Melding Beam Weapons and Guns

[awesomenessofme1]

Originally Posted by Proteus

I'm not a real-life gun person, but it seems to me that the lack of recoil is the most obvious difference between the two. Given how often recoil seems to make fools of newbie gun users, wouldn't its absence cause a significant difference in usage and thus skill? (Then there are potential issues, as already mentioned, like needing to adjust beam collimation for various distance bands, and all the other little bits of behavior that go into understanding the "immediate action" required to use / maintain a weapon.)

At the scale where you use Beam Weapons rather than Gunner or Artillery, another big difference is that lasers are effectively instantaneous. Even though that may only be a fraction of a second difference, that can still matter in some cases.