Boil sea

“You've been hands-on in the simulator, you've seen the reads, so I'm not breaking any big news here," his CO said, breaking Tenn's reverie. "This is a monster gun, but it's not a repeater. You miss the first shot, you won't get another one on your shift."

Tenn nodded. He'd asked about power storage first day on the simulator, and the engineers had fallen all over themselves backing away from that one. But once he'd seen the numbers-they had to keep those honest, even in sims-he'd figured it out pretty quick. The capacitors could hold enough juice to light up a planet, true enough, but once they discharged, they weren't going to be filling back up real quick. Once you shot the thing, you might as well turn off the lights and go take a long nap, because it wasn't going to be back up to full power for the better part of a day. True, you could still pump out some pretty nasty low-power beams-and the definition of low here was still bigger than what a Star Destroyer could manage, even letting all the hardware spit at once-but it would be a duster instead of a buster. You could scorch a city or two, boil away a large lake or perhaps even a small sea, but that was about it.

***

Star Wars: Death Star Part 2 Chapter 48