Not too long ago, I, Martin Lawrence, I received a communication from a deep space exploration, that they have found something incredibly odd.
As they were going through Omicron Minor system, some distance from the Graveyard, they noticed an almost intact "Gull" transport, which it seemed to have unknown origins.
As they were surprised of such vessel being there, they wanted to explore it a bit.
As they approached the almost intact structure, they first scanned for life signs, but as expected the vessel was there for years there now.
What they found, however, is very odd.
In the cargo bay of this transport, they managed to lock an intact crate; the crate size was oddly small for something to require a transport to be transported, but they've seen that the crate was heavily locked.
It took them almost 3 hours to open it, but as they managed to open it, the shock was even bigger.
They found in it a weapon. By the measures they've sent me, it seemed that the weaponry was developed for Very Heavy Fighter Class Vessels.
At the moment, they are on their way to Ames Research Station, where we are going to study it deeply.
Their arrival is scheduled to tomorrow, where I'm going to personally take care of this project.
The small convoy has arrived with a bit of delay to Ames, because they got caught in an Ion Storm on the way so they couldn't advance.
After it passed, they safely managed to arrive with this odd weapon.
By a first look, it confirmed me that the weaponry was designed for smaller spacecrafts such as Very Heavy Fighters.
But the question of what exactly does, what exactly is.
So we did not waste any time to it and started slowly unmounting it.
The design of the weaponry is very odd as how it was mounted was not inspired to anything, or better I didn't personally see anything with that internal structure.
But piece by piece we kept unmounting and writing down every move we were doing, so we knew how to mount it in once piece. I can say that this weapon was a complicated task, but not impossible.
After we've unmounted all the pieces of the weapon, we found a somewhat connection to the common "Zapper", meaning a weapon with focused Photons, creating a Photon Ray. The difference between the "Zapper" and this weaponry, is that the electrical plant is differently built to somehow withstand much more power output from the vessel's powercore. It's structure is more resistant than normal weaponry, by implementing iridium plating on the weapon as well, while the electrical plant is built with Copper and Silver wiring which was thicker than the average wiring but around the wires, we found a foil shield which is made by an alloy made of Copper and Zinc, to prevent the dissipation of energy transfer to the weapon, therefore the weapon is by far more efficient than normal ones.
At the moment, we've rebuilt the weapon, and we are going to run some tests around it.
Then we will determine if it's worth spending more resources on studying it.
It went as expected.
We had to invent a temporary cooling system for the tests, as they were made in the hangar of Ames, where we used as target some Iridium plates. And I must say I'm very impressed with the final results.
However, till we got the final results, we risked two times to blow ourselves up because the weapon was overheating due to the huge power-output for the size of the weapon itself.
I'm very surprised that the electrical system actually has resisted to all the tests, and maintains it's integrity.
However I think we can stabilize more the weaponry.
We can install on it a heat sensor, which at the point that the weapon reaches very high temperatures, the sensors cuts the power until the temperature lowers down.
This should be more efficient than trying to install a cooling system within the weapon, thus needing a complete change of the weapon's design.
But in the future it can be an option, to completely rework it.
Anyway, as we started to test on the Iridium plate, at the beginning the weaponry has done low to no integrity damage, but as we continued with the tests, it seemed that slowly it started to leave like it was melting, but at the same time cutting it.
After the fifth test, the twenty centimeter plate, had a hole in the middle, that had the diameter of the beam, so it perfectly "drilled" through the plate.
Each test was about twenty seconds each, which in the last cases almost brought us to overheating, as stated before, but this can be easily fixable and hopefully we can build some working blueprints of the weaponry.
Right at this moment, we are starting to work on the sensor, and hopefully we can finish it soon.
After a lot of work put to make that sensor work and to be actually stable, we manged to finally stabilize the weapon.
The heat sensor is made that it gives live informations about the current weapon's temperature, and as soon as it reaches a very high temperature, basically the sensor sends a command to the main computer to shut the weaponry from being used, until it cools down.
We also added a cooling system, that, when it reaches said temperature, the cooling system would help cool the weapon down, so the firing process would be faster than with only the sensor.
But still takes about 2 seconds to make it usable again.
It took us over forty tests to actually make this work, and it was never experimented on an actual vessel, but we tried to simulate as much as we could how a vessel works as we did not want to risk a vessel for such tests.
But from the results, I can proudly say that this prototype is fully functional and here is attached the list for building this prototype.