Luke, I live in Texas and I have no desire to be a Texan. Not that I'd ever admit that
Absolutely see your point of view, though.
Sorry for my delay in posting. Remedying the problem now.
By the way, guys, I think most of you are picturing Salem's gun firing an antigravity pulse, so I think I may not have been explaining it properly. While it can fire a wide, short-range pulse (which he used before, when firing blind at Rathien), when the blades are locked into place in front of the barrel, they serve to re-concentrate the force into a needle-thin beam. The beam causes acceleration of matter away from itself in all directions, though thanks to the nature of the beam, this means that the force is effectively concentrated only in the two dimensions perpendicular to the beam itself. What you wind up with is a cylindrical area from which matter is ejected, the force increasing in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the beam.
Each burst only lasts a split-second (when Salem's not being an idiot, anyway; longer shots will actually break the gun, which he did during his entrance to the bar), but that's enough time to create a vacuum along the length of the beam- air is accelerated away as well as everything else. When the beam is shut off, the air along the path rushes back in to fill said vacuum, causing a noise very similar to thunder; rather than coming from the gun itself, the noise comes from the path of the shot after it's been taken. With the gun on its lower settings, this sound is probably roughly equivalent to a shotgun blast. Very loud, but there's not much of a vacuum to fill. With the gun on higher levels, the sound would be more akin to a thunderclap.
I drew the gun many years back. I'll go see if I can dig out the drawing.
