Well I know the tribarrels use a larger backpack ammo pack; so they're capable of much longer sustained fire than a pulser rifle.Evilnerf wrote:OP here. Sorry, I was a bit drunk in my original post. Some people car surf when drunk, apparently I worry about Tri-barrels.
Anyway, I did some further research when sober and found that the "Heavy Tri-Barrel" is actually the standard one used by power armor troops and weapon emplacements according to House of Steel.
With this in mind, I think we can surmise that the Light Tri-barrel is the one used by people outside of battle armor. I guess this serves the roll as squad support weapon, although I'm not sure why you'd need it if the rifles have Full-Auto capability.
But I'm not sure why they need three barrels to achieve that; instead of a backpack and feed tube attachment for a 'normal' rifle. But I don't remember if we've been given the cyclic rates of a rifle on full auto and of a tribarrel. (Nor do I believe we've been given the endurance of either)
So presumably the multiple barrels (and I assume multiple grav drivers) provide for some combination of faster cyclic rate and increased sustain fire duration. The grav drivers in a rifle presumably have a maximum rate they can be cycled at, and a tribarrel should (if loading ammo isn't a bottleneck) be able to fire 3x that rate simply by using drivers of the same cyclic rate on each of the 3 barrels. But it's also likely that the grav drivers or other mechanisms can't sustain their max cyclic rate indefinitely; going to 3 barrels lets you back off the firing rate for each barrel to something more sustainable while still matching or exceeding the burst rate for a single barrel/mechanism.
