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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Plane Sailing" data-source="post: 2744292" data-attributes="member: 114">Another interesting concept that Traveller originally came up with (AFAIK) was the big ship Meson gun - the idea being that you accellerate an ultra-high energy meson to relativistic speeds and time it so that it decays inside the target vessel. No whizzy ray beams, just explosions occuring inside ships armour. Now I could see this in terms of a guided munition, but not a ballistic weapon - but that may be because I've got different expectations around the word. I'm thinking of ballistic weapons as those which are given an initial impetus and then travel to their target without terminal guidance or additional propulsion; add those qualities and I'd call them missiles or rockets - something other than plain ballistic.Since most sci-fi has room-sized hyperdrives, that particular example is from a vastly higher tech level, enough so that the equivalent energy weapons might be 'point your gun at the target and it disappears' so some other virtually magical effect. At the very least I'd expect energy weapons to fire through hyperdrive lenses which cause them to arrive faster than the speed of light too.Then again, if you are projecting destructive micro-black holes at one another, would you count that as ballistic or energy weapons <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Cheers</blockquote>

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