Ah yes, Macross... Loved Frontier, 7 was... kinda slow, but that just me...
Sequals always aspire to be better than the first and almost never succeed... Hate newer prequals based on 20-30 year shows...
Have a question about the Weapons Technology section... (if the creator reads this..?) Just an annoying statement...
The list there went:
laser (ofcourse, understandable)
laser-resistant armor (one want to defend against the same weapons)
neutral particle beam (wat..?)
charged/helical particle beam
defensive screens ( a strong magnetic field aught to do it
)
plasma focus
pulse cannon (pulse what? laser? plasma? heart rate?.. no, found it, it WAS plasma, sorry
)
But if this IS part of the fictive things let's just ignore it, shall we..?
Don't really know how it was meant to be...
The funny thing is that we have had the technology to affect charged particle beams (particle accelerators) about 50 years longer than we have had laser tech.
Neutral particles are impossible to affect, since they ARE neutral. Also why it took so long to find the neutron. To accelerate them you need like gunpowder or something
. Very difficult to make a beam out of it at all. Or you can do what they do today in labs or other places where they need neutrons and other neutral charges (nuclear reactors, creation of deuterium and tritium, etc.). They use a radioactive material that emmits neutron during decay. Not much speed to get from that. But if we ignore that part..
Pros and cons of charged vs. neutral: Charged particles are easy (and cheap) to accelerate (ah, yes the ol' CRT...
) Neutral particles are complex to accelerate (lets ignore price...). Neutrons are generally unstable when alone and decay quite fast to a proton and an electron (beta decay). Charged particles also do more damage than neutral, and have the added bonus of a small EMP effect at the target location (think it was mentioned). Too flimsy an explanation..?
Another fun thing about beams... The faster ther particles are fired, the longer the distance.
So a list could look like:
laser (all ready to go), can be pulse (higher energy) or beam (lower energy)
laser countermeasures (gas (ablative hull?) or a mirror hull if the lasers are within the optical range
)
particle weapons (needs more development), can be in beam (Go Homeworld
) or pulse (Homeworld 2) configurations
defensive screens (if it works for particle weaponry it will work for plasma weaponry)
plasma weapons (same as particles, so it is easy to develop from those), a beam may be dificult since one wish to retain the high thermal energy, so pulse is probably a
logical first step... also agrees with Historians giving the Loroi a "dumed-down" version of plasma tech...
Otherwise I apologize if I came off too... something... with all this pointless comments...
Ooh... just figured out how to actually make a "kind of" neutral particle weapon...