Aetheric Beam weapons
The sale, maintenance and manufacture of Aetheric Beam weapons is primarily controlled by Yamataian government. Any unauthorised use is strictly illegal under Yamataian guidelines. In many nations, it is a felony to operate an aetheric weapon within an atmosphere.
There are many types of aetheric beam weapons but most follow a relatively simple idea of compressing the contents of an aether generator into a high-energy volatile degenerate state (instead of feeding off its energy potential as electricity) then using scalar repulsion to direct the output at a target to violent effect.
As the round leaves the barrel, the gauge-boson lattice carrying the force-potential of the shot stops vibrating and it rapidly begins releasing its photons, rendering the shot visible, usually white or pale blue and then shifting through the spectrum to red as the number of photons rapidly drops.
With no wavelength and no grip on its own photons and an equal number of X and Y gauge-bosons (resulting in a neutral charge), the shot is no longer affected by electromagnetic or scalar fields and aether beams will freely pass through each other with zero displacement or repulsion.
Often, a round can be seen triggering nuclear decay of the gasses it travels through in an atmosphere. The huge release of heat leaves behind a tunnel of superheated plasma giving the illusion of a larger beam and deals secondary damage to targets.
On impact, the effect of an aetheric beam is devastating. At first, the lattice-arrangement is broken and the huge energy potential stored is unleashed. This usually destabilises the nucleus of a physical target, super-heating it. Often a beam will pass cleanly through the target, should it possess sufficient mass and velocity. Despite the damage, this is of course not the intended effect.
The real damage comes from the degenerate-state of the gauge-bosons, triggering matter to collapse on itself. In fact, it can trigger a chain-reaction leading to total annihilation of the target.
Some beam weapons alter the lattice as it leaves the barrel, either further stabilising it into a spherical pellet rather than a beam. While this offers many advantages (reducing its surface-area and so it doesn't leave as much of an observable plasma trail, making evasion more difficult, higher round velocity) -- pellet shots are typically much weaker than beams and lack mass, making them less effective against larger targets such as starships.
An example of a 'pellet' style aetheric beam weapon would be the Aether Gatling Rifle (
https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=st ... ling_rifle), a weapon which uses multiple barrels to discharge an extremely high number of shots. While technically weaker, the high number of shots strikes multiple points on a target (rapidly chipping away it rather than directly piercing it) and is much easier to re-aim once firing, unlike an unwieldy particle stream which must be aimed before the shot making the Gatling Rifle more practical in high speed combat.
