Heavy Repeater Laser Cannon
Description:This technology was been developed at Stellar Enterprises to bring new life into the laser cannon. It was accomplished using mostly off the shelf, readily available parts. Using these parts the project took less time and money to complete and also allows the whole system to be purchased at a lower cost.
While it was tried for the first time on a standard heavy laser cannon, the basic principle will be tested and applied to a variety of different weapons systems including point defese lasers, turbolasers, heavy turbolasers, turbolaser batteries, and even ion cannons.
What the system does is turn an energy weapon emplacement into a repeater type of weapon. It allows the use of a single laser barrel to fire three shots in rapid succession with a second of cool down time in between. To keep the fire rate high the coolant was replaced and so was its pumping software. This new coolant system allows the barrel to cool faster than normal. A new sophisticated computer control system was created to time these shots and cool downs perfectly and maximize the weapons effectiveness. This cool down period also gives the capacitors more time to recharge.
In the time it takes a normal laser to fire twice this repeater system could send six or more shots down range. The other advantage to firing three shots at a time is that all of the blasts will hit pretty much the same area or spot on their target, meaning a faster kill. Instead of hitting the shields with one shot at a time, the three successive bolts could strike almost the exact same stop and quickly overwhelm the targets armor and shields.
To fire quickly the system uses three capacitors instead of just one and discharges one after the other to provide the power needed to fire each shot. The older laser cannons used only one capacitor meaning just one shot would be fired at a time to give the capacitor time to recharge for the next shot.
The only disadvantage to the system right now is that its larger. To install this into a ship requires a lot of fabrication work. For this reason it will mostly be used on newer ships that are in construction or in the planing phase of it. It also has a slightly greater power requirment than normal lasers. Both these things limit its use to larger ships since fighters and most bombers don't have the room to spare for them. This might change in the future, however, with newer technologies.
RP Thread: Start of Stellar Enterprises
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