Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/Ray Weaponry

Invisible Death
In (insert date), within the heavily contested (insert name) island, an Empire tank battalion stumbled into a hidden Rebel base. The base's garrison was quickly alerted to their presence, and in the brief ensuing skirmish the battalion was almost completely wiped out, save for a few survivors who barely managed to limp back to their superiors and report their discovery. Obviously, this was highly unfortunate for the tank battalion, but a boon for the Empire.

By this time in the war, both sides were fighting for any advantage they could get, material or technological. As such, plans were quickly drawn up for an assault, and a large Empire forces were sent out to secure the base. Though the base defenders fought valiantly, they were heavily outnumbered and were soon overwhelmed by the Empire forces, who proceeded to comb the entire base for any valuable research. They soon found what it was the Rebels had been protecting; a radiation projector.

Analysis of the captured device by Empire scientists soon revealed more details about it. To the best of their ability, the Empire scientists were able to determine that it was a heavily modified spectrum beam generator, tampered with by the Rebels extensively, though how they managed to get one is still a mystery to all but the Viceroyalty. Unlike a spectrum beam generator, the Rebel device was calibrated to produce thermal radiation. It was obvious what the Rebels had been trying to develop.

A death ray.

The Power of Amber
Immediately, the Empire set about to reverse engineer the weapon for their own ends. Creating a workable death ray, however, would not prove to be such an easy feat for the Empire. There were some successes, such as the creation of a projector that could produce a high-powered heat ray. Then the project ran into a major roadblock; lack of power.

The captured projector, to the scientists' dismay, proved to be far less powerful than they would have liked. Despite their best efforts, the Empire had difficulty raising the power of the radiation projector to lethal levels; though larger prototypes could produce a beam of radiation powerful enough to kill a man, they were far too inefficient and far too bulky.

Unimpressed by the lack of progress, the Empire switched its focus to other, seemingly more promising projects. Research would continue, even so, until a Rebel surprise attack to the lab housing the projector led to not only the portable projectors being taken, the larger ones being destroyed, but also all of the data and the scientist to recreate it. Thus the project was abandoned altogether, with the Empire not even caring as they assume that the Rebels wouldn't make any progress seeing as how they failed. And they were right.

Even with all of the data and functioning prototypes, the Rebels had struggled to increase the power of the projector. Until the Amber meteors came. Thanks to Amber, working ray weapons were developed, ones that were powerful enough to be lethal and compact enough to be usable by a person or mobile platform.

Viceroyalty ray weapons are best described as generating an initial beam of highly excited, and therefore hot, photons, which is then "amplified" by an Amber lens. Though the exact mechanism of this is not well understood even by the Viceroyalty, it is believed what happens is that the beam of high-energy photons destabilizes the Amber, causing it to emit an even more intense beam of heat. Better still, this beam can be used to then induce a second Amber lens to emit a burst of heat-rays, in effect amplifying the beam. Repeated enough times with enough 'lenses', one will get a lethal blast of heat that can reduce even tanks to molten slag. Of course, this degrades the Amber over time; eventually, a 'lens' will require replacement with a new one.

To increase the destructive power of a ray gun is a simple matter of passing the gamma-ray beam through multiple Amber lenses; the most powerful ray weapons the Viceroyalty use can require the beam to be amplified dozens of times. It should be noted, however, that the ray weapon designs employed by the Viceroyalty are extremely inefficient; even the beam of the least powerful ray weapon must be amplified several times to even have any useful destructive power. With finding ways to make it more efficient being one of the top priorities for the scientists.