Directorate Officer
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
- Intent: To provide a Ripper Rifle in the Lucerne Personal Defense line-up
- Image Source: here
- Canon Link: N/A
- Permissions: N/A
- Primary Source: N/A
- Manufacturer: Lucerne Personal Defense
- Affiliation: Silver Jedi, Closed-Market
- Model: LPD-31 Stormshard Ripper Rifle
- Modularity: Rail attachments, scope, other typical gun modifications
- Production: Mass-Produced
- Material: Slugthrower & blaster components, Durasteel casing, electronics, Permex furniture, Magnatomic Grip Panels
- Classification: Ripper rifle
- Size:Average
- Weight: Average
- Ammunition Type: Turadium flechettes, power pack. gas canister
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Ripper Mode Shotgun mode Light Blaster mode Ammunition Capacity 200 (Low) 20 (Average) 100 (Average) Effective Range Average Personal Personal Rate of Fire High Very Low High Stopping Power High
ExtremeLow Recoil High High Low
- Ripper (Energy-Propelled Slugthrower): The Stormshard is a type of Ripper weapon, which uses energy to rapidly launch metal flechette projectiles with exceptional shield-piercing qualities. The Stormshard itself uses laser ablation propulsion by using a small blaster housed in the weapon's rear to ignite the rear of the projectile to turn it into plasma which then propels and envelopes the projectile as it leaves the barrel. Due to the projectile's high velocity and encasement in plasma, these flechettes are unusually effective at penetrating through shielded targets.
- Variable Fire Modes: While the Stormshard is typically used as a ripper weapon, it can focus more on its kinetic or energy nature to get different effects. The blaster mechanism at the rear of the weapon can be used by itself, which despite the rifle's side, is only as powerful as a sporting blaster pistol. While fairly weak, this does provide Stormshard users with a viable stun setting. Alternatively, the Stormshard's variable chamber can be overloaded with flechettes. In this mode, the blaster in the back is not able to fully convert all of the flechettes' base into plasma at a consistent level, which effectively turns the Stormshard into a short-ranged if powerful shotgun.
- Stun Setting: The Stormshard does have stun setting via its internal blaster.
- Picatinny Rail: The Stormshard does have a Picatinny rail, which allows it to use a variety of off the counter weapon's attachments such as aftermarket sights or scopes.
- Combo Light/Laser: The Stormshard as a combination targeting laser and flashlight built-into the weapon just beneath its barrel. The targeting laser is often used reflexively, which combined with the weapon's short pull of length makes it very easy to use in close-quarters combat.
- Variable Fire Modes: The Stormshard can alter the intake of its ammunition and firing cycle to allow it to be used in different weapon roles, making it a versatile weapon.
- High Rate of Fire (Ripper & Blaster Mode): The Stormshard has a fairly high rate of fire for a weapon of its size, being largely equivalent to that of conventional blasters such as the famous BlasTech E-11.
- Impressive Stopping Power (Shotgun Mode): The Stormshard can cast out an impressive number of flechettes at short range at reasonable velocities, which gives it a very high stopping power at short ranges.
- Shield Penetrator (Ripper): The Stormshard, like other Ripper designs, is fairly effective at penetrating through personal-scale shields, though the damage it inflicts after piercing is less than it would be against an unshielded target.
- Dropoff: The Stormshard has a shorter effective range than many more common long-arms. Even its ripper mode, the Stormshard's range is typically comparable to a blaster carbine than a blaster rifle the Stormshard's size. This is largely due to the relatively light weight of the Stormshard's flechettes.
- Low Stopping Power (Blaster Mode): The individual blaster bolts produced by the Stormshard are fairly weak, largely because the built-in blaster is optimized for use a propulsion system rather than a purpose-built weapon on its own.
- Slow rate of Fire (Shotgun mode): The Stormshard kicks quite a bit when employed in the shotgun mode because of the volume of flechettes being unleashed as well as the Stormshard's relatively light weight.
- Jack of all trades, master of none: The Stormshard isn't quite as good in any of its secondary roles as dedicated weapons of that specific type: it's light blaster mode is equivalent to that of a blaster pistol, but it's significantly larger in size. While it's as powerful as even the largest shotguns, it doesn't have the same modularity in ammunition that most do.
Seeing a proliferation of personal shielding technologies becoming more common on the battlefield, LPD president Tresk Ek'ala directed his designers to develop a weapon to counter this development. In turn, these designers turned back to the ancient Ripper weapon and combined it with the laser ablation propulsion concept previously used on Lucerne Labs' Seure-class Cannon. The resulting weapon can fire a steady and rapid stream of flechettes well-suited towards penetrating shields and into the target behind it.
The Iceshard uses a miniaturized blaster located in its rear to fire very diminutive bolts that partially vaporize the rear of the Iceshard's turadium flechettes, which are fed at almost the tip of the blaster's barrel by a vertical magazine. The vaporization of the rear mixes plasma not only from bolt itself, but the flechette as well. This exothermic reaction not only propels the flechette out of the barrel at a high velocity, but also encases in it a icy blue energy sheath not unlike that of bowcaster's energy quarrels. Because of the flechette's high velocity, the Ripper is a fairly straight shooting weapon throughout its effective range, requiring very little understanding of ballistics to effectively use. Upon impact with an energy shield, the flechette's surrounding shell of plasma helps disrupt the energy casing itself, while the nature of turadium can better withstand the heat produced by its impact on the shield itself before it tears into its target. While individual flechettes are only about as powerful as a typical blaster bolt, the volume of fire that an Iceshard can produce often means that multiple flechettes are impacting a shield a time, which improves their odds of penetrating through a shield to cause grievous harm to the target. While this is generally effective in most combat situations, the Iceshard can alter its fire and feeding operations to generate other effects.
The most common of these is to simply turn off the flechette feed and double the blaster component's cycle charging time. This effectively turns the Iceshard into a blaster pistol with the ergonomics of the rifle. While extremely easy to use in this configuration because of its low recoil, it is also hampered by relatively short range and low power output. This mode is often in conjunction with the blaster's stun setting, which unusually gives what primarily is a slugthrower weapon a stun setting. Its actually far more common for Stormshard users to use the weapon's other setting, which effectively turns it into a shotgun.
In its 'shotgun' mode, the Stormshard feeds a stack of twenty flechettes into its chamber which also mechanically dilates. The blaster bolt used for ablation also is increased in charge. Despite this, the ablation propulsion process is less complete, leading to the haphazard vaporization and encasement in plasma of the flechettes. The flechettes then fly out the Stormshards at a variety of angles and with slightly different velocities and trajectories in a semblance of a stack of projectiles. The sheer mass of the projectiles being expelled makes it exceptionally dangerous, with it almost being equivalent to being hit with ten blaster pistol bolts simultaneously. However, with such power comes great recoil, a highly reduced range, and a slow rate of fire. This makes its use to limited to being a potent manstopper in close-quarter's environments.
The Stormshard is exotic enough in that while its advantages have given it a certain widespread appeal on the market, it is also unconventional enough that few organizations have adopted it on a wide scale. Most users that have bought the weapons know that they will be facing shield-equipped organic foes, with the second most common buyers citing that they were looking for a more versatile close quarters combat weapon. Ek'ala expects that sales will increase once conflict escalates in the galaxy once more.
3/21/2020
-Fixed coding for table
-Updated submission to fit new Factory standards - some ratings were changed in order to meet compliance with new balancing scheme
-Fixed coding for table
-Updated submission to fit new Factory standards - some ratings were changed in order to meet compliance with new balancing scheme
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