system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[General] Why don't more sci-fi settings use smoke grenades to counter laser small-arms?
gpt
I used to play laser tag at a place that had a small fog machine so you could sometimes see the lasers when you shot across the room. The fog didn't diminish their effectiveness in the least, and those were just laser pointers. An actual laser rifle or pistol would fire an incredibly more powerful beam, designed to blast through armor and flesh and cook people's insides. A little smoke in the air wouldn't do anything to stop a proper laser round.


Potentially, you could develop a grenade that releases a dense cloud of extremely tough, reflective materials, but to even stand a chance at diminishing the power of a laser round the particles would probably have to be as large as motes of dust, which wouldn't stay in the air very long. If you were able to keep large hard objects floating in the air around a grenade then you've probably developed an interesting enough technology that it would be wasted on trying to bring the heat of a las beam down by a few degrees.


In all, it's easier to just develop better armor than to using little tricks that require more effort for smaller gain.