Equipment Locker: Boser Weapons

I've been reading Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space recently and highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys science fiction (and not just because Reynolds is a fellow Welshman). Reynolds' setting is best described as relativistic space opera; spacecraft called lighthuggers travel between star systems at a hair's breadth below the speed of light, their Ultranaut crews genetically and cybernetically modified to endure years-long voyages and repeated hibernation. Inhabited planets and star systems have an array of different technological levels, with the splinter group of humanity called the Conjoiners responsible for ridiculously advanced technology that exhibits Clarke's Third Law. The thing that piqued my attention enough to write a blog post was a type of weapon several characters use in the book, called a boser.

"Boser" obviously has a hint of "laser" about it, following in the tradition of masers, grasers and spasers by making a portmanteau of laser and something else. But what they actually were baffled me for a while. A hint comes during an altercation about halfway through the book on the planet Resurgam, where the beam of a boser is described as "coherent matter". This made me curious enough to look it up and as soon as I saw the words "Bose-Einstein condensate", I immediately understood. For those without the background in particle physics I have, I'll explain below, and give some highly speculative statistics.

If you don't care about the technobabble involved, skip to the section below, which takes the GURPS-style approach of a simple explanation followed by game-relevant information and a table.

All particles can be described as either fermions or bosons. This is to do with an intrinsic property all particles have called spin. Fermions have a spin of ½ and because of this obey Fermi-Dirac statistics while bosons have integer spin (0, 1, 2...) and obey Bose-Einstein statistics. The specifics of where this comes from and what those mean is beyond the scope of a blog post about RPGs but the important thing is that particles that obey Fermi-Dirac statistics cannot occupy the same physical space at the same time. But bosons don't care – two bosons can overlap.

So a slightly less high-concept description now we have the precursor. A laser is basically a way to "pile-up" light – you make more and more photons occupy the same space and have the same phase so their waves all add together coherently to produce one really really strong pulse of light. Photons can do this because they're bosons. So if you do the same thing with another boson, like certain atoms, you have the atoms piling on top of each other, adding their energies together into one much more intense "coherent matter pulse".

Surprisingly this isn't superscience – just TL12. Modern science has given them the horribly inaccurate name of atom lasers and the first one was built and tested in 1993. Just like regular lasers, they have many possible uses. But since we're talking about an often combat-focused RPG, we care about how well they can blow things up. The advantage of bosers is that atoms are heavier than electrons or photons, allowing them to carry significantly more energy. A boser might deliver several nanograms of atoms at a high fraction of the speed of light. Unlike a bullet, all that mass is piled on top of itself, so all the energy is delivered at once. My rough estimates put a single shot from a boser in the region of 2 megajoules, or about half a kilogram of TNT. If that energy is delivered over only a few nanoseconds, its destructive power is magnified greatly.

Unlike lasers, however, the method they inflict damage isn't heat. Lasers damage objects by pumping heat into an area faster than it can be dissipated, forcing it to melt, evaporate or explode. Laser light is absorbed by electrons, whereas a boser beam would be absorbed by atoms. Molecules in the target will shatter as their atoms are barraged with so much kinetic energy that the chemical bonds break, releasing large amounts of heat. A shot from a boser bores a hole in an object, vaporising material by sheer concussive force.

Boser Weapons (TL12)
These particle beam weapons fire bosonic atoms in a coherent beam, the properties of bosons allowing the atoms to overlap and travel in phase, like photons in a laser. In an atmosphere, each shot is preceded by a high-intensity laser to create an evacuated channel for the beam to travel down. On impact with normal matter, the kinetic energy of the coherent bosons rip molecules apart, releasing heat. Apart from power, bosers also need a supply of atoms that can be turned into a Bose-Einstein condensate to form the beam, such as Chromium-52, Strontium-86 or Dysprosium-164, but the amount is negligible and included in the weapon.

Bosers inflict corrosion damage with a (10) armour divisor and the incendiary damage modifier. Their armour penetration and damage beats most other weapons, since the fact they use atomic matter rather than subatomic particles allows them to deliver immense amounts of energy to the target. They're usually used against extremely hard targets, like combatants wearing warsuits (GURPS Ultra-Tech, p. 185), since they can eat away at armour, though most TL12 armour suits have some capacity for regeneration.

TL	Weapon	Damage	Acc	Range	Weight	RoF	Shots	ST	Bulk	Rcl	Cost	LC	Notes
12 12 12 12 12	Boser Pistol Heavy Boser Pistol Boser Carbine Boser Rifle Dinosaur Boser	3d(10) corr inc 4d(10) corr inc 5d(10) corr inc 6d(10) corr inc 8d(10) corr inc	6 6 12 12 12	600/1,800 900/2,700 1,500/4,500 2,000/6,000 4,000/12,000	1.5/C 3.3/2C 5.6/2C 8/Dp 19/Dp	10 10 10 10 1	66(3) 56(3) 28(3) 83(5) 35(5)	4 6 5 7 10	-2 -2 -3 -4 -5	1 1 1 1 1	$6,600 $14,400 $26,000 $48,000 $52,000	3 3 2 2 1

My apologies for the format-breaking table... I'm in the market for a new way to do them since ranged weapons almost uniformly break them.

Post-Mortem [EDIT]
To be honest I rushed this post a lot. It was written in the morning while I should have been packing and I finished it off that evening in a rush to make sure it was ready for the GURPSday pull the next day. So there are a few extra things I wanted to add to clear up some stuff that occurred to me later.

Tech Level
The TL of boser weapons is totally arbitrary. I picked TL12 because bosers were considered reasonably current in a setting that was quite comfortably TL12. But really, they could be anywhere from TL10 to TL12. They should be at least TL10 because they rely on many of the same basic technologies that handheld laser weapons do. My personal judgement would make them TL11 at minimum, since they're at least one step more complicated than lasers. If you use bosers as TL11 weapons, you may want to lower the armour divisor one step to (5), though that does somewhat counteract their main purpose. For TL11 weapons, they are very expensive, so leaving their high armour divisors may well be fine.

Under the Hood
Boser weapons were a remix of existing weapons – I took statistics for gamma-ray lasers, doubled cost, replaced the ranges with that of rainbow lasers, and changed damage from burn to corr inc. Why fix what isn't broken?