IIRC that article got merged into the C5 article which did get approved.
This article is a new laser box, which references the previous article which is part of the C5 article. The art is recycled (but that is listed in the initial post), mainly because I didn't want to edit out the laser wigglers and put in the FSC cells and really I'm not sure anyone is looking close enough at this artwork to notice that kind of small change.
Wow, that weapon is way above its damage group in terms of balance.
There are no terms of balance in the DR system, or any rules regarding what weapons can go on what ships. I would love to be able to argue that a ship of a certain size could carry this weapon, but that tool just doesn't exist in the DR rules.
The mods also love pointing out you can't compare your existing submission with a previous submission. So I can't take a look at what is already on the site and say 'hey, this is what we've done before' or 'this is what has been done recently'.
This feels like a primary weapon, sort of like a Plumeria’s MWA which is a big single-shot device rather than an array weapon.
Below is an image of the Tier 12 container next to the Tier 9 turret on the Plumeria. (Finding another Tier 12 weapon with art is hard)
View attachment 15367
The container itself is more than 6 times the size of a single Tier 9 gun, which puts it just in the Tier 12 range sorta. It is hard to say since there isn't a rate of fire for the Tier 9 gun. It is probably more than 1 round a second though, meaning the tier 9 guns probably put out tier 10 damage firing maybe 2 rounds per 10 second 'turn' which equates to a tier 10 weapon under the old system which Fred removed.
You could also fit 20 Tier 14 Sunburn missiles in one container if you want to compare it with higher power weapons.
It's my impression that each of those circles isn't actually an individual weapon but actually just a bunch of emitters that link together to fire a single beam.
Yes, it is a single beam. A laser weapon's effectiveness is very heavily dependent on how large an aperture you have.
That aperture doesn't
have to be circular, but it sure helps.
And with the dimensions of the container, a single large aperture could only be less than 4m in diameter. It makes it a lot easier to have a bunch of smaller apertures to better make use of the space in front. Ontop of that it fits with the design philosophy of having lots of redundant parts so that it doesn't break down easily.
This feels like a primary weapon, sort of like a Plumeria’s MWA which is a big single-shot device rather than an array weapon.
The original idea was to have these as an array and use them as one big single death beam.
I was playing Children of a Dead Earth, and wow, lasers put out way more heat than I thought and I need a lot more radiator space on my ships to use these things. To reduce the heat buildup it makes sense to go back to the DRv2 of the laser which was to have a bunch of low damage output weapons stacked together. Under DRv2 the low SDR weapons wouldn't be able to penetrate shields making it effectively like a laser: Powerful but slower to burn through defenses than a kinetic weapon.
So in the context of the C5 we'd have a bunch of these stacked together which effectively turns it into a Tier 12 machine gun which I think works pretty well for a massive main gun.