ShadowLogan wrote:It bears mentioning that Political lobbying or political philosophies may also be a factor here without any actual technical rationale or need/desire by the forces themselves.
Per the RPG, and Tommy's stance on the animated continuity, the political arena after the 1st Robotech War was mostly for show and had little or no actual power or influence to speak of. That would seem to make this rather unlikely.
ShadowLogan wrote:I am assuming their would be proper use procedure, but the weapon does appear to be man-portable. Maybe not like an M-16/AK-47 is, but certainly man-portable like some guns are with teams.
I doubt it, honestly... it may be man-portable in the sense that it can be carried by an unaugmented human, but firing that cannon would cause severe injury to the user. Guns with less than half the muzzle energy of that railgun (most notoriously the PTRS-41 14.5x114mm anti-tank rifle firing KKV rounds) had an unpleasant reputation for breaking the user's arm and/or shoulder, collarbone, etc. when fired, even when braced with an anchored bipod. A gun developing better than twice that muzzle energy as a rapid-fire weapon is going to send the operator to the medics unless it's on a stationary ground-mount or carried on a recoil-compensating powered suit.
RiverJack wrote:Well for starters Lasers are Particle beams because photons are a particle.
Both in real-world applications, and in science fiction in general, laser technology does not fall under the umbrella of particle beam technology for a variety of reasons. For the purposes of our discussion, and as a simple fact of the terminology's use in the real world, a laser is not a particle beam.
RiverJack wrote:Most people don't realize that or that Photons do have mass.
Photons do, in fact, have mass... but their mass is so infinitesimally small compared to other elementary particles that they are, for all practical concerns, considered to be massless.
RiverJack wrote:Once you get into they higher end Laser you'll notice that they do cause thermal Kinetic damage. But like I was saying Lasers really are the most power weapon you can have a non-Laser Particle beams can never be more powerful because of the way the weapon it self functions, they are essentially basically Rail Guns that fire particles.
I'm afraid you may have some very, VERY severe misconceptions about how a laser functions. Laser technology relies upon the optical amplification and collimation of light, the photons themselves are not accelerated electromagnetically. On many forms of laser technology, electromagnetic forces are used in the stimulated emission process, but that's all. They are not, in any way, shape, or form, relatives of railgun technology the way particle beam technology is. In a particle beam emitter, electromagnetic and/or electrostatic fields are used to accelerate particles to relativistic speeds, conveying large amounts of kinetic energy to the target. A railgun similarly uses electromagnetic force to provide acceleration.
RiverJack wrote:Right now the most powerful Laser being built is capable of destroying the fabric of space. The UK or EU will be using this for experiments in space.
You may be being misled as to the efficacy of lasers by the high-powered ultra-short pulse research lasers... which have a high peak power, but are only capable of producing a beam for a nanosecond or so. In terms of weapon applications, laser technology is less destructive by far than particle beam weaponry at similar power outputs because of the physics of both systems. The greater destructive potential of particle beam weaponry is the reason that practically all SF series treat the laser as the particle beam's inferior, low-power cousin...
Robotech is no exception, nor are the three original shows it consists of.
(As a side note, exotic particle beam weaponry is generally depicted as being more powerful than regular particle weapons by most science fiction series. A general hierarchy of energy weapons, from most potent to least potent, looks something like this for most SF:
(Extra)Dimensional energy (Most Powerful)Exotic Particle (incl. Antimatter)
Conventional Particle (incl. Charged)
Lasers (Least Powerful))
RiverJack wrote:I don't have much to say about Trek, however in Star Wars Blasters are not just one type of beam weapon like you listed, [...]
Tell me I'm not a
Star Wars expert and I'll cheerfully cop to it... however, based on the information available to me it does appear that you are correct about this.
Star Wars "Blaster" technology is an umbrella term applied to both the conventional particle beam technology (e.g. the BlasTech E-11), albeit at a non-relativistic scale, or an older system that combined the effects of plasma and laser technology.
RiverJack wrote:Yeah or just use weapons so powerful that it doesn't matter if the armor is resistant or not.
There is that option, yeah... though the UEDF and UEEF's apparent preference for energy weaponry over conventional solid ammo guns probably has a deeper reason than that.
RiverJack wrote:Are you sure that Disc-blasters are not Lasers? I have seen many sources say that the Bioroid drum is a ion pulse weapon but for the later I have only seen it called a pulse beam.
The Robotech.com Infopedia officially describes both the "disc" and "drum" type weapons as pulsed ion beam cannons, a form of particle beam weaponry. The usage is inconsistent in the Infopedia, though the "Commander" and "soldier" entries use the full description, while the other two abbreviate it to just "pulse cannon" when explicitly referring to the same weapon.
RiverJack wrote:If is a Calvary reference I personally feel it should not count as a reference for RT because they are two different universes even if they share the same machines to a degree.
As far as my research into the original
Southern Cross has been able to uncover, there are OSM identifications for the Bioroid's weaponry. Therefore, it is almost certainly not from the original source material. However, your personal feelings about the applicability of the OSM are immaterial, as Harmony Gold continues to borrow from it heavily (increasingly often, these days), and treats is as an entirely valid source of information for
Robotech in virtually all cases. Palladium got onto this bandwagon themselves in 2E, copying a lot of their information from the OSM.