Estimating the destructive energies of the OYW Beam Rifle and Bazooka.

[MythSearcher]

Warning: Long Essay detected.

Summarized:
Beam Rifle energy: ~100MJ
Bazooka energy: ~300~400MJ

This stems from a question asked in another forum, about the reason SRW placing the Bazooka weapons as a higher attack weapon(with a larger damage) than Beam Rifles in most UC MSs. (Specifically about UC)
He also asked about the reason bazookas being used when literally beam shots are flying everywhere.

As I reply, I figured this topic is actually quite interesting.
I have answered similar questions before, mostly about solid projectiles vs beam weapons.
I mostly reply about it being that solid projectiles can fire in a curved path and thus has its advantages in the atmosphere, with the Earth's curvature.
Some will mention about solid rounds can have different war heads, like AP(Armour Piecing) and HE (High Explosives), etc.
At least in UC, I usually will just say the settings give the Mega particle beam weapons an explosion on impact because they turn back to Minovsky particles and the volume is increase by a lot.(notice a lot of energy is used to compress the Minovsky particles for it to degenerate into Mega particles, most of that energy is now released)
For the AP equivalent, the VSBR high penetration setting settles that.

I was thinking of the mass of the beam and figured the explosion might actually be pretty weak as one, at least compared to the MS bazooka round calibre. the 280~380mm rounds can house about 50kg+ of explosives in it, even with current tech, that is about 300MJ of energy with C4.(When in doubt, C4) If the Minovsky particles in a beam shot adds up to a single kg, you need something like 24km/s of explosion speed to match that energy, while we usually think the beam shots are even lighter than that, and sadly, Minovsky particles when scattered, don't disperse really fast due to it forming an I-Field lattice by their own EM charge, it is only when reaching 100km from the point of dispersion, is when they start to accelerate exponetially to sub light speeds.

However, I don't know why it suddenly came to me that this really has a big problem and the explosion destructivity is doubtful.
Settings gives us that they have very little interaction with matter, and will pretty much just go through matter without doing much to it. The only way to contain it is through a EM Field or conductors with a current passing through it.
So, other than the temperature and high EM charge, the exploding Minovsky particles really shouldn't be doing much. Maybe more of an EMP than anything.
We really shouldn't be seeing that many explosions after MS and ships being hit by beam shots.
Anyway, since those are made by conductors, and maybe even humans are pretty much a conductor, we will see some level of explosion.


Back to the topic.
As a reference, the Deutschland-class cruiser has 28cm guns on it, with a muzzle velocity of 910m/s and 5km shell velocity of 752m/s.(Typical OYW combat range) firing 300kg shells. This has apporximately a muzzle energy at 124MJ and 5km energy at 85MJ.

I figured out we can estimate the actual energy of the beam weapons and the power output in the settings really aren't that dubious. However, only on selected units with enough information to back it up, which, sadly, has only RX-78-2 meeting that criteria.

In both the anime and settings, the RX-78-2 beam rifle is said to be comparable to the power of a warship gun at the time.
Except the 580mm guns on the Pegasus class, sadly, we have no idea what the calibre and power of a ship gun at the time. And I am pretty sure no one agrees to use such a large calibre as a comparison.
Therefore I listed the Deutschland-class above, which is smaller than even the lower end spec of the Salamis class(212m, I prefer the 288m setting) and has lower tonnage(16000t compared to 22000t) It's gun should be what people are expecting when talking about "Ship gun".
You can argue most Light Cruisers in the WWII era only has 5~6"(120~155mm), while Heavy Cruisers mostly has 8"(200mm), but OYW has much larger ships (WWII Battleship size for OYW Light Cruisers) and recorded much larger calibre equipped even on an MS, and I am using them as an energy comparison, so I find that argument to be kind of weak.

I start by giving a typical reply I use for determining the energy of the weapon before this post.
"The power of the RX-78-2 beam rifle is 1.38MW, if charged for 1 sec, it has 1.38MJ of energy. Since beam rifles has a 5~20x power amplification from the E-Cap, and assuming the beam rifle to be the first of the technology and it gets the lower end of 5x, the total energy released is 6.9MJ.
This is of course very low for a weapon, considering the estimated energy of the M256 120mm cannon nowadays has about 1500m/s muzzle velocity and about 9kg projectile, the projectile carries 10.125MJ of energy. If using a HE type round, the explosives inside will carry even more energy."

I know that some people, including Mark, don't want to accept the power spec of the beam weapons to be the input power and take the term literally to be output power, but to be honest, 1.38MJ will be even less likely.
I don't find that reasonable and the 1.38MW is quite obviously matching the output power of the 1380kW of the generator, so I stick to the 5~20x gain from the E-cap idea.

By piecing settings together though, the RX-78-2 actually takes 15 sec to charge one shot of the weapon according to Master Archive. Which can be found in another thread on this forum where we assumed it to be charging the E-cap.
However, if that is the time it takes to trigger the E-cap to give a shot, the power going in will be 20.7MJ, so even without the power gain from the E-cap, it is still more than double the 120mm cannon shot. With the power gain, 103.5MJ is over 10 times. This is what we are expecting from a futuristic weapon.

If you think the 20.7MJ is enough already, well, maybe. However, this is far from the ship gun class output they kept talking about in show. You can disregard what they say in the anime and settings about the rifle is in the power class of warships of that era, the power amplification factor settings, the reasonable energy carried by such a weapon and just stick to the literal term "Output" and just call me stupid to be using the output as the input.
I will take this argument if we are talking about the energy of later era, say, the Sentinel MSs, since their beam guns power rating has a few times their generator output and using S as an example, the beam smart gun alone is about 8 times the power of its generator and no settings supports it has an E-cap for the power gain.(It still requires some kind of electrical capacitor to store the energy if it really can give such an output, so I am more inclined to say that it has an E-cap and that is where they get the energy gain)

Let us estimate the energy of an MS bazooka.
This is rather simple. The WWII Nazi 28cm rocket launcher has a muzzle velocity of about 150m/s and the shell is 300kg while carrying 50kg of explosives. Since it is a rocket, it can accelerate during flight. Since modern missiles can accelerate up to 1000~2000m/s without much problem, it'd be stupid to assume they cannot back such a rocket in OYW. As long as they do not fire it point blank like in the anime, I'd be lazy and use the kinetic energy calculate above and call it 124MJ. The 50kg explosives, has 300MJ energy also listed above at the very least, or you'd assuming they are using something worse than modern time. So it will be about 424MJ.
Even if you fire it point blank and it hits at 150m/s, it still has over 3MJ of kinetic energy and you get 303MJ with the explosion.
Still much greater than a beam rifle shot, about 3~4 times more powerful.
This, however, still couldn't really match the description of the confiscated 360mm rounds in the California base of EFF by the Zeon. These are said to be able to one shot cruisers, which, we really don't see that much of a power in show other than when they hit critical parts or has plot power(like the ship exploding when the bridge is hit with no real reason to do so, which also happens when only a few 90mm rounds hit so one can hardly say that it is the power of the 360mm round)

On top of that, we have Beam resistive coating after the MS-07B3, which reduces the effective energy transfered to the target, I-Field for the Big Zam, Beam scattering screen war heads for ship to ship combat(and Big Rang), beam shots may not really be that effective on the field.

Beam shots are more effective in the accuracy department, since it travels faster(In Sentinel, we have an example of it travelling a few ten thousand km in 3 sec, while it cannot hit at that kind of distances, it would be more accurate at usual MS combat range of a few km)

For later periods (We have RX-93 and RX-0 using Bazookas), even though the beam weapons has an increase in power, we also get the Anti Beam Coating and M war heads.
Also, the ships may not be able to provide maintenance to that many E-Pacs, and thus in a big enough battle, the charge rate may not be able to catch up with usage(RX-0's Beam Magnum surely does not help) thus easy to supply weapons like the Bazooka comes in handy.

[Seto Kaiba]

I start by giving a typical reply I use for determining the energy of the weapon before this post.
"The power of the RX-78-2 beam rifle is 1.38MW, if charged for 1 sec, it has 1.38MJ of energy. Since beam rifles has a 5~20x power amplification from the E-Cap, and assuming the beam rifle to be the first of the technology and it gets the lower end of 5x, the total energy released is 6.9MJ.

Quick correction... the output power of the BLASH XBR-M-79-07G beam rifle used by the RX-78-2 and RX-78-3 isn't 1,380kW, it's 1,900kW. Your entire premise here is basically faulty.

BLASH XBR-M-79-07G
BEAM RIFLE
Spec
開発：ブラッシュ社
全長：9216mm
出力：1.9MW
装弾数：1チャージあたり16発
推奨ジェネレーター出力：1380kW

Developed by: BLASH Co.
Total Length: 9,216mm
Output: 1.9MW
Number of Shots: 16 shots per charge
Recommended Generator Output: 1,380kW

I know that some people, including Mark, don't want to accept the power spec of the beam weapons to be the input power and take the term literally to be output power, but to be honest, 1.38MJ will be even less likely.

It'd be impossible for those listed powers to be the input energy requirement... they're almost universally higher than the rated generator output of the mobile suits carrying them. Of course, there are sources that spell it out quite clearly that those power ratings are output power not input power (like the above).

For instance, the MSZ-006 Zeta Gundam's generator is rated for 2,020kW but its beam rifle's power rating is given as 5,700kW... can't be the input power because the Zeta can't generate that much energy.

I don't find that reasonable and the 1.38MW is quite obviously matching the output power of the 1380kW of the generator, so I stick to the 5~20x gain from the E-cap idea.

We can't say with any certainty what the input power is, but it has to be lower than the total generator output of the Mobile Suit using the weapon (so less than 1,380kW in this case) otherwise the mobile suit would grind to a halt every time it tried to fire and it seems rather unlikely they'd redline the generator every time they wanted to fire.

By piecing settings together though, the RX-78-2 actually takes 15 sec to charge one shot of the weapon according to Master Archive. Which can be found in another thread on this forum where we assumed it to be charging the E-cap.
However, if that is the time it takes to trigger the E-cap to give a shot, the power going in will be 20.7MJ, so even without the power gain from the E-cap, it is still more than double the 120mm cannon shot. With the power gain, 103.5MJ is over 10 times. This is what we are expecting from a futuristic weapon.

I cannot seem to find the statement that it takes 15 seconds to charge the XBR-M-79-07G for a single shot. Please link to the thread of quote the appropriate remarks.

The output of the XBR-M-79-07G beam rifle is given as 1.9MW - 1.9 megajoules per second - meaning that the MS would only need to devote about 9.2% of its generator output to charging the weapon for 15 seconds if that part about needing to charge for 15 seconds is even applicable to this weapon. It seems likely that the rifle's actual discharge lasts longer than 1 second, so simply multiply 1.9MJ times the length of the discharge for the amount of energy. It'd need to be firing for about six seconds to rival the muzzle energy of the kinetic penetrator contained in the M1 Abrams's M829A3 anti-tank shell, which suggests the damage caused is thermal rather than kinetic.

[MythSearcher]

The output of the XBR-M-79-07G beam rifle is given as 1.9MW - 1.9 megajoules per second - meaning that the MS would only need to devote about 9.2% of its generator output to charging the weapon for 15 seconds if that part about needing to charge for 15 seconds is even applicable to this weapon. It seems likely that the rifle's actual discharge lasts longer than 1 second, so simply multiply 1.9MJ times the length of the discharge for the amount of energy. It'd need to be firing for about six seconds to rival the muzzle energy of the kinetic penetrator contained in the M1 Abrams's M829A3 anti-tank shell, which suggests the damage caused is thermal rather than kinetic.

That would have the same problem as it does with the 1.38MW.
Even at 1.9MJ, it is still way too low as a futuristic weapon.

1) You don't see in any show other than 08MS team's GM Sniper[G] that they hold the beam on the target for more than a fraction of a second, and the Sniper[G]'s gun settings specifically says that it got a low power mode to assist in aiming and that is what the long exposure narrow beam is, the beam is also not shinning on the same spot during its exposure time but moves around quite fast, drawing out a path instead of heating a small patch for damage. So your argument about it firing for 6 sec really isn't holding. And the Kinetic energy of a tank shell hits with all that energy on impact, which is a fraction of a sec. (If at 1500m/s, the 10kg, 892mm long penetrator M829A3 has 0.6ms to travel its whole distance of its length) The power in the short amount of time will be like 18GW instead of in the MW range.
2) If the beam weapon actually only take 9.2% from the MS generator, there is almost no reason for the generator to have that kind of output. We already discussed about there's being at least another generator for the thermo-nuclear thrusters and from the Rapport Deluxe books, we also have the output power of the MS for their actuators that is much higher than the generator output.(e.g. RX-78-2 has 65000HP and MS-09 has 70000HP)

Even if I give you a 2+ sec charge with 4MJ, that is still less than a 90mm round going at 800~1000m/s, this is also only accounting for its kinetic energy, APFSDS rounds will have extra charge for faster velocity and HE type have explosives in it. Meaning you are suggesting the Gundam's beam rifle is weaker than the MMP-80 Zaku 90mm machine gun and I guess while it makes a whole lot of sense why EFGF's 79[G]s used 100~110mm machine guns, it makes totally no sense to say the beam rifle is on a power level of ship main guns, or is essentially saying the MMP-80 machine gun is more powerful than ship main guns. Would make much more sense if they just have ships with many 90mm guns instead of those weakling mega particle cannons as main guns, no?

As a side note, not even the HEAT rounds penetrate with thermal and effect is purely kinetic in nature even with its few thousand degrees jet. As the Kinetic penetrator doesn't even reach hypersonic impact velocities like space debris, the damage isn't likely to be thermal. It heats up at the impact point, but most of the damage is still a solid rod pushing away the material instead of melting through the armour.

I cannot seem to find the statement that it takes 15 seconds to charge the XBR-M-79-07G for a single shot. Please link to the thread of quote the appropriate remarks.

viewtopic.php?f=17&t=17015&p=385732&hil ... ve#p385732

It is the BOWA BR-S-85-C2 though, I didn't notice that until just now(Just looked at the Beam Rifle title), so the XBR-M-79-07G may require a different time, but likely similar as the BR-S-85 is likely just a stablized upgrade with similar mechanics.
The GM II has a higher generator output and assuming similar usage, really shouldn't be that much of a different.

[Seto Kaiba]

This damned forum's login problems caused me to lose this post the first time I wrote it...

That would have the same problem as it does with the 1.38MW.
Even at 1.9MJ, it is still way too low as a futuristic weapon.

1.9MW is a pretty damned futuristic weapon by today's standards... modern military laser weapons top out around 105kW. That humble first gen beam rifle has 18 times the energy output of the best military laser weapons we've got.

1) You don't see in any show other than 08MS team's GM Sniper[G] that they hold the beam on the target for more than a fraction of a second, and the Sniper[G]'s gun settings specifically says that it got a low power mode to assist in aiming and that is what the long exposure narrow beam is, the beam is also not shinning on the same spot during its exposure time but moves around quite fast, drawing out a path instead of heating a small patch for damage.

That GM Sniper was using a BLASH XBR-X-79YK beam sniper rifle, which has twice the output of the XBR-M-79-07G beam rifle we're talking about... and was being used as a cutting tool rather than firing for effect.

開発：ブラッシュ社
全長：15980mm
出力：3.8MW
装弾数：1チャージあたり2発
推奨ジェネレーター出力：2000kW
使用機体：陸戦型ジム、ジム・スナイパー

So your argument about it firing for 6 sec really isn't holding. And the Kinetic energy of a tank shell hits with all that energy on impact, which is a fraction of a sec. (If at 1500m/s, the 10kg, 892mm long penetrator M829A3 has 0.6ms to travel its whole distance of its length) The power in the short amount of time will be like 18GW instead of in the MW range.

12 megajoules is 12 megajoules, we're talking about total energy here... so trying to misleadingly shift the units for hyperbole's sake is rather disingenuous.

2) If the beam weapon actually only take 9.2% from the MS generator, there is almost no reason for the generator to have that kind of output. We already discussed about there's being at least another generator for the thermo-nuclear thrusters and from the Rapport Deluxe books, we also have the output power of the MS for their actuators that is much higher than the generator output.(e.g. RX-78-2 has 65000HP and MS-09 has 70000HP)

... have you completely forgotten how beam weapons in Gundam work?

Mega particle cannons work by using energy condensers to compress Minovsky particles siphoned from a Minovsky fusion reactor until they fuse into mega particles. There was no way for the much smaller, lower output reactor used by a mobile suit to achieve this on its own. Dr. Minovsky's solution to the conundrum of miniaturizing mega particle weapons was the e-cap, a small Minovsky particle trap that could be charged by an energy condenser to hold a quantity of Minovsky particles compressed to just shy of the fusion threshold. Further pinching its stored particles to start fusion required only a small amount of additional energy from a mobile suit's generator, so the mega particle cannon could effectively be miniaturized with some fairly aggressive limitations.

That only a small amount of energy input from the mobile suit is literally the defining characteristic separating a beam rifle from a mega particle cannon.

There are plenty of energy hungry systems in a mobile suit that need the hundreds of kilowatts the generation is producing... the mobile suit's sophisticated computers, heating and cooling systems, electric motors for smaller systems like the ammo feeds in a EFF MS's 60mm guns, sensors and avionics like RADAR, LIDAR, and the various cameras, and a thousand system fluid pumps for things like lubricant oils and fuel.

As we've discussed before, a mobile suit's reactor seems to be spectacularly inefficient when connected with an electrical generator... and we know the energy that isn't being used to generate electricity is being used in the fluid pulse system (or field motors in EFF suits) to actually drive actuators, to heat fuel for the monopropellant rockets, and so on.

Even if I give you a 2+ sec charge with 4MJ, that is still less than a 90mm round going at 800~1000m/s, this is also only accounting for its kinetic energy, APFSDS rounds will have extra charge for faster velocity and HE type have explosives in it. Meaning you are suggesting the Gundam's beam rifle is weaker than the MMP-80 Zaku 90mm machine gun and I guess while it makes a whole lot of sense why EFGF's 79[G]s used 100~110mm machine guns, [...]

The rounds fired by many solid ammo weapons in Gundam seem to be rather slow... but there are remarks about mega-particle weapons effectively ignoring conventional armor that may account for the popularity of the beam weapon. Zakus were armored like a cream slice, so it's not terribly surprising that machine guns using old kinetic rounds would do the trick.

[...] it makes totally no sense to say the beam rifle is on a power level of ship main guns, or is essentially saying the MMP-80 machine gun is more powerful than ship main guns. Would make much more sense if they just have ships with many 90mm guns instead of those weakling mega particle cannons as main guns, no?

Actually, it does... it's worth remembering that ship-scale mega particle cannons come in a variety of sizes and power levels. Their appeal is no doubt a combination of the fact that they require no actual ammunition to be carried by the ship and thus have functionally indefinite endurance as long as the reactor is running and giving power to the condensers, combined with the far greater accuracy over distance and relativistic speed that the beam exhibits, making them much more effective weapons at long range.

We also see that the Zaku machine guns are perfectly capable wrecking an EFF ship's sh*t in various depictions of the Battle of Loum... at short ranges.

It is the BOWA BR-S-85-C2 though, I didn't notice that until just now(Just looked at the Beam Rifle title), so the XBR-M-79-07G may require a different time, but likely similar as the BR-S-85 is likely just a stablized upgrade with similar mechanics.
The GM II has a higher generator output and assuming similar usage, really shouldn't be that much of a different.

Ah, I see the source of your apparent confusion there.

That's from Master Archive Mobile Suit: RGM-79 GM Vol.1 btw.

That translation isn't of the best quality. It's mostly accurate, but it's not immediately clear in that translation to English that what the book is talking about there is how quickly the Mobile Suit's condenser - the one it also uses for recharging the e-caps in the beam sabers it carries - can replenish the beam rifle's e-cap. The RGM-79R GM II can use its energy condenser at full power to replenish one shot's worth of Minovsky particles in the e-cap of the BR-S-85-C2 in 15 seconds. There are similar remarks for other beam weapons, like the RGM-79 being able to fill the e-cap of its less powerful beam spray gun in 40 seconds of running its condenser at full power. (In both cases this is implied to draw a LOT of power from reactor and is best done while the suit is idling.)

It isn't talking about the amount of energy the mobile suit needs to supply to initiate the fusion reaction.

[MythSearcher]

This damned forum's login problems caused me to lose this post the first time I wrote it...

I just reported a 403 error yesterday, it seems like they have issues with the new host still being resolved.
Better type in the reply elsewhere before posting.

That would have the same problem as it does with the 1.38MW.
Even at 1.9MJ, it is still way too low as a futuristic weapon.

1.9MW is a pretty damned futuristic weapon by today's standards... modern military laser weapons top out around 105kW. That humble first gen beam rifle has 18 times the energy output of the best military laser weapons we've got.

1.9MW is, 1.9MJ isn't.

That GM Sniper was using a BLASH XBR-X-79YK beam sniper rifle, which has twice the output of the XBR-M-79-07G beam rifle we're talking about... and was being used as a cutting tool rather than firing for effect.

This is where the Master Archive isn't specific enough. Gundam Officials said that it is the low output setting for aim assistance, it is not running at full power at the time.

And like I said, it is the only case we see them doing something like this, most of the time the shot itself is only a fraction of a sec. Even if you account for the suspense time before the shot where other anime will scream "High energy response detected!", that is at most something like 2 sec max and mostly just under a sec.

12 megajoules is 12 megajoules, we're talking about total energy here... so trying to misleadingly shift the units for hyperbole's sake is rather disingenuous.

That is what I am saying. You should not ignore the fact that 1.9MW isn't the energy acting on the target, and 1.9MJ is awfully low as an anti-armour weapon.

Just put a M256 cannon in that world and you'll see why.

... have you completely forgotten how beam weapons in Gundam work?

Mega particle cannons work by using energy condensers to compress Minovsky particles siphoned from a Minovsky fusion reactor until they fuse into mega particles. There was no way for the much smaller, lower output reactor used by a mobile suit to achieve this on its own. Dr. Minovsky's solution to the conundrum of miniaturizing mega particle weapons was the e-cap, a small Minovsky particle trap that could be charged by an energy condenser to hold a quantity of Minovsky particles compressed to just shy of the fusion threshold. Further pinching its stored particles to start fusion required only a small amount of additional energy from a mobile suit's generator, so the mega particle cannon could effectively be miniaturized with some fairly aggressive limitations.

That only a small amount of energy input from the mobile suit is literally the defining characteristic separating a beam rifle from a mega particle cannon.

That is what I am saying, the 1.9MW should be the output of the MS and input of the beam rifle, not the output of the rifle.

There are plenty of energy hungry systems in a mobile suit that need the hundreds of kilowatts the generation is producing... the mobile suit's sophisticated computers, heating and cooling systems, electric motors for smaller systems like the ammo feeds in a EFF MS's 60mm guns, sensors and avionics like RADAR, LIDAR, and the various cameras, and a thousand system fluid pumps for things like lubricant oils and fuel.

As we've discussed before, a mobile suit's reactor seems to be spectacularly inefficient when connected with an electrical generator... and we know the energy that isn't being used to generate electricity is being used in the fluid pulse system (or field motors in EFF suits) to actually drive actuators, to heat fuel for the monopropellant rockets, and so on.

No matter how inefficient the electrical conversion, the 1380kW is the output, so we don't care if it is burning away 1380MW of nuclear fuel as long as it doesn't bake the pilot.

LIDAR maybe, RADAR isn't useful once Minovsky particles are scattered.
60mm gun motors aren't activated full time.
Cameras requires power far from the kW range.
Life support requires maybe around 2kW for pumping the waste heat away.(not so efficient air consditioning systems enough for a large room with poor insulation with 8 people are rated at about 1.5kW)
Computers in UC aren't really power monsters, they are huge only because they require protection.
The learning computer on RX-78 is an optical computer which does not use current to avoid interference by M particles so

Even if we talk about a 10MJ energy, charging it with 1MW just requires 10 sec. I don't see RX-78-2 with those 4 waist capacitors can't handle short term high demand of power for firing the beam rifle.
At 1.9MW for 15 sec, the capacitors only have to store an extra of 5.6 sec of output, and a few dozen of seconds per shot to charge up seems to be still fast enough if compared to tank or ship guns nowadays.

The rounds fired by many solid ammo weapons in Gundam seem to be rather slow... but there are remarks about mega-particle weapons effectively ignoring conventional armor that may account for the popularity of the beam weapon. Zakus were armored like a cream slice, so it's not terribly surprising that machine guns using old kinetic rounds would do the trick.

We also see that the Zaku machine guns are perfectly capable wrecking an EFF ship's sh*t in various depictions of the Battle of Loum... at short ranges.

Yes, and therefore I am already not using the more common 1500m/s of the modern projectile speed.

Mega particle weapons can pretty much ignore conventional armour because it is high energy, if you are lowering the energy of it then it makes no sense.
Mega particle beams are metallic jet beams at high temperature and high velocity, and it got more mass from energy to mass conversion, you will definitely want much much more energy going into it for the E=mc^2.

MS armour is thin, given the average thickness of such armour with the empty weight spec is going to be very low even without all the internal mechanics. But ships are at least in the range of WWII ships and the armour really isn't as butter as they seem like in show. the 90mm rounds may penetrate 1 side of the armour and cause internal explosions, while in MS Igloo, the much lower speed 120mm fired at point blank didn't penetrate(only heated red/white hot marks are seen on the hull without holes) but they seems to be using an equivalent of HEP/HESH and the ship still exploded at that area anyway.
Oh and BTW, MS Igloo 2 also shows that some of the rounds fired didn't even penetrate M61A5 tank top armour if you freeze frame.

The RX-78's beam rifle penetrates the entirety of the ship and comes out on the other end without visually slowing down or dispersing and there are multiple accounts of it doing so.

Actually, it does... it's worth remembering that ship-scale mega particle cannons come in a variety of sizes and power levels. Their appeal is no doubt a combination of the fact that they require no actual ammunition to be carried by the ship and thus have functionally indefinite endurance as long as the reactor is running and giving power to the condensers, combined with the far greater accuracy over distance and relativistic speed that the beam exhibits, making them much more effective weapons at long range.

The beam rifle is at the same "destructive power" class, not the same "mechanism".
Yes, it comes in various size and power levels, but the beam rifle is specifically said to be on par with the ship main gun powers. Some sources(Like the MG manual) even go to the more specific "Battleship class" wording.

While they have the appeal to be more effective at long range, if their power is only on par with 90mm machine guns, the "require no ammunition" is completely offset by the bulk of the cannon itself.
These cannons are the size of 16~18" or even larger guns, you can carry tens of thousands of 90mm rounds for a dozen of 90mm machine gun turrets in exchange of just one such cannon. Not to mention the firing rate and spread will be enough to match the effectiveness in accuracy.
So the mega beam cannon is left with only one benefit, the projectile's travel time over the distance. Which is also kinda off set by the inability to accurately hit any target at 300km and most ships has to resolve to go to something like 20km or even 10km before they even can start to hit a target. They will be able to land much more hits with 90mm rounds at that kind of range.

Also, I don't think relativistic speeds helps too much here? Its more like 10% the speed of light, with the best single case we have(The Sentinel). The mass doesn't significantly increase until you reach something like 95% c.

Ah, I see the source of your apparent confusion there.

That's from Master Archive Mobile Suit: RGM-79 GM Vol.1 btw.

That translation isn't of the best quality. It's mostly accurate, but it's not immediately clear in that translation to English that what the book is talking about there is how quickly the Mobile Suit's condenser - the one it also uses for recharging the e-caps in the beam sabers it carries - can replenish the beam rifle's e-cap. The RGM-79R GM II can use its energy condenser at full power to replenish one shot's worth of Minovsky particles in the e-cap of the BR-S-85-C2 in 15 seconds. There are similar remarks for other beam weapons, like the RGM-79 being able to fill the e-cap of its less powerful beam spray gun in 40 seconds of running its condenser at full power. (In both cases this is implied to draw a LOT of power from reactor and is best done while the suit is idling.)

It isn't talking about the amount of energy the mobile suit needs to supply to initiate the fusion reaction.

It would make more sense to mean the triggering power for each shot, that is what I am saying.
This is due to a combination of settings, mainly the depiction of the shear destructivity of the beam rifle and settings of it being ship class power but the power rating of the weapon is just too low. It'd would really make much more sense if that is the power it is getting from the MS, not the output power of the beam itself, so the beam can have all the advantage from the settings of it being amplified by the E-cap tech and charged for a much longer while.
Again, 1.9MW isn't low if it is the input power, because that can mean 10~100MJ of energy in the beam and that matches more to the ship class main gun power level.(Actually still at the low side if we are talking about WWII battleship guns, but at least matches cruiser main guns and battleship secondaries)
But 1.9MW from a fraction of a second beam means something less than 1.9MJ in energy, pathetically low.
And it is not entirely out of the settings saying it is the input power, since the PG manual does give us the input electricity vs range graph in which it shows test data of the RX-78 rifle being fired in 0-10MW inputs.

[Seto Kaiba]

1.9MW is, 1.9MJ isn't.

They're the same amount of energy... 1.9 megawatts is 1.9 megajoules per second.

This is where the Master Archive isn't specific enough. Gundam Officials said that it is the low output setting for aim assistance, it is not running at full power at the time.

You missed my point... "low power" mode on a beam rifle with twice the output of the XBR-M-79-07G could easily still be more energy than the XBR-M-79-07G can output at full power.

And like I said, it is the only case we see them doing something like this, most of the time the shot itself is only a fraction of a sec. Even if you account for the suspense time before the shot where other anime will scream "High energy response detected!", that is at most something like 2 sec max and mostly just under a sec.

I've reviewed a number of different scenes from various shows including Mobile Suit Gundam, Mobile Suit Gundam: 08th MS Team, Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, Mobile Suit Victory Gundam, Mobile Suit Gundam UC, and Mobile Suit Gundam: Twlight Axis, and most often the continuous radiation time of a beam rifle seems to be between 1 and 3 seconds.

That is what I am saying. You should not ignore the fact that 1.9MW isn't the energy acting on the target, and 1.9MJ is awfully low as an anti-armour weapon.

By the standards of today's armor-piercing anti-tank machine gun ammunition it's actually pretty good... around ten times the energy of the PGU-14/B depleted uranium anti-tank round. It looks a little anemic compared to a shell from an artillery piece, but you have to remember that mobile suits generally can't support one of those in battle either (without standing still and bracing). Mobile suits ARE NOT tanks, they depend on their mobility for damage avoidance rather than heavy armor (unless they're made of gundarium).

That is what I am saying, the 1.9MW should be the output of the MS and input of the beam rifle, not the output of the rifle.

But 1.9MW is the output of the beam rifle... you're trying to understate it by leaping to extremes that are not really analogous to Mobile Suit weaponry.

No matter how inefficient the electrical conversion, the 1380kW is the output, so we don't care if it is burning away 1380MW of nuclear fuel as long as it doesn't bake the pilot.

1,380kW is the output of the electrical generator, not the total energy produced by the reactor. That won't even be the amount of energy input into the generator either, because no system has perfect efficiency.

We know for a fact that a substantial amount of energy is not harnessed by the generator and is instead used for driving actuators via [fluid pulse/field motor] systems and so on.

LIDAR maybe, RADAR isn't useful once Minovsky particles are scattered.

There are a LOT of applications of RADAR beyond long-range search radar. Short-range radar systems have a LOT of uses. Collision avoidance is a big one, and there are myriad uses of short-range radar for assessing terrain like contour reading (as input to the auto-balancer) or assessing the stability of terrain to ensure the MS won't sink or tilt.

60mm gun motors aren't activated full time.

They're on hot standby in combat, so that power needs to be available.

Cameras requires power far from the kW range.

Individually... but a Mobile Suit has a LOT of the damned things, and there's a lot of computer power needed for processing that input.

Computers in UC aren't really power monsters, they are huge only because they require protection.
The learning computer on RX-78 is an optical computer which does not use current to avoid interference by M particles so

Even an optical computer needs electricity to power the laser diodes that produce the light.

Even if we talk about a 10MJ energy, charging it with 1MW just requires 10 sec.

10 seconds where 100% of that energy is being diverted to whatever capacitor is holding it. You keep assuming these Mobile Suits have no energy demands beyond beam weaponry.

I don't see RX-78-2 with those 4 waist capacitors can't handle short term high demand of power for firing the beam rifle.

Y'know, I've done a bit of research on this subject and I can't for the life of me find any source that actually describes the blocks on the waist as capacitors. Every source I've located thus far that identifies them identifies them as a "helium core" or propellant tank, not as a capacitor.

Mega particle weapons can pretty much ignore conventional armour because it is high energy, if you are lowering the energy of it then it makes no sense.

By the standards of directed energy weapons, 1.9 megawatts IS high energy... and I can't seem to find any statement corroborating your claim that the beam weapons are overcoming armor by pure brute force and nothing else.

The beam rifle is at the same "destructive power" class, not the same "mechanism". Yes, it comes in various size and power levels, but the beam rifle is specifically said to be on par with the ship main gun powers. Some sources(Like the MG manual) even go to the more specific "Battleship class" wording.

I'm somewhat less than surprised that dubious claims are coming from model kit manuals, to be frank. I've never considered those to be reliable sources of information.

While they have the appeal to be more effective at long range, if their power is only on par with 90mm machine guns, the "require no ammunition" is completely offset by the bulk of the cannon itself.

Only if you assume you'll always hit first time out, or that you'll always be within range of a resupply station to easily replenish ammo stores. (Several of the books I've checked while fact-checking you have also noted that beam weapons are considered advantageous in that they don't produce potentially dangerous space debris.)

It would make more sense to mean the triggering power for each shot, that is what I am saying.
This is due to a combination of settings, mainly the depiction of the shear destructivity of the beam rifle and settings of it being ship class power but the power rating of the weapon is just too low.

Frankly, I think you're just MASSIVELY overselling the quality of armor available on Mobile Suits and ships in the fifteen-minutes-into-the-future Universal Century.

It'd would really make much more sense if that is the power it is getting from the MS, not the output power of the beam itself, so the beam can have all the advantage from the settings of it being amplified by the E-cap tech and charged for a much longer while.

Every time you say this you're making a science teacher somewhere cry.

YOU CAN'T AMPLIFY ENERGY. FFS, that'd be a violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics.

E-caps are energy storage devices... their name is literally shorthand for energy capacitor. They aren't amplifying anything. They just store energy generated by an external Minovsky fusion reactor in the form of high energy Minovsky particles under extreme compression. Beam rifle e-caps store their Minovsky particles at sufficiently high energies and compression levels that a small amount of additional energy from the mobile suit's generator can excite the Minovsky particles to the point of fusion and release that stored energy in the form of a high-velocity mega-particle beam. The energy transfer from the mobile suit that triggers the beam rifle's fusion reaction is, in principle, little different from a spark plug in a combustion engine... a little bit of energy that is nonetheless sufficient to trigger the release of an exponentially greater quantity of energy that was stored in a fuel material. The energy in the beam rifle's beam is the energy that was stored in those Minovsky particles.

Getting right down to it, your refusal to acknowledge how beam rifles are explained to work seems to be the crux of this theory of yours. The energy from the mobile suit plays basically zero role in the force of the beam, it's all the energy stored in the e-cap's Minovsky particles.

[MythSearcher]

They're the same amount of energy... 1.9 megawatts is 1.9 megajoules per second.

You are saying they are not the same thing exactly.
Thank you.

1.9MJ and 1.9MJ/s are two different things.

We have always said that the power ratings on the beam weapons are useless because they do not give a time on it.
1.9MJ/s for 10s is 19MJ and for 0.001s is 1.9kJ.

See? they are different.

You missed my point... "low power" mode on a beam rifle with twice the output of the XBR-M-79-07G could easily still be more energy than the XBR-M-79-07G can output at full power.

And still much lower than the power of projectile weapons we use on tanks today?
Get real, you won't get much penetration on that kind of tonnage of ships.

I've reviewed a number of different scenes from various shows including Mobile Suit Gundam, Mobile Suit Gundam: 08th MS Team, Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, Mobile Suit Victory Gundam, Mobile Suit Gundam UC, and Mobile Suit Gundam: Twlight Axis, and most often the continuous radiation time of a beam rifle seems to be between 1 and 3 seconds.

What radiation time are you talking about?

Are you sure you are talking about the "output" of the rifle?
I never see the beam shining on the target for 3 sec, they look like short rods that comes and go.
Ok, I can think of some case where they stay, like Big Zam firing on whatever targets, but the target explodes on contact and the beam just kept shining on the explosion. And it is an MA specialized in beam bombardment.

The output of the rifle is the power of the beam, a 2MW beam isn't going to give you a miraculous 6MJ if it did not stay in contact for 3s.
Side note, the beam sabre is even worst, while they have longer contact times at parrying, they don't with slicing, and the power rating is even lower.

Or are you ignoring some scenes are just slow motion for the dramatic effect? Like the first Zaku being shot down?
All of the motion are obviously slowed down, including the Zaku's motion.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... C59ED21699
Just pick out the Gundam, Mk-II, Rick Dias, Gelgoog, Zeong, Jegan all fire pretty fast and beams travel pretty fast, much shorter than a sec.
The 023 video for Gundam is also showing the beam to be only a fraction of a sec in most shots.

The 001 video for Gundam also stated very clear @0:26, "Its Beam Rifle had the power of a battleship main gun". If you claim this as a dubious source, I do not know what sources you are using.
Official site of that video also states: ビーム・ライフルは戦艦の主砲なみの威力を発揮。
https://www.gundam.info/special-series/ ... 03_7p.html
Gundam Officials P.149 says it is comparable to battleship output at medium to long range, and also compared it with Zeon's nuclear bazookas stating that it has a similar combat results and P.569 is a bit more humble, it says as powerful as the Musai class main guns.

Actually, I remember something to that effect being uttered in the anime, but I may be wrong and I don't want to double check the show, but surely the above sources are clear and not dubious?

Surely tactical nukes class weapons are not 6MJs? W54 has a yield of 10t TNT and is the current smallest nuke we got.

By the standards of today's armor-piercing anti-tank machine gun ammunition it's actually pretty good... around ten times the energy of the PGU-14/B depleted uranium anti-tank round. It looks a little anemic compared to a shell from an artillery piece, but you have to remember that mobile suits generally can't support one of those in battle either (without standing still and bracing). Mobile suits ARE NOT tanks, they depend on their mobility for damage avoidance rather than heavy armor (unless they're made of gundarium).

And you are comparing the beam rifle with the 30mm round... *Facepalm
MS are not tanks but they are surely holding up against tanks pretty well, at least as direct battle record we see 3 MS-06 getting a 1:2 exchange rate with M61A5 in MS Igloo 2 and 08th MS team has 3 MS against 3 Magella attacks and winning.
I can let you argue the Magella attack main gun isn't as powerful because the Megalla top needs to fire it in mid air and the design is awful as a tank.
But M61's 155mm main guns are better than modern MBT tank guns, since it is designed for long range BLOS firing with satellite linking when it is still possible in 0061.
And this 150/155mm gun cannot penetrate MS-06 frontal armour at least in some cases. (If it can, They can all just charge in and fire from the front.)

And you are picking a 30mm round and say that the beam rifle has enough energy compared to it?
Are you serious?
Or you have sources stating the 30mm round can one shot a tank in most situations?

But 1.9MW is the output of the beam rifle... you're trying to understate it by leaping to extremes that are not really analogous to Mobile Suit weaponry.

You are overestimating 1.9MW and ignore the power it displays in show.

1,380kW is the output of the electrical generator, not the total energy produced by the reactor. That won't even be the amount of energy input into the generator either, because no system has perfect efficiency.

We know for a fact that a substantial amount of energy is not harnessed by the generator and is instead used for driving actuators via [fluid pulse/field motor] systems and so on.

Actually we can calculate the efficiency of the whole system.
We know that a MS surface reaches 200 degrees C in operation, and has a surface area of about 200m^2 if we use human skin area 1~2m^2 and multiply by a factor of 100(since MSs are about 10 times the height)
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/radi ... d_431.html
At 200 degrees, radiation is transferring 2kW/m^2, so we get 400kW of waste heat at a stable state.
A 71% efficiency is actually insanely efficient even if we assume the other energy conversion rate is 100%. If other systems are not, then the electrical generator is just going to have even less waste heat.
Yeah, that and the 65000HP power from the Rapport deluxe books means it is over 99% efficient, I 'm not going to comment on that.
I am not even using Gundam Century's two 38000HP Thermal Nuclear reactor figure. This one actually listed a 37500HP for its engines for motion so we know how much power it directed to moving its limbs. The thrusters in this version uses another source, small pellets of fusion fuel heated by lasers, so laser fusion thruster. Sadly the thrusters can only operate for 29 s at full power with its 28t of fuel. The fun thing is that Gundam Officials rejected the 28t fuel and 29s thrust but didn't reject the pellet idea but reused it in explaining the laser propulsion system Albion uses.

There are a LOT of applications of RADAR beyond long-range search radar. Short-range radar systems have a LOT of uses. Collision avoidance is a big one, and there are myriad uses of short-range radar for assessing terrain like contour reading (as input to the auto-balancer) or assessing the stability of terrain to ensure the MS won't sink or tilt.

The problem here is that a MS has a Minovsky fusion reactor, it is releasing M particles itself.
And the closer to the source the more impossible it is to use a RADAR.
Once scattered, a 40km diameter area from the centre of scatter is basically radio silence.

They're on hot standby in combat, so that power needs to be available.

I don't see them using both the 60mm and beam rifles at the same time in UC.
Some MS like ZZ even has a power down time after firing its head cannon so the power isn't really available.
This isn't too surprising since even in 0087 we still get MS that cannot use beam rifle and beam sabre at the same time.

Individually... but a Mobile Suit has a LOT of the damned things, and there's a lot of computer power needed for processing that input.
Even an optical computer needs electricity to power the laser diodes that produce the light.

Which is likely to still be in the kW range.
These are not super computers.
One thing explains the dumb computers very well, M particles damages LSI or higher, so they really are using dumb computers.
Notice when Amuro required a simulation he uses a much bigger computer on the WB and not the RX-78 computer, which should have direct data on itself?
Later periods like in 0087 they do use the MS computer instead when doing simulations (Since they have 7 years to improve their shielding) even not on a ship but a large space dock.
So it is really not a matter of comfort.

10 seconds where 100% of that energy is being diverted to whatever capacitor is holding it. You keep assuming these Mobile Suits have no energy demands beyond beam weaponry.

No, I assume the MS has a surplus of electric power in most of the cases when it is just dodging and aiming, and the surplus is stored in capacitors which can be later used.

Y'know, I've done a bit of research on this subject and I can't for the life of me find any source that actually describes the blocks on the waist as capacitors. Every source I've located thus far that identifies them identifies them as a "helium core" or propellant tank, not as a capacitor.

I got this piece of information from Gundam SF world, published in 1981 by Kodansha.
Gundam Officials call them "Power Boxes", while rejecting the idea that they are fusion reactors themselves.

By the standards of directed energy weapons, 1.9 megawatts IS high energy... and I can't seem to find any statement corroborating your claim that the beam weapons are overcoming armor by pure brute force and nothing else. The number of claims you're making that I'm unable to verify is growing at a rather disquieting rate...

No, the highest power rating laser we have today it 2PW, but the energy it gives out is only 200J.(2 petawatts at 1 picosecond)
1.9MW isn't high energy if you cannot support the claim of it shining on the target for enough time.
Use the video link above, and find about 10 instances with an MS shining the rifle/gun's beam on the target for more than 2 seconds.

I'm somewhat less than surprised that dubious claims are coming from model kit manuals, to be frank. I've never considered those to be reliable sources of information.

I don't know. Model manuals are published by Bandai, the second top shareholder of Sotsu Agency, which is the IP owner of Gundam series, largest shareholder of Sunrise, the anime production company, the sole sponsor for most of the Gundam shows after Clover's collapse. It is a primary source of the topic.

Gundam Officials and Ver. 1.5, for example, are books published by Kodansha which is paid by Bandai to do so and not just getting a license right to publish.

Master Archive, for example, is published by GA Graphic, owned by SB Creative, not a sub company of Bandai, and only paid Bandai for the IP to publish the books.

The level of officialness of the model manuals are actually higher than Master Archive.

Only if you assume you'll always hit first time out, or that you'll always be within range of a resupply station to easily replenish ammo stores. (Several of the books I've checked while fact-checking you have also noted that beam weapons are considered advantageous in that they don't produce potentially dangerous space debris.)

WWII cruisers and battleships don't really have that much of a problem with their even bigger rounds.

And yes, space debris, the problem is the energy level you are proposing is so low that it doesn't seem like that much usefulness to use mega particle weapons at all.
Having 30mm level main guns or 90mm level main guns?
Most of the WWII ship design can tell you bigger is better.

Also, the solid rounds definitely are not comparable to the beam rifles, hence they banned the use of beam weaponry in colonies and only used ammo. At least that is what's told in 0080's GM Command settings.

Complete side note, as a fun fact when I am going through Gundam Officials, the RX-79[G] beam rifle has a longer range in atmosphere than the RX-78-2 beam rifle, because it is specially redesigned to diverge less in air.

Frankly, I think you're just MASSIVELY overselling the quality of armor available on Mobile Suits and ships in the fifteen-minutes-into-the-future Universal Century.

No I am not.
We can see much larger rounds failing to penetrate MS armour from ground anti-tank/tank weapons.
Salamis has a mass of 22000t, and at 288m, even if its mass isn't mostly armour like WWII ships, it is still going to be a significant chunk of mass you need to penetrate.
Musai is similar in mass(When they crash into each other the Musai does not get pushed away by a Salamis) and Gundam's rifle just puncture it from top to bottom like nothing. This is why it is not just the armour, it is the mass of the target you are shooting through counts every bit.
Rifle shots have been seen in penetrating this way on engine blocks, front section, gun section and bridge section, so basically the whole ship, so you really can't say it luckily landed on where you get little mass.

Every time you say this you're making a science teacher somewhere cry.
YOU CAN'T AMPLIFY ENERGY. FFS, that'd be a violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics.

E-caps are energy storage devices... their name is literally shorthand for energy capacitor. They aren't amplifying anything. They just store energy generated by an external Minovsky fusion reactor in the form of high energy Minovsky particles under extreme compression. Beam rifle e-caps store their Minovsky particles at sufficiently high energies and compression levels that a small amount of additional energy from the mobile suit's generator can excite the Minovsky particles to the point of fusion and release that stored energy in the form of a high-velocity mega-particle beam. The energy transfer from the mobile suit that triggers the beam rifle's fusion reaction is, in principle, little different from a spark plug in a combustion engine... a little bit of energy that is nonetheless sufficient to trigger the release of an exponentially greater quantity of energy that was stored in a fuel material. The energy in the beam rifle's beam is the energy that was stored in those Minovsky particles.

Sigh, I am not going to argue the vocab I'm using, but I made my point very clear, you get most of the energy from the E-cap and not the MS. I showed them in my first post. I use the term amplify as a description of the energy it gained from the e-cap.

Getting right down to it, your refusal to acknowledge how beam rifles are explained to work seems to be the crux of this theory of yours. The energy from the mobile suit plays basically zero role in the force of the beam, it's all the energy stored in the e-cap's Minovsky particles.

What I am saying is exactly how you are saying it, the only difference is that I am using a higher power input and a longer charge time, while you are trying to say they have a long exposure time to the beam output.

I am arguing they used the wrong term "output" in the settings for what kind of power they are showing in the anime, and you are arguing they are showing a wrong exposure time in the anime.

[Seto Kaiba]

Sigh, I am not going to argue the vocab I'm using, but I made my point very clear, you get most of the energy from the E-cap and not the MS. I showed them in my first post. I use the term amplify as a description of the energy it gained from the e-cap.

Y'know what, I'm gonna skip everything else and just down to the meat and potaotes of this topic.

The problem we're having here is you still fundamentally misunderstand how these weapons work. There is no direct relationship between the energy from the mobile suit's generator and the energy output of the beam rifle.

The mega-particle beam's energy isn't coming from the mobile suit, it's the release of the energy that was stored in the weapon's e-cap (or e-pac) in the form of compressed high-energy Minovsky particles. The energy that the beam rifle's discharging when it fires is the energy from the e-cap. That's what determines the output power of a beam rifle... how much energy is stored in the e-cap and what percentage of the e-cap's stored energy is being drawn out for each shot. The only role the energy from the mobile suit plays is to provide just enough of an impulse to trigger the release of the energy in those compressed Minovsky particles. You aren't going to get significantly more energy out if you put more energy in because all you're doing is giving it a little tap to start the fusion reaction going. That's where the beam rifle stats only have a recommended minimum generator output and not a maximum. You're just releasing stored energy from a separate system. All you need to do is fill the minimum input requirement because there's no advantage to be had in exceeding it.

It's like my car analogy from the previous reply. You're not going to get better performance out of your car if you pump 30 amps through your spark plugs instead of 30 milliamps. You only need to hit that minimum requirement because there's a finite amount of energy stored in the fuel and throwing more energy at it to start the reaction isn't going to do much to affect the amount of energy released in the reaction unless you go below the minimum and get nothing.

Think of the e-cap's Minovsky particles like gunpowder. At the same level of compression, the only way to have more power from the same type of gunpowder is to have more gunpowder. The reaction is violent enough that you won't see an increase in released energy by applying more energy to ignite it. The power of a beam rifle is entirely about the e-cap and the quantity of compressed Minovsky particles being used for a shot.

[MythSearcher]

Y'know what, I'm gonna skip everything else and just down to the meat and potaotes of this topic.

The problem we're having here is you still fundamentally misunderstand how these weapons work. There is no direct relationship between the energy from the mobile suit's generator and the energy output of the beam rifle.

Yes, there is no direct relation from the MS's generator and the output of the beam, that is why I keep stressing there are capacitors onboard to store the energy for the release.

The problem is you are the one not understanding the key idea here is degeneracy pressure.
If M particles reach X Pa, it reaches critical state and degenerate into Mega particles.
It is not directly related to the total energy of that batch of M particles, but is related by the volume of it.
If you have 1 kilo litre of it vs if you have 2 kilo litre of it at the same pressure 0.99X Pa and temperature, the 2 kilo litre batch is obviously going to be double in energy.

You need certain energy as a trigger to compress the high energy M-particle plasma to meet the degeneracy pressure to turn them into Mega particles and to maintain the I-Field in the chamber.

If you want a higher energy beam, you need to be firing more Mega particles to do so, because you cannot compress more of the M particles or they go critical. Thus you need a larger compression chamber and more energy to compress the chamber.
You simply need more energy to compress more particles unless your tech level is higher and you can get the pressure in the e-cap to be closer to the critical state and not degenerating.
Also, you need more energy to maintain the I-Field that is directing the Mega particles towards the barrel due to the bigger chamber and bigger end result volume of Mega particles.
You may be able to have the same power for the barrel if you have the same diameter because the pressure will be the same, but you will end up with a beam stream longer in length and thus still taking more energy from your MS for the longer time you need to maintain the power of the barrel. Making a bigger barrel and thus a larger power consumption may or may not be beneficial due to many factors, so it is likely a trade off.

You seem to have a misunderstanding that you can give the same trigger energy to the weapon for whatever output it has from your description.

The car spark plug and gunpowder analogies only works to a certain extend because it powers its own chain reaction and you only need a spark.
This is not the case in Mega particle guns because you need the energy to compress a larger amount of particles.

Take the RX-0 Beam magnum as an example, it must be specially designed so RX-0 is giving it enough energy to compress everything in the e-pac to release all of it at once, if your MS does not have that much energy to do so, it will not be able to fire unless the magnum itself has capacitors to store the energy and fire the shot.

A better analogy is the fusion reactor.
You simply need more energy to heat up the fuel to a plasma state before it goes critical, even if I preheat the fuel for your generator to 99% of the temperature, that 1% heat requirement is still going to change as you use more fuel.
Same story here for the Mega particle guns, you have a fixed pressure you need to achieve, and getting to that pressure for a higher energy gun will require more trigger energy and power to maintain the system.

I guess you can argue they can use a higher temperature plasma for more energy and keep the volume, but that also requires higher tech and more power to contain the more energetic plasma in the e-cap and it will also have probability of some of the particles going critical just by ramming into each other. And the truth is we never get settings telling us what happens to a hotter plasma and a higher power gun is just hotter. (Unless you are using the other definition of hot, well yes, I guess I have to agree with that.)

Or if you understand all this, you are simply ignoring the fact that what I am arguing here is the 1.9MW isn't enough as an "output" of the gun. And you need to prove that the beam lasts for more than a fraction of a sec as the contact time to actually be able to transfer enough energy to the target. Or you simply misunderstood the idea of power and energy like you keep saying 1.9MJ and 1.9 MJ/s is the same thing above.

[Seto Kaiba]

Yes, there is no direct relation from the MS's generator and the output of the beam, that is why I keep stressing there are capacitors onboard to store the energy for the release.

You keep stressing it, but your source for the existence of these capacitors appears to be outdated... every publication I've been able to find that identifies the blocks on the Gundam's waist calls them "helium cores". Even model kit books.

Even if we assume these capacitors do exist, you're just trying to shift the same fallacious reasoning to another source. The Gundam franchise's oft-repeated official explanation/history of the beam rifle is that Dr. Minovsky was able to successfully miniaturize the mega particle cannon for mobile suit use via the invention of the e-cap, which substituted for the impossibly high-output reactor requirements by providing a reservoir of pre-compressed Minovsky particles for the weapon. Thus, the mobile suit only needed to provide a small amount of energy for the particles to achieve critical pressure and discharge the weapon.

There's no direct connection between the energy from the mobile suit and how powerful the beam is, there's only that minimum energy requirement to start the reaction that varies depending on the output power of the weapon because what changes the output power is the amount of Minovsky particles used per discharge.

The problem is you are the one not understanding the key idea here is degeneracy pressure.

No, I understand it just fine... I just touched on it in less overwrought terms because we both already know how that part works.

If you want a higher energy beam, you need to be firing more Mega particles to do so, because you cannot compress more of the M particles or they go critical. Thus you need a larger compression chamber and more energy to compress the chamber.

Precisely, this is why the minimum recommended generator output for the various models of beam weapon varies from model to model. Different quantities of Minovsky particles are necessary to achieve different output levels, and as the logical consequent of different quantities of Minovsky particles you need different amounts of energy input to achieve the necessary small additional compression to trigger the fusion into mega particles.

You seem to have a misunderstanding that you can give the same trigger energy to the weapon for whatever output it has from your description.

No, that's just a strawman you've erected. We were talking about one specific model of beam rifle - the XBR-M-79-07G - and the fact that applying slightly more trigger compression will not yield a noticeably more energetic reaction.

The car spark plug and gunpowder analogies only works to a certain extend because it powers its own chain reaction and you only need a spark.
This is not the case in Mega particle guns because you need the energy to compress a larger amount of particles.

Actually, compression force is an essential part of how both of those things work. If you don't have sufficient levels of compression in the energy storage medium (gasoline, gunpowder) you'll get a much less energetic reaction or even no reaction at all. That's part of why I chose them as analogies.

Take the RX-0 Beam magnum as an example, it must be specially designed so RX-0 is giving it enough energy to compress everything in the e-pac to release all of it at once, if your MS does not have that much energy to do so, it will not be able to fire unless the magnum itself has capacitors to store the energy and fire the shot.

That depends more on the compression level in the e-pac than anything.

What we're told is it takes only a small amount of energy from the mobile suit to trigger a normal beam rifle because the Minovsky particles in the e-cap have been compressed to just below the threshold of fusion. I would expect that along with making e-caps removable as e-pacs they'd improve compression levels over time, so while the RX-0 may still need the typically over-the-top generator output of a Gundam to trigger the weapon it's still not going to be a huge proportion of the generator's total output.

Or if you understand all this, you are simply ignoring the fact that what I am arguing here is the 1.9MW isn't enough as an "output" of the gun. And you need to prove that the beam lasts for more than a fraction of a sec as the contact time to actually be able to transfer enough energy to the target. Or you simply misunderstood the idea of power and energy like you keep saying 1.9MJ and 1.9 MJ/s is the same thing above.

No, the original point here is that you're trying to judge an orange by the standards of apples.

The reason you need such massive amounts of energy to penetrate armor with a projectile weapon is that projectile is having to push the armor material it encounters out of its way. Armor is designed specifically to spread kinetic energy from a projectile impact as widely as possible to minimize damage, either through the sheer thickness and density of that armor material or by having thinner layers of alternating densities so that the compaction of the material occurs at different rates and slows the projectile down. This is the principle at work in both composite armor and bulletproof glass.

Why a beam weapon can achieve more destructive potential with less energy is that it's not firing a physical projectile... it's burning through the target with a high-energy particle beam. It isn't trying to push all that armor material out of the way, it's burning a hole through armor material without moving the surrounding material. With a nice, wide, unfocused beam rated at 300W you can warm a piece of sheet steel to about 130 degrees F. Focus that same energy down to a quarter of a millimeter and you're instantly burning holes in thin sheet steel. The same armor material on tanks which stands up to 12MJ impacts from armor-piercing ammunition can be cut through almost instantly with a kilowatt laser cutter. At just 4.0kW you can instantly cut through inch-thick sheets of steel comparable to the interior bulkheads of a Navy warship.

We're talking about what is essentially a plasma cutter with around 500 times that output. Of course armor is useless against it, that's a ridiculous amount of power for a tight-focus cutting tool. We've seen that the actual beam from the beam weapon is much narrower than the barrel or nozzle because of the focusing. The cutting edge of a beam saber being essentially a narrow stream of high-pressure Minovsky particles and that the wider lightsaberlike beam is what plasma gets trapped by the i-field. 1.9 megajoules doesn't sound like a ton of energy compared to high explosives or armor-piercing kinetic projectiles, but it's still overkill against armor because it's playing by a different set of rules than what the armor was designed around. It's not shifting material in the course of punching a hole, it's burning one and leaving the surrounding material largely untouched becuase of the tight focus of the beam. The energy isn't spreading out nearly as much, so you get much better penetration from the beam than you would from a bullet.

It doesn't sound like a lot of energy, but it IS a lot of energy when you consider how it's applied.

[domino]

Interesting discussion here so while there remains a bit of debate on if the e-cap/e-pac has pre-compressed mega particles or not, it sounds like the generator output of the mobile suit and the MW rating of the beam weapon are largely unrelated.

So, the MW rating for the beam weapon indicates the amount of power released per release of compressed mega particles from said weapon?

That would explain why any mobile suit seems capable of firing the Unicorn's beam magnum but how does it relate to mobile suits that are equipped with on-board/built-in beam weapons with extremely high MW ratings? Do they have internal e-caps/e-pacs or is that where the capacitors come into play? IIRC mobile suits like ZZ could only fire its mega particle cannon once or twice before it failed?

[Seto Kaiba]

Interesting discussion here so while there remains a bit of debate on if the e-cap/e-pac has pre-compressed mega particles or not, it sounds like the generator output of the mobile suit and the MW rating of the beam weapon are largely unrelated.

That e-cap/e-pac contains pre-compressed Minovsky particles held at a state just shy of fusing into mega particles isn't really what we're debating, we're arguing over how much of a role the trigger impulse from the mobile suit's generator is having on the output power and whether the weapons output ratings are high enough to do what's shown in the anime.

So, the MW rating for the beam weapon indicates the amount of power released per release of compressed mega particles from said weapon?

Yes, the ratings given for beam weapons in megawatts (MW) indicate the amount of energy the weapon emits over a period of one second. A Watt is defined as one joule of energy over a period of one second.

That would explain why any mobile suit seems capable of firing the Unicorn's beam magnum but how does it relate to mobile suits that are equipped with on-board/built-in beam weapons with extremely high MW ratings? Do they have internal e-caps/e-pacs or is that where the capacitors come into play? IIRC mobile suits like ZZ could only fire its mega particle cannon once or twice before it failed?

Weapons like the ZZ Gundam's high mega cannon and the Sazabi's scattering particle beam cannon are conventional mega particle cannons. Instead of using e-pacs or e-caps charged with highly compressed Minovsky particles, those weapons are tied directly into the mobile suit's Minovsky reactor(s). The mobile suit's generator powers a condenser system that collects Minovsky particles from the reactor(s) and compresses them until they're just below the level of fusing into mega particles, and holds onto them until the command to fire comes... at which point it compresses the particles that little extra step to trigger the fusion into mega particles.

Because those weapons used condensers like battleship-mounted mega particle cannons they can put out a lot more firepower than a beam rifle, but at the same time they're extremely draining to use because producing, collecting, and compressing all those Minovsky particles burns a lot of fuel and takes a lot of electrical power. That's why only a few mobile suits have them and why they're not really suitable for repeated use... the energy requirements are so massive that the mobile suit's reactor can't keep up.

[domino]

Thanks Seto. This makes me wonder about the 'refueling' of funnels. It seems most ZZ-era funnels are equipped with e-caps so are they being refilled with mega particles from the mobile suit's generator or is the 'refueling' solely for the funnel propellant and energy source required to actually trigger the mega particle emissions?

[MythSearcher]

You keep stressing it, but your source for the existence of these capacitors appears to be outdated... every publication I've been able to find that identifies the blocks on the Gundam's waist calls them "helium cores". Even model kit books.

I listed Gundam Officials' "power box".
PG and MG 1.0 Manual didn't specifically state what are the yellow patches but tells us there is a sub generator NC-7 type along with the hard point for mounting weapons. Since the only place the generator can be placed are inside the yellow patches(the front and back middle parts served as a coolant spreader and weapon mount), this is likely where Gundam Officials is referring to be rejected, thus I am not using these as a source an say those are generators.
It does suggest some other sources call it the Sub control system, but since GM doesn't have it, it is hard to imagine it to be anything as crucial as a control system. Which make sense because reducing the power or capacitors only lower the
HG, MG 1.5, ver. Ka and ver. OYW completely ignored the parts, same for the G04 and G05 manuals.

Also, Rapport Deluxe's Mobile Suit Gundam 大事典[一年戦爭編] also gives us a super capacitor, only that it is on the side of the waist, not the yellow patches.

So I really wanted to know where you get "helium cores", since there really aren't that many sources going into this kind of detail and the yellow patches are usually ignored.

Even if we assume these capacitors do exist,.

Wouldn't it be strange to assume there aren't any capacitors on something mainly driven by electricity?
Most of the weapon systems we currently have IRL that required a high power output for a short period are designed with capacitors. It stablises the surges in the circuit and basically lets us have a power sources with much lower output by storing the energy.

The reasoning is basically the same as an E-cap.

you're just trying to shift the same fallacious reasoning to another source The Gundam franchise's oft-repeated official explanation/history of the beam rifle is that Dr. Minovsky was able to successfully miniaturize the mega particle cannon for mobile suit use via the invention of the e-cap, which substituted for the impossibly high-output reactor requirements by providing a reservoir of pre-compressed Minovsky particles for the weapon. Thus, the mobile suit only needed to provide a small amount of energy for the particles to achieve critical pressure and discharge the weapon.

There's no direct connection between the energy from the mobile suit and how powerful the beam is, there's only that minimum energy requirement to start the reaction that varies depending on the output power of the weapon because what changes the output power is the amount of Minovsky particles used per discharge.

So what are you trying to say here?

1.9MW isn't insanely high, it is just 38% higher than RX-78's own generator.
Are you trying to only focus on the part stating it is insanely high but ignoring the fact that you keep sticking to the 1.9MW as the output of the beam isn't insanely high?
You said my reasoning is fallacious, but what you are saying here seems to be fallacious.

Precisely, this is why the minimum recommended generator output for the various models of beam weapon varies from model to model. Different quantities of Minovsky particles are necessary to achieve different output levels, and as the logical consequent of different quantities of Minovsky particles you need different amounts of energy input to achieve the necessary small additional compression to trigger the fusion into mega particles.

And I am saying the minimum energy needed is what the power rating of the gun should be, and the e-cap is using that to give us an even higher power to match what they are showing on screen.

No, that's just a strawman you've erected. We were talking about one specific model of beam rifle - the XBR-M-79-07G - and the fact that applying slightly more trigger compression will not yield a noticeably more energetic reaction.

You are erecting the strawman here. I am not suggesting you can just randomly apply more energy to get more output.
I am saying the power rating should be higher.
And we do have a source from the PG manual with this specific gun model that says they tested a 10MW input on it, so me suggesting a 1.9MW as the input and not the output isn't completely out of the blue.

Actually, compression force is an essential part of how both of those things work. If you don't have sufficient levels of compression in the energy storage medium (gasoline, gunpowder) you'll get a much less energetic reaction or even no reaction at all. That's part of why I chose them as analogies.

The problem is these are reactions that can sustain themselves with their own energy generated.
As long as you have the right mix of fuel and oxidizer, they burn/explode.
It doesn't matter if I am lighting up 1kg of gunpowder of 2kg of gunpowder, I only need the same amount of energy to do so. Once lit, the combustion will continue to burn and it will just be completely burned up and you won't need to have more power to blow up more of it.
I know the there's more to it but the specifics aren't anything like the e-cap, where if the same triggering energy is used, you get nothing for a larger amount of particles.

That depends more on the compression level in the e-pac than anything.

What we're told is it takes only a small amount of energy from the mobile suit to trigger a normal beam rifle because the Minovsky particles in the e-cap have been compressed to just below the threshold of fusion. I would expect that along with making e-caps removable as e-pacs they'd improve compression levels over time, so while the RX-0 may still need the typically over-the-top generator output of a Gundam to trigger the weapon it's still not going to be a huge proportion of the generator's total output.

And I am saying the small amount should be the 1.9MW the power rating is giving us.

Compared to their operation time, 10~30s really is just a small amount of energy.

No, the original point here is that you're trying to judge an orange by the standards of apples.

The reason you need such massive amounts of energy to penetrate armor with a projectile weapon is that projectile is having to push the armor material it encounters out of its way. Armor is designed specifically to spread kinetic energy from a projectile impact as widely as possible to minimize damage, either through the sheer thickness and density of that armor material or by having thinner layers of alternating densities so that the compaction of the material occurs at different rates and slows the projectile down. This is the principle at work in both composite armor and bulletproof glass.

Why a beam weapon can achieve more destructive potential with less energy is that it's not firing a physical projectile... it's burning through the target with a high-energy particle beam. It isn't trying to push all that armor material out of the way, it's burning a hole through armor material without moving the surrounding material. With a nice, wide, unfocused beam rated at 300W you can warm a piece of sheet steel to about 130 degrees F. Focus that same energy down to a quarter of a millimeter and you're instantly burning holes in thin sheet steel. The same armor material on tanks which stands up to 12MJ impacts from armor-piercing ammunition can be cut through almost instantly with a kilowatt laser cutter. At just 4.0kW you can instantly cut through inch-thick sheets of steel comparable to the interior bulkheads of a Navy warship.

We're talking about what is essentially a plasma cutter with around 500 times that output. Of course armor is useless against it, that's a ridiculous amount of power for a tight-focus cutting tool. We've seen that the actual beam from the beam weapon is much narrower than the barrel or nozzle because of the focusing. The cutting edge of a beam saber being essentially a narrow stream of high-pressure Minovsky particles and that the wider lightsaberlike beam is what plasma gets trapped by the i-field. 1.9 megajoules doesn't sound like a ton of energy compared to high explosives or armor-piercing kinetic projectiles, but it's still overkill against armor because it's playing by a different set of rules than what the armor was designed around. It's not shifting material in the course of punching a hole, it's burning one and leaving the surrounding material largely untouched becuase of the tight focus of the beam. The energy isn't spreading out nearly as much, so you get much better penetration from the beam than you would from a bullet.

It doesn't sound like a lot of energy, but it IS a lot of energy when you consider how it's applied.

Only problem is that you are ignoring the actual diameter of the beam rifle.
The beam isn't as narrow as a laser cutter, it is a beam as wide as, or maybe even wider than the muzzle of the beam rifle.
The hole being penetrated is never a small one like what you see in a laser cutter, but something as large as a normal kinetic penetrator for armoured vehicles.
Just took a measurement on screen, the first beam rifle shot, the Zaku is 20cm on my screen and the hole is 7mm.
Which makes the instance penetration of about 60cm of super high tension steel.
And I actually measured the Zaku from head to waist and from waist to foot, not using the direct measurement with a smaller number as it is bending its knees a bit, or the hole will be even larger. The holes it shot through Zeong are pretty much the same in diameter, and the famous final shot actually burned away Zeong's head for more than a human height(Amuro is just flying near)
Plasma and laser cutters cut deep and not wide, you don't want to waster that much energy and material for a cutter.
500 times the output of it doesn't give you 500 times the diameter, but 22.4 times. I don't thing we have a plasma cutter operating in cutting a 2.6 cm diameter hole in just a fraction of a second.

The specific heat of vapourization of iron is about 6.21MJ/kg, 6MJ vapourize about 1 kg of iron, which is about 128mL. (Which actually you still haven't prove that the targets are exposed to the beam for 3s and not only a fraction of a sec at all.)
With a 60cm diameter, your penetration is about 0.45mm.
Far from the penetrating front to end we see in show.
If you want to say the beam only melts the material away, there isn't enough time for the material to get away from the front of the beam, and the heat transfer rate of iron at 80W/(mK) isn't fast enough to melt 60cm of it before the rest of the beam hits that spot.

Unless you keep the hole to be something smaller than a 4 cm diameter, where you get a penetration depth of 10cm, you are not very likely to do much. Think about it, 10cm on an MS is 1mm on your 1/100 model.
You can say that you just pick something like a 10mm diameter for the beam rifle and get a 163 cm penetration, but you will need to find a reference of a beam shot opening just that kind of a hole on a MS.
1.9MJ is just going to be worse.

Oh yeah, in case you haven't noticed, I haven't even included the energy required to heat the iron from 473K to 3000K, which is about 1.17MJ/kg and the energy you needed to melt it but only the vapourization energy needed.

There is a reason the kinetic penetrators carry that much energy, it is needed to move all of those material away from their original spot. Even if you change it to heat energy, you still need that much to move the mass.
A beam rifle isn't a plasma cutter, their working principle is similar but the design parameters they are using are just simply too big of a difference.

Side note, I just love WolframAlpha for doing all the calculations for me.

Thanks Seto. This makes me wonder about the 'refueling' of funnels. It seems most ZZ-era funnels are equipped with e-caps so are they being refilled with mega particles from the mobile suit's generator or is the 'refueling' solely for the funnel propellant and energy source required to actually trigger the mega particle emissions?

Probably both.
For Hi-Nu's Fin Funnel, which has its own onboard generator, it still requires the funnel pod(Which Nu doesn't have) to recharge their "energy".

[domino]

Probably both.
For Hi-Nu's Fin Funnel, which has its own onboard generator, it still requires the funnel pod(Which Nu doesn't have) to recharge their "energy".

Great example mentioning the Fin Funnels but given that having an onboard generator increased their operation limit significantly then I suspect that mobile suits may actually only be capable of refuelling propellant for their funnels and not resupplying the e-caps. Incidentally, the reason why E-Pacs seem to have been made was that it may have been prohibitive to try resupplying a depleted e-cap mid-battle. Maybe it would unnecessarily drain the mobile suit's own reactor/generator

For instance, the Jaqd Doga funnel mounts don't seem capable of doing much more than just re-mounting the funnels after usage. The Sazabi, Quebeley and Nu Gundam all have funnel mounts close to their main thrusters which may be to allow for quick fuel resupply.

[Seto Kaiba]

Thanks Seto. This makes me wonder about the 'refueling' of funnels. It seems most ZZ-era funnels are equipped with e-caps so are they being refilled with mega particles from the mobile suit's generator or is the 'refueling' solely for the funnel propellant and energy source required to actually trigger the mega particle emissions?

Apart from a few early Earth Federation designs that weren't equipped for it, mobile suits outfitted with funnels have the ability to recharge the e-caps of their funnels with Minovsky particles from the mobile suit's reactor the same way every mobile suit recharges its beam saber's e-cap while it's stowed.

Great example mentioning the Fin Funnels but given that having an onboard generator increased their operation limit significantly [...]

Fin funnels aren't actually funnels, they're miniaturized bits that are dependent on chemical propellant as a result of the miniaturization of the design.

Incidentally, the reason why E-Pacs seem to have been made was that it may have been prohibitive to try resupplying a depleted e-cap mid-battle. Maybe it would unnecessarily drain the mobile suit's own reactor/generator

Master Archive Mobile Suit does describe the GMs as having the ability to recharge the e-cap of their beam rifle and/or beam spray gun in the field, but the process is energy-intensive and can take a long time so it's not something you'd want to do on the battlefield in mid-fight. During the One Year War, recharge rates were about 40 seconds for a beam spray gun to recharge one shot's worth of Minovsky particles in its e-cap off the mobile suit's reactor. Even the best recharge rate achieved by the GM II and a state of the art Gryps conflict-era beam rifle (BR-S-85C-2) was still 15 seconds to replenish enough Minovsky particles for one shot.

E-pacs were a lot more efficient for the mobile suit, since a beam rifle could be restored to full charge in a matter of seconds without the mobile suit expending any additional energy.




@MythSearcher: I haven't forgotten you, I've been having a blast researching for my reply to you and have had to start over and restructure my reply several times as I find more and more interesting tidbits like descriptions of beam rifles having variable beam focus and other interesting capabilities. There's some good sh*t hidden here... which I guess is only to be expected when the people who actually worked on the show get involved.

[MythSearcher]

Great example mentioning the Fin Funnels but given that having an onboard generator increased their operation limit significantly then I suspect that mobile suits may actually only be capable of refuelling propellant for their funnels and not resupplying the e-caps. Incidentally, the reason why E-Pacs seem to have been made was that it may have been prohibitive to try resupplying a depleted e-cap mid-battle. Maybe it would unnecessarily drain the mobile suit's own reactor/generator

For instance, the Jaqd Doga funnel mounts don't seem capable of doing much more than just re-mounting the funnels after usage. The Sazabi, Quebeley and Nu Gundam all have funnel mounts close to their main thrusters which may be to allow for quick fuel resupply.

The problem is that it is dubious whether there are e-cap onboard most of the beam weapons we see. We get the Qubeley's funnel stating it has e-cap, that is pretty much it.
It would be strange to not utilize the technology in all beam weapons, including ship cannons for various advantages, mainly to increase the rate of fire, even just for the first few volleys. They have all the time needed to charge the e-cap before any battle, and it would be hard to say that the e-cap cannot sustain that much power because RX-78-2's beam rifle is said to be at the battleship main gun level as well as RX-93 Nu's beam rifle. Price problem can be mitigated by using larger and less compressed e-caps(the ships have all the power they need to fully charge the shots anyway)
At least I don't see a major disadvantage of not using the tech on ship guns or any beam guns even if the MS has the power to fully charge a mega beam cannon and fire it without the e-cap. If you can have something like 10 shots of 80% charged shots(RX-78's e-cap has 12~16 shots depending on your source material), the rate of fire is 5:1, you get 5 shots vs the non-e-cap system's 1 shot. You get 10 shots on each gun while your enemy only gets 2. Even if it lowers your rate of fire to only half the speed with all the added mechanism(I just randomly picked a low enough number, it is highly unlikely to have that much of an impact), you will still have fired more shots until the 17th shot(and the same at 18th shot) per gun. With 6 guns(e.g. Gwazine, Chivvay, Zanzibar, Musai, Salamis), that is 102 shots; with 14 guns(e.g. Magellan), that is 238 shots. This kind of design will be better in deploying a hit and run tactic, which is more common in the entirety of UC.

Also, Yes, Jagd Doga's mounts don't have a charging pod, the funnels are just hanging there like Nu's FFs.
The only MS funnels during that period that can be charged are Qubeley, Sazabi and Hi-Nu, and the settings are pretty clear about these 5 with each of them written specifically with a can and cannot other than Nu, but since Hi-Nu made it a point that its difference to Nu is the Funnel pods that can charge the FF, it is also clear that Nu cannot do so.

Master Archive Mobile Suit does describe the GMs as having the ability to recharge the e-cap of their beam rifle and/or beam spray gun in the field, but the process is energy-intensive and can take a long time so it's not something you'd want to do on the battlefield in mid-fight. During the One Year War, recharge rates were about 40 seconds for a beam spray gun to recharge one shot's worth of Minovsky particles in its e-cap off the mobile suit's reactor. Even the best recharge rate achieved by the GM II and a state of the art Gryps conflict-era beam rifle (BR-S-85C-2) was still 15 seconds to replenish enough Minovsky particles for one shot.

It is quite fun that some sources, like Rapport Deluxe, place the charging of mega particle cannon at a few minutes, so Master Archive's 40s for the whole clip, or even for just one shot is still really fast compared to that.

Of course I will just agree that a few minutes per shot is never seen in newer shows(and I don't remember if I ever see any in the older ones) and a few minutes is just too slow even for ships, and CDA has a Modified Zanzibar that has special Mega particle cannons that can fire at about only a minute and a half per shot.

E-pacs were a lot more efficient for the mobile suit, since a beam rifle could be restored to full charge in a matter of seconds without the mobile suit expending any additional energy.

I'd say e-caps are just more efficient in any unit with a beam gun, unless there's some kind of disadvantage/catch in it that they didn't have in any settings.

@MythSearcher: I haven't forgotten you, I've been having a blast researching for my reply to you and have had to start over and restructure my reply several times as I find more and more interesting tidbits like descriptions of beam rifles having variable beam focus and other interesting capabilities. There's some good sh*t hidden here... which I guess is only to be expected when the people who actually worked on the show get involved.

About the variable beam focus, are you talking about the aiming device they are using at the muzzle of the mega particle cannon and S Gundam's beam smart guns? I know they exist, and can direct the beam for up to 20 degrees from the barrel, can't recall if they can focus the beam more but I assume they can.(Especially they have scattered mega particle cannons like the Apsaras III which are shown to have a pretty accurate aim at multiple targets with each separate beam)

[Seto Kaiba]

PG and MG 1.0 Manual didn't specifically state what are the yellow patches but tells us there is a sub generator NC-7 type along with the hard point for mounting weapons.

Generally, I don't consider model kit and toy manuals to be authoritative sources of information because we have zero idea who wrote it, if it was subjected to fact-checking, etc.

Over the course of my enjoyable little research binge the other day, I did confirm the existence of that aforementioned sub-generator. Its placement is a bit hard to describe in polite terms, being essentially underneath and slightly behind the structural frame of the pelvis. I was also able to confirm the existence of the hardpoints, and a variety of optional configuration hardware adopted by the RGM-79 in the MS's armor skirt. I wasn't able to turn up any mentions of there being capacitors down there though.

Master Archive Mobile Suit does, in multiple volumes, identify the yellow bits down there as covers for the suit's "helium core unit[s]". They're apparently large, square, removable helium storage tanks that are used by the Gundam's cooling system located in what the book unflinchingly refers to as the unit's codpiece. The similar modules seen on a number of GMs including the RGM-79N are also labeled as "helium core unit". (Apparently this is why they're not on a number of GM models designed for land warfare... they don't need that cooling system.)

Also, Rapport Deluxe's Mobile Suit Gundam 大事典[一年戦爭編] also gives us a super capacitor, only that it is on the side of the waist, not the yellow patches.

I'm looking through the Rapport Deluxe books right now and I'm not seeing that term come up? Which volume is it in?

So I really wanted to know where you get "helium cores", since there really aren't that many sources going into this kind of detail and the yellow patches are usually ignored.

It's described in the "Structure of RX-78 GUNDAM" section of the RX-78 Master Archive, with a piece of art which shows the cover removed and the helium core exposed. It's labeled on a number of diagrams including the one for the RGM-79N in the second volume of the GM Master Archive. The same diagrams do mention (and show) all of the hardpoints but do not mention a super capacitor in that location.

Wouldn't it be strange to assume there aren't any capacitors on something mainly driven by electricity?

Oh, I don't doubt that there are capacitors somewhere for various purposes... we're just not clear on the specific set of capacitors you're referring to and their unclear purpose.

So what are you trying to say here?

My wording must have been unclear.

What I was explaining was that the miniaturization of the mega particle cannon was dependent on the invention of the e-cap and displacement of the Minovsky particle generation and compression to an external condenser system because it was technologically unfeasible for a mobile suit to incorporate a Minovsky reactor capable of meeting the demands of a conventional mega particle cannon. The invention of the e-cap was specifically to work around that stumbling block via displacement of virtually all of the charging power requirements to an external source prior to use.

And we do have a source from the PG manual with this specific gun model that says they tested a 10MW input on it, so me suggesting a 1.9MW as the input and not the output isn't completely out of the blue.

A manual written by whom? Nobody actually connected with the franchise's creative staff, I assume.

Without reading the actual document, I would be inclined to suspect that the 10MW input was a bench test without the use of an e-cap, or possibly a test of different compression characteristics. I have seen several publications mention development of the first generation beam rifle was fraught with complications and the initial prototypes were unreliable and highly inefficient weapons, leading to the development of the less complex beam spray gun as a stopgap.

The problem is these are reactions that can sustain themselves with their own energy generated.

Likewise, simply releasing the stored Minovsky particles in an e-cap yields quite an energetic weapon without having to fuse them into mega particles. That's pretty much how beam sabers work.

Only problem is that you are ignoring the actual diameter of the beam rifle.
The beam isn't as narrow as a laser cutter, it is a beam as wide as, or maybe even wider than the muzzle of the beam rifle.

On that score, I am not so sure. Master Archive mentions on a few occasions the Federation's beam weapons can dynamically manipulate the beam's focus for a variety of purposes including long vs. short range firing. Also, from what I've read the barrel of a beam weapon is lined with an i-field to protect it from the mega particle beam it's focusing onto the target. That would tend to imply the actual beam is narrower than the bore of the barrel by definition.

There's a diagram in the RX-0 book that I've been pondering for a while now that seems to indicate that the actual beam is very narrow - essentially the thin white line drawn in the heart of the beam discharge - and that most of the beam that we see is low-energy plasma byproducts of the mega particle reaction. It also seems to imply that there's more at work than just the kinetic energy of the mega particle beam itself, mentioning a plasma gas shock wave and high temperature mega particle reactions at the impact point, apparently at around 10,000 degrees C.

(Which actually you still haven't prove that the targets are exposed to the beam for 3s and not only a fraction of a sec at all.)

Look at the animation, there are plenty of instances in most any Gundam show where you see beams (not in slow motion scenes) that last upwards of a second in an individual shot. (We do see a lot of faster fire in later titles, though those weapons also have five to ten times the output...)

Oh yeah, in case you haven't noticed, I haven't even included the energy required to heat the iron from 473K to 3000K, which is about 1.17MJ/kg and the energy you needed to melt it but only the vapourization energy needed.

See the above about temperatures and possibly secondary effects of mega particle weaponry.

There is a reason the kinetic penetrators carry that much energy, it is needed to move all of those material away from their original spot. Even if you change it to heat energy, you still need that much to move the mass.

You're not moving as much though, that's the point, because the means by which the energy is conveyed to the target material is different (on a macro-atomic scale anyway).

A beam rifle isn't a plasma cutter, their working principle is similar but the design parameters they are using are just simply too big of a difference.

... I'd submit the ending 08th MS Team as proof that they actually pretty much are.

[Seto Kaiba]

As a related note, something I discovered in the RX-78 Master Archive puts the remarks about "battleship class" in a somewhat different light.

It contends that it's the effective range (20km), not the output power, that's being referred to as "battleship main gun class".

[MythSearcher]

To save some time, you might want to answer the question at the end of the reply first.
If I am getting you wrong, you might not want to reply to the whole thing.

Generally, I don't consider model kit and toy manuals to be authoritative sources of information because we have zero idea who wrote it, if it was subjected to fact-checking, etc.

A manual written by whom? Nobody actually connected with the franchise's creative staff, I assume.

Without reading the actual document, I would be inclined to suspect that the 10MW input was a bench test without the use of an e-cap, or possibly a test of different compression characteristics. I have seen several publications mention development of the first generation beam rifle was fraught with complications and the initial prototypes were unreliable and highly inefficient weapons, leading to the development of the less complex beam spray gun as a stopgap.

Actually, we have no idea who wrote most of the sources, a lot of them just attribute the author as the publisher.
Model manuals are actually overseen by mechanical designers like Katoki Hajime, he is the most famous but he is surely not the only one doing so. Most of the MG manuals are by him, he became the person in charge at least since 2004 when Bandai made it much more public, and the GFF line is all by him.
So they are actually pretty connected.
If we look at the publisher, it is most certain that Bandai is the most authoritative in this matter, unless Sotsu Agency publish something on its own.(Which is unlikely because it is a copyright management company, its business does not involve publishing the actual copyright materials)
Also, at least the UC product line is pretty consistent throughout the various products especially since 1991 when they recompiled the settings to be what we are seeing now.(e.g. not using UNT Spacy in 0080 and confirm as EFSF instead)

Gundam Officials also like to acknowledge what is said in those manuals, at least whenever I cross check the related sources, like all other official or semi-official settings book published at the time, some addressed settings are even originated from unofficial sources like Gundam Century.(Although Gundam Century is very well known and acknowledged by fans, it is just something editors of the Out magazine working along with the creators without request or even proper copyright licensing.(Those were the days where copyright isn't too much of an issue)
I tend to use the manuals first because it is easy to just check it in digital form on dalong.net, while pulling out the 3.5kg Gundam Officials is quite a hassle.

About the PG manual, they didn't explain too much about the diagrams. The said page (p.11) explains about the Mega particle cannon and beam rifle, with the two diagrams showing the relationship of the input power against effective range(input up to 10MW) and temperature(input up to 5MW) as the testing of the beam rifle.
It really doesn't matter if it is bypassing the e-cap or not, as long as you accept this source, you have to acknowledge the power of the rifle can operate at 10MW even if you are not taking the e-cap into account and the 10MW from the input is directly connected to the output of the gun.

Over the course of my enjoyable little research binge the other day, I did confirm the existence of that aforementioned sub-generator. Its placement is a bit hard to describe in polite terms, being essentially underneath and slightly behind the structural frame of the pelvis. I was also able to confirm the existence of the hardpoints, and a variety of optional configuration hardware adopted by the RGM-79 in the MS's armor skirt. I wasn't able to turn up any mentions of there being capacitors down there though.

Well, I know the sub-generators exists, Gundam Officials mentioned there are 7 generators on board and listed where they are. It is just that it particularly rejected the idea of the yellow patches being generators.

Master Archive Mobile Suit does, in multiple volumes, identify the yellow bits down there as covers for the suit's "helium core unit[s]". They're apparently large, square, removable helium storage tanks that are used by the Gundam's cooling system located in what the book unflinchingly refers to as the unit's codpiece. The similar modules seen on a number of GMs including the RGM-79N are also labeled as "helium core unit". (Apparently this is why they're not on a number of GM models designed for land warfare... they don't need that cooling system.)

The problem is that Master Archive by itself, no matter how many volumes of it, is a single source that is not directly published under the request of the license holder.
The level of officialness is in the Tier 2~3 range, where they can just write whatever they want and pay a licensing fee to get it published.
Rapport Deluxe and Gundam SF World is at the same tier, so you either accept both of them or reject both when no higher Tier sources says otherwise. In which case, since Gundam Officials said either they are "Power Box"(動力ボックス) or Sub Control System (サブ。コントロール。システム), but didn't mention anything about helium core, the helium core really isn't holding much officialness unless it can be explained as part of the power box.
The DeAgostini published Gundam Fact File and Perfect File is a good example of similarly licensed product, which has description completely newly written and never seen or contradict other sources, even officially published ones. It is also poorly edited, with many errors (some at a very fundamental level like where instead of a unit's name, it has ああ instead of BD-2.)
A more extreme example will be like the doujin where they obtain a single day license right to sell a certain number of copies. Of course I won't consider doujin with any level of official, but the idea isn't too far off. If you think doujin doesn't have the editorial oversight of the copyright holder, they do need to send in a copy to obtain the license, but common sense tells us they won't go extremely detail into correcting all the terms and such. From the DeAgonstini example we also know that they don't do so even in more formal publishing, so...

]

Also, Rapport Deluxe's Mobile Suit Gundam 大事典[一年戦爭編] also gives us a super capacitor, only that it is on the side of the waist, not the yellow patches.

I'm looking through the Rapport Deluxe books right now and I'm not seeing that term come up? Which volume is it in?

P.100 where they showed RX-78-2 picture and spec, labeling some of the parts.
It is not the 4 volume version but the single volume version.

Oh, I don't doubt that there are capacitors somewhere for various purposes... we're just not clear on the specific set of capacitors you're referring to and their unclear purpose.

I mentioned capacitors because they can provide a storage and short bursts of higher power, which can be useful for the purpose I am talking here.

What I was explaining was that the miniaturization of the mega particle cannon was dependent on the invention of the e-cap and displacement of the Minovsky particle generation and compression to an external condenser system because it was technologically unfeasible for a mobile suit to incorporate a Minovsky reactor capable of meeting the demands of a conventional mega particle cannon. The invention of the e-cap was specifically to work around that stumbling block via displacement of virtually all of the charging power requirements to an external source prior to use.

Yes, but 1.9MW isn't an insanely high amount compared to 1.38MW, thus if you are really only powering a Mega particle cannon with just 1.9MW, it would seems like the e-cap isn't necessary for the miniaturization of it, conventional capacitors or fast discharge batteries can have similar effect to just compress the M particles even without an e-cap to meet that kind of requirement.

A simple design where the generator of the MS compressing the M particles until it cannot provide enough pressure(since providing that pressure exceeds its power) and then discharging from a capacitor to provide the remaining pressure is completely within our current knowledge and technological level. (Which is similar in design with our railguns and laser weapons)

Likewise, simply releasing the stored Minovsky particles in an e-cap yields quite an energetic weapon without having to fuse them into mega particles. That's pretty much how beam sabers work.

Yes, beam sabres can be doubled as beam guns because of this reason. The only disadvantage of doing so seems to be the shorter range of it and a higher possibility of it being blocked by an EM field because it carry charges.

Side note, I do question the shorter range because with the electric charge, it forms an I-Field lattice which should make the beam disperse slower. While the mega particle is a neutral beam, it carries the Tau force which is repulsive in nature and is pushing each other apart.

On that score, I am not so sure. Master Archive mentions on a few occasions the Federation's beam weapons can dynamically manipulate the beam's focus for a variety of purposes including long vs. short range firing. Also, from what I've read the barrel of a beam weapon is lined with an i-field to protect it from the mega particle beam it's focusing onto the target. That would tend to imply the actual beam is narrower than the bore of the barrel by definition.

There's a diagram in the RX-0 book that I've been pondering for a while now that seems to indicate that the actual beam is very narrow - essentially the thin white line drawn in the heart of the beam discharge - and that most of the beam that we see is low-energy plasma byproducts of the mega particle reaction. It also seems to imply that there's more at work than just the kinetic energy of the mega particle beam itself, mentioning a plasma gas shock wave and high temperature mega particle reactions at the impact point, apparently at around 10,000 degrees C.

Well, it can focus, but from footages(anime) we see it making a 60cm hole and thus it must be able to vaporize that much material.
It doesn't matter if you can focus the beam to a diameter of 60nm, as long as you created a hole of 60cm in diameter, you need that much energy to do so. Whether you can heat a needle up to a temperature where you can just push it into a block of butter with ease is one thing, whether you heated that needle up to a temperature where after you pushed it in, it melts a 60cm diameter hole is another.

The absolute temperature of the beam also doesn't matter, the PG manual diagram mentioned above even has the graph up to 20,000 degrees C, as long as it is high enough so that energy will transfer from the beam particles to the target particles, the main concern is the energy it is carrying. If you use 1kJ to heat up a bunch of particles up to 20,000 degrees but you are trying to vaporize a block of metal where you need 1MJ to vaporize, you can at the best scenario vaporize 1/1000 of it. Some of it will take the energy and melt, so you get even less vaporization and more of a liquid dripping after a while.
A good example is the Thermosphere, particles there can reach 2500 degrees C, but you will still feel cold there because there aren't that much energy to heat you up.

Look at the animation, there are plenty of instances in most any Gundam show where you see beams (not in slow motion scenes) that last upwards of a second in an individual shot. (We do see a lot of faster fire in later titles, though those weapons also have five to ten times the output...)

A second is not enough energy for a 1.9MW beam to cause that much of a damage though.

See the above about temperatures and possibly secondary effects of mega particle weaponry.

Secondary effects still require the energy to cause damage.
The melting I mentioned is a secondary effect, which still took energy from the source.
Just like the shock wave of a nuclear bomb is taking energy from the nuclear reaction, and not from the surroundings.

From your reply, I do want to clarify one thing.
The 1.9MW you are talking about, are you referring to the total output of the beam rifle, meaning 1) the beam carries 1.9MW of power, or are you referring to 2) 1.9MW being just a part of the power of the beam and thus there is the secondary damage from the other parts for more power?
1) 1.9MW, period.
2) 1.9MW as thermal(or whatever)+X MW of kinetic+Y MW as shockwave+Z MW of bleh

Basically same question as the end, so if you haven't answered that first, you may want to now.

You're not moving as much though, that's the point, because the means by which the energy is conveyed to the target material is different (on a macro-atomic scale anyway).

... I'd submit the ending 08th MS Team as proof that they actually pretty much are.

Vaporization is making the particles move away by themselves.
Kinetic penetrators are pushing the particles away, and energy weapons are making them into a more energetic state so they move away. The latter is actually not likely to require less energy when making the same sized hole because of the nature of it being at a higher temperature and thus energizing the target area at a much quicker but much shorter time and thus usually only energizing a smaller amount of particles. It would be hard to just melt them without vaporizing and spread the energy to more particles because the contact time just isn't enough for the energy to transfer out to other particles. Thus usually an energy beam moving particles away by heat can be less efficient and requires more energy than a bullet because of this.

I am not saying you are wrong, if the beams in shows are making pin sized holes most of the times your argument is sound, but they are instead making holes very large in diameter and this would require a very high energy to work with.

A lower temperature beam can melt the target without vaporizing it, but then the effect will not be that instantaneous and actually very different, since the melted liquid won't necessarily move out of the way or at least will be moving at a much lower speed due to the mass difference.

There is also a reason higher energy lasers don't actually have similar high penetration effects we see in fiction. They vaporize a very small amount of the target, create a cloud of gas deflecting the rest of the beam. That is why people start to develop concepts of pulsed laser or wide area laser to overcome the problem.
Either that or you have ultra high instant kill energy beam that carries enough energy to vaporize enough of the target's mass before the explosion of the vapour blocking the rest of the energy.
Just pumping up the energy of our current laser weapons really don't give us linear results due to the different reactions of the target creating different results in different states of matter.

As a related note, something I discovered in the RX-78 Master Archive puts the remarks about "battleship class" in a somewhat different light.

It contends that it's the effective range (20km), not the output power, that's being referred to as "battleship main gun class".

20km is also the range in the diagram in the PG manual, but that would require an energy higher than 10MW if we project the graph.

Battleship main gun class can mean a lot of things, but in this case it is specifically stated as 威力, so it is hard to say it is anything but the raw destructive power. I am not saying this is a reasonable settings, but it's wording is so rigid that we can't really interpret it too much. A similar problem exists in RX-93 settings, where its beam rifle highest output is on par with period battleship class main guns, but the shield mounted beam gun, which is more powerful in the power rating, listed it to be on par with the OYW beam rifle in terms of output energy.

Or we can say that the RX-78-2 beam rifle is just that powerful and special, but inefficient in all senses (including but not limited to logistically, economically, power efficiency, etc.) thus they just simply take away all of those in the GM Spray gun and later models. Which also kinda explains the shield mounted beam gun of RX-93 using it as a reference in power. I don't want to do so though.
I'd rather rationalize it by saying beam guns using e-cap are actually using the power rating as the input into the e-cap as the trigger power and gives out a beam actually in the battleship main gun class (maybe lower for the GM spray gun) which will align much more with the settings wording and what is shown on screen and interpret it as the power per area, thus the smaller area of the beam rifle means a smaller total power and energy, but still much higher than the 1.9MW as the output which is hard to rationalize to match what is on screen.

We actually can attach a power number to many parts of the beam rifle:
A) the input from the MS to the gun
B) the plasma of the e-cap going into the guns' chamber before compression
C) the power to compress the plasma in the chamber
D) the power used to maintain the I-Field in the chamber
E) the power of the beam going out of the muzzle
F) the power to maintain the I-Field of the barrel

I'd say if we ignore power loss by efficiency,
C+D+F=A and B+C=E
Do you agree with this?
If so, our difference here is if we should attach the 1.9MW/1.38MW to A(my interpretation) or E(Your interpretation).
Am I at least getting this right? Or did I misinterpreted you?