You may find yourself as a pilot wondering what the heck is up with munitions in Mecha Galaxy. I've a simple explanation for you as to why laser weapons fire slower than projectiles... You see, slugs reload in a magazine, clip or are fed mechanically along in a belt, and this makes sense. The reason it takes awhile for laser weapons to shoot is that they have to charge up. This pumping and amplification cycle must occur between shots and takes a rather high amount of energy. One cannot argue with the results though... it's quite nice having beams that can cleanly punch a hole through the hull of an oncoming enemy mecha. Missile weapons are traditionally slow and this has to do with their physics as well... without external mechanisms to increase their speed, the primary reaction of propellant combustion's exhaust providing thrust is how they are driven, which means a low starting velocity with constantly increasing acceleration.
Some special engineering in newer classes of missiles has increased their speed to a respectable 99 to 100 which in of itself is something many arms manufacturers are rather proud of. Supercooling the materials used to freeze enemies with ice weapons involves some complex chemistry, generally a rather complicated series of reactions of an endothermic nature rather than the quick exothermic combustion reactions between fuel and gas that are typical of fire weapons. There are some exceptions, mind you, as certain fire weapons that are slower involve heating controlled emissions of volatile gas mixtures, for example. Overall this is generally believed to be the reasoning behind why weapons have the firing speeds that they do.
Submitted by Mycobacter#712744
