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Theorie

If freespace lasers are light, and the cocpit of terran and vasudan fighters are made of transparent "glass-like" material...

then in theorie, can you fire a laser into the cocpit of the ship and kill the pilot without damaging the ship too much?

I guess... if they really are lasers.
A Subach is a xaser, and the Maxim is just uranium. Those capship blobs are probably plasma (light=fast). Beams are probably light... but then there's the whole "commence plasma-core insertion" stuff, which can mean pretty much anything

The Prometheus is an argon laser, right? It could just use argon to make the light...

Anyway, an x-ray laser should be really fast as well. I guess everything in FS is downscaled in terms of speed

I'd assume that in FreeSpace what you see as a pulse in a weapon is simply the energy spike of the waveform.

A subach HL-7 does fire a beam that travels at the speed of light, but what appears as a pulse is the region of the waveform which is rendered ineffecient by the cannon's shunting off power. (thus it enters the visible light spectrum)

The rest of the ship is just as vunerable as the cockpit which is made of a ferro-fiberous clearplastic alloy. (the cockpit might be stronger than the hull in the case of ships like the Pegasus)

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The canopy propably incorperate a filter in their design that blocks all wavelengths other than visible. the probably also have some type of active polerization system that darkens the canopy for the duration of the blast in order to protect the pilot's vision against lasers, stars, and explosians. also, the sheilds are supposed to stop these blasts before they reach the haul.

Well, if it goes the speed of light, then how come no damage is done until the visible portion hits?

Because the biggest portion of the waveform is the visible part (which is spilling into the visible light spectrum, the rest is just a em wave). So thats the part thats doing the damage.

its not the light thats doing the damage, its the energy in the beam being transfered upon impact. its not the light in the 1 terawatt beam that does the damage, its the 1 terrawatt of energy that makes up the beam that causes the damage. a laser hitting the canapy would not go completly through, just a small portion of the visible section. the energy instead would start melting its way throught the material that the canapy is maid of. if there is a system in place to transfer the energy away from the canopy, than the canopy won't melt. in this case, the beam probably generates heat, if there is a system to transfer some of that heat away, and then of course there is the hard vacuum of space, well then, all you get is a warped spot on your canopy instead of a breach or and explosive decompresion of the cockpit.