Range: 35 Km
Damage: High
Penetration: High
Rate of Fire: Very slow
The LongBow or Sniper cannon is a very long range heavy beam cannon, with a low rate of fire.
The beam used is different to a standard PBC - instead of simply drawing charged particles from the collider ring the Sniper cannon draws a lot of power to energise a heavy vector meson generator.
The generator uses electron beams to collide electrons and positrons to create mesons in a process similar to the accumulator rings of a PBC, except that the flow is controlled with gravity rather than magnetic fields, which takes a extreme amounts of power. The beam of charged particles and mesons is formed into a coherent bolt and discharged by using a focussed gravitational field.
When the Meson beam decays it degrades into lower energy mesons and neutrinos, dumping a lot of its energy into its target. As mesons don't interact with matter the beam is focused to pass through shields, armour and ships hulls before it decays and releases its energy to damage the ships internal structure. Throughout the bolts life the mesons are decomposing, releasing energy in the form of neutrinos and generating the characteristic 'sparkling' of the bolt as these excite matter.
To make the process reliable and energy efficient enough to be used as a ship mounted weapon, the meson generator uses disposable superconductor shells similar to the Assault Cannon's, but much bigger.
In general the LongBow cannon is most useful when coupled with a military
enhanced Imaging Module.