As a dazzling beam appeared behind the Bastion-class Mining Ship, a tremendous blast of energy instantly destroyed its aft thruster nozzles.
Although the Votann's shield systems were far more advanced than the Imperium's, with even a mere destroyer's shields rivaling the strength of an Imperial cruiser's Void Shields, they were still insignificant before the weapons of the Men of Iron.
Reverse engineering the Micro-Field Generators on the Ironkin had allowed Iax to easily identify the weaknesses in this shield system.
The thick ion pulses easily destroyed the main thrusters, and flickering arcs of energy swiftly disabled the entire mining ship.
Besides the Pectaro, the other vessel was a brand-new Heavy Strike Cruiser.
Compared with the original assault variant, the strike variant carried a wider variety of more powerful weapons, though its armor was weaker.
However, after analyzing the Votann's shield technology, Iax could equip these ships with stronger shields to compensate for their reduced hull armor.
The beam just now had come from the Twin-Arc Ion Pulse Cannon array along the Strike Cruiser's flank.
These enormous twin-emitter turrets, whose energy containment assemblies extended dozens of meters, could charge in advance and fire fifteen times in a single second.
More than thirty of these massive weapons were mounted on just one side of the midsection of the kilometers-long hull.
The Strike Cruiser's bow also mounted a Shatterer Cannon of the kind Iax had once used on the planet.
Unlike the previous land-based installation with its giant turret.
The Fragmentation Cannon mounted on the Strike Cruiser dispensed with the original conventional turret structure, instead using a horizontally rotating turret that occupied one-fifth of the hull.
This unusual turret gave the cruiser a broad, two-hundred-degree firing arc from left to right without requiring the ship itself to move.
An omnidirectional design had not