Solar cannon

From Starport: Galactic Empires

The solar cannon is the ultimate defense for your colony. It will fire incredibly powerful blasts at any unauthorized ships in the vicinity of your colony. The rate of fire of the solar cannon can be increased with more colonists in the colony allocated to the military workforce. The solar cannon requires the Metal Ore resource to be present in the colony's refinery in order to operate. The solar cannon consumes at least 25 holds of ore per hour, and can use up to 250 holds per hour if set to the highest setting of 10 shots per burst.

Resources required to complete construction: 500 metal, 100 oil, 200 uranium, 200 equipment, 300 spice.

A solar cannon cannot defend effectively by itself; a colony defense requires turrets and/or mines as well. The solar cannon can only be built on a planet after refinery 1 has been built. Once the solar cannon is built you edit its statistics by clicking on its picture inside the dome. At the solar cannon you can see the percentage of military strength and how many of your colonists are working on military. You can change the shot style of your solar cannon to concentrated, narrow, medium, wide, quarter circle, half circle, defensive, and full circle. You can also change the number of shots anywhere from 0-10. If you don't have enough ore to support the cannon it will not fire.

You can change the number of shots per minute by editing the amount of the workforce allocated to military on the biodome screen. The cannon will fire between 30 and 120 bursts per minute, depending on the relative strength of the defending army. The graph below shows this relationship.