Schlock Mercenary

Any grade-school student should be able to tell you that at a continuous rate of fire, fifty gauss-pistols would need to fire 8.3333^[repeating] rounds per second in order to go through 50,000 rounds in two minutes. What a grade school student might not be able to tell you is that 8 rounds a second is slooooow.

Unrelated Note: Some readers may be alarmed to see how willing Tagon is to culturally contaminate aboriginal aliens in order to achieve a military objective. Addressing those concerns, the author has this response:

It makes for a good science-fiction adventure to have the captain say something along the lines of "prime directive be damned." It makes for much better science-fiction, however, to have the captain able to say in frank honesty "I have no idea what this prime directive concept is, and it sounds like foolishness that belongs in another universe entirely. Go away. I have work to do." If you persisted in whining about native cultures, that captain would have no choice but to shoot you.