Optical Wargames

It's been a while since I did any non Barony non short fiction posting, and this is another one of those ideas that's been swirling around in my head forever and ever. Some short history: I used to play the very very great classic Unreal Tournament 99 a lot when I was a kid. I played its equally great, but quite different sequel UT2004 as well, quite possibly more than any other single game in my life (I never got on with UT3). In Unreal Tournament, there is a gun called the Shock Rifle - for my money one of the best deathmatch weapons ever designed. It's primary fire is a quick-firing hitscan beam that kills in three hits, and it has secondaries you can play with at closer range for higher lethality - it's a high skill/hire reward kind of weapon. There is also a mutator (game mode, for those unlettered in XTREME nineties naming cultures) in those games called Instagib, which gives everyone a shock rifle that always kills in one hit. What this does, obviously, is turn a deathmatch…