I'm writing a story about a group of people on a cargo space ship. They are being stalked by pirates and want to defend themselves/go on the offensive, but lack any weapons to do so. They MacGyver up one of their shuttles with plasma cutters on the outside, which they can control from the inside of the shuttle, which I want them to use to stealthily cut through the side of and board the pirate ship. My question is, would plasma cutters behave differently in space, or would they work the exact same way as they do on Earth?
They should but that is at almost touching range. One side effect: since these work by squirting a gas, that will cause thrust. I don’t know how one could do that stealthily, though.
Like Kira said, since plasma cutters operate by ejecting gas in the form of plasma, this would be a steady thrust away from where the cutters face. And since we're talking about basically a welding torch here, you'd basically have to body slam the other ship so that the cutters could cut, which would damage your own just as much. Another thing, space is a vacuum, there's no friction of any kind to slow down the gas, so it look like a light trail.
