Sci-fi Writers Guild Forum

Well, Snpr could have been compensating... After all, he was more or less 'just' a First Generation BioAndroid at the time so he didn't have... anything... at all at the time. ;)

Laser Guns are the lowest class of optical weaponry I've used (excluding Paladin Point Defense Lasers) and offer high fire rate in return for low power. As a carrier, the SwarmCarrier wasn't built to go frontline, at least until the Charlie-Class version was built, with the prototype for the E-Beam, the E-Baby. (Consequently, the E-Baby was upgraded to be a mass-produced model, and is now used primarily for planetary attacks because of the much smaller diameter, thus less area of effect and exponentially less splash damage beyond that.) With the advent of the Delta-Class, the SwarmCarrier became true to its technical name "Imperial BioAndronian Empire BioAndronian Aerospace Engineering Shipyards Self-Sufficient Battle Carrier Vehicle Model 77 Mobile Weapons Platform" and took that self-sufficiency to greater heights: frontline and solo operations. Being based off the huge Alpha-Class Armoured Barge didn't hurt, and thus it had a 144-foot thick deck plate from the beginning, which served to hold the E-Beam or hundreds of missile silos depending on the model, and the primary bridge in all cases. (SwarmCarriers have one mobile bridge embedded in the deck armour, which can retract halfway back and is protected in that state by dozens of heavy blast doors. It also has a small one just above the massive hangar door, and a third behind the hangar in the command complex, in the event that both bridges are out of action. The deck bridge has its own climate and atmospheric control, and the tunnel it travels in has little air in it, to allow for much less friction during emergency pullback, but still let anyone inside a crippled bridge unit escape to the hatch it falls into, halfway through the armour. (Unfortunately, after that its a two kilometer sheer drop, and if the small energy shield covering the hatch is down, any human would die violently either through suffocation, catastrophic loss of pressure (hello spontaneous human explosion) catastrophic hyper or hypothermia. (If the hangar has been opened, it has no air. If the SwarmCarrier is in decent range of a star, and not in a shadow, there is nothing to rests the heat of the star, so one would boil alive in a second. Conversely, if they were in a shadow of some sort, one would freeze just about as fast. As humans are used to pressure exerted on their bodies, they naturally counter that pressure. If all that pressure were to suddenly vanish- much faster and more violently than a sudden decompression in an aircraft- they would not be able to stop exerting outwards pressure in time, so they would literally blow themselves apart. If you biol alive, you're atoms all over the place. If you freeze, well, you could remain whole, or be a weirdly bloated statue.)

Next up after Laser Guns are Laser Batteries. These are the middle class of the basic Laser family, and offer a balance between fire rate and power. They range between a bias of either one depending on settings and model, but generally its about even. (Oddly enough, you will never find one that is even. Commanders and gunners always saw that kind of setting as a huge waste. Take a proposal to even the settings to Rear Admiral FLKN, and you might not see the light of day before he's done chewing you out. He's very much a perfectionist, and can barely tolerate the fact that the human component- mainly their randomness- is actually quite a deciding factor in much of an ACVs operation. He puts up with his almost entirely human crew (a first for a Ninth Generation BA naval officer, they usually have minimal or none whatsoever) just barely at times.)

After that comes Laser Cannons, the reverse of Laser Guns, and varying like Laser Batteries in actual settings. Very hard to use an an anticraft weapon, but there are handfulls of elite gunners here and there, usually on more dedicated Battleships which forgo typical anticraft defenses and depend on their Laser Cannon gunners to work both the antivessel and anticraft roles. Laser Cannons, on some more extreme settings, are borderline Class I Turbolasers!

The next family is a family of two, the Turbolaser family. Class I is the true-to-inspiration version, largely based off of Star Wars' Turbolasers, and offer even lower fire rate than the average Laser Cannon, but even more power. (As well, the 'ratio' of RoF loss to Power gain is much larger.) Class II is true to name: a fast-firing yet still powerful Turbolaser. These can be compared to low-end Laser Cannons with the firing speed of a 'slow' Laser Gun. This is achieved through a more complex energizing system than the Laser family weapons, requiring a much heavier mounting. Only standard Light Cruisers and above would be able to mount these as secondary weapons in any number, and only a Destroyer with significant structural reinforcement, would be able to mount a few. (A Naval-Type hull would only be able to mount one due to how the hull handles recoil forces, which is to say, it doesn't handle short-distance, high-strength, rapid recoil forces which often effect one or two times while the first recoil force is still going. Two would rip the Destroyer apart; Naval hulls are built more for the slower-firing, longer recoil of physical guns, and are better suited for the lower-strength recoil forces of Laser Guns and Batteries, which require little to no reinforcement of mounting areas, rather than a complete rehaul of half to all of the vessel. They can use Laser Cannons as main armaments without reinforcement, or as secondaries with some more extensive reinforcement than a Battery. Naval-Type Frigates, on the other hand, can only use them as primaries, as they lack the strength- and often room on their flanks to put reinforcements or even the gun itself.)

After that come the 'superweapon' types of Laser weapons, the most expansive family of weapons, highly varied, and mostly existing as placeholders because I haven't designed much of them at all, and thus way too long to really give examples. (Other than the Genesis' fire cannons would fall under this category, albeit very loosely.)

Then come the Plasma family, another base family of two, Plasma Cannons and Plasma Artillery. The Cannons were the mainstream 'superweapons' before what would later be called the Laser family of superweapons were in great numbers, and much more powerful. Lobbing great projectiles of energized plasma, they can tear through most normal shields, and their varying frequencies make them hard to defend against period: they can impact at the same frequency as Laser family weapons, Turbolaser family weapons, both, or in extremly rare cases they can register as Kinetic-class impacts. (The terror of all early ACV commanders, as early Kinetic shielding was horribly weak, and lacked the strength to go through an asteroid belt or withstand a heavy bombing without failing at least once, much less take a full-on Plasma Cannon shot.)

Plasma Artillery was previously only available as fixed emplacement weapons, such was their recoil. (The physics of that are sketchy, but I decided that was early history, and I ain't backing down from that. I'll figure out how best to explain that rather gaping hole in physics someday.) With the advent of the Juggernaut Cannon- even if it ultimately failed as a weapon- this class of weapon was finally available to ACVs, starting with the towering behemoth that is the E-Beam. Firing an even larger energy shot, the focus of these weapons is not around the energy, but rather the payload inside: these shots were the first true hybrid of energy and physical technology, and made great use of space junk and garbage. The E-Beam forms an energy ball of sorts around a collection of physical objects, often junk or assorted explosives and fires it, in this case, through a series of three energized plasma stations, which serve as accelerators and cooling units- they energize the deenergized plasma projectile to speed it up, and than eject, cooling the massive barrel. (it should be noted that the E-Beam is an unsurpassed feat of technology: energized plasma acts to transfer energy to its deenergized counterpart, but at the same time, it acts like a magnet. This is a problem, because not only will either one try to connect with the other, the union is a naturally occurring semblance of what an antimatter torpedo does; when the two meet they react explosively, the strength of which depends on the difference in charge (at low differences it is very safe, however) so the E-Beam could be said to be an accident waiting to happen. If the coolant canisters were ever to fracture, or not eject their contents fast enough, the whole thing would blow up rather spectacularly. I include not ejecting fast enough, because it energized the projectile plasma through the canister- it is still trying to attract itself to the ball, and if it isn't shot out, it would without a doubt break free of the clamps and fling itself at the projectile- or simply fracture the canister in trying to do so, with the same effect. On a similar note, that would, however, take a while to do, as the canisters are rather thick. One can tell when it is time to replace coolant canisters when the sensor at the tip of the barrel is displaying a firing speed quite higher than the speed it reported during the test-firing, when it received its last replacement.)

The Juggernaut Cannon was like the E-Beam, but so powerful there was no recoil canceler powerful enough to stop it. The E-Beam was based off of this, and offers a scaled down frame that retains most of the power with much less recoil. The J-Cannon was then redesigned to be the E-Beam's counter-recoil unit, and is now known as the Juggernaut Engine. Despite the engineer's attempts to perfect it, the Juggernaut Engine is still quite powerful, and thus it is suicide to sit behind a SwarmCarrier about to fire its E-Beam; however much it has been weakened, it is still powerful enough to emit a weapons-grade pulse. (This engine also gives the SwarmCarrier its unique shape, turning it from a big rectangle, to one with a huge pyramid on the end, made out of engines.)