Ion canon . . . Depending on how you define it . . a ion gun is a particle gun that happens to fire a charged beam . . Unfortunately such a “beam” would be EASALLY defended ageist and quite hard to aim because of its charge. (well aiming would be very easy, not having it bend all over, disperse and sill hit what you are aiming at . . . )
Any magnetic field would bend it regardless of strength of the beam. The larger the number of fields and there gradients would disperse it at a greater rate. So it would be also useless near any natural magnetic fields.
An alternate form would be a plasma weapon . . This too has it’s problems since it too would not move in a strait line. . Would cool fast and disperse.
Though hit any hull with energetic matter and . . . it will not be the same
I have made personally a Ion “beam” (think more jet then beam) what was powerful enough to hold a large Styrofoam ball in the air. This could also be used as an Ion motor for a dinky spacecraft. Even scaled up Not very useful as a weapon because of its very short range lack of “hitting” power and would not “disable” anything if any though at all was used in the targets construction.
Also EMP looses its bang for the buck VERY quickly as soon as you remove wires from the equation . . the use of Fiber optics and faraday cages around sensitive (still vulnerable parts) effectively harden any target to the point of making EMPs so ineffective to be almost useless.
8Mikey8 had a better idea . . if you have to have it just make it effective on shields or something. but just please do not folow the crowd . .
