Prism tower (Red Alert 2)

The Prism Tower was an Allied advanced defense structure developed by Albert Einstein, used during the first and second iterations of the Third World War.
==Background==
The prism tower consists of 6 rotating mirrors on the top of a tower. These mirrors are positioned to form a charging chamber to produce a photon beam to be directed by the tower's top mirror. A single prism tower's laser beam is less powerful than a discharge from a Tesla coil, but the its rate of fire is faster and has a slightly further range. Two or more adjacent prism towers have the ability to combine their beams, increasing the power of the resulting beam, a property that the Tesla coils do not possess. In essence, this was done by firing off a beam at another tower's mirror, often in a chain, after which the final tower that the beam would reach would fire an enhanced beam that is proportionally powerful to the number of chained prism towers.
They were particularly effective against heavily armoured tanks, even Apocalypse tanks. Artillery units outranged them, however. Combining beams from nearby towers would create a blast that could destroy a tank in a single hit, but had a downside - prism towers that were close to each other could only focus on a single target.
==Usage==
The prism tower was developed by Albert Einstein to counter the Soviet Tesla coil. The technology was first used at the Pentagon, as seen during Operation: Liberty.
The Soviets attempted to replicate prism technology in a secret base near Tulum, Mexico. They placed turrets with larger mirrors upon Mayan temple ruins. This version was more powerful and had a faster rate of fire. The prototypes and the surrounding Soviet base were destroyed by a group of Navy SEALs during Operation: Sun Temple.
==Aftermath==
During the Post-war Crisis, prism towers were still used by Allied forces, and retained the ability to combine their beams.
Despite the disappearance of Albert Einstein, the prism tower was replaced by the functionally identical spectrum tower in the third iteration of the Third World War.
==Gallery==
File:RA2 Prism Tower blueprints.png|Prism Tower blueprints
File:RA2 Prism Tower simulation.jpg|Albert Einstein's simulation displaying the power of combined prism towers
File:Prism_tower_animation_1.gif|Unused destruction animation
File:Prism_tower_animation_2.gif|Buildup animation
File:Prism_tower_animation_3.gif|Charge animation
Prism tower in Snow Theater.jpg|In a snow theater
===Cameos===
Textless cameo from the official website:
Pre-release cameos, in order: early alpha, late alpha
==Trivia==
* In the campaigns, prism towers are much more potent when combined, as only two could destroy a Soviet Apocalypse tank in a single beam, while it took the combined beams of five towers in skirmish mode.
**The reason they are more potent is because of a bug, and that bug affects all missions and maps that modify the Generals section in any way, shape, or form, but don't re-set the flag PrismSupportModifier to the original 150%. ModEnc has the full explanation, but the gist of it is the value gets multiplied by 100 every time the General section is re-read by the game, resulting in a highly over-powered weapon by the time Prism Towers are introduced in the missions, assuming you play all missions in order. How loading saved games affects this was not researched.
***ModEnc: "This flag is parsed in an incorrect way: after reading its value from the INI file, it's multiplied by 100 before being saved internally. Due to the fact that the ini parser reads each flag in [General] whenever the [General] section is present in the file, and if it can't interpret the flag's value properly (say, the flag was not redeclared), it falls back to the value the flag already has. Which means, if the [General] section is present in the mpmode file/map, but this flag is not, then its value is multiplied by 100 again for each such case. Which results in a severely overpowered weapon."
** Ares DLL fixes this bug, so Prism Towers in Ares-powered mods are no longer "more potent", or overpowered, as they actually are.
==See also==
* Tesla coil
* Psychic tower
Category:Red Alert 2 support structures