COLONY LASER
The Colony Laser: As the name suggests, a space colony gets converted into a laser cannon. That said, the colony itself is just the outer shell, and the critical laser oscillator and the high-power power generation facilities that operate it must be newly constructed. In this story, Gryps 2 was converted into a colony laser, but it can be said that this colony, which was initially a sturdy closed-type and could be moved with a nuclear pulse engine, was ideal for that.
The critical components of a colony laser are the structure of the colony, the performance of the laser oscillator as well as the energy source. Ensuring enormous power is the first problem when it comes to firing a powerful laser beam that is a colony diameter scale. In the case of Gryps, it supplies power to the colony through microwaves via a large number of solar panels positioned around it. Still, it is likely a system that stores up energy little by little and releases it all at once as a powerful laser, and this seems to be the reason why it takes time to fire the colony laser.
It should be noted that in the world of Gundam, utilizing lasers as a weapon instead of for communication or sensors wasn’t very prevalent, which may be in part because laser beams can be deflected relatively easily with only a coating that scatters or repels light.
