User:RelentlessRecusant/Gauss Battery

The Gauss Battery is a UNSC Defense Force naval weapons system, and is a cut-down and scaled version of the ubiquitous Magnetic Accelerator Cannon (MAC) armament.

While the gauss battery was originally conceived as a replacement for the MAC system near the end of the War, because of the irreparably crippled UNSC economy and the UNSC's reduced manufacturing base to outfit all newly-constructed capital vessels with MAC weapon(s), the closure of the Human-Covenant War ensured that all further UNSC vessels would have full-sized MAC fire systems. Instead, the gauss battery design was intended for specialized purposes; the Sojourn-class battle cruiser would carry six onboard gauss batteries as secondary tactical armaments, and the stealth reconnaissance frigate UNSC Behind in Twilight would carry a gauss battery instead of a MAC system because of the magnetic field radiated by a full-sized MAC system, which would fatally compromise its stealth capacities.

While the gauss battery carries only a fraction of the firepower of a fully-sized MAC system, a new retrofit to the gauss battery, anticipated to be called the "Mark II Gauss Battery", is expected to increase the firepower of an individual system by increasing the number of ceramic superconducting coils, increasing the cryogenics of the system to enhance magnetic conductance, and by replacing the hammerhead tungsten projectile with a shaped kinetic penetrator (KE) projectile whose structure increases armor penetration at the cost of reducing the sonic shockwave caused by the impact of a standard hammerhead round.