Weapon Designs

Notes on my concept
Takes place on a Penal Colony planet, basically the Australia of the galaxy.It's an extremely harsh desert environment with only the occasional oasis.

Walled cities inhabited by fairly advanced scientists, descended from the political and scientific prisoners (think Galileo and Copernicus). Their technology is more advanced and elegant, it runs off a plant native to the planet. However this plant takes a lot of water to grow so it's very costly to use and thus they need to conserve energy as much as possible. Their main source of transport is a public transit system through the city like a subway of sorts. Their cities are built around large oases because of the high demand for water in their society.

There's also large groups of raiders that live lives outside the city walls, most of them are descended from the thugs and murderers, thier technology is more haphazard as it's built out of parts scavenged from space ship wreckage. Their main source of food water etc comes from raids on the cities and the occasional caravans that foolishly try to trade goods between cities. They possess hover vehicles but thier fuel is so limited by what fuel cells they can find in wrecks that they only really use the hover vehicles in important raids. They often abduct people from the city to use as slaves and occasionally as new recruits.