Slow Laser

If you see it coming, it's probably not traveling at light speed.

When you turn on a Laser Sight, it immediately shows up on your target. This is because it's a laser and moves at the speed of light. So wouldn't you think a laser weapon would also (effectively) immediately hit the target? Logically, yes; but this is TV, where Hollywood Science rules. Thus, energy weapons move a lot slower than the speed of light (and a lot slower than bullets in the same show) and can be dodged after they are fired. (Occasionally, it's handwaved by the dodger seeing the person aiming at them and going for the trigger, and moving in the split-second before they pull it.) Regardless of a laser's frequency and the medium it's shooting through, it will make futuristic zap noises and be visible (and glowy).

Most of the complaints about laser weapons not behaving like real lasers are because their primary function in TV are not to be realistic depictions of how real energy-based weapons would work. They are merely stand-ins for "real" guns to appease media watchdogs, to establish a show as being futuristic, or simply applying the Rule of Cool. Being able to show the audience who is firing and where is yet another plus, for which the shots can be Colour-Coded for Your Convenience. In fact, the usual "laser bolts" effect looks a lot more like machine gun fire using tracer bullets (which was even colored according to nation, as in Star Wars) and early writers' World War II experiences may have inspired the effect.

For those keeping score, the former title of this trope (Frickin' Laser Beams, which is now a redirect to Energy Weapon) comes from an otherwise unrelated line in the first Austin Powers movie ("I want sharks with frickin laser beams attached to their heads!" - and when they appear in the third movie, they are realistic lasers instead of a Ray Gun). If it's Raygun Gothic, it's probably a Death Ray. When such weapons are used excessively, see Beam Spam. And when they track their target like missiles, see Homing Lasers. Often overlaps with Hand Blast for the user's convenience. See also the Laser Blade, when your lasers are used to cut things at melee range.

Sub-Trope of Weapon Running Time (a projectile's time to hit its target is long enough for things to happen).

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Beam weapons in Gundam, while fast, are frequently dodged when they are fired (in one of the first episodes of the original series, Char Aznable stated very clearly that he dodges where the gun points before it's fired, not the beam itself once it is). This is also because the beam weapons aren't laser beams, but are made up of particles with a considerable amount of mass, called a "Mega-particle", and thus are much slower than the speed of light. See below, and also see Minovsky Physics (the Wave-Motion Gun-grade weapons like the Solar Ray and Solar system are portrayed as traveling at the speed of light; fortunately, Newtypes sense the shots before they fire in Gundam).
  • Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino has commented, in later years, that he chose to use particle beam weapons over more realistic lasers for dramatic purposes, feeling that the invisibility and unerring accuracy of lasers would make for boring combat sequences.
  • Actual laser weapons are briefly seen in Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, which otherwise uses the franchise-standard particle beams. They are depicted as hitting instantaneously and melting armor on contact, and go right through the Planet Defensor barriers of Mobile Dolls. They're not more common because the laser rifles used overheat very quickly when used, even if for a few minutes. This is displayed when they are equipped on Taurus mobile dolls. Several of them end up getting destroyed by their own weapons.
  • In the Universal Century, aka the original Gundam continuity, actual laser weapons short of apocalyptic superweapons have been rendered obsolete by ablative anti-laser coating and Minovsky particle dispersion. It's also stated that beam weapons were found to be more efficient than their laser-based counterparts.
• They are all over the place in the Mazinger series (Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger, UFO Robo Grendizer). Both Humongous Mechas and Robeasts are frequently seen dodging beams.
• Sailor Moon:
  • Sailor Venus' Crescent Beam. It's described as been made of light, but moves far slower. Also in one notable occasion the Crescent Beam bounced on the enemy, regrouped as a ball on his head and then launched a dozen beams on his head (appropriately, this variant was named Crescent Beam Shower), while in another Venus fired a few dozen curving beams.
  • Sailor Star Fighter's "Star Serious Laser" attack. Shown as a beam of light that travels much, much slower than the real thing.
• Transformers: Cybertron actually pokes fun at this in one episode by having Starscream open fire with his laser cannons, point out that lasers travel at the speed of light, and then having Optimus Prime promptly dodge his lasers with ease.
• In Heavy Object, laser weapons are commonly used on Objects for point defense. Due to the speed at which an Object's pilot can identify and react to threats, combat planes have been rendered nearly obsolete as they're in the sky with nowhere to hide and they can't dodge something moving at the speed of light.

Fan Works

• Advice and Trust: In episode 7 Rei fights Zeruel. The Robeast started out the battle shooting a laser beam at Rei, but she dodged it quickly. During the battle she constantly dodged its energy blasts, since when she tried to block them, it almost vaporized her.
  The Angel’s eyes flashed again and Rei threw herself to the side. The beam missed her by bare meters and vaporized another building behind her with a cross-shaped blast.
• The Child of Love: In the seventh chapter shows up an Angel shoots laser beams. Shinji and Rei have little trouble to dodge them or raise their energy shields before the beam strikes them.
• Fate Revelation Online: Lasers are portrayed correctly; Rosalia's glaive exploits her [Light] element to concentrate light into a dangerous beam. It is instant and invisible, with no obvious effect besides vaporizing a large portion of the target. On the other hand, plenty of [Ether] element spells look similar to traditional slow lasers. Since the element is related to luminiferous aether, an obsolete theory on how light works, that kind of fits.
• In Fractured (SovereignGFC), a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands crossover and its two sequels, this trope is in full effect (as to be expected with something involving Star Wars) however the GARDIAN systems of the Mass Effect universe (being harder sci-fi) actually still act like lasers.

Films — Animated

• Over the Hedge: Subverted when Hammy casually outpaces a laser: it's not slow, he's just moving that fast.
• In Turning Red, the bolt of light emanating from Mr. Gao's coin sword takes a few fractions of a second to reach its target. This may be justified as the light being magic however.

Films — Live-Action

• The blasters of Star Wars are not actually lasers (retconned into plasma-casters) and neither are the lightsabers, nor the ship-to-ship turbolasers. The Death Star's superlaser came a little closer to an accurate laser, if only thanks to the enormous distance between it and Alderaan (though one component in the beam is a proton MASER). That said, Attack of the Clones shows off some lasers that do act more like lasers, a constant (albeit visible) beam that appears instantly. And that one Star Destroyer's constant-beam laser in Revenge of the Sith that breaks a Banking Clan Comm Ship (right before a bit of debris from it hits the Star Destroyer). The sound of it was awesome.
  • Said shot was fired by a SPHA-T (Self Propelled Heavy Artillery-Turbolaser) in the Destroyer's main hangar. They notably also are shown shooting a Trade Federation Core ship out of the sky during the battle in the former movie.
• Star Trek (2009) follows the "bullets of light" model: a handheld phaser shoots discrete pulses. The Enterprise itself shakes from recoil as its phasers fire.
  • However, as portrayed through all Star Trek series, phasers are not actually lasers but phased particle beams (called nadions) that occasionally look like lasers. Word of God is that Gene Roddenberry realized shortly into TOS that people who saw the show in 20 years would say "Lasers don't do that" and retconned all weapons into phasers instead.
  • In contrast to most of the rest of the franchise where phasers are presented as beam weapons that connect instantly. They still create shaking on a target when hit though... Err... those are Particle beams. The phased laser is carrying all kinds of hazardous extras for the feds.
• Mostly averted in Congo; the laser has no recoil, travels immediately in a straight constant beam and produces deadly amounts of heat and cutting power. It does, however, include a visible beam, appears to cauterize wounds, and is powered by an unprocessed diamond that was chipped out of a rock seconds earlier. So all the cool parts without any of the hassle or overwhelming gore.
• The Fantastic Four by Roger Corman has one of the most extreme versions. After Doctor Doom fires a laser beam at New York City from Latveria, Johnny Storm has enough time to make a quick statement to the others about "I never could beat the laser in that video game!", catch up to the laser on its way over the ocean, follow the ballistic arc it traces, and then use a bolt of fire as a Beam-O-War to eventually stop it.
• In Blood Machines, the green laser beams of Vascan's gun are not only slow enough that he can curve the beams by slanting the gun, after shooting the beams linger in the air almost a minute after he last fired.
• The laser weapons in Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity are slow enough that Tisa is able to snatch a breastplate off the wall and use it to reflect it back at the robot who fired it.

Literature

• Haruhi Suzumiya: Yuki proves fast enough to dodge Mikiru's Eye Beams, several of the variants which are explicitly lasers. The lasers are portrayed correctly; instantaneous and invisible. Which means Yuki can either move faster than light, or she's cheating by looking into the future and dodging early. It says a lot about Yuki that either theory is plausible.
• Averted in Humanx Commonwealth: One of the few instances of lasers are mentioned as merely one of the many and varied types of advanced weaponry in the stories. They behave much as one would expect a powerful beam weapon to in real life, with speed-of-light travel, cutting through things, etc., and there are lasers for everything from starships to hand weapons.
• David Weber handles this particularly well, especially in the Honor Harrington series (Horatio Hornblower IN SPACE!, clearly acknowledged both by the author and in the series itself). There are multiple fights in the books where technologically inferior ship #1 sends out a radar pulse to try to find ship #2, which is received by ship #2 who then instantly triggers their laser weapon already targeted by their superior technology on ship #1, such that the return radar pulse is received by ship #1 immediately followed by the laser pulse which destroys them, because radar and lasers both travel at the same speed. There's also the aversion to the "clean cut" rule. The lasers in use are so powerful that when that energy impacts the hull of a ship, the matter explodes and sends out deadly shrapnel everywhere. It's why shipboard lasers and bomb-pumped lasers become the primary weapons of space warfare. This also applies to graser, which are gamma-ray lasers.
• In the Hyperion Cantos:
  • Laser weapons work at the speed of light. Unfortunately, space battles take place across such great distances that the enemy ships have to watch the beam crawl across space towards them. While the time it takes for lasers to hit is realistic, unless their sensors work considerably faster than light there's no way they could notice the attack until it hit, and it raises questions about why they don't move out of the way.
  • In one scene, a character granted Super-Speed stands and watches as a beam of light slowly emerges from an enemy soldier's laser gun. While effective at communicating just how fast he can move, it also raises some of the same questions as the above.
• In the sci-fi murder mystery The Patchwork Girl a police message laser is used as the murder weapon. At maximum power it can transmit to a spaceship in orbit, so it's also designed to be used as an emergency weapon if needed. In an earlier Gil the ARM story, someone tries to murder the detective with a hunting laser; fortunately such weapons have been modified to fire in visible pulses of light to at least give the prey some chance. Gil sees the reflected flash in a window and is able to fire back while the weapon is recharging for the next pulse.
• The works of Dale Brown have featured anti-ballistic missile lasers on modified airliners or bombers and ground-based anti-satellite lasers that prove very capable of tearing spaceplanes a new one. There is realism in that the lasers are instantaneous, effectively undodgeable resulting in a Surprisingly Sudden Death, aren't instant-kill but need time to burn through armour and the Kavaznya one at least was supported by a nuclear plant. At one point the operator of a laser on a modded bomber also notes the lack of the stereotypical sound.
• In The Conquerors Trilogy, the Zhirrzh use lasers as their main weapons, whereas humans and other races mostly use missiles and kinetic-based weaponry. The Zhirrzh lasers are instantaneous like Real Life ones, but produce a visible beam. While they can be dodged, that relies purely on luck and reaction lag of the gunners, and only the Copperheads manage to do it regularly given the improved reaction time granted by their cybernetic interface.
• In The Chronicles of Professor Jack Baling, when Jack fires his death ray, not only can he actually see a red beam of light emit from the end of the weapon, he has time to watch it travel from the barrel to his target.
• Averted Troy Rising: At one point, it's specifically mentioned that lasers don't show the beam unless they're going through a debris field or otherwise have things to reflect off of. That said, the beam weapons used by the battlestations are not lasers. It's light reflected and focused from the Sun (and no, it's not possible for it to be that powerful).
• Subverted in Sergey Lukyanenko's Competitors: The protagonist sees lasers on the screen. He then realizes that it must be the ship's computer helpfully adding the lines on the viewscreen in order to provide a visual, as laser beams move too fast to see.
• Despite lasers not having been invented yet, the Lensman series actually has one of their more realistic depictions. Spaceships fight using intense beams of highly focused light which must be held on target and cut through things that aren't protected by forcefields. Somewhat ironically, the most unrealistic part in this case is that the lasers travel too fast, hitting instantly even when at great distance.
• Lasers are depicted very realistically in Iain Banks The Culture novels, although they have long since been rendered nearly obsolete and superseded by much more powerful weapons. This is something of a plot point in the first book Consider Phlebas, in which a group of mercenaries attack an ancient temple which is, unknown to them, built mainly out of mirrors.
• In Line of Delirium, energy weapons are typically either lasers or plasma. Lasers are silent, but flashes are still seen. An interesting case with tachyon weapons, like the Excalibur rifle. Since tachyons travel faster than light, they also move backwards in time, so the weapon fires almost a full second before the trigger is pulled.

Live-Action TV

• Averted in an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, where an enemy agent explains to the immobilized captain that the energy weapon's immobilizing beam moves at the speed of light, and is therefore impossible to dodge.
• Happens in Doctor Who fairly often. Cybermen sport wrist mounted lasers that can be seen flying through the air at their targets. Daleks have them as well, although In Universe these beams are described as electrical discharges that scramble the target's nervous system, rather than straight-up lasers. Even the Time Lords, the most technologically advanced civilization in the universe, play this trope straight, as seen in their battle with the Daleks in "Day of the Doctor".
  • Energy weapon beams actually did travel instantaneously once, but once the special effects budget increased, Reality Is Unrealistic set in and we got the generic "energy bullets".
• Stargate SG-1 takes this over the top. The beam weapons of the Ori Motherships are so ridiculously slow that any ship can easily dodge them, but make up for it by being able to pack such a punch they tear through vessels even with Asgard shielding. Similarly, Goa'uld weaponry tends to be highly inaccurate and are designed mostly to inspire terror in less advanced races. Although that does not apply to everything. The concealed lasers used by their Brainwashed and Crazy zatarc agents hit instantaneously and can go through several bodies at once, as one Tok'ra bodyguard learns when trying to shield his leader from harm. It's very surprising that this technology is not further developed by the humans.
• Star Trek: While they're called "Phasers" and they form a solid glowing line, they hit the target almost instantaneously. They are a bit slower then they should be, however, with a visible (albeit inconsistent) delay between firing and hitting the target. This is explained by phasers being a particle-based weapon. In the technical manual, they are stated as firing a stream of "nadion" particles. Real lasers as weapons do appear very early in the franchise, but beyond that are only mentioned once in TNG, where they are described as being grossly underpowered by current Federation standards of technology.
• V (1983). Not only are the blasts of the Visitors' sidearms slow enough to dodge, if you're in good shape you could probably outrun them.
• Averted in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which has the characters using hand-held laser guns that fire a visible light laser that is a continuous beam that is instantaneous...although it still makes the 'zap' sounds.
• Space: 1999 has what are possibly the slowest laser beams in television history. The beams have a clearly defined beginning and end.
• In Battlestar Galactica (1978), both the hand-held guns and the viper-mounted guns were "lasers". The little red or blue bolts they fired travelled with visible slowness.
  • Interestingly enough, some episodes actually had realistic lasers on the hand-held guns. When they fired their guns, there was a small flash from the barrel, and an invisible laser hits the target pretty instantaneously.
  • Averted in the remake, though most ship-based weapons use tracer rounds that look like your typical lazer bolt.
• Averted in Firefly: The show usually sticks with Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better, but laser weapons do make the occasional appearance. They're shown fairly realistically with a continuous beam that instantly hits its target.
• UFO (1970): The aliens have a laser weapon in their ships. It fires a bolt of energy that travels slow enough for the human eye to see it moving.
• The Orville's space combat falls into this trope with the lasers they fire often being rather easy to track. Those are said to be plasma cannons, though.

Pinballs

• In Laser War, everyone is armed with Ray Guns shooting easily-dodgable laser beams.

Tabletop Games

• In Warhammer 40,000, the Imperial Guards' standard "lasguns" are the weakest of all guns actively used by the series' factions, and they can blow body parts off. How realistically the weapons are portrayed varies.
  • In previous editions, lasguns were actually described as firing a discrete "bullet" of laser energy, described in at least one novel (and portrayed in at least one video game) as a twinkling ball of light that moves at about the same speed as a bullet, if not slower. This has been rectified as of the third edition of the game, so that all laser weapons are now assumed to fire actual laser beams (and are portrayed doing so in Dawn of War).
  • In the 40k novels, what lasguns are and how they work vary Depending on the Writer. Dan Abnett has a sniper having to compensate for wind and gravity, with a permanent bruise from the recoil. Others have had lasguns fire normal bullets, in a bizarre inversion of Family-Friendly Firearms. One mistake all of them do is have the shot cauterize the wound. In real life, lasers would do the same damage as normal firearms, albeit much larger calibers than normal humans carry as the lasers would cause explosive flash vaporization and flash flesh into briefly existing plasma. How accurately this is depicted varies; while "lasguns can blow limbs off" is an oft-repeated maxim, Dan Abnett depicts a lasgun leaving a small, scorched hole bored clean through a character's leg.
  • Lascannons and other larger laser weaponry are generally portrayed more realistically, although the beam is usually visible. Lascannon portrayals also avert the weakness of their smaller 'pew pew' cousins, and are particularly powerful anti-armour weapons.
  • 40k also has plasma weapons, which are typically depicted as behaving more like the classic 'laser bullet' type device — firing discrete bolts of magnetically contained plasma (essentially, tiny stars) at a range comparable to an assault rifle (and color-coded in Dawn of War, with blueish for imperial forces and red for Chaos).
  • 40k also has melta weapons, which are described essentially as microwave beam guns, yet behave closer to how a "real" plasma weapon would: they fire a short ranged 'sub-atomic' heat blast, designed to melt through armored targets and vapourise softer things.
• Lasers in GURPS are represented accurately. In fact, their lack of recoil is a big selling point compared to guns, but can be defended against by reflec-armor. As it happens the Ultra-Tech book has pulse lasers that do fire a "bullet" of light, albeit one that moves at the proper speed.
• Rifts: This trope is played with in regards to the ability to dodge lasers. Energy weapons can be dodged in Rifts, but at a -10 penalty. The explanation given is that the character sees the trigger being pulled, and tries to get out of the way before the shot is fired. A -10 penalty is big enough that player characters almost never bother trying to dodge the blast. One part where this trope is played completely straight is that laser blasts are visible in Rifts.
• Standard in the BattleTech, for both infantry units and the iconic Humongous Mecha. Lasers are rarer for infantry but common as dirt on a 'Mech. They are remarkably realistic for fictional laser weapons: they hit instantly and produce a ton of heat (this being their primary disadvantage to offset their having unlimited ammo), the only strange part being that they're visible. Originally they were invisible and the Battlemech's internal displays made them visible to the pilot, but this was quickly and quietly retconned to them being actually visible for Rule of Cool. Also some adaptations have the more damaging lasers be deeper on the visible spectrum, which is not only Rule of Cool but realistic.

Video Games

• Breed have the lasers used by the titular aliens, which are actually visible and can be avoided by side-stepping, even if the Breeds are less than twenty meters from you. In contrast, your weapons (and the human units) all use bullets, like the machine gun and sniper rifle, which proves far more lethal than the lasers used by the Breeds.
• Averted in Empire at War: Forces Of Corruption gives the Star Wars universe "point-defense lasers" that actually work like lasers, instantly appearing and vaporizing their targets. Just like the laser in Attack of the Clones, they're color-coded a deep azure blue.
• Mass Effect: The Reapers' main weapons, which look and sound like unscientific lasers... aren't lasers. They're actually molten ferrofluids fired at relativistic speeds.
  • Mass Effect 2 also shows the aforementioned GARDIAN lasers in action twice. In both cases the VFX artists went with Rule of Cool in their depiction. In the first instance during the battle on Horizon, Shepard activates the colony's anti-air defenses to drive off the Collector cruiser. Prior dialogue describes them as GARDIAN lasers, but the visuals go with the stereotypical discrete slower-than-light bolts. Much later the Normandy's point-defense lasers are shown firing during the battle with the Oculus attack drones after exiting the galactic core mass relay. This time, they're shown as a continuous visible beam.
• Metroid Prime: Hunters features the Imperialist, a laser sniper rifle, which strikes the target instantaneously, but creates a very visible red beam that lasts just long enough to give away the firer's position.
• The Halo series: The Spartan Laser seems to be actually a pulse laser - that is, instead of the laser projecting a continuous low-power beam, it shoots multiple beams in very quick succession, like a machine gun.
• Marathon (Bungie's pre-Halo FPS series) had all sorts of energy weapons which moved very slowly, and a number of typically near-hitscan bullet weapons. Since there were only one or two enemies with bullet weapons and one or two Cool, but Inefficient energy weapons you could use, this typically added up to you dodging lots of enemy fire and them ending up as bullet-riddled heaps of steaming entrails (when you didn't trick them into starting a fight with the other guy that was standing behind you.)
• In Descent, the various laser weapons travel approximately at twice your ship's velocity and can be dodged-however, the Vulcan Cannon, effectively a machine gun that fires pieces of metal, travels instantly and can not be dodged. (Now imagine the Vulcan Cannon doing much more damage per shot with an equally high rate of fire, and you have Descent II's Gauss Cannon.) Once you get the afterburner powerup, you can travel at the same speed as the laser beams.
• X-COM
  • X-COM: UFO Defense has lasers, which are slower than light and pulse, but they are impossible to dodge as it's a Turn-Based Strategy game.
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown has laser weapons that behave more realistically, producing a single burst/beam of light that cuts straight out and hits the target instantly.^note The laser rifles (normal and sniper) and pistol are not quite hitscan, but rather extremely fast projectiles, as can be noticed when an Overwatch shot with one of these weapons misses at close range: the beam will jet off in a random direction at a relatively slow speed. The Scatter Laser and Heavy Laser are both true hitscan, though. The MEC Trooper's Particle Cannon, the plasma-tier weapon, also acts like a huge hitscan laser cannon with a two-stage beam emission.
• Zigzagged with Unreal's ASMD/Shock Rifle. The weapon's primary fire has always hit instantly, but in Unreal and Unreal Tournament, the beam looks like a slower projectile; the result is the target lighting up with the blast shockwave before the actual bolt reaches it. From UT 2003 onward, the Shock Rifle appears to shoot a typical laser beam.
• The BattleTech Expanded Universe zig-zags on the matter:
  • MechCommander featured a bizarre spin on the matter: lasers move as visible projectiles towards the target (at the same speed as ballistic projectiles), but whether they hit or not is predetermined at the moment they are fired. This results in bizarre situations where firing at a fast-moving target will cause the laser to actually bend, change course, and follow the target until impact.
  • In MechAssault pulse laser shots travel like your average "laser" projectile, while lasers shoot visibly-moving beams. Both types are, at least, as fast as bullets.
  • In MechWarrior 2, lasers are moderately high-speed energy bullets.
  • In Mechwarrior 4, pulse lasers are hitscan, but the appearance of the beam suggests a high-velocity energy machine gun.
  • MechWarrior: Living Legends, MechWarrior Online, and the 2018 Battletech game avert this trope completely. Not only do lasers travel and hit instantly, but pulse lasers actually flicker, unlike previous games where Pulse Lasers were depicted as chained-blobs.
• Averted in Command & Conquer: Renegade, which has perhaps one of the most realistic instances of lasers. They are hitscan, fire in short pulses (with gatling lasers being able to saturate the target faster thanks to its three collimators), and their blooming effect causes the air to be translucent rather than opaque. Perhaps one of the few unrealistic effects of the laser is that on Easy mode, auto-aiming will cause the lasers to turn slightly from a direct line to hit targets.
• Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast has a particularly infuriating version of an actual instant-hit laser being dodgeable. The Disruptor Rifle is actually hitscan on normal enemies, but force-sensitive ones will dodge out of the way in a single frame if you try to zap them with it. The player character is an actual Jedi themselves, but can't block said shots.
  • Handwaved in the sequel Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. They do it with Force Sense in the short time between when you decide to pull the trigger and the actual pulling. But obviously it is to force you to fight them with your lightsaber.
  • Jedi Outcast does allow the player to dodge the Disruptor Rifle shots, if you have Force Speed. It activates Force Speed for the duration of the dodge animation, making it look cooler, and drains a lot of Force Power, so the Computer is still a cheating bastard.
  • In a mission to capture Boba Fett, he is also able to insta-dodge Disruptor shots, with the same animation.
• In the Crusader games, laser bolts are slower than bullets. It's not like the speed of light was actually altered in-universe or anything, but the fact remains that bullets do hitscan damage and lasers fly through the air slightly faster than rockets.
• Space sims vary somewhat, usually for gameplay reasons more than anything else — for shooters, players are expected to have to lead their targets in addition to lining them up, so nearly everything is a projectile, lasers included. 4X games vary, since the player isn't the one doing the lining up and shooting.
  • In the Escape Velocity games, lasers, plasma, protons, and bullets all move about as fast, but a number of special weapons (like the original game's particle beam) move instantly but with a very short range. Some projectiles, though, are faster or slower in the third game: "blaster" shots are fast, with railguns and fusion pulse shots being slower. Weapons described as "lasers" like the Capacitor Pulse laser, Bio Relay laser, and the Thunderhead do hit instantly, but all had visible beams. There were also some non-laser beam weapons that hit instantly.
  • In Endless Sky, lasers and heavy lasers are beam weapons, and unlike EV they're available from the start as standard (albeit advanced) human technology. They hit instantly and thus avert this trope, making them very useful for fighting in dense asteroid fields and avoiding overkill when disabling ships. However, their short range practically makes them melee weapons compared to "blaster" and particle weapons, which are traditional sublight projectiles.
  • In Freelancer, everything is a projectile. The laser and photon weapons just have faster projectiles.
  • The FreeSpace games saddle the player with lasers that fire projectiles. However, capital ships in the second game usually mount "beam" type weapons as their main guns. These are highly visible so that the player has a chance to avoid flying through them and being destroyed... assuming the player isn't in their path to begin with, as they are hitscan weapons.
  • All the Wing Commander games (you guessed it) feature projectile weapon mechanics, even for the "lasers".
  • A different kind of space sim, the 4X game Master of Orion II used lasers as its most basic ship-mounted beams — big red beams. They traveled as quickly as every other beam, and only traveled instantaneously with the "continuous" upgrade, which several other weapons could also use.
• Too Human avoids this, as its laser weapons shoot an immediate continuous beam, which also heats up and does more damage the longer its kept on target.
• Touhou often has these kind of weaponry in Spell Cards. Two notable examples are the slow laser beams rampant in Keine's and Nitori's attacks (from Imperishable Night and Mountain of Faith, respectively), and the laser sight to laser in Mokou's and Patchouli's attacks (from Imperishable Night and the gaiden game Shoot the Bullet, respectively)
  • There are also quite a few instant laser attacks, generally done by having a faint and harmless laser appear for a second or two before the opaque laser that damages you appears in the same location.
  • Undefined Fantastic Object adds Shou Toramaru, whose entire theme involves magic lasers. Aside from slow accelerating lasers, she has spinning laser crosses and lasers that curve in midair to hit you.
• EVE Online has lasers, used primarily by the ships of the Amarr Empire. EVE lasers are visible as solid beams, but do strike the target instantly.
• In Tachyon: The Fringe, the fighter-mounted pulse lasers travel slower-than-light and are visible. Ironically, capital ship-mounted beam lasers strike the target instantly (still visible beam though). To top it off, one of the factions has a railgun weapon, which strikes the target instantly (i.e. faster than lasers).
• In Crystal Quest, the Menace employs "laser beams" that extend and retract like measuring tape.
• Kirby can gain a "laser" ability (slower than light, travels in tangible lumps rather than as a continuous beam); in the words of the ability description screen, "it bounces off walls, too!".
• Star Wars: Battlefront, being a Star Wars game, has the slower-than-light "blaster bolts" we've come to expect. However, it at the same time subverts this trope: sniper rifles and some vehicle-mounted weapons utilize a beam that travels at the speed of light. In the case of the vehicles' beam cannons, it can even be swept across an enemy front.
• Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire is a fully interactive virtual reality experience in which not only do blaster bolts move slow enough to see, they move slow enough that you can dodge them.
• The Fallout games do partially avert this trope, although in a very subtle way involving the recoil: Although you can physically see them recoil back when shot, the energy weapons skill is based on your perception score, implying the recoil is so negligible that you only need to see your target to hit them. Contrast this with the small weapons skill using agility (your natural reflexes allowing you to better deal with the recoil) or heavy weapons using endurance (the recoil being so massive, you have to worry more about passing out from the shock).
  • It is less subtle in Fallout 2, though in the turn-based context, it doesn't really matter that it's presented as a moving sprite.
  • Fallout 3 goes further with the aversion, in having its laser weapons be true hitscan beams, while the two previous titles had them fire the more "traditional" slow-moving bolt of energy. Fallout: New Vegas also continues use of the proper beam lasers.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy: Golbez both averts the trope and plays it straight — Gravity System, Float System and Sector Ray fire out continuous lasers that appear instantly, but Attack System fires out a barrage of small laser projectiles.
• FEAR 2 has a laser gun that averts this trope. It is a constant beam with no recoil that hits instantly. Especially annoying since the enemies can still hit you even in Bullet Time.
• Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere and Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown feature Pulse Lasers that act more like long range, higher power machine guns than proper lasers, firing relatively fast but still definitely slower-than-light blasts that need to lead their targets like machine guns ans electromagnetic launchers. The series also features several planes with a Tactical Laser System that is not a slow laser, but rather a continuous hitscan beam of light.
• Several different varieties of laser are staple weapons in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and like all weapons, have various stats describing how they supposedly work (aside from their flat Attack Value), including Active Medium, Type, and Burn Rate for one meter of steel. The basic laser, the first new weapon you can research in the game with AV 2, is a fiber-coupled diode laser and burns through one meter of steel in 0.76 seconds. The Singularity Laser at the end of the game, with AV 24, is a singularity induction laser using a temporal boundary as its active medium. Burn rate? Relative.
  • There's also the Gatling Laser, Fusion Laser, and Quantum Laser amidst the other weapons.
• There's an arcade Shoot 'Em Up called Strikers 1945. As the title suggests, it ostensibly takes place during World War II. You have a choice of six or so planes to fly against the ostensible Axis powers. Ostensibly because these are WWII-era planes in 1945 shooting these at transforming Humongous Mecha.
• I Wanna Be the Guy has at least one room which rapidly fills up with absolutely huge laser beams coming out of nowhere to reduce you to splatter.
  • It's also the attack Mecha Birdo pulls out after you destroy its antenna.
• Defense Grid: The Awakening partially averts this: Laser towers fire continuous beams that heat up the aliens and continue to do damage after they leave the laser's range. This heat damage is extra effective against the fast aliens, the Racer and the Rumbler. But the tower fires a laser the same color as it: green for level 1, amber for level 2 and red for level 3; in Real Life the green laser would be the strongest and the red would be the weakest.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man 2: Quick Man's stage says hi, infamously Nintendo Hard with its huge screen-crossing orange quick lasers. While sluggish for laser beams, they're still faster than Mega Man. You have only a brief window of forgiveness to try and outrun them before they render one or more routes impassable, sometimes an entire given screen — the game pretty much expects you to die at least once before memorizing them. As such, they're a favorite Kaizo Trap of ROMhackers, even in Mega Man games other than 2.
  • There are strangely few laser weapons in the Mega Man franchise. The only one from Classic is Gemini Man's Gemini Laser, representing both the 'slow-moving projectile' and 'reflection' sub-tropes. Mega Man Legends has the Shining Laser, which creates a beam of damaging light instantaneously, unrealistically limited only by range, which is the game's Infinity +1 Sword. Mega Man X4 has the Aiming Laser, which is also instantaneous in use, but limited by targeting range; X has to target enemies before he can use the laser, and the targeting reticule stays fairly close to himself.
  • The Mega Buster also qualifies, since it's stated to be a weapon that fires "bullets of highly compressed solar energy" which is in essence, a solar-powered laser. The projectiles that the Buster fires are constantly ridiculed by fans for looking a lot like lemons.
• It's worth noting that in the game Scribblenauts you can create a Laser, as well as a Shark, and then put the laser on the sharks head, though it won't fire... unless the shark is on land. The shark will disappear eventually, though.
• In Evil Genius, the mission to steal the giant lab laser is actually called "Fricken' Laser". It is a parody of the spy genre, after all...
• Several games in the 1942 series have lasers. In World War II.
• Ninja Gaiden. The Xbox remake plays this oddly with the apparent laser from the bone demon bird boss Paz Zuu: It traces a path, which then ignites.
• Age of Mythology had light based weapons. Granted they're parabolic reflectors mounted on crocodiles (or in the Atlanteans' case, towers), that concentrate sunlight into beams. And, yes, they DO hit instantly.
  • Taken to extremes in the "O Canada" cheat which grants you a "Lazer Bear" dressed in a Canadian flag. It shoots lasers out of its eyes.
• The Cataclysm expansion for World of Warcraft features a quest requiring you to kill a giant shark with a robotic shark of your own (not surprisingly, this is in the goblin starting area.) What is the robotic shark's primary attack? A frikken laser beam. Yes, they actually include the word frikken in the attack name.
  • Also as a response to one beta-tester's critique of The Maelstrom as not being epic enough, the dev team added a flying shark with a laser beam to the zone. And there's a frickin' dinosaur on top of that shark manning the frickin' laser. And riding that dinosaur is an undead with a mohawk rocking out on a guitar axe.
• Most bosses that aren't fire-based in Sonic The Hedgehog video games are laser-based. In Sonic Colors, the Cyan Wisp can turn Sonic himself into a laser beam, able to shoot through enemies and bounce along electric coils and crystals.
• The Naval Ops series has a number of lasers that can be mounted on warships. They fire in different patterns and colours. Sadly, Beam Spam is difficult to achieve because lasers cannot be fired in salvos like regular guns.
• The "Beam" line of powers in Golden Sun. Available to Jenna's base class in The Lost Age and Eoleo's base class in Dark Dawn.
  • Also, certain weapon unleash techniques use a laser effect.
• Dynasty Warriors - Previous to the sixth game, Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi's special moves involved them shooting ancient Chinese lasers chi beams from their hands.
  • Zuo Ci can also shoot chi beams from his magic paper tassels.
• Samurai Warriors - Kanetsugu Naoe eventually gains the ability to shoot chi beams from his Onmyōdō cards.
• In X-Universe, most of the energy weapons that fire a Painfully Slow Projectile are technically some form of plasma cannon or particle accelerator, but a handful like the Photon Pulse Cannon with its slow moving disco balls of doom are ostensibly laser radiation weapons. The Kha'ak-exclusive Kyon Emitter is the only actual laser, and its effectively hitscan nature makes it lethal to fighter craft. Ironically, while X: Rebirth features more laser-like hitscan weapons, they are explicitly not lasers, like the Plasma-JET LR that fires a beam of plasma.
• Averted in Raptor: Call of the Shadows. Yes, there are three laser weapons in the game (Laser turret, Death Ray and Twin Laser). However, they are all instant-hit weapons, similar to real lasers. Your best bet was to not be in front of it when it fired: whether from you or foe, there was no real lag between fire and impact.
• Vega Strike among all weapons mountable on a small ships has lasers doing the most shield-piercing damage at the longest range, which makes them attractive even despite total damage being less than by other weapons for the same mounts. It also has a Shout-Out with a weak plasma weapon shooting slow red bolts named "Laser" which according to its own in-game description is "not a laser by any stretch of the imagination".
• Portal 2 features the "Thermal Discouragement Beam." It behaves exactly like a real laser save for being highly visible, passes through glass, and can be redirected with "Discouragement Redirection Cubes". It's also one of only two ways (in the player's control) to actually destroy a turret, but it's surprisingly non-fatal when the player touches it — it won't kill you but it hurts enough that you can't simply walk through it.
• LittleBigPlanet 2 has the creatinator power-up which can fire different kinds of elemental lasers among other things.
• Team Fortress 2 has several Ray Gun weapons (colloquially recognized as simply "laser" weapons), and all of them fire energy projectiles that are significantly slower than bullets. Some weapons are able to keep pace with projectile weapons (Soldier's "Cow Mangler 5000" fires plasma particles that travel just as fast as the rockets out of his normal launcher, and Pyro's "Manmelter" fires projectiles that travel faster than their normal Flare Guns), but with the case of Soldier's "Righteous Bison" sidearm and Engineer's "Pomson 6000", both are vastly slower than a simple shotgun.
• Night Trap downplays this. Sure, there are laser guns introduced at first, but only a couple characters have them, and they are still unable to win against the Augers. Also, SCAT comes into the scene with real guns, which are able to take down Augers...but not full-fledged vampires.
• STAG from Saints Row: The Third use laser weaponry for both their infantry and their vehicles.
• Serious Sam:
  • The series' XL2 lasergun fires non-hitscan lasers.
  • Some enemies fire slow laser beams as well. Examples include minor biomechanoids, octanian troopers and orcs.
• Shatterhand has a bot that shoots lasers.
• In Stealth Bastard, laser beams are one of the main obstacles. They're also fired by enemies.
• Sword of the Stars has both the Hollywood bolt lasers and Beamers that are continuous beams.
  • Interestingly, the sequel has revamped the damage system, and the pulsed lasers are no longer as weak as before. Each armor section has a pattern. That pattern is damaged differently by different weapon types. For example, mass drivers provide more damage overall but don't provide much penetration. Lasers specifically do a lot of damage to the armor in one spot. If they manage to hit that spot with a laser multiple times, then the armor at that spot will be gone, and subsequent precise shots will do internal damage.
• Kaos' Undead Spell in Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure summons harmless targeting beams that quickly turn dangerous if you stay in their path. Some of the Skylanders themselves also use laser beams, being either earth-types with a Power Crystal theme or tech-types.
• Warzone 2100 has two kinds of lasers - laser turrets and the Laser Kill Sat, both depicted as rather slow moving - the turret lasers are depicted as projectiles (despite there being a rail gun in the game that is depicted as somewhat beam-like) and move slightly faster than machine gun bullets, but they are homing projectiles, with an 80% chance to hit, while the Laser Kill Sat is depicted as a cone of fire descending on it's target area.
• Star Ruler has lasers as a weapon choice. They use continuous beams, are instant-hit and do not need ammo, unlike kinetics. It gets ridiculous when you research them to where their range is measurable in AU (~8 light-minutes/~500 light-seconds) and STILL hit instantly!
• One of the allied units and several enemy units in Alien Hallway have guns that fire laser bullets.
• Aqua Rhapsody, despite taking place entirely underwater.
• Each of the three sides in Earth 2150 has a unique Energy Weapon (with the Lunar Corporation having an extra one). The Eurasian Dynasty has lasers, which fire bright red beams that hit instantly. However, unlike a typical laser, it doesn't do any damage. Instead, it rapidly heats the target until the target's power plant or ammo stores explode. If the beam is interrupted, the target quickly cools down with no damage. Building are almost impossible to destroy with lasers, as stone has a higher melting point than metal.
  • Earth 2160 has ED use the bolt version of the laser that does damage on impact.
• Sins of a Solar Empire has at least three kinds of lasers. A number of TEC and Advent frigates have pulsed lasers, a typical example of a slower-than-light bolt. The TEC Kol-class battleships are also armed with heavy orange laser beams. Pretty much all Advent capital ships Beam Spam bright blue laser beams. The Radiance-class battleships have an incredibly powerful (and bright) laser beam the size of the battleship that pulverizes almost any target. Even Advent bombers are armed with hitscan lasers. Some Vasari capital ships get Pulse Beam weapons which fire a brief beam that hits instantly. Naturally, there are Game Mods that add even more options.
• In Conquest: Frontier Wars, the Terrans use pulsed lasers, while the Celarions use both the pulsed and continuous beam versions. Interestingly, the beam version doesn't stay in one spot but keeps moving across the target, slicing it.
• Nexus: The Jupiter Incident has a few kinds of lasers. Most often, they are used for Subsystem Damage, lacking the firepower necessary to damage shields or the hull. Later on, lasers become more powerful and do inflict small amounts of damage. The flak system uses thick criss-crossing laser beams pulsing (not a "pulse laser" but a laser beam pulsing) and completely automated, targetting missiles, torpedoes, and fighters. Fighters are also initially armed with lasers and can't do much beyond Subsystem Damage. Battleships are equipped with Siege Lasers, which can One-Hit Kill most ships... if they stay in one spot for about 30 seconds necessary to charge and fire the weapon. Also, while charging and firing, the battleship and three other ships are unable to move or fire weapons, diverting most of their power into the Siege Laser, which is the only weapon capable of taking down a Fortress Shield.
• Silent Hill had a few, each obtainable by getting the UFO Ending:
  • The first game had the Hyper Blaster which could also be obtained by plugging a Konami Justifier into controller port 2. It came in three flavors, and each one was essentially a handgun, shotgun, and rifle with unlimited ammo.
  • Silent Hill 3: Heather Beam
  • Silent Hill: Origins, which was a Lethal Joke Weapon with overwhelming power and unlimited ammo, but a ridiculously poor range.
  • Silent Hill: Homecoming had the laser pistol which broke the game wide open and could kill bosses so fast it could cause glitches.
• Silent Storm has energy weapons developed by Thor's Hammer and fired either out of a bazooka-like handheld weapon or using a specialized Panzerklein. The green beams travel almost instantaneously and cut through everything like butter, even Panzerklein armor. Their plan is to launch a Kill Sat with an upscale version of the weapon to threaten the world and force its capitulation. One extremely rare random encounter involves a UFO with a number of THO Panzerkleins roaming the area. Near the UFO you can find a more compact rapid-fire energy rifle that looks almost exactly like the laser rifle from the original XCOM. The implication is that THO reverse-engineered the tech.
• Star Fox: All over the place, starting with the Arwing's main weapon.
• In Super Smash Bros., both Fox and Falco use slower-than-light laser pistols as their Neutral-B special. There's also the Ray Gun item that anyone can pick up. All of them can be deflected if you have fast enough reflexes and/or enough distance to see it coming (especially Falco's blaster which is slower than Fox's to make up for having more power). This became especially noticeable in the later games when Bayonetta and Joker were added, as they both use guns with actual bullets that nevertheless hit faster than Fox or Falco could ever hope for.
• Sunrider: Every single mecha and ship seems to have some form of laser-based attack.
• Borderlands features Eridian weaponry. Most of these fire slower-than-light energy pulses of some kind (though averted by the sniper rifle equivalent, which is a Lightning Gun), but are never explicitly stated to be lasers. Borderlands 2 brings us E-Tech weapons, however, which are described as things like lasers, particularly the Blaster range of E-Tech rifles. As expected of the trope, however, they are all fire blob-shaped energy pulses with obvious travel time, sometimes ending up even slower than standard bullets. The reason they still use up ammo (at twice the going rate even) is due to the guns somehow turning standard cartridges into energy projectiles. The saving graces of increased damage, elemental properties, and pure Rule of Cool keep them from being just novelties.
• Beam weapons in Space Pirates and Zombies fire what look like variously-colored lightning bolts with limited range that hit instantly, which contrasts with the (also energy-based) cannon weapons, which fire spherical projectiles. Non-energy based cannons fire various other things.
• Starbase Orion has two types of lasers and one laser-like weapon. The standard laser turret is usually the first weapon to be researched. It's fairly weak but has a long range, although damage drops with distance. The beam is instantaneous (and hitscan) and visible, appearing for about a second. The point-defense laser system automatically shoots down enemy missiles and torpedoes in range with thin instant beams. Ion pulse cannons are not lasers but their animation certainly looks like one. They appear as thick white beams that are also instantaneous and hitscan. After the recent update, the IPC also bonus structural damage if it hits a shield.
• StarCraft has comparatively few lasers: The first game had the Wraith and Battlecruiser's weapons which fired a single laser bullet at a time, while the Protoss Scout had "Photon Blasters". The sequel's Protoss have continuous laser attacks, from the Sentry to the Void Ray (which does more damage the longer it stays on target, and carries over to the next one).
• WarWind has a few elite units equipped with laser weapons, which do considerable damage and have a long range of attack. The latter advantage makes them very useful in softening the advancing enemy before he reaches your main defence force, especially when you place the laser-equipped unit in a watchtower.
• The aptly named laser in DownWell.
• All laser weapons in System Shock 2 fire slow prismatic bricks which you can dodge gracefully with a sufficient agility stat.
• Lasers in Star Wars Battlefront (2015), in Star Wars tradition, are brilliantly visible for all to see and far slower than light. Specifically, the laser bolts from Chewbacca's bowcaster are so slow that a person can step aside and dodge one as it heads for them.
• The Corpus from Warframe is Origin System's leading producer of weapons of The Future: boxy gadgets that recoil madly as they shoot bolts of plasma or somesuch travelling at subsonic speeds. The few laser weapons they produce that behave like actual lasers tend to suffer from cripplingly short ranges; trying them on targets more than 20 metres away is usually an exercise in futility (not that they aren't useful, though; the Amprex is very good at crowd control thanks to its Chain Lightning properties).
• Kurt and Max in MDK2 can find and use laser weapons, shooting laser bolts travelling at subsonic speeds. Their enemies also use similar weapons, making dodging their attacks easier than it could be.
• The "laser" weapons in FTL: Faster Than Light shoot bolts of energy that spaceships can dodge by maneuvering or even intercept with advanced defense drones. Weapons that behave like actual laser weapons, shooting a beam that cannot be dodged and only absorbed by shields, are classified as "beam" weapons.
• In the Bloons Tower Defense series, the Super Monkey can be upgraded to fire laser Eye Beams (and in later titles, sun rays). These projectiles are nowhere near the speed of light, to the point where they might sometimes miss if the bloon is fast enough and moving perpendicularly to the attack at a long enough range.
  • The Laser Cannon upgrade for the dartling gun shoots slow laser projectiles. However, it can be further upgraded into the Plasma Accelerator and the Ray of Doom, which are both solid, instantaneous beams (although the former cannot travel past the targeted point).
• Persona 5 Strikers: Sophia's blasters shoot oddly slow projectiles, though they make up for it with a wide area of effect.
• The Laser Cannon in Quake Mission Pack 1: Scourge of Armagon fires laser bursts that are only about as fast as a nail, much like the laser rifles of the Enforcers.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2: A plot point; when Jin activates his Super Mode, Mythra uses her Kill Sat Siren's laser beam. He dodges, because he's moving at just under lightspeed, and her "laser" is actually a particle accelerator; it's fast, but not lightspeed fast. Pyra then uses Siren's targeting laser to threaten to destroy herself. It does move at lightspeed, and the only difference between a targeting laser and a weaponized laser is the amount of power you put into it.

Webcomics

• Khrima in Adventurers! loves laser beams a little bit too much... make that ''far'' too much.
• In Sluggy Freelance, Riff regularly carries a laser cannon around whenever it looks like trouble might be brewing.
• Subverted in Schlock Mercenary as most of the characters, with the exception of Sergeant Schlock who prefers a plasma cannon, tend to use projectile weapons. The reasoning for this is explained in the footnote for This comic.
  • In addition, most ship to ship combat seems to involve missiles and gravitic weapons, despite them having lasers, as well as masers, plasma lances, and railguns.
• Gunnerkrigg Court has laser cows. They're just like real cows, only with lasers.
  "Elsie" 113: Auditory response: Moo.
• A laser appeared in Jayden And Crusader which moves slowly enough for one character to leap in front of it yelling a Big "NO!"
  • Shooting out her frickin' arm!
• In the future of S.S.D.D., buckminster fullerene armor has made conventional guns obsolete. However handheld lasers are ridiculously expensive, over 30 times as expensive as a coilgun or solvent-grenade launcher.
  • And then there's the Black Rose Plasma cannon, which looks like a flamethrower but fires a plasma stream that burns straight through fullerene alloys. Unfortunately it has a tendency to explode and has a reputation for killing more of its users than enemies.
• Galactic Maximum: The opening fight.
• In Minion Comics the minions are given a plan: "Run in there and shoot lasers everywhere."
• In Bob and George, the Yellow Demon can shoot lasers in some forms.
• The demon Baphomet in 8-Bit Theater:
  Pronteran #1: Look out, he's using laser eye beams!
  Pronteran #2: But we haven't invented lasers yet.
  Baphomet: WE HAVE!
• In Mass Effect 3: Generations, Tali has suddenly gained twin combat lasers (not targeting or anything canonical) to the side of her helmet, and the quarian spider husks have cannons firing large green beams not resembling anything found in actual canon.
• Starslip: Parodied with Katarakis' slow laser, which is so slow that he tells a minion who has failed him to hold still for a few days so it can hit him.

Web Original

• Teh internets brings us IM'A FIRIN' MAH LAZER! and PEW PEW PEW.
• In These days, they seem to be Ayase's attack of choice.
• Cracked mentions a home made laser gun^note  that is, buying a bench-top laser and battery pack in a $2000 USD kit, which could then probably be mounted on a rifle grip in their article 6 Things You Won't Believe Are More Legal Than Marijuana and a weaponized laser pointer in 5 Deadly Sci-fi Gadgets You Can Build At Home.
• SCP Foundation
  • SCP-2099 ("Laser Shark Fetuses") are some deformed cycloptic baby sharks apparently engineered by Dr. Wondertainment to be demented kid's toy versions of the sharks of the Trope Namer.
  • SCP-2099 ("Brain in a Jar"). SCP-2099 has invented 713 different types of laser gun, all of which he keeps in a bin labeled "713 different laser guns". He has also invented a pistol that fires out highly concentrated X-rays (i.e. an X-ray laser pistol) that is powered by two AA batteries and focused by a common quartz crystal.

Web Videos

• The Nostalgia Chick shows off this ability in her Top Ten Dance Crazes list, burning her BFF Nella's shoulder.
• Exaggerated in this video from Corridor Digital. While the laser is devastating enough to vaporize anything it touches, it moves so slowly that it has to be shaken out of the gun and can be dodged by simply stepping aside. This doesn't stop a Too Dumb to Live victim from getting barbecued and the inventor getting arrested for it.

Western Animation

• Justice League:
  • Sinestro is irate that the energy from his ring can't touch the Flash. The catch is while the ring's constructs and projectiles are that fast, Sinestro isn't.
    Sinestro: My beams are as fast as you are! Light speed!
    Flash: Yeah, but you don't think that fast.
  • Also, Superman in "Kid's Stuff":
    Kid: What are you gonna do? You're just a kid.
    Superboy: [zaps the ground by their feet with his heat vision] I'm the kid with laser beams comin' outta his eyes. [the kids flee in terror}
• In every episode of Code Lyoko, the monsters that XANA sends normally shoot laser beams from various parts of their bodies. Some have other type of attack, though, like Bloks (which in addition to lasers also can shoot ice beams and rings of fire).
  • The only exceptions to this rule are the Scyphozoa (which use memory-draining or mind-controlling tentacles), Sharks (which shoot torpedoes in the Digital Sea), the Kalamar (which uses a drill) and the Kolossus (which can sufficiently destroy anything just by walking over it or slashing with its arm-blade).
  • Also, the materialized monsters that XANA created on two separate occasions in Season 2, namely Kankrelats and later Krabes, though the latter destroyed the Scanners upon materialization due to sheer size, were able to shoot lasers. Unlike in Lyoko, these lasers are actually very dangerous, and almost killed a few people. Fortunately, the attack was stopped and Return to the Past'd Just in Time.
• Somewhat standard equipment in Kim Possible, especially in A Sitch in Time (in a Bad Future). Due to Non-Lethal Warfare, it never hits anyone human. Drones, on the other hand...
• In Monster Buster Club the kids have these as well, but they don't work like conventional lasers. Instead, when hit, the enemy would then be sucked up into the gun, into a little cartridge thing the kids could remove and place in something that looks like cold storage until the authorities come to take them away.
• Parodied in Aqua Teen Hunger Force when the Mooninites fire laser beams at ATHF. The beams move very, very slowly.
  • Frylock's Eye Beams, on the other hand, don't.
  • Also parodied with the Plutonians attempted to trap Shake in a laser cage. They turned out to be harmless disco lasers.
• Jonny Quest TOS. In the episode "Mystery of the Lizard Men'' the villain had one that was visible, moving at a VERY slow speed. It was so slow that the ship's captain could see and report it coming, and likewise Dr. Quest could order his crew to move a mirror to intercept it in order to reflect it back and destroy the enemy ship.
• Metalocalypse - Dethklok had acquired a Soviet planetarium laser light-show machine for a concert - unfortunately their adopted ward Fat Kid played with it, and it ended up cutting a philharmonic orchestra in pieces.
• Ecto-beams in Danny Phantom are Hollywood laser or plasma weapons.
• Surprisingly, laser beams did travel instantaneously in Street Fighter.
• In the Superfriends 1973/74 episode "The Shamon U", one of Dr. Shamon's devices is a giant laser that he uses to fuse space gold dust into gold meteors. The beam clearly travels slower than the speed of light.
• The Herculoids. Used by Zok (from his eyes and tail), by one of the title characters in the episode "The Gladiators of Kyanite" (in the form of a laser spear), and by the title opponents in "Laser Lancers".
• The Magic School Bus: In "The Magic School Bus Makes a Rainbow", Miss Frizzle builds a pinball machine operating with light and prisms to teach about color, with the light moving gradually as if it were an actual pinball. The "Is This The Magic School Bus?" segment admits this clearly isn't how light works, but their hands were tied.
  Caller: There's no way you could have a light pinball machine like the one you showed. Light travels way too fast.
  Producer: Okay, so we fudged it a little. But if we didn't slow down the light, you wouldn't be able to see it move.
• The New Adventures of Superman
  • "Luthor's Lethal Laser". Lex Luthor uses a laser gun based on the moon to threaten to melt Earth's polar icecaps unless all of the countries on the planet surrender to him.
  • ''Luminians on the Loose". Lex Luthor uses a laser telescope to bring the title creatures to Earth (and later to send them back).
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Very powerful unicorns, as well as Changelings, are capable of firing these from their horns. The next stage is a continuous beam moving at light-speed.
• Skysurfer Strike Force has a lot of lasers to go around but Bioborg Lazerette is the greatest offender.
• Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths and Legends: The Alliance has a lot of these, thanks to all the alien technology they use.

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