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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Alien "n" Human Lazers


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One thought I had would be to use battery packs, which act like ammo clips, but they never run out.

 

The trick is to make the human -v- alien's battery packs unique.

 

How? I don't know.

 

For example, the human battery pack could have a large battery size and recharges slowly. You can recharge the gun by swapping the battery packs out and let one recharge while you continue to fight with the other. Or you could boost the charge by plugging it into a recharge unit (whatever or wherever that may be. Perhaps a solar energy collector mounted on a HWP or something less silly...) or maybe transferring the energy from some other power source into the battery pack. The main advantage of the human batteries would be the fact that you can pull off a few overcharged shots but suffer a longer recharge time.

 

Then there's the alien battery packs that has smaller charges but recharges a lot faster. The main advantage being that you can use it a lot more frequently, but not having a large battery capacity, you can't execute overcharge shots.

 

You could even come up with a solution where you plug the gun directly into your power suit and draw off the power suit's energy - for infinite attacking power at the cost of a minor reduction in a few of your power suit's special abilities if you attack too much without resting (loss in carrying strength or perception enhancements (audio/visual) after a continuous burst of overcharged attacks for example). Use it too much and you might just keel over for a short while until you've regained your strength. ;)

 

But, eh, that's just an example. There's better ideas out there.

 

- NKF

Edited by NKF
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One important thing to remember concerning switching power sources is the inherent dangers of such an activity.

 

With a standard, human designed laser, the laser's "power" is actually primarily generated by its focus, rather than its power source.

Certainly, more power allows a stronger beam, but without the necessary focus, this has a comparatively minimal effect - you can't simply have a super laser by replacing the power source, at best, you'd have a comparatively minor improvement - Heavy Lasers would be a "100" rather than a "85" weapon, Laser Pistols would be a "55" rather than a "46", and rifles a 70 power weapon, rather than a mere 60.

 

So for starters, even with Xenium batteries, lasers still wouldn't outclass an equivalent plasma weapon (super heated antimatter fueled blasts of screaming death > focused light).

 

Secondly, and more importantly (and this includes "overcharging" too) would be the focal points of the laser. Lasers produce high amounts of heat, even at their smallest level of output; too much heat, and you start to risk damaging the laser itself, or changing the properties of the lasing material, meaning increased need for heat sinks, better focal properties, better materials.... and possibly even an entirely new lasing agent.

A heavy laser might have enough space inside to accomodate any changes to it, but smaller than that and there would need to be a complete redesign to accomodate variable outputs. As a result, standard lasers and Xenium lasers would likely not be interchangable - a laser with enough attention dedicated to high power output would not have the right layer of lenses, correct lasing agents et cetera, to efficiently project a lower powered beam, whilst a low power devoted model would most likely do something less than desirable with a high power emission, such as melt.

 

 

So, whilst it would be possible to design a high power laser with alien technology (a bear minimum being lasers, xenium, and alien alloys), such a weapon series would require a completely new series of designs and manufacture to create. Given the mentality of a war situation, and the superior utility of the plasma weapons, it seems unlikely that scientists would willingly go down that particular path of research any more than they would start researching "alien alloy bullets" for their autocannons, rifles and pistols - a lot of work, for little overall improvement.

 

Oh yes, and new power-source'd laser weapons would still probably require some xenium and alien alloys to manufacture, c'est la vie.

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Recharging clips - clips that you can reuse from battle to battle. ;) Plus with a variety of power sources to add a little variety(which would have to be retrofitted to work with the lasers - I hadn't thought of that).

 

Since Xenocide isn't going to have an 80 item limit, I'm pretty sure a few extra batteries won't matter - and troops are going to remember what equipment they are carrying, right?

 

One other compromise is to have the guns themselves with an in-built battery but with the ability to add additional battery packs to increase their recharge (batteries recharge independantly) and ammo capacity.

 

- NKF

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I would like to see what could be done about designing an AA Laser. These would be lighter and possibly better for some application(tiny improvement in damage, mostly in reaction/accuracy/strength). However non-Xenium powered weapons would be a desireable state.

 

Now for AA terran weapons, you should be able to research that so you can eventually sell the patents and fund yourself that way. Earth forces could then have a weapon that was marginally useful against aliens(much more against ourselves :))

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