Game Science Weekly: Plasma Guns

If you play videogames (and I guess you do, because you ARE reading this) you have probably seen plasma guns in games. This week’s column is about just that.

I will use the Halo series as my base to how plasma guns are portrayed, but you can find a lot of examples in games and movies. First of all we have the plasma pistol and plasma rifle, they are small, handheld guns that shoot beams of light that seem to be very hot and that, after hitting a surface, dissipate quickly. Then we have the plasma canons, mounted on bases or ships (like the tank used by the covenant), also, the rays that come out in different colors (green in the pistol and purple in other guns).

Alright, now let’s go to the science part of this deal. First of all let me explain what plasma is. Plasma is the fourth state of matter, it is an ionized gas where the molecules are further apart and move much faster than in a regular gas. Since there is a lot of energy, some of it is dissipated as light, that light has a color determined by the emission spectrum of the element in question.

Now this is why you can’t make a plasma gun today: since you need to heat a gas to a very high temperature (some plasma can reach Kelvin) you need a lot of energy, the kind of energy that doesn’t fit into a little handheld battery or even a twenty square feet canon. There are many academic institutions and research labs around the world that produce and use plasma on experiments, but all of them need huge, very energy consuming installations to ionize, heat and contain the gas.

Well, so that is it, I hope that I haven’t broken anyone’s heart by telling you that a plasma gun is not possible today. Maybe in the future we can find ways to produce energy much more efficiently and isolate it so it doesn’t melt your arm and the gun.

I would like to thank the help from Ettore Baldini, a very intelligent physicist that helped me research about the topic.

Here are some nice related links:

Color spectra of all the elements

Wikipedia article: Particle beam weapon

DO YOU HAVE ANY DOUBTS ABOUT THIS TOPIC OR A CONCEPT INTRODUCED HERE? DO YOU HAVE SUGGESTIONS FOR TOPICS FOR A FUTURE COLUMN? DO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE COLUMN? Visit the forums or email me at: glanzetta@gamersdailynews.com