For those of you aware of what Starcraft I and Starcraft II are, you can skip this little forward. For those of you that are unaware, I shall gladly make you aware. The Starcraft games, produced by Blizzard Games, are RTS (Real-time strategy) games that revolve around 3 playable races all battling for survival and/or supremacy. The human race, the Terrans, focus on Marine combat units as their primary offensive, mirroring the modern military outfits of soldiers with guns and protective gear. In Starcraft I, a group of Marines would be accompanied by a Medic, naturally, to keep them healed.
What I’m interested in is the science behind the Medic and how the Medic heals the Marine on the battlefield. The lore behind the Medic is that the Medic uses a thin laser and an anesthetic to perform on-site surgery. In Starcraft II, the aerial replacement for the Medic, the Medivac, operates in a similar fashion. The Medivac is an aerial dropship equipped with a healing laser beam that can fix wounded soldiers on the ground. The lore for the beam is that there are actually two beams at work: a laser-scalpel and an auto-suture, which, when combined, can patch-up all sorts of wounds. The main question, then, is “How do these things work?”. Additionally, if these fantastic elements are a little too bizarre to accept, I’d also like to explore alternative answers to the thought of battlefield healing through lasers.
The Medic uses an anesthetic and a super-hot laser beam that instantly cauterizes wounds. Okay, that makes some sense, since we have recently increased the usage of lasers in surgeries. So, in another couple thousand years, why wouldn’t lasers be able to instantly, deeply, and quickly cauterize a massive wound? What makes this a little hard to accept is the unit it targets most frequently: the Marine. A Marine is clad in thick metal armor, meant to protect the wielder from enemies and to allow them the ability to breathe and fight on foreign planets. They’re combat-geared space suits. How, then, can a laser penetrate armor meant to prevent enemy claws, guns, and lasers from getting though? Any opening the laser could get through to heal the Marine, the hole in the armor would already cause an air vacuum that would most likely suffocate and kill the Marine inside, let alone any physical damage that the vacuum would cause.
Vacuums aside, let’s suppose the atmosphere is hospitable to human life and other carbon-based species, allowing them the ability to breathe. Here, the Medic shooting a laser through an opening in the armor makes sense: if a Marine is wounded and the armor shredded, the Medic can use that same opening to cauterize the wound. Brilliant!
Returning to the original theory, there is a way to make it plausible: the Medic doesn’t actually heal the Marine but instead uses nanomachines to quickly repair the Marine’s armor as it’s being damaged. This stretches the concept a little, but it also fills a conceptual gap in unit design. I’ll leave it to the reader to mull over the nanotech / laserbeam approaches as I still have another unit to talk about.
The Medivac does the job of a Medic, but from sky, away from the immediate dangers on the ground. Additionally, the Medivac offers surgical lasers that can pinpoint and remove anything left behind in a Marine after an enemy attack, e.g, a Hydralisk spine, a Zergling claw, or even a stray bullet.
The problem is that the method of a highly controlled set of twin laser beams being sent down from an aircraft hovering over allied units is very difficult to think about in a practical way. In the game, the Medivac hovers over your units and heals them, as if it were a Medic with engines. This engine-bound Medic, however, has a laser that is shot from 40-50 feet in the air. Theoretically, a laser will not stop once emitted, unless interfered with by an opaque object. This logic would conclude that the Medivac would operate exactly as the Medic does, but from the sky. The same goes for the nanotech repair theory, though that may be weaker from the Medivac due to distance and speed of application. It’s still shaky in theory, but the fictitious elements have certainly taken care to include and utilize real technology and theories.
Both the Medic and the Medivac are interesting cases of science fiction and a potential future of warzone healing. Perhaps the Medivac will be a real thing later on, but instead of sending lasers down to heal units, the units would be picked up, treated in the air, and dropped back off to resume fighting. As for the Medic, we already have such brave heroes on the battlefield. Maybe some lasers could help them someday soon.
– M. B