Plasma is what you get when you heat a substance, in this case hydrogen, to an extremely high temperature. For hydrogen, that would be around ten or so thousand degrees celcius. At that point, the electrons start to separate from "orbit" of the atomic nucleus, and begin freefloating, in a way. This plasma is obviously very hot. And magnetically charged. That last one is very important for weapons tech. And
Fusion power and thrusters. And a few other things.
Non-military applications
The most evident is obviously
Fusion power. Fusion thrusters, too, operate on plasma-based thrust. Contrary to the name,
Hardened plasma has very little to do with actual plasma, it just kind of looks like it.
a lot of industry also use plasma at times.
Guns
Function
Plasma weapons house a central fusion reactor, which is given hydrogen through vents from the atmosphere, and then heat that up to plasma in the reactor, then funnel it out whenever the gun fires. The barrel is isolated in a magnetic field and kept cool, which is part of why the guns are expensive, they house a lot of high-tech stuff. The plasma passes through the barrel and is arranged in such a way that its magnetic field sustains the ball for a time. This results in a fast, roughly football-sized ball, bright-white, flying through the air. Plasma are short-range, as the air around it leeches heat away. This magnetic field also has the benefit of disrupting shields when the ball impacts, diminishing their effectiveness.
Infantry-scale
Plasma weapons are quite big. Chunky, even.
(god i love that word.) They're also very cumbersome, expensive, complex, frustrating to maintain, and dangerous to the people nearby. But they are powerful. Very much so. The smallest ones are often mounted on suits of heavy weapon power armour platforms, at a meter or so in length. Even these are very powerful, capable of vapourizing the front of an unshielded tank. They have a lot of disadvantages. They're expensive, and require time and advanced machinery to assemble. They, being so big, are unwieldy, and are quite hard to maintain in working order. However, these disadvantages are absolutely worth it, for the sheer force multiplier that plasma weapons are. A well placed plasma cannon emplacement can devastate a convoy, and the heavy duty plasma cannons of an
AB-FSP are no joke, being even a danger to infantry near the mech.
Starship-scale
Of course, whenever some weapon is developed for infantry-scale combat, there is always an upscaling into starship-scale. No different here. Space has the advantages of having nothing really in the way of the plasma, as well as no air to leech power. Still, the magnetic field can only last so long, and plasma weapons aren't that long-range. Of course, short-range as they are, that's still hundreds of kilometers, but compared to other weapons, it's effectively short-range. These weapons are rarer, due not only to the range but also the heat produced, which is tricky to get rid of on a spaceship in the airless void of space.
Particle beams
There's an even more devastating form of plasma weaponry that regular plasma weapons. Instead of shooting a singlular blob of ultra-hot plasma, it shoots out a beam of it. A pretty long beam. Essentially the same system, just cooled a lot more and a lot bigger. So big in fact, that only really battleships can have them, and even then as spinal weapons. Unless it's the
Titanic Lance, which is so big it has
four particle beam turrets. These beams can melt right through several layers of shields, disrupt the magnetic fields that guide them, and melt straight through thinner hulls and the water in between. They're comparatively rare, due to their cost, complexity and sheer size, but god help you if you have to face one in battle.
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