Reaver Glitterstim
Resurrected Darkness
69
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Posted - 2012.03.27 22:44:00 -
[1] - Quote
Defense of Gatling Beam Lasers:
I saw a lot of you complaining that gatling beam lasers don't make any sense. Here, let me try and explain. Your typical handheld pocket laser runs a steady beam straight off of a slow-release battery. It can do this because it is a very low power laser. Now these laser weapons have their output facilitated by an individual capacitor mounted to each individual beam. This capacitor charges over an extended period of time (say, 3-6 seconds) and then can release that charge in a much shorter span of time to generate an extremely powerful but very brief laser beam. This laser beam has much more penetrating power than the same amount of energy spread out over the full time between shots, because concentrating the energy gives the target's molecules less time to distribute the energy and withstand the attack.
I'm just guessing here, but I would suppose the beam lasers are a pulse laser of sorts like the one I just described, while the lasers actually called pulse lasers fire in multiple short pulses with each capacitor charge, instead of one medium-length burst. You can see this in the firing graphic. The advantage of firing in multiple short pulses would be that you can concentrate the beam even more strongly within each pulse, without overwhelming the firing device or the frequency crystal. One might suppose that special crystals are required to withstand the pulse laser design, and that these crystals don't focus as well, hence the greater damage but shorter range.
So a gatling beam laser or gatling pulse laser would probably just be a laser with multiple crystal apparatuses which rotate and fire individually, giving each one a longer time to cool. Of course, rather than make things overly complicated, CCP made gatling lasers take 1 crystal to operate just like other lasers, and they made beam and pulse lasers use the same crystals. Just like how a 1400mm artillery and a 1200mm artillery fire the same ammo which incidentally is the same ammo that a dual 425mm autocannon fires.
Hope that clears things up.
-á"The Mittani: Hated By Badposters
i'm strangely comfortable with it"
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