Railguns impose power and cooling penalties

A railgun needs either very large capacitors and batteries or a reactor able to supply an enormous pulse of power. Generating energy over time is not enough unless the ship can store and release it almost instantaneously. The weapon also creates a waste-heat problem, with active cooling required after repeated shots. A Gauss gun follows a different architecture and is described as easier to scale, which is the path associated with Chinese and Russian work. A weapon that looks compact at the barrel can still drive the displacement and machinery of the entire ship.