In Stargate, the ballistic weaponry was the most effective measure against the Replicators (until they eventually developed the special anti-replicator weapon). Asgard technology was decades ahead of our own, but they had to admit that shotguns were actually better at defending from Replicators than any weapon they had.

Didn't the movie take it a step further?

Guns couldn't get thru personal shields, so they were going to use a bow or throw a spear or something.

But I think Star Wars logiced it away the best. Ballistic weapons take a shit ton of logistics, energy blasters could just be charged by anything electrical.

It's less than an AR15 is worse in a single soldiers hands, it's that a blaster is easier to get into millions of troopers hands and keep them firing.

That 100% makes sense, and once militaries made the switch, it would make ballistic ammo insanely expensive and only used by wealthy bounty hunters, and only then in scenarios where they need the narrow advantage. They'd still default to a blaster.

This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class Dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means: Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space!

ballistic weaponry being treated as ineffective simply because it’s “old” technology

I mean, from a supply chain perspective, it's much nicer to have a weapon that never runs out of ammo and has very few moving parts, especially when you're deep in the field.

Idk if I'd say the problem is that they're "old" so much as they're "solved" (various scifi alien shields tend to be great at blocking ballistics).

And I think that's supposed to go to the existential horror of alien civilizations. Not that guns, specifically, are ineffective. But that humans feel impotent in the face of foreign invasion.

The movie Alien 2 makes firearms ineffective with wave attacks of alien drones running the Marines out of ammunition, for instance. And more primitive weapons like knives and short range explosives risk throwing acid blood back at your face. They're very effective at first, but increasingly useless as the fight drags on.

I always thought they should establish in some of these universes that fabric technology has progressed to the point where ordinary clothing is bulletproof, which is why they need glowy beam weapons. They could've done that in Star Trek, but I guess it was more important to show off Shatner's chest.

To misquote Mass Effect - „Issac Newtown is one mean sonnovabitch“

Now there's an oft forgotten body horror.

Dr wars and Dr trek seem obvious. But Dr gate is an enigma.

Heh, that was a fun episode. I think it was a grenade rather than C4 though...

I guess I don't know enough about light saber physics to know what kind of modifications you'd have to make. But it's a least something a rogue could do with it; nothing's as good as a blaster at your side.

Yield depends greatly on the shield and laser settings. The only reason that one instance goes the way it does is because the shield were set to protect from a single direction, at full power, and the lasers were randomly sweeping the ground at maximum power trying to blindly roast stragglers. The single direction setting on the shield carried the most weight, usually the energy would be roughly evenly divided in all directions. In more standard fights with average shield use and laser settings, you are going to get a blast closer to a fragmentation grenade than a nuke. The biggest problem is it will happen at a completely random point along the beam, so it still isn't an attractive proposition.

Not if you want a compelling plot.

Wasn't that a projectile weapon with a transporter attached?

It can vaporize any unshielded matter if you turn it up far enough.