Originally posted by truejedi
depends: Can machine guns get through shields? perhaps lasers were invented because of the shields that you could carry around in KOTOR? If solid weapons don't penetrate, perhaps lasers were invented so that warfare could still be carried on.
Melee weapons (read: kinetic attacks) go directly through shields and blasters existed before the development of a personal shield.
With Star Wars tech, it should be easy to propel a slug a few thousand km/s, generating enough kinetic energy to make a turbolaser seem pathetic.
Say you have a 5 kilogram slug, with a diameter of 10cm, traveling at 5 km per second and the target is 1000km away.
You are going to have somewhere around 20000 joules of kinetic energy.
Thats about four grams of TNT in every shot and this is a rather small weapon.
Double Post
(because KMC has a retarded 15 min limit)
If we up the slug to 10kg and 20cm, we get 90000 or so joules instead of 20000.
At 20kg, we get nearly 20,000 joules.
At 50kg, we get almost 50,000 joules.
These are at a modest 5km/s which is possible with today's tech.
Since SW has crazy tech, lets up it to 100km/s and see what we get.
With a 10kg slug at 20cm in diameter, moving at 100km/s with a relative extra 1km/s in relation to the target which is 1000 km away, we get nearly 40 million joules of energy per cm2.
About the equivalent of 130 kilograms of TNT at say a rate of a 100 shots per second. 100 times 40 million is 4 billion. Thats 4 billion joules per second. That's a tactical nuke every second.
And thats with a tiny ass 10kg slug about a little over a foot in diameter (so a really low density slug.)
More realistic would be a much smaller and more dense slug which would pack even more punch, waay more punch.