On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 11:09 AM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> IMTU, turret cannon have a number of shots just like smaller weapons - at
> least on civilian vessels and light warships - because their power comes not
> from direct feeds but from a capacitor. And keeping a set of capacitors
> charged for to long at a time (at that scale of load) tends to wear them out
> early. I find that this lends a bit more tension to the prospect of a fight.
> When do we charge our capacitors? Will charging them too soon cause a fight,
> as the other fellow's sensors officer detects the charging? Who has the
> bigger capacitors? Whose will go empty first?
>

This makes sense, and is nice color. Also adds a fun thing for
dramatic effect: "Charge weapon capacitors!" as part of the role play
of going to battle stations

Personally, I see cap's more as part of pulse lasers but not beam lasers.

An alternative which might be interesting for pulse lasers would be to
have a controlled fusion reaction set up next to a feeder that drops
lasing rods in front of it.
Picture repeating cannon or machine gun based on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
The breech of the gun would have a thing that's a crossbreed between
and FGMP and the mini fusion plants in Book 8.
Forward of that would be a belt-fed chamber that loads lasing rods.
Then a superdense barrel to help channel the energy and make sure it
doesn't leak back into the turret.

This would be kinda neat in that it has people running new belts up to
the turret, and you get a WWII turret gunner on a B17 feel.
It also lets the turret fire when the power plant is offline - you'd
need a feed to light off the mini-fusion, but after that it'd be self
sustaining.
On the other hand, it make for dramatic release of plasma when the
turret takes an internal hit.  Lots of explosions and visual SFX.