Meson Accelerator/meta

In real life mesons decay (and all particle decay) does not work in the way implied by the description.

Traveller canon experts theorize this weapon is named for Dr. George Meson, the Terran scientist who discover the principles of the weapon and built the working prototype during the 8th Interstellar War.

Ian_Whitchurch here.

• For you non-gearheads, Meson Guns are one of the two critical military technologies in med-tech Trav, along with Nuclear Dampers.
• Before Meson Guns, you can just load armour up on your vessel and be pretty secure, so you tend to get a smaller number of very big, very heavily armoured ships.
• After Meson Guns, you tend to get more ships with Meson Guns (with some Particle weapons in the Fleet to keep the other side spending some of their resources on armour), as ships tend to start exploding violently from the inside once the Fleets get into range.

Of course, you also get Meson Screens at TL12, and big ships make a comeback.

Striker had Battlefield Meson Guns at TL15, and they do exceptionally bad things to Grav Tanks. I would hypothesise that the Imperial Forces are still pretty wedded to Grav Tanks, and wont move to a Meson Guns-plus-spotters way of war until forced by a major military defeat.