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Neural Net ID LEONISLEY
Good day.
My Captain asked me to take a look at our pair of Manticore Beam-Accelerated Cannons for you. I'll say straight away I'm not an expert on them, but with the Cult of Technology being rather unwilling to share their technology, I'm probably one of the few people outside that Cult that understands a bit about them. I haven't finished my in-depth report on them yet, but the Captain told me to answer your comm anyway.
First of all, while the gun emits beams, those beams are not what damages the target. In fact, these beams are proton-based accelerator rays that allow projectiles to reach extraordinarily high velocity. The beams move at the speed of light, the projectiles don't. It is sort of a very intimidating but also pretty helpful optical illusion. Helpful, as in, you know you should turn on the afterburners the moment you see these beams targeting your ship, because the projectiles will hit you very, very, very shortly after. Since the snub-version of this technology is however short-ranged, there is not much delay. It is different with the carrier-type Heavy Manticore Beams.
Technically we are able to reproduce these guns, at least for snubs. However, the resources required for the production of these beasts are hilariously rare and expensive, while the biggest problem is the fact that sirian and probably gallic ships are not made to support these guns. They will never be as efficient as on a Cultist drone ship. This is why you will rarely find ships using these salvaged guns despite the fact that there are quite a bunch of them out there.
Before one can even think about upgrading them, these guns need to be refitted to work optimized on non-Cultist ships. The major issue here are power supply and heat exchange. From the analysis of drone remains, we know the drone ships are, well, drone ships. They are remotely controlled by carrier vessels of the VS-0074 type or similar. While remote-controlled ships aren't a mindblowing new invention - not at all - these ships have been specialized on it. They can endure more heat and can compensate for more heat, meaning they can support a higher energy production. That means more energy for the gun, and means, compared to the adaptions we can do for those guns on snub-sized vessels, more oomph and faster refire.
There are two ways how to deal with this. One could upgrade a vessel to be more like a Cultist ship. And with that I mean a drone ship, remotely controlled from a ship in the same system or equipped with an emergency automatic piloting system like the Apahanta Rovers. If one takes away all the stuff necessary to support a human life in a snub, it gives much space for other things. More heat sinks, capacitors, etc.
The other way would be to find a way to quote unquote upgrade the cannons in specific aspects. I do believe that is possible. Of course, on the downside, that means there needs to be compromise. Higher refire rate? Possible, but at the cost of multiple other aspects like damage output.
Both ways are rather expensive and will take a lot of time. You will need to get some experts and skilled engineers for that. That is a project for a team, not just one man. Chances of failing are high, chances of running out of CoT materials are high. Chances are the result won't be better than streamlined military equipment on the open market. It would be one hell of an expensive toy.
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