Originally Posted by
DrNewGod
One that faintly bothers me is the depiction of laser weapons, in no small part b/c I worked in an industry that used a variety of them extensively.
There's no dodging a laser beam, even if you're light seconds away from it because by the time you can see the weapon being pointed at you, it's too late. Star Trek's usually been a bit better about that kind of thing than most sci-fi, but Kylo Ren shouldn't have made it out of the opening scene of TFA.
Another nasty thing about lasers is you don't dare operate one without eye protection. Several wavelengths of lasers, even otherwise relatively harmless varieties can flash boil the vitreous humor in your eyeballs if you're at all close to directly in front of them. There were (likely apocryphal) tales of soldiers blinded in tests of early laser range finders when the reflected beam came back through the aiming scope.
Which brings up another real downside to lasers as weapons: the closer an object's color to the beam's color, the more likely the target is to act like a mirror and Return To Sender. That's not a problem with invisible wavelengths, like x-ray, but I wouldn't recommend blasting a fire truck with a bright red laser (rolling around in the back of my head has long been a short story that includes a space battle in which the ships' shielding consists of color changing hulls, but, I digress).
Of course, on the other hand, anything transparent, even a force field, is not going to stop a laser, or even be affected by it in most cases. It'll pass thru as easily as sunlight unless the surface contains a substance prone to absorbing that wavelength.