The behavior of a single‐mesh pulse‐forming network for driving flashlamps in both steady and nonsteady time response regimes is discussed. The resistance of the flashlamp is modeled as dependent only on the stored energy in the flashlamp dischargeEp. This energy in turn depends only on the electrical energy input and a characteristic decay time &tgr;d. It is shown that this formulation applies for any input pulse width and allows analysis of the case where the desired input pulse is shorter than &tgr;d. Numerical solutions are presented for a wide range of parameters and critical damping parameters are presented for response conditions ranging from steady to very nonsteady. Finally, a procedure for obtaining these parameters experimentally is presented so that the previously developed solutions can be applied to specific situtations of interest.