Questions: Ship weapons with auto fire

[DivineWrath]

I'm having some trouble working this out. There are two kinds of weapons for ships that have auto fire.

Railgun Bay, Auto 4-6
Plasma-pulse Cannon Bay, Auto 6-8

For railguns, I think it is rather strait forward how they work. The auto fire uses more ammunition.

However, the Plasma-pulse Cannon has auto fire but doesn't use ammunition. I'm trying to figure out how auto fire works for it. Does it use more energy than what is listed? Is the energy listed consumed per shot fired?

 

[locarno24]

I would use the normal auto-fire rules to work out how many "single shot" equivalents a burst represents, and just assume it sucks up that much energy.

 

[Annatar Giftbringer]

The way I understand it is that ammo and power is per full auto attack, like with missile bays.

If one attack was a single shot with railguns the medium bay wouldn't even be able to fire (auto 6, 3x auto = 18 shots) so the bay having enough ammo for 12 full salvoes makes sense.

If the power requirement for plasma pulse bays were per single shot they'd be insanely power intensive, requiring twice as much power as particle beams yet reaching much shorter, so once again it makes more sense if the listed requirement is per full auto attack.