Photo by: Yinglan
Earth was invaded by aliens in 1877. No one knows because a Kansas farmer single-handedly stopped it.
Horace MacCauley was a former gunfighter. He gave up killing because growing potatoes wasn’t nearly as stressful. He liked to stay sharp though. Horace routinely shot bottles on a horse cart with his Colt Peacemaker.
As he placed more bottles, an alien spacecraft landed in the lawn. An alien emerged. It had huge muscles and blue skin and a tiny little head on top. Horace didn’t know about aliens. He figured the alien looked funny because it was from New Jersey.
Roc, the leader of all Him’oc starships boomed, “Human! I’ve watched your pitiable low-tech gun. My gun is two-hundred times more advanced than yours.”
Horace whistled, “Two-hundred?”
“Yes! I will wager that I can defeat you in a gun fight.”
“If I win?”
“My fleet of one thousand ships will not invade and destroy Earth!”
Horace struck up a familiar gunfighter’s pose, fingers poised. “Then draw, son.”
“Hang on,” said Roc, examining his gun. “It needs to charge up…”
_____________________________
Written for Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers: https://flashfictionforaspiringwriters.wordpress.com/2017/04/17/fffaw-challenge-week-of-april-18-2017/
Author’s Notes:
The Colt Peacemaker is known as the gun that won the West: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colt_Single_Action_Army
EagleAye
Momus News 
he he he…. sometimes the best thing is the old fashioned thing! 😉
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Yep. A common club may be low tech, but it always works, rain or shine. 😉 Thanks Courtney! 🙂
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Ha! Good one. Reminds me of trying to make a phone call around this house…once I finally locate the cordless, that is. 🙂
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Haha! Same here. I really do like my cell phone, when I can find it…when it’s got a signal…when I remembered to charge it… 😉 Thanks much, Christine!
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Nice. The first paragraph draws you in and the last allows you to imagine your own satisfying ending automatically.
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It’s good to know the story worked out so well. Thanks so much! 🙂
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LOL I’m so glad I wasn’t drinking coffee when I read this. I’d hate to have to put on another clean shirt 😀
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Haha! And coffee really burns when it shoots out through your nose. 😉 Glad you got a laugh. Thanks kindly, Lyn!
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LOL. Oops.
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Yeah, a very big “oops!” 😉 Thanks James!
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I get the feeling this was Roc’s fight gunfight. And last…
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Yeah, kinda like a penguin challenging a giraffe to a neck stretching contest. Roc had 200 times better technology, but in gunfighting he didn’t realize he was outmatched by 1,000 times!
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Hee hee! Yup, nothing better than a dose of Dr Magnum’s little copper coated pills for dealing to aliens! 🙂 Joking aside, I gather that – in terms of energy delivered vs area – the common or garden pistol is a lot more effective than any possible hand-held (and battery powered) laser. It boils down to kinetic impact vs the quantity of electromagnetic energy that can be pumped out. The bullet wins. You can’t change those laws of physics…
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Haha! That’s right. It’ll be a long time before handheld lasers are up to par with ordinary guns. And when they are, and perhaps 100 years more advanced, the gunman’s skill set will remain the same. You still have to aim correctly. 😉
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Actually, since the kinetic energy is proportional to the speed squared and only directly proportional to mass, and since a shot from a laser travels at around the speed of light (300,000 times faster than bullet), a laser is probably going to become more and more practical as the batteries get more powerful and will eventually be more practical than a firearm.
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Except that photons have no mass and Newtonian physics don’t work to calculate their momentum. If you solve on Newton’s equations where v = c you get a Ke of 0. The energy of a photon isn’t a product of mass and velocity – it’s defined by its frequency (as a wavicle): the equation is E^2=P^2c^2+m^2c^4 – which was defined by Einstein in 1905 as a kind of warm-up for Special Relativity. Upshot is that, yes, electromagnetic radiation carries energy, but not in the sense of a moving projectile. I really must do a blog post on this because the real ability of a laser to do damage is also a function of time, which allows more energy to be delivered. (“Hey, my Acme Lase-O-Tron really deals to super-heroes.” “Who did you kill?” “Er… Captain Statue.”)
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From what I understand, lasers do their damage by super-heating the target. Do that fast enough and you’ve got an effective weapon. Particle beams or ion cannons use kinetic energy to cause destruction. I think we might have handheld lasers eventually, but until have hand-held fusion power supplies or can squeeze all available energy out of the quantum foam, we’ll be stuck with projectile weapons, although railguns look very promising.
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Railguns definitely show promise – I think the US Navy has one in development. I can definitely feel a blog post coming on about the physics of lasers. And possibly a story about someone who grabbed the laser units out of (let’s say) 1,000,000 old printers and ganged them up as a weapon… (OK, you can see where it’s going – a huge junk pile rippling with sparks and smoke…and that’s just the laser weapon…)
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Yes, the Navy is working on it. Two companies have guns in the offing, but BAE Systems looks like it will be selected. There’s videos available of some spectacular firings.
Well, I look forward to your post on lasers. I always love your science-related posts.
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Hehe, like Nokia vs Samsung:)
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Haha! Very true.
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For such a tiny little head, Roc’s got a pretty big mouth.
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No kidding. He doesn’t have a big mouth anymore, nor a head to put a mouth into. 😉
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Excellent. Loved it.
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Glad to hear that. Thank you! 🙂
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Great take on the prompt!
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Thanks most kindly! 🙂
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My pleasure 😊
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Very well thought out story. So simple yet get me thinking 😊
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I love it when my stories get folks thinking. It tells me I’ve done my job. Thanks very much! 🙂
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So simple yet gets me thinking 🤔
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