Drakken laser drill

"One hundred and seventy four gigawatts - 'the power of the sun at your fingertips.'"

- Tychus Findlay

The Drakken laser drill is a large terran structure. It mounts a large turreted beam emitter which may be used for excavations or, if the need arises, as a weapon. Its laser has an energy output of 174 gigawatts.

History
The laser drill was originally designed for excavation projects.

In 2504, the Moebius Foundation assembled a Drakken on Xil to breach the door of a xel'naga temple and retrieve an alien artifact. The excavation was interrupted when the terrans were wiped out by the Tal'darim.

The Foundation hired Raynor's Raiders to complete the dig. The Tal'darim pressed in on the new interlopers. The appearance of archons and warp prisms prompted Matt Horner to grant Jim Raynor manual control of the laser. This allowed the Drakken to be re-targeted against enemy units.

With the temple's doors destroyed, the Raiders extracted the artifact and departed.

Game Structure
The laser drill is a very powerful weapon, capable of killing archons and collossi in less than a second. It is also the only weapon that can destroy the three protoss research objectives on the map. Though it does massive damage in seconds once it begins firing, locking onto a target and firing the initial laser has a delay, and the laser must swing around to fire at units, further delaying its firing.

Development
The drill underwent an artistic revision during development, in order to make it look more like hardware and less like a weapon. The artwork was retextured a few times (construction yellow, to covert-ops black, and then back to construction yellow again with a hint of covert-ops black). There used to be a floor inside the railing which would have had operators maintaining the drill, as well as a seat in front of the monitor bank with a operator behind the keyboard. Time and various other factors eventually phased those features out. The texture on the monitors remained unchange; they resemble the Windows Blue Screen of Death.