield technology is that good, an elite energy shield should be able to easily shrug off hundreds of tank rounds.
Trekkie
and a plasma gun wouldn't act anything remotely like a flamethrower
Yes it would. Plasma is a superhot ionized gas. The very first thing it's going to do upon leaving the muzzle of a gun is disperse in all directions, pretty much like the Halo flamethrower.
So this plasma must have some sort of magical self sustaining field. Not only that, but the plasma must be dense enough to have an almost level flight path in air, which means it must be close to the density of air, or it'll simply shoot upward like a hot air balloon.
For it to be close to the density of air, it's got to be under a ludicrous amount of pressure to squeeze it that dense. Pressure several thousand times more than the yield strength of good steel.
If the Covenant have the technology to compress plasma to a ridiculous degree, and then generate a magical self-perpetuating force field to keep it compressed, and have this all done by a device small enough and cheap enough to be used as a standard issue weapon given to foot soldiers as inept as Grunts, the war should have been over within a day or two at most. An elite should be able to point at a star system and make it go "poof".
95% of sci fi writers are lazy inept hacks who can't be bothered to think through the logical ramifications of the technology terms they so blithely toss around because they sound cool. A civilization with the tech level to use plasma blob weapons for infantry should be powerfull enough to make a Dalek shrit itself, which the Covenant clearly are not.