Photon Beam was the weapon Kouji used more times, and many Mechanical Beast were equipped with laser beams. Mazinger Z: Mazinger-Z was the first Humongous Mecha -how many times have we repeated that sentence?- used Eye Beams.The Mazinger franchise has a special relationship with this trope:.Wonder what the Geneva Convention would have to say about that? Specifically it has a microwave claw that cooks enemy pilots alive.The Guren even uses it more like how it would work in real life, they explode. Even though the majority of grunts use bullets for their knightmares the black knights' best mechs instead use some form of laser or energy blast as their method of attack. Anything with less inertia than the shield can generate is deflected away, including lasers, since they're effectively massless, while anything with more inertia, like bullets traveling at a significant fraction of c. They do give a Hand Wave of sorts for this, in that the shields are not really based on gravity so much as inertia. Notably that's the exact opposite of how things should work: solid projectiles would be much easier to affect with gravity.
While lasers are common, they cannot penetrate the Deflector Shields used in the series since they are based on Artificial Gravity tech & can thus redirect lasers using the gravitational lensing effect. Kinetic weapons are the big thing in Cannon God Exaxxion.Mike Wong of does a good job explaining how the strength of even the strongest shield can come down to how well it's attached to the superstructure of the ship. To stop a projectile, the shield has to decelerate it, and any force applied to the projectile is in turn applied to the shield generator. In defending against lasers, the in-universe shields may be extremely effective at re-radiating heat back into space. There are also real world scientific reasons for using projectiles instead of energy weapons, especially against shielded ships. but audiences still expect to see Laser Cutters, so we're stuck with them.įor a detailed look into why one may or may not use projectiles over energy weapons, visit our Analysis page. This does of course have its roots in the fact that Reality Is Unrealistic: serious laser weaponry actually uses short duration pulses with incredibly high energies that would simply explode an object into plasma the same as if it were hit by a high-velocity projectile. The reason for favouring projectiles in fiction is Rule of Cool - while subjecting stuff to melting or explosive evaporation is cool, broken pieces of the same stuff flying away with a boom may be even better than the mediocre zap of a laser.