What happened to other laser weapons?

[The Vrusk]

I seem to recall from my college days with Megatraveller that there were several TL tiers of laser weapons including xasers (x-ray lasers) and grasers (gamma-ray lasers) which had powerful "Penetration" stats meaning they could punch through armor. I also seem to recall the xasers were TL 13. But current lasers are TL8-9 and 12?

Thoughts? Ideas?

 

[Condottiere]

Wait for ideas to run out, and have it added in the High Guard section in the next adventure/supplement?

 

[Sigtrygg]

People likely researched x ray lasers and discovered how useless they would be in an atmosphere.

 

[WHULorigan]

People likely researched x ray lasers and discovered how useless they would be in an atmosphere.

There ought to be some mention of a tunable free-electron laser system that can be frequency-adjusted and optimized for environment or for some degree of desired effect.

 

[Sigtrygg]

That is a more likely development for the higher TL personal laser weapons, that or using pilot beams of one frequency switching to another frequency. For space based weapons x ray lasers are deadly, but making them tunable from UV to hard x ray is likely to be a more useful weapon system.

 

[rinku]

From memory, Classic and MegaT had TL13 with better performance, which was mostly this (x-ray lasers). TNE went into it in a fair bit of detail, up to and including wavelength considerations (and focal diameter) into the performance of FF&S designs.

 

[tytalan]

Most of those are now done by using the weapon and screen advantages on pg 71 HG 2022.