Well, the flexibility was the governing characteristic I wanted to put in this gun. Let's see if I come up with any improvements or moves to cheap it down a little after I read the article. And Lord preserve us from 80 Gauss rounds helical magazines. I think that something 12mm will do nicely against light infantry, and that will make the difference which allows to get a larger magazine.
So many wiki articles... Gonna read them all.
EDIT: So, I have to either somehow fit a 4 TPU-worth generator into that, or increase the clip cost by adding a battery in each one, which also means I reduce the versatility, because then I won't be able use Gauss clips.
So how about I fit two regular Gauss rifle generators into it? It'll be costy, though, but there are actually three parts in this rifle that are actually costy - two generators and kinamp. Given a kinamp used there should be smaller than a postage stamp to fire the GAUPT projectiles without accidentally kicking the barrel, its should consume a bit less energy to function and be pretty autonomus with 2 TPU-generating source. It also might be cheaper to produce smaller kinamp.
EDIT_2: Earlier it was mentioned somewhere that infantry support machine would come in handy. So, I thought about making a
gunship on
ion engines. I thought about ion engines because we have very productive power sources available, so it would allow us to adapt them in a way where they use the atmospheric air as ion source while in, well, atmosphere, and interior fuel storages to fly in places without one. But we are talking mostly about supporting assaults on inhabited planets, right? So the second option is probably redundant.
The key assumption to this idea is that in ER we have
much better power sources than we do nowadays IRL. It might be not cheap to build, but think about the resources and money saved on fuel!