Drifter turrets, other than not being mechanically connected to the hull, don’t appear to be anything to really write home about. The drifters’ ‘superweapon’ isn’t exactly a massive advance over the empires’ technology, either. In some ways, it can even be thought of as less advanced than the ‘normal’ shield systems we (and they) use.
Obviously, we’d need to get an intact Drifter battleship to be 100% sure, but there’s 2 basic ways the behavior we’ve observed can be explained. So, just to establish the common baseline, that behavior is:
Drifters have an ‘overshield’. When that additional shield layer is exhausted, the superweapon (which I’ll call ‘the Lux’ from here out because it’s easier than typing ‘superweapon’ over and over) fires, releasing between 650,000 and 850,000 standard structural units of energy into the target. This energy strikes across all four resistance profiles, and appears to interact with, and ground out through, the vessel’s shield systems—if it hits, it all hits[1]. So, on to the theories…
The first, simpler theory, is that when the overshield runs out of juice, there’s a current disruption—think of the overshield as electricity arcing across a gap in the wire. While the overshield is up, the energy continues to flow from source to terminus. But incoming damage still disrupts the energy field that allows this the smooth transmission of this power over the outside of the normal shielding. So when the overshield drops, there’s a 1-2s period of feedback as the energy source tries to continue its normal rate of emission, which then fires off as the Lux ‘weapon’[2].
The second possibility is that the overshield itself is charging the Lux. That it’s not functioning to dissipate or deflect the incoming energy (be it kinetic or electromagnetic[3]) the way normal shields do, but rather, it absorbs that energy. Railguns and projectiles slam into the shield and impart their energy, missiles explode and impart theirs, beams basically get sucked up like a drink through a straw, etc etc. What would have been destructive energy gets shunted into reserve capacitors.
In this framework, the overshield isn’t actually being disrupted by incoming weapons-fire, so much as the strength of the field we interpret as ‘the overshield’ is actually just a result of a throttled draw-down working to avoid over-saturating those reserve capacitors (which might cause system failure or a sudden, violent discharge within the vessel[4]). In effect, the ‘overshield’ is a spring, and every time we hit it, we’re cocking back the hammer on the Lux just a little more… when the capacitors are full, the Lux can (or must, see [2] below) fire. Basically, the overshield is a kind of enveloping defensive Nosferatu, if this is the case.
Personally, I’m more inclined to think the first option better explains the behavior we’ve seen, but the second can’t be ruled out[5]. In either case, I’m not sure that it really is ‘vastly ahead’ of the tech we use, just a very different application.
1 - In this regard, the Lux doesn’t behave like a coherent beam weapon so much as it resembles a static discharge. Like a short-circuit or an emergency failsafe, really. That might also explain why the Drifter suddenly seems to drop all targeting and then establishes a new target lock that appears (or did in the past, it’s been a while since I was doing Hive ops) to be semi-random, and usually close by. That ‘target lock’ might actually be a kind of carrier wave, functioning like a target painter, trying to establish the pathway for the failsafe to discharge along.
2 - If this is the case, and the discharge is a result of the overshield defense field’s failure, the Lux may not have been designed as a weapon at all. It may simply be a repurposed failsafe that engages while the system resets. Offensive application might well have come much later, and would explain the semi-random targeting behavior of the Lux. See [1].
3 - Don’t give me ‘what about explosive and thermic?’ crap, either. Explosions are sudden releases of both kinetic and electromagnetic energy, and heat is just the excitement of atoms—which is physical motion, therefore kinetic. Shut up.
4 - Like what happens if you over-charge a lead oxide/sulfuric acid battery system too much.
5 - The reason for this is the death of Jamyl Sarum. The Lux volley that destroyed TES Seraph was the first shot of the engagement, so far as we’re aware of. If the first scenario is accurate, that could be achieved by simply shutting down the overshield defense field while still keeping the ‘generator’ for it running, and thus shunting things to the Lux/failsafe immediately. The second option would basically have meant the combined Tyrannos fleet spent a few minutes shooting one another down to firing energy, then warped in to fire. The pod kill, after all, did not use the Lux superweapon.