Proto laser tech

[Arthanor]

Out of curiosity, where does all the "this colour laser does that" info come from? Are you in a secret US lab doing research on laser weapons? 

It looks to me like they're all light, yellow no more or less than any other ones. Red is light at the longest wavelength we can see, purple at the shortest, and the others in between. LASER means "LIGHT Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation", it's an acronym, for a special kind light/light emission. I don't understand why yellow specifically is so bad. It sits right in the middle of the spectrum of visible light.

Your groupings are also weird:
Purple and red sit at opposite extremes of the visible light spectrum, yet are both long range, low damage?

Green is in the middle, so sure, if you want to go from one side of the visible spectrum being long range/low damage, the other short range/high damage, then green is the medium range&damage. But you have both extremes as long range/low damage so.. middle should be short range/high damage?

Yellow is between red and green, but somehow that's the wavelength where everything falls apart and it can't damage anything?

Then blue, between green and violet, but shortest range and highest damage?

If you had violet as your short range high damage, going to long range low damage as you get towards red
(so range ~ wavelength; damage ~ frequency), that could be an interesting model. But then your squad with laser weapons will shoot rainbows and from a game aesthetic perspective, I don't like it. I like to keep lasers as is. My improved lasers (Actually the Elerium Optical Effect Lasers mod, which I tweaked) shoot red beams, because it reminds me of Star Wars blasters.

I just checked a few laser cutters (never done that before!) as an approximation to a (bulky, super short range) laser weapon and their wavelengths vary. Some of them are even in the infrared (CO2 laser cutters, 10.6 um) and entirely invisible. But that would be super lame for a weapon.. I wanna see the beams when it makes pew-pew!

[HelmetHair]

Visible and invisible lasers are not mutually exclusive based on equipment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-electron_laser

The best lasers that XCOM would have and probably build would be a free electron laser(FEL). Lasers of this type can be tuned across a HUGE swath of the electromagnetic spectrum and it would stand to reason that they would be adaptive to the conditions and enemies present. So it would be whatever color(s) it would need to be at the moment it need to. Infrared to X-ray based by the analysis of onboard electronics Of course the limitations on this technology are the power source, but MEH it is X-com and we have Elerium-115 for that.

I always wanted a laser weapon that had different settings. So I could spray down a field with IR and start a fire doing a tiny bit of incendiary damage but providing light or safer zombie killing. I also always want a police baton and Zipties in Xcom for beating the shit out of civilians or aliens, it does stun damage AND fatal wounds

-HH

[Arthanor]

Interesting.. Lasers being independent of colour makes more sense to me, I was just curious about where the claim came from.

Indeed, laser weapons with various settings would be interesting. Sadly, the only way to do that with the rules would be to change clips (all clips can be infinite, that's no issue.. but swapping clips is really expensive TU wise). You could then have incendiary lasers, damage lasers, stun lasers (see Mechtoid mod, it has the ElectroLaser, a pretty cool idea). AP or Plasma lasers don't quite make much sense though.

[XOps]

I couldn't get infinite clips to work completely. Well they do work in that you get infinite ammo for the mission you are on, but the the game still counts the clip as having been used so you lose the clip at the end of the mission. Theoretically each mission should eat one clip since the game recycles ammo I think though I haven't tried this with multiple clips yet. Don't know if this still holds up since that was several nightlies ago.

[Arthanor]

Oh..?! I actually hadn't tried that, but it's good to know!

One that would be cool is for a weapon to itself have infinite ammo and not need clips, but still allow clips, which would then be used instead of the "Default Mode". Haven't tried that either but I assume it doesn't work since it is a bit wonky. You could then have your normal laser rifle, but charge a "Super Power Pack" in, and now it fires 100 times the energy, making an explosion on impact! or "Electropulse Power Pack" and it turns into the equivalent of a Mechtoid Electrolaser (Stun by lightning!).

Aah.. OpenXCom, the game you can dream about all day!

[NoelBuddy]

I couldn't get infinite clips to work completely. Well they do work in that you get infinite ammo for the mission you are on, but the the game still counts the clip as having been used so you lose the clip at the end of the mission. Theoretically each mission should eat one clip since the game recycles ammo I think though I haven't tried this with multiple clips yet. Don't know if this still holds up since that was several nightlies ago.

This could be explained as them having enough charge that you don't need to track it in mission but they need to be recharged/replaced afterwords.

[XCOMFan419]

The way I see it, this mod will turn out like how XCOM 2012's Long War Mod handled lasers. Regular old lasers and then Pulse Lasers, which did slightly more damage and had more critical chance.

Now the way I see this going is that ProtoLasers are kinda the regular lasers in longwar. Expensive at first, do slightly more damage than rifles, and you plan to make them heavier. Lasers will be more like the Pulse Lasers, which are more refined, do more damage and stuff like that.

Not like doing it End War style is bad or anything. I kinda thought of the same thing a while back.

And yes, Pulse Lasers vs Lasers are a thing. The way I see it, Lasers in this game are Pulse Lasers, firing lasers in tiny pulses of high power and then little power and then high power and so forth. A real laser would be like the ones in 2012, firing a continuous beam of light.

[Arthanor]

This sounds a lot like the regular lasers and Elerium lasers we already have. Many ideas also delay lasers and give time to shine to alloy ammo. Besides making early lasers heavy, what's the difference?