Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
Taste the rainbow, bitch.
What's better than having a laser? How about 50 BAJILLION OF THEM?
Beam spam embodies the idea that quantity has a quality all its own. Rather than impressing the audience with just how powerful the Wave Motion Gun is, you instead impress them with insane amount of energy rays spewing out at the same target. The key word here is beam SPAM. Roboteching with inexplicably bending beam weapons is a frequent way of getting more lasers to fit on screen by allowing them to come out from more places than just the front of the vessel.
This is common in ship to ship space combat, but you'll also find this frequently in as a trope in shows with Hermetic Magic. You almost always see the barrage emanating from the sides and back of the character before Roboteching when Beam Spam is magical.
Compare Spam Attack (melee), More Dakka (Bullets), Bullet Hell (Bullets to avoid), Macross Missile Massacre (Missiles). Contrast Wave Motion Gun, Kamehame Hadoken.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- In "Shakugan no Shana" this is basically Hecate's primary form of attack... and her lasers bend and partially home in on the target! She can also spam smaller fireballs.
- Gainax's Gun Buster: HOMING LASER!!!!
- Mahou Sensei Negima - Aside from Roboteching, Magic Missiles also have the tendency to suddenly shoot in straight lines when locked on.
- Attenborough of Gurren Lagann, the gunner of the many Cool Ships throughout the series, lives for this kind of stuff. So much so that his Fan Nickname became Beamspam McMuppet.
- Entire battles in Legend of the Galactic Heroes consist of tactics-infused beamspam. Interestingly Alliance ships are most prone to beamspam, and one of their most notable commanders is named Attenborough.
- Both the Justice and Freedom Gundams in Gundam SEED (and their upgrades, Strike Freedom and Infinite Justice in Gundam Seed Destiny), especially when equipped with the METEOR packs. Kira Yamato's Fan Nickname could easily be Aimbot McBeamSpam. Combine near limitless energy, a state of the art radar targeting system (two luxuries that normal mobile suits in SEED don't have) with the Ultimate Coordinator who refuses to kill and you get someone who can show up in the middle of a large battle and then proceed to completely disarm both sides of the fight in a few minutes. In addition, the Providence and Legend Gundams are capable of remotely-controlled Beam Spam thanks to their DRAGOONs.
- Please note that the Strike Freedom is also equipped with a DRAGOON System, allowing it to remotely-controlled beam spam a foe.
- Nearly every Gundam series has at least one example of this. SEED and SEED Destiny are especially known for it though, because they use so much Stock Footage Beam Spam.
- Gundam Wing had this in the form of entire walls of beam-cannon equipped armies firing at once, and the entire space station Libra did this when it wasn't showing off its Wave Motion Gun.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has the combat cyborg Otto and her aptly named Inherent Skill, Ray Storm, which sends powerful beams flying in every direction. Nanoha herself also has a few examples of this, not least is her Blaster System, which functions much like the DRAGOONs mentioned above. And Fate has her Phalanx Shift attack that is a Beam Spam version of her basic beam attack.
- The episode that introduced Fate gave us Bardiche's first spoken words in the franchise. "Photon Lancer. Full Autofire." Beam Spam ensued.
- Dragon Ball. Uncountable times. It rarely works; a single huge beam is almost always depicted more effective.
- Buu spammed an entire planet with lasers to wipe out the planet's entire supply of Muggles. Tian and Chiaotzu actually outlasted the rest of the Z team because they were down on Earth at the time rather than at Kami's lookout, and therefore only had to survive the beam spam rather than the "Chocolate Lasers" he used on the foes right in front of him.
- Seen in various forms on Eureka Seven. You have your ship-mounted type, seen in the aerial battle between the Gekko and the Izumo, as well as the Nirvash typeTheEND's personal homing laser array. The latter puts out nearly enough beams to turn the whole screen red and white.
- The main weapon of Lelouch's Shinkirō Knightmare in Code Geass produces an attack of this sort, via the power of refraction. Later on in the series Suzaku (who is now dangerously close to stealing Kira Yamato's coveted executive beam spammer club trophy) gets a spiffy new upgrade to the Lancelot. It's new energy wings double as a weapon allowing it to deluge targets in energy. You almost have to feel sorry for them....
- Two instances in the series Vandread. Once, in the first series and never used again, when Vandread Dita bounces a whole lotta energy beams off the other Dreads to wipe out a fast-moving enemy attack in one shot. And, in Vandread: The Second Stage, when Bart unlocks the Nirvana's Main Gun in his Crowning Moment Of Awesome moment. This attack is used in the remainder of the series, and consists of the Nirvana firing hundreds of beams all at once, that not only seek using Roboteching, they seek their targets while dodging friendlies
- The Neuroi in Strike Witches attack like this.
- She may not have a big gun, but one of Minako/Venus's light and energy based attacks is basically this and its name is Crescent Beam Shower
 .
- Bleach example: The bow Uryuu got after regaining his power has the consecutive rate of fire (whatever that means) of 1200.
- That's how many bolts he can let off before taking a break, if they're going with standard usage. If that's per minute, the boy has a higher rate of fire (and this being Bleach, more destructive power per projectile and better accuracy) than your average anti-infantry heavy machine gun.
- It's per second - neither standard military use. The boy is frightening, and fires 12 times faster than a helicopter minigun. An anti - tank helicopter minigun. Makes sense, as he usually sweeps thousands of hollow out of the sky at once.
- At little more recently, Starrk's release gives him the ability to rapid-fire multiple ceros at once, fitting with his release's gunslinger motif
- Super Dimension Fortress Macross and its follow-on series use this trope (in the forms of turret-spam and ships-with-WMG-spam) almost as much as they do the Macross Missile Massacre - and when you have 100+ ships on each side each with 100+ turrets ...
- In the ''Super Robot Wars: Original Generation Divine Wars (Yes, that's the title,) the Cosmo Nova special attack is depicted as a roboteched Beam Spam.
- Kiddy Grade: The Deucalion gets to do this to a variety of targets.
- Bokurano has some ridiculous beam-spam in the closing chapters, though it does help that the Humongous Mecha Zearth can fire beams from any point of its body (remember that thing that Buu from Dragonball did mention earlier in this article? It's kinda like that◊).
- Satchii, the anti-hacker device in Dennou Coil, uses this as its ultimate attack modus. It only works virtually, but since all of the protagonists spend most of their time in virtual reality it's still very terrifying to them.
- Kuki's Dolem from Rah Xephon has this as it's power, making it a nigh unstoppable engine of destruction. In one memorable scene a Macross Missile Massacre was launched against it only to shot to pieces before the missiles could even get halfway.
- The original Gall Force used this a lot, with their bendy laser beams.
Film
- The Death Blossom mode in The Last Starfighter. (Kira Yamato, eat your heart out.)
- Godzilla's arch enemy King Ghidorah often does this with its "gravity light", often firing blasts in random directions with its unoccupied heads while the third is busy grappling with an adjacent enemy.
- Mechgodzilla in all of its incarnations is practically king of this trope. Each version is armed to the teeth (probably including the teeth themselves) and carries a massive of buttload of firepower that it can unleash from its entire body. This is particularly glaring with the showa version, which had guns and lasers on practically every part of itself. Godzilla's battles with Showa Mechagodzilla probably contained a higher explosion-per-second ratio than your average Michael Bay flick.
- While the Death Stars are most famous for their Wave Motion Gun, the pilots will tell you that the
thousands millions of turbolaser turrets and emplacements dotting their surface is the much greater challenge if you want to actually destroy one.
- In most Star Trek works ships fire phasers one or two beams at a time (usually because they're only in combat with one other ship), but in the new film they're capable of firing about a dozen at once while still maintaining precise accuracy as evident when the Enterprise gives cover fire to the Alternate Universe Vulcan vessel Spock is using and destroys Nero's Macross Missile Massacre. And at the beginning of the film as the USS Kelvin is covering the escape of Kirk's mother aboard a shuttle.
- Another example is in Star Trek: Nemesis when The Enterprise is trying to find the cloaked Scimitar. they fire a full spread from all phaser strips in the hope of hitting something.
- The Enterprise-D also fired multiple rounds on a few occasions—in Conundrum, and The Survivor most notably.
- Best of Both Worlds. We see why it was a good idea to stick some phaser strips everywhere they could find room - even on the nacelles.
Literature
- Anyone who's read David Drake's Hammers Slammers series is quite familiar with Beam Spam. One of the staple weapons in the novels is the vehicle-mounted tribarrel, a weapon with three rotating barrels that shoots energy blasts (called "bolts") so fast that the bolts leaving the weapon appear to be a solid line - not individual bolts. The weapons scale up, too - his tanks in the series have both a tribarrel and a 20cm "main gun" that can literally cook mountainsides with one shot. Too bad the weapons, being energy, have no penetrative qualities...
- Not true. Very little can stand up to the 200MM main guns on the tanks, and even 50MM tank killer guns can punch holes in iridium tank armor.
- The tribarrel is based on a cross between the real-life MG 42 machine gun and the Gatling gun, both of which have beam-spam-class rates of fire.
- The Wheel Of Time. Arrows of fire. Book 11. (Or: How to fully kill a Fade before nightfall)
- The Star Wars Expanded Universe makes it quite clear that if they want to, the bigger Star Destroyers are quite capable of this even without using all their weaponry. The Executor-class (the ones like Vader's ship) is specifically noted as seem to throw up "sheets" or "walls" of energy.
- The Honor Harrington universe has an interesting mix. Material advances have made bomb-pumped lasers more effective at breaching the shielding. So a Macross Missile Massacre of becomes a beam spam of nuclear bomb-pumped lasers. One battle has ~65,000 of these bomb-lasers.
- Missiles. And each of them had in average from 6 to 8 lasing rods. So Yeah.
- In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40000 Gaunts Ghosts novel Necropolis, at one point, the Chaos forces have so many lasguns firing at the same time, that nobody can hear the individual shots being fired. Instead, they think that weird sound in the background is the wind blowing. )
- In Blood Pact, when the Chaos witch bursts into the room to attack Mabbon, Maggs kills her by simply unloading his lasgun at her, firing over two hundred shots at her and overwhelming her warp-shields. It even freaks him out.
Live Action Television
- In Babylon 5 the space station is shown to be armed with a number of laser-autocannons stretched along the spine of the station, capable of putting out impressive volumes of fire. In Season 2 this weapons grid is upgraded and in the Season 2 finale is shown to now have several Gatling-laser positions and several massive energy turrets added to it, quite capable of destroying a flagship battlecruiser belonging to a substantially more advanced alien race in a few burts of concerted fire (aided by fighters strafing it as well).
- The first season of Power Rangers had the Ultrazord, whose only attack was, you guessed it, a beam spam.
Tabletop Games
- In Dungeons and Dragons a Wizard or Sorcerer can learn the Magic Missile spell, which grants more and more magic missiles as they gain levels. At the highest level, it becomes the embodiment of this trope.
- And by that, we mean that at its highest power, you get a grand total of five missiles. Seriously, Minute Meteors is a better beam spam.
- 1st Edition has no limits on the number of missiles, so magic missile spamming is possible at high levels. Just one of the reasons why they turned it down to five, tops, too much bang for a first level spell.
- The Wizard's Compendium describes the Improved Magic Missile spell, which is a 3rd level spell that ups the limit to 10, but is otherwise identical. Considering that MM never misses (at least not until 4th Edition) and is effective against ghosts and other pesky incorporal creatures, it has its uses.
- That's nothing compared to a Quickened Maximized Energy Admixtured Twinned Split Scorching Ray from an Artificer.
- Use the right magic items and feats and it might be possible to fire off six of those at once. That's 72 shots for 48 points of damage each... at a minimum of 27,225 gold pieces cost just for the wand charges.
- You forgot Empowered. That's a total of 5184 points of damage - 72x72. Also, the combination of Force Missile Mage (if you DM will allow it), Argent Savant, Incantatrix, and Spellwarp Sniper can be absolutely terrifying for a Magic Missile. Incantatrix to get free metamagics applied, Spellwarp Sniper to turn it into a ray so you can put stuff like Split and Twinned, Argent Savant for further damage, and Force Missile Mage for more damage and more missiles.
- Though Magic Missile isn't that hot, it's older brother Chain Missile moves the upper limit to ten missiles. Combine that with several castings of Delay Spell (which delays the activation of a spell until a later turn), and you can spend several rounds before firing off sixty or seventy never-miss missiles who then proceed to chase after secondary targets. It's a complete waste of time and higher level spell slots, but damn if it doesn't look cool.
- Baldur's Gate offers a variant: Combine the Spell Timestop with Improved Alacrity (removes delay between spells)and the "Robe of Vecna (lower casting time). You can then cast ALL your magic missiles, Acid Arrows, Flame Arrows plus a host of other spells (all the way to tenth level Infinity Plus One spells like Dragon's Breath or Comet), and they will all be fired at the target at the same time once the Timestop ends. There Is No Kill Like Overkill.
- In the first Baldur's Gate, when you see Gorion battling Sarevok, Gorion unleashes a huge barrage of magic missiles at a time that, due to experience caps, you are unable to in the game. However, in the sequel, you are limited to 5 no matter what level you are. But that still can't stop you from getting a party of 6 rested mages to cast alacrity, then time stop at the same time so that at the end, they simultaneously (one after another with a nanosecond in between) unleash a red wave of doom upon the target. Give each one a spell sequencer (carrying three magic missile spells each) and a spell contingency (also three magic missile spells and set to "attacked"), then during their time stop turn have them each take a corner of a hexagon around the desired enemy and unleash the sequencers and as many memorized magic missiles as possible. Even if you only fire off 10 spells per mage, the target will be obliterated by [(1sequencer+1contingency)(3spells)+(10memorized)](5missiles)(6mages) = 480 missiles!
- The Imperial Guard in Warhammer 40000. Each infantryman is armed with a laser weapon, and they tend to field a lot of them. For kicks, their vehicles come with "multilasers". Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
- In Dan Abnett's Gaunts Ghosts series, there is one point where the Chaos forces have so many lasguns firing at the same time, that nobody can hear the individual shots being fired. Instead, they think that weird sound in the background is the wind blowing.
- The Tau fall along the same lines, though their numbers are fewer. Possibly the worst thing you can do against them (besides using transports) is to put a squad less than a foot away from a Fire Warrior group. The words "Rapid Fire" usually follow.
- Unless someone in the squad survives the barrage long enough to get into melee.
- The Eldar, while mostly famous for their monomolecular shuriken launchers and other exotic toys deserve at least a honorary mention for their laser weaponry, and can probably rival the Imperial Guard if they try. Their scatter lasers tend to have higher rate of fire than most Imperial weaponry (including the above multilasers), and their light walkers can come with two of them per piece at a reasonable point price. Oh, and there is also the Sunrifle, arguably the quickest-firing weapon carried by hand, and the Fire Prism, which, well, pretty much embodies this trope. It uses a refraction prism to create enough laser beams to either hit anything in a large radius, or project a "concentrated" beam with enough force to stand a chance of going through the thickest armors in the setting... over a somewhat smaller radius. Yep, Beam Spam indeed.
- GURPS Ultra-Tech gives us the "Gatling Laser", a tripod-mounted weapon consisting of four "Dinosaur Lasers" (shoulder-fired BFGs "powerful enough to blow away a dinosaur"), each firing multiple times per second. Higher Tech Level versions include gamma-ray and x-ray models.
- Battletech has several mechs built for laser spamming, however spamming lasers has the possibility to overload your reactor due to the heat from firing so many lasers at once, then there is the Pulse Laser and the Nova Cat. The pulse laser fires more laser blasts at your foe but it gives off even more heat, the Nova cat on the other hand fires several PPC at your general direction.
- Novacat? That thing only has 3 lasers. The Blackhawk (aka Nova) has 12, and, its big brother the Supernova only has half as many, but they are bigger.
Video Games
- every shmup ever.
- In regular Super Robot Wars, The Rein Weissritter can use Flash Step to Beam Spam all by itself with only one gun.
- The entire cast of the Touhou series has some form of Beam Spam at their disposal.
- A notable example is Shou Toramaru. Lets see, her attacks include normal lasers, short, bullet like lasers, large lasers, lasers that stop for a few seconds, lazers that curve, and lasers that spin while the center of them keeps moving towards you.
- Note: this includes the mooks.
- THIS. Just... watch it. Shame such artillery gets used on a frigging soccer ball.
- Aozaki Aoko of Tsukihime uses both martial arts and Beam Spams when fighting, as seen in Melty Blood. This ranges from needle-thin shots to beams launched off her fists and her leg when in midair (which sweeps the entire screen with blue fire).
- The homing version of these are Jehuty's main method of clearing swarms of Mecha-Mooks in Zone Of The Enders. Many other Orbital Frames in the series can pull it off as well.
- It seems that pretty much any orbital frame designed to actually carry a pilot has one of these, and all of them have that homing principle. Those that the game's main antagonist, Anubis, fires though, take the "homing" part to a whole new level of silly - they move by zigzagging here and there gradually in an angular pattern.
- Rudy's Prism Ray ARM in the original Wild ARMs game.
- Anything with 'Diffusion' in the name in an R-Type game.
- Ikaruga's charge attack.
- Bangai-O can switch between this and a Macross Missile Massacre for it's special attack.
- During one segment of the Final Exam Boss Battle in Kingdom Hearts II, Sora and Riku are situated in the middle of a Death In All Directions magic missile globe. They spend the next few minutes deflecting the attack.
- And gamers spend the subsequent hour with thumb atrophy. Damn you, Xemnas, you magnum douche!
- Approached in Unreal Tournament 2003, where the prequel's Plasma Gun is retooled as the Link Gun, with plenty of Beam Spam potential. Using alt-fire, the entire team can link-fire their guns at each other, granting the end user with ridiculous power. Unreal Tournament 2004 adds Link Turrets to the mix. Though they cannot target each other, they play nicely with Link Gun users.
- Even with all the possibilities that the Link Gun adds, it just isn't quite like having two full teams of 16 players armed with the Instagib on a small map. It adds a whole new meaning to "Beam Spam" in video games.
- Crab Spider Soldiers villain archetype in City Of Heroes have a power similiar to Beam Spam, although the number of blasts might not reach the level of spam regularly seen elsewhere.
- Masterminds in City Of Heroes, if they choose the Robotics powerset, can have dozens of beams spraying all over the screen from their various minions- each of the three lowest-level drones has an attack that fills the screen with laser fire, and if all of them go off at once, well...
- Although it's supposedly not her preferred M.O., Samus Aran's Arm Cannon can certainly qualify as Beam Spam, considering the unlimited ammo (the Power Beam in the Prime games even has rapid fire). Combined with the Wave Beam, the Spazer, or the Plasma Beam (especially true in Super Metroid) and... hoo boy.
- The Hyper Mode's charge beam in Metroid Prime 3 is literally a Beam Spam, firing so fast the blast forms a near-constant stream.
- Not to mention many player's reactions to the Metroids. "*skree!*" "KILLITKILLITKILLIT!!!"
- X's Charged Attack in Mega Man X: Command Mission certainly qualifies.
- His Hyper Mode charge shot qualifies even more especially since you can now unload everything on one target or simply pick who you want to blow up.
- In the shooting battle mode of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, 20 rings will give you one of these to unleash on your opponent.
- A laser monsoon was seen in the game Knights of The Old Republic when the Sith fleet bombarded Taris.
- The Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy IX versions of Alexander shoot off dozens (upon dozens, in the second case) of beams of Holy magic. Alexander VIII shoots them from deployable cannon batteries mounted on its shoulders, whereas Alexander IX releases them from its city-spanning wings. In the latter case, they're also of the homing variety.
- In Final Fantasy X, the Aeon Valefor's second Overdrive, Energy Blast, is very much this.
- Tidus's Energy Rain Overdrive also counts.
- The Homeworld series loves this trope. The first game has the Kadeshi Multibeam frigates, tiny little ships that have four titanic ion cannons squeezed in. When firing, they "sweep" space in front of them, making them almost more of a danger to fighter squadrons than capital ships. The sequel has its own version of the Multibeam Frigate, which takes eight beam emitters and plants them all over the ship's hull, making it an unholy terror when diving into fighter swarms (it's named the 'Dervish' for a reason). And Homeworld 2 has Pulsar Gunship squadrons, which are capable of outright swarming enemy ships with tiny little ion beams.
- And this isn't even getting into Ion Cannon Frigates or the Progenitor Dreadnought, which edge closer to Wave Motion Guns (though the Dreadnought also has anti-fighter beam turrets all over its hull) except for the fact that you can have dozens of the frigates all firing at a single target.
- In Xenosaga, KOS-MOS's most popular weapon, the X-Buster, is a spread-beam laser cannon fired from her stomach. A perfect example of this Trope.
- As is the Durandal's main cannon.
- The super move of Sarara from Magical Battle Arena, where she attacks a target by firing thriteen beams at the same time from her Attack Drones and mechanical bow.
- The Advent in Sins Of A Solar Empire have a serious love of beam weapons. The Halcyon Carrier capital ship carries up to 7 squadrons of bombers (which are armed with beam weapons) in addition to the 8 heavier beam cannons mounted on the ship itself.
- However strange it may seem, the final form of the final boss from Wario Land The Shake Dimension, aka the Shake King has multiple attacks involving an absolutely gigantic laser beam being fired at Wario, as well as multiple fireballs being sent everywhere at the same time. And another attack involving about five columns of lightning bolts being fired down from the top of the screen.
- The Multilock move from Devil May Cry 3 has Dante fire multiple shots at a single target with the Artemis demonic energy weapon, if admittedly quite lacking compared to most of the other examples here.
- In the first two Doom games, the BFG9000 is implemented internally as a beam spam weapon. The visual effects do not reflect this.
- Technically, when the BFG9000's shot detonates, the game fires twenty 2D rays from the player's viewpoint spaced out horizontally across the screen. Anything that one of these hits takes damage and has the visual effect show up on it.
- The Blaster and Hyperblaster from Quake II normally fired little solid blocks of energy. A very simple mod could change this into a hitscan laser. Even without the mod, the Hyperblaster was basically a gatling energy weapon. If two people were dueling with them...
- Also, the Quake II version of the BFG (BFG10k) fulfils the trope: It fires a green ball that fires lasers on all targets in the vicinity of it's trajectory. When it hits a solid object, it explodes in a similar way to the original Doom BFG: The game checks if a line-of-sight can be drawn from the target to the ball's location of detonation and from the detonation site to the player who fired the weapon in the first place. If both lines of sight are met, the target is going to take a heap of damage and this is applied to all possible targets. Reportedly, it is a good tactic to fire the BFG into the ceiling in a room with a bunch of other players in a deathmatch game.
- The Gatling Laser weapon from the Fallout series probably qualifies (especially the weapon in the third game). It's Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
- Similarly, Command And Conquer Renegade has a laser minigun, which is just a teeny bit overkill when you consider the normal laser rifle already has a high rate of fire.
- THIS.
- Glue a massive amount of Laser L parts onto any Fraxy boss and you're done!
- Similar to the D&D Time Stop combination mentioned above under Tabletop gaming, Ultima Underworld for the PC had a Time Stop spell as well. At the upper levels, this allowed you to fling vast quantities of items, fire arrows, and blast spells at the opponent, limited only by the fact that if they collided with one another before the opponent, most of them would be harmlessly destroyed. More amusingly, running into your own arrows in mid-flight could kill you even before the spell expired.
- Jak And Daxter. The Beam Reflexor. "It's an upgrade to the sniper weapon", you say. "It doesn't have that high a rate of fire", you say. Then you see what happens when a) you're mashing the trigger and b) the blasts are rebounding in all directions. Spammy!
- In Iji, the final boss makes extensive use of this as well a couple other types of projectile spam. There's also the Alpha Strike, which is basically a bunch of alien ships getting together and beamspamming an entire planet to death.
- And Asha. Specifically, his supermoves Plasma Rage and Plasma Vortex.
- The Amarr in Eve Online are very fond of their infidel-purifying lasers, but the Abaddon-class battleship is in particular known for it's picturesque beam spam broadsides◊.
- After a certain plot event in The World Ends With You Joshua can use Beam Spam attacks; a certain combo finisher has more in common with a Wave Motion Gun instead.
- Not to mention the final boss, that beamspams fireballs. Thanks god for Neku's dodge ability.
- The Star Wars RTS Empire at War has, for the Empire, an anti-fighter corvette ship called the Tartan. The Tartan has the special ability to fire pretty much every gun at once. Max space unit per side in battle is 20 for the Empire in Galactic Conquest mode. Tartan's are 2 population each. 10 Tartans + special = LASER CANNON DAKKA.
- This counts for any massed unit that uses lasers, really. Tartan's are just the most beam spam/dakka-ish. Even ground units can count if one uses a mod to remove the in-battle population cap, if you can manage to land all of them before the AI rushes your reinforcement point.
- The second and third Master Of Orion games allowed you to make rapid-fire versions of some beam weapons, with further research after developing the weapons. Load up the larger ships with such weapons, and it's pretty much "game over" for the other guy if you're anywhere near at parity with their tech levels.
- In Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, Maria (the game's only gunslinger) has an ability that's basically More Dakka with lasers. Souping up this ability is a common tactic with Freya. You can see it in action in this video, where it probably hits 20 times for 20,000HP each.
- Tachyon: The Fringe had one particular ship/weapon combo which embodied this - the GalSpan Phoenix heavy bomber, fitted with as many Deimos Heavy Lasers as it could muster. Five of those firing in unison, especially in linked fire, could fry any shield in one shot and breach the hull in three. And you still had your pick of missiles, chatter cannon, railgun etc for the other hardpoints. This troper would use the lasers to breach, then follow it up with an EMP missile to paralyse them.
- Caster in Fate Stay Night is such a master of this trope that she beamspams beamspams. In essence, she takes spells that ought to take at least thirty seconds to cast for a very good magus speed casting and does them instantly. Over and over and over, effortlessly. This is only possible on her home turf though, so normally she fights in a much more subtle manner.
- Also, according to outside sources, Beserker's nine lives noble phantasm is essentially "an anti-phantasm beast, dragon-type 9-shot simultaneous homing laser volley." That's right, he can shoot out nine homing dragon lasers with a bow. Too bad that being summoned as a beserker prevents him from using it.
- In Higurashi Daybreak, when Rika is using a mop as her weapon, she can Beam Spam cannons of water.
- The Panzer Dragoon series' playable dragons' Berserk attacks, along with Atolm Dragon's "Ne-rai" move in Saga.
- In Freespace 2 a large battle can have so many beams flying everywhere that it makes the picture at the top of this article look like nothing in comparison.
- In Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, there's a weapon called the Homing Laser. It shoots out up to four homing beams. The typical VS can mount two of them.
- In Veck SE, the player's ship maxes out at firing 1,575 bullets per second.
- Most weapons in Outpost2 are relatively slow firing (about one shot per second if you're lucky) and don't get any substantial upgrades to their rate of fire, so the Tiger heavy tank compensates this by mounting two of whatever weapon it's given. Then however you have the Laser and Microwave, which can get a very noticeable speed increase on top of the fastest rate of fire in the game. So if you put either one of them on a Tiger... Yeah.
Web Original
- In the first book of Dimension Heroes, Rob is infamous for using this trope to try to defeat his enemies, and oftentimes failing.
- All over the place in Super Smash Bros Brawl: Subspace Emissary, but the most notable one is during the attack on the ship carrying the Subspace Cannon. The heroes have to dodge ridiculous amounts of beam-spam—with lasers bigger than the ships they're flying in, no less—while Kirby closes in on his Dragoon. Definite Crowning Moment Of Awesome all over the place.
Western Animation
- Although we never actually see the effect, in an episode of Re Boot, Matrix enters an unfriendly bar. When threatened by a lot of bad guys, he simply says "Gun, Death Blossom Mode". Gun immediately starts spinning in a stationary globe and every single resident of the bar soon finds a red dot on their chests or head. Presumably the intro to an epically devastating Beam Spam attack; shame we never get to see it.
- Justice League Unlimited got a rather funky one when Amazo was making a return appearance; most of the space-capable Leaguers were hovering in low orbit, along with most of their Javelins. Amazo approaches, Green Lantern yells "Light 'im up!", and black space abruptly turns all kinds of pretty colours. Naturally, it doesn't work. Sure looks cool, though.
RealLife
- The bomb-pumped laser, a multi-directional bloom of extremely high-powered x-ray lasers powered by a nuclear bomb that never left the design boards and ended up inspiring several science fiction weapons (including the one mentioned in the Honor Harrington entry, above). Obviously a single-shot weapon, it was intended as a defense against a massive Soviet weapons launch as part of the Star Wars system. Conceived of by Edward Teller, who is also known for the H-bomb and proposals to dig a deep-water harbour with multi-megaton nuclear bombs.
- The multi-beam version was meant to be based on specialized Excalibur satellites. The actual test of the basic concept showed that it didn't work even as a single beam.
- Fusion ignition by laser is, however, an ongoing subject of research.
|
|
