Fire rate of lascannons

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**Grey Templar**

Platuan4th wrote:
Lord Damocles wrote:

It's obviously playing up to the 'WW2 pilots only had ~45 seconds of ammunition angle of 'Battle of Britain but in spaaace', but it's still pretty stupid.

I mean, not necessarily unrealistic. The F-22 has all of 6 seconds of ammo for its rotary cannon.

As someone who plays Warthunder, 6 seconds of ammo is a generous amount as far as real life airplanes go past WW2.

Many modern/cold war jets have less than 2 seconds worth of ammo for their cannons, some don't even have cannons.

**Lord Damocles**

Olthannon wrote:
Lord Damocles wrote:
kabaakaba wrote:
There is two explanation
First is that tb have better cooling, and second author don't give a gak about how inunivers weapon working. I believe first. Also there is huge amount of air helps cool down the guns.

You'd think that a pilot would be able to identify the difference in appearance between a lascannon and an autocannon firing in under 30 seconds...

It's obviously playing up to the 'WW2 pilots only had ~45 seconds of ammunition angle of 'Battle of Britain but in spaaace', but it's still pretty stupid.

I've recently read the book because I got a hold of the new one of the series.

Simple mistake by a rookie pilot at the very start of the book essentially. Thunderbolts are pre-programmed with the lascannons armed and you need to toggle to fire the quad autocannons. In the "oh plums" moment of being buzzed by enemy fighters and dogfighting, pressed the big red shoot button down until the lascannon batteries went dead. Oopsie. So the rookie flattens the charge in a few overcharged 'bursts'.

Also based on the books in question, the thunderbolts have better missions time than current planes. So not really the Battle of Britain thing at all, beyond it being a novel about fighter planes defending an island of course.

If you can accidentally flatten the batteries of the lascannons before realising that they're not autocannons, that seems like a pretty limited fire-time...

**kabaakaba**

Imperial Armor refered Lascannons on vehicle to have unlimited ammunition

**Ashiraya**

We know it's not literally unlimited, as we see them run out of charge in some novels, most recently Ashes of the Imperium (which is a very new book).

But yeah, they pretty much have power as long as the vehicle does.

**kabaakaba**

New novels are a bit the mess for my taste. Many things done wrong just for drama

**Olthannon**

Lord Damocles wrote:

If you can accidentally flatten the batteries of the lascannons before realising that they're not autocannons, that seems like a pretty limited fire-time...

I've got a work lamp that has two settings, if you use the high setting it lasts 40 minutes. If you use the slightly lower setting that has no real difference it lasts 4 hours. In the context of that moment in the book there seems to be a substantial difference between firing the lascannons once and firing them essentially on full auto bursts.