this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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Showerthoughts
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I think the simple answer to both of these questions could be "power limitations".
That's what the big rifle ones are for.
And with the lightsaber, they have double sided ones. Why not focus the twin beams into 1 extra long one?
Janeway used a wide beam dispersal at least once.
Maybe the length of the saber doesn't scale linearly. Maybe there's some extremely fast dropoff in effectiveness after a couple of feet.
And the power limitations of the phasers seem to me like they require some kind of capacitor to charge up and release in a burst. Plus maybe the tip of the phaser would overheat under sustained fire.
And sure, you could say "add more tips", but we've tried that with gun barrels IRL for the same reason. They're heavy & unwieldy so they only get used for mounted guns, like with the minigun.
And star wars has miniguns as well to solve that problem, usually carried by a single heavy gunner
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