Tau Cannon

"Man, why aren't we using it?!"

- Black Mesa Security Guard

The Tau Cannon is an experimental energy weapon first featured in Half-Life. Due to its strength and versatility, it is considered to be one of the best weapons in the game.

Overview


A prototype for the assault rifle of the future, the Tau Cannon is an experimental weapon developed by scientists at Black Mesa. Its advanced technology allows it to use depleted uranium as fuel. Furthermore, Gordon does not have to worry about reloading the gun – it taps directly into the ammo reserve. The depleted uranium ammunition is shared by the Gluon Gun. The tau cannon is also known by many as the ‘gauss gun’, as many of the Half-Life game files refer to the weapon as the ‘gauss’, though this is most likely a relic of Half-Life’s alpha development stage.

The tau cannon is a type of experimental weapon that fires beams of Tau particles. The weapon has two different fire modes. The first shoots tau particles rapidly, visible as yellow beams in the air; each beam damages a target with its negative charge and its bullet-like kinetic energy. Though not particularly powerful per hit, these rapid discharges can quickly gun down unarmored targets. The alternate fire mode charges up the weapon to fire more powerful white-hot beams; these can shoot through multiple targets or penetrate walls, causing a devastating explosion-like blast of particles on the far side. ''In multiplayer this means that it can be safer to jump around in the open than duck behind cover if the opponent is armed with a tau cannon. Furthermore, in multiplayer the recoil from the weapon’s secondary attack is greatly increased, and if the gun is fired at the floor, the recoil will kick backwards high into the air, propelling to a high location. This technique is commonly known as ‘gauss jumping’.'' The tau particle beams can reflect off walls if they are hit at the right angle, and in fact can be reflected several times. This aspect can be useful as it can be used to hit targets when there is no clear shot, but as with bullet ricochets there is also a danger of friendly fire or self-harm. Tau cannons are compact and light enough to count as small arms, despite the fact that a blast from a charged-up tau cannon can penetrate or destroy armored vehicles. Originally developed at the Black Mesa Research Facility, the prototype design somehow survived the facility’s destruction and years later the tau cannon was utilized by the Resistance, including a version that was mounted on the Scout Car that was given to Gordon Freeman.

The tau is the most massive member of the lepton family of elementary particles; like electrons, tau particles are negatively charged, but tau particles have more than three thousand times as much mass. This would explain the tau cannon’s powerful penetrating power, as well as its significant recoil. Though the early tau cannon prototypes used normal household batteries as an initial power source for the particle accelerator, a micro-fission reactor generated the deadly particle beam. This advanced nuclear device, developed at Black Mesa, was capable of using inexpensive depleted uranium as fuel rather than an enriched isotope. (The same technology was put to use in the experimental gluon gun that was developed during the same period.) When the tau cannon alternate fire mode was used the reactor would be fed more depleted uranium fuel without being fired, and the energy would be stored in a set of spinning capacitors. Although these prototype capacitors could store a vast amount of energy they could not hold a charge for long, and if the tau cannon’s capacitors were fully charged-up the weapon would have to be fired within ten seconds to prevent a catastrophic discharge that could kill the user of the weapon.

The vehicle-mounted tau cannon used during the time of the rebellion against the Combine is a more advanced model. It uses an alternative fuel source that gives it seemingly unlimited ammunition (probably the air and it uses a micro-fusion reactor instead of the fission one), and the capacitors can hold a full charge indefinitely. The weapon is devastating against Combine soldiers and alien life-forms, but useless against Combine APCs as their advanced armor is designed to reflect energy weapons. It can kill a gunship with enough hits at full power, though.

Name confusion/confirmation
In Half-Life 2 the player receives a Scout Car that has a version of the weapon mounted on it; Alyx actually refers to the weapon by name, calling it a Tau Cannon, thereby officially confirming the name of the weapon. Since the tau cannon is a particle accelerator, it is possible that it uses an electromagnetic acceleration technique similar to what might be found in a gauss gun, therefore the gauss gun term could still be applied to the tau cannon as long as it is remembered that the weapon fires particle beams rather than more conventional projectiles.

Half-Life
A gauss gun (or coilgun) is a device that uses electromagnetism to accelerate projectiles, and has some similarity to a railgun. Early during Half-Life’s development Valve intended the weapon to be a hypervelocity projectile weapon (as it is referred to by an unused HEV sound clip, saying "Experimental Hyper-velocity Projectile Weapon Acquired"), but later changed their minds and made it into a particle beam weapon, but did not feel there was any need to change names of the game’s data files to reflect this. The weapon uses the same ammunition as the gluon gun, which is obviously an energy weapon, giving further evidence to the weapon not being a true gauss gun. The evidence for the weapon’s real name can be found in a game of Half-Life Deathmatch: in the game console a kill from the weapon is recorded as being a death by ‘tau_cannon’. When the Opposing Force: Capture the Flag multiplayer game was released the key configuration menu included the option to bind keys to particular weapons; here the weapon in question is listed as the Tau Cannon.

Half-Life 2
Besides being mounted on a Scout Car, the Tau Cannon was first intended to be one of the weapons that could be used by player as an identical model, but it was cut out of release version, likely due to its similarity in function to the Pulse Rifle.

Trivia

 * An unused sound clip (gettauoff.wav) can be found in the game's files of a citizen talking about detaching a weapon - deduced to be the Tau Cannon due to the name of the file - from the Scout Car, suggesting that at some point in the game's development, the Tau Cannon was to be detached from the car for the player to take with them after leaving the car at Lighthouse Point.
 * SMOD restores the Tau Cannon as a usable weapon. It has to reload every 20 shots, gets altfire ammo directly from the player's ammo supply and uses the SMG model. Besides this fact, SMOD Redux V7 have a modified version of the gun's model from Half-Life 2 Beta, and it's own ammo, that is the same model from HL1.
 * Its function and ammo somewhat resembles the Railgun from the Quake series, due to the railgun also firing beams and using depleted uranium cells, and it can tear apart enemies with a well placed shot.
 * In the Half-Life 2 files, several texture files for HUD weapon icons can be found, most of which still containing the icons for almost all of the cut weapons. The Tau Cannon is among them. It is also present in the font "HalfLife2.ttf", used for all the HUD glyphs.
 * In Garry's Mod, the Tau Cannon's icon is used to represent the Physics Gun in the HUD.

List of appearances

 * Half-Life 
 * Half-Life 2