ShadowLogan wrote:Hotrod wrote:There actually is a way to reflect a laser back to its source: Take three adjoining sides of a cube and make the inside faces reflective. Any beam coming in along a fairly wide angle will get reflected back to the source (depends on how deep the indentation is). This is how many reflective panels work. Convex mirrors, which is what the armor of a GB is made of, spreads out beams of light, which would reduce the effective range of the reflected beam. As for angular dependence, the art depictions of Glitter Boys don't reflect (pun) that.
I'm just saying that game mechanically the laser resistant nature of the material ONLY reduces damage by 1/2, it doesn't do the reflection thing except under very specific circumstances (ex. trickshooting). If mechanics of attacking a glitterboy (or other LR-material) said (for example something like) "you take 1/2 damage as the other half is reflected like a wild shot, roll to see who gets hit with the reflected beam" I would agree that a Laser Welder might be an issue, but as it is I am not aware of any such mechnaic that applies all the time which would allow someone to laser weld.
You can indeed make a rules-based argument for what you're describing, but there's a letter of the rules vs the spirit of the rules issue here. Combat rules are meant to model combat, and extrapolating them outside of the context in which they're meant to be applied leads to some ridiculous scenarios, like characters shooting themselves in the head with S.D.C. guns to show the bad guys how tough they are, because "it's only S.D.C."
We know that lasers can ricochet off Glitter Boy armor, and that they generally do half damage. Unless you specifically designed GB armor to reflect incident beams back where they came from, having a ricochet combat mechanic is a little silly, as the odds of such a beam bouncing and hitting anything more than a few feet away get very small, very fast, and at those distances, the convex curves of the GB armor would spread the beam out.
A mechanic using a laser torch isn't 10 feet away; he's going to be a foot or so away. He's also not firing single shots (not usually, anyway). He's using it as an industrial laser to cut and weld over a significant period of time. The hazards and risks of such a scenario aren't covered in the combat mechanics of Rifts.