Directorate Officer
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
- Intent: To provide a conventional shotgun in Lucerne Personal Defense’s inventory
- Image Source: Matanza Arms CARB Shotgun from AVATAR
- Canon Link: N/A
- Permissions: N/A
- Primary Source: N/A
- Manufacturer: Lucerne Personal Defense
- Affiliation: Directorate, Silver Jedi Concord, Closed-Market
- Model: LPD-45 Firespray Shotgun
- Modularity: ammunition, chokes, sights, scopes, barrel attachments, rail attachments
- Production: Mass-Produced.
- Material: Durasteel barrel and receiver, ceramisteel internal components, permex furniture, Magnatomic Grip Panels
- Classification: Shotgun
- Size: Average
- Weight: Heavy
- Ammunition Type: shotshells, shells, slugs
- Ammunition Capacity: Average (7 rounds in detachable box magazine; 6-9 rounds in underbarrel tubular magazine depending on ammunition type)
- Effective Range: Personal
- Rate of Fire: Average
- Stopping Power: Extreme
- Recoil: High
- Gas-Operated Slugthrower: The Firespray is a traditional slugthrower that uses a form indirect impingement by using as a gas piston to unlock and rotate its five lugged bolt. The gas block located just behind the barrel can be adjusted for different ammunition types to ensure better reliability based on power loads. This means that the more lightly loaded (and consequently less powerful) ammunition can run reliably in the weapon just as well as ‘hot’ loaded ammunition with only a little tinkering by the end-user. This conventional mechanism of operation also means that the weapon is unaffected by EMP, ion, and other similar effects.
- Modular Ammunition: The Firespray can use a wide variety of ammunition, ranging from classic canister shot such as bird and buckshot to large solid slugs to saboted rounds and a vast array of specialty munitions including different types of microgrenades.
- Dual Magazine Feed: The Firespray is unusual for shotgun in that it has two separate magazines: a traditional tubular magazine located underneath the barrel and a detachable box magazine located in the butt of the weapon. With the flick of a selector switch, the user can choose which magazine is currently feeding the weapon, allowing the user to easily switch ammunition types during the battle. While the box magazine is significantly quicker to reload, it is also less tolerant of accepting unusual ammunition types. Conversely, the tubular magazine is slower to reload (though it can be continually ‘topped off’), it easily accepts ammunition of different lengths, making it more well-suited for employing unusual munitions that don’t necessarily conform to traditional specifications of shotgun shells.
- Threaded Barrel: The Firespray’s barrel has both internal and external threading at the end. The internal threading allows various types of chokes to installed into the barrel with the twist of barrel key, which allows users to easily change the spread pattern of the weapon in the field in under a minute. The external threading allows different types of external barrel attachments to be used, such as compensators, flash hiders, and silencers – however, many of these are incompatible with canister shot and can only be used with slugs/shells.
- Picatinny Rails: The Firespray comes up with picatinny rails on both its top and bottom, allowing a wide variety of different attachments to be added to the weapon for easy customization, ranging from night sights and scopes to foregrips, lights, and underbarrel attachment weapons.
- Modular: The Firespray is an exceptionally adaptable weapon, capable of taking on a wide variety of aftermarket devices and a vast variety of specialty munitions. This allows the Firespray to be employed effectively in a wide variety of circumstances in a wide variety of roles.
- Manstopper: The Firespray’s projectiles are fairly powerful, not due to the velocity of the projectiles themselves, but due to their large size (and consequently large payload).
- Limited Range: The Firespray is a smoothbore weapon, which means that it imparts little spin to its projectiles upon firing, which in turn limits its effective range much more significantly compared to other slugthrower weapons.
- A Rolling Mountain: Despite the Firespray’s relatively high weight, the weapon still has a fairly noticeable kick. This manifests for practical purposes as slow follow-up shots for the unprepared or physically unconditioned.
While Lucerne Personal Defense had hoped that its Hailstorm Flechette Carbine would effectively break into the scatter gun market because of its longer effective range and similar effects compared to conventional shotguns, the company found that the limited ammunition versatility of that weapon along with its unorthodox firing mechanism prevented it from making major headway into the market. Chagrinned by their lack of success, the company’s designers went back to the drawing board and came up with a more conventional shotgun whose major innovation is an unusual dual-magazine feed operation which allows users to easily switch ammunition types during combat.
At its heart, the Firespray is a fairly conventional gas-powered slugthrower that shares millennia old operating mechanisms also used by a number of the company’s other weapon systems, such as the battle rifle - the tried and true rotating bolt thrust back and forth by a gas-piston is probably one of the more common firearm mechanisms in the galaxy. Like many other shotguns, the Firespray also comes with a set of screw-in barrel chokes, ranging from full chokes (for a tighter spread of pellets at long ranges) to a cylinder bore (for using single-piece slugs or producing wide spreads with pellets). This allows the Firespray to use a wide variety of ammunition types with close to maximum performance. While ostensibly designed to use LPD manufactured 12 gauge ammunition, the nature of the tubular magazine and its feed mechanism allow the Firespray to be compatible with a large number of ammunition types:
Birdshot: This shotshell contains dozens to hundreds of tiny durasteel pellets. When fired from the Firespray, these pellets spread out to encompass a relatively wide area of effect, whose exact pattern width and density is dependent on the choke screwed into the Firespray’s barrel. While traditionally used to hunt birds and other small game with a minimum of tissue destruction, this is also sometimes used to intentionally wound (but not kill) targets or in instances where there are concerns about overpenetration, such as in crowded urban areas or in pressurized vessels like suborbital freighters and passenger shuttles.
Buckshot: This shotshell contains approximately a dozen durasteel balls, each of which is roughly the size of a small pistol bullet. Like birdshot, these pellets spread out somewhat when fired, with the exact spread pattern depending on the choke uses. Buckshot has been traditionally employed when hunting medium game animals such as banthas, but it is quite effective against human-sized targets: at short ranges, being hit with a single buckshot shell’s contents is roughly equivalent to being shot ten times by a blaster pistol. This is probably the most commonly used round with the Firespray.
Solid Slug: This is essentially a common slugthrower cartridge, consisting of a large durasteel slut with an internal Mirrsteel penetrator designed to increase penetration against armor. Unlike many other slugthrower ammunitions, the slug relies heavily on its large mass and inertia to inflict damage rather than its speed. While this does not make it a good projectile at long-ranges, it is excellent at breaking through physical cover (such as walls, trees, foliage, etc) relatively unopposed before inflicting heavy damage.
Explosive Slug: This shell is has a projectile slug composed of detonite covered in a thin jacket of durasteel. Upon the jarring impact against a hard surface such as a wall or battle armor, it violently explodes, producing a brief fireball several meters in diameter. Unsurprisingly, it tends to be very effective against targets wearing battle armor, droids, and light vehicles. Conversely, sometimes the impact will not detonate upon impact with soft, unarmored targets as there is insufficient kinetic jolt for the detonite to ignite.
Micro-Grenade Shell: Firespray can support the use of many existing micro-grenades already found throughout the galaxy thanks to an adaptor shell. The microgrenade is simply and snuggly pushed into the adaptor shell, which otherwise merely contains a shotgun shell’s primer and propellant. Commonly used micro-grenades used by the Firespray include fragmentation, stun, and ion. Due to the use of chemical propellant, micro-grenades typically have a shorter range through the Firespray compared to dedicated micro-grenade launchers, but the Firespray also can operate unaffected by ion and EMP attacks and be silenced, unlike conventional micro-grenade launchers.
ElectroStunner: This slug contains a small power cell, transitor, a quartet of metal prongs at its tip as well as six metal spikes that extend laterally from the projectile while in flight. Upon contact with the target, as long as two of the prongs or spikes makes contact with the target, an electric current is introduced into the body that overlaps the frequency of electricity used by most organics to control their muscle systems. This effectively can trap its target in a series of uncontrollable muscle spasms for about half a minute until the powercell’s power is depleted.
Gas Shells: This shell contains a very thin ceramic container filled with a weaponized gas. Upon contact with a hard surface, the container shatters and releases its payload in the immediate vicinity. Commonly used gases include plank gas, coma gas, and Agent T-238. The shells contain only a small amount of gas which quickly disperses, making it a useful precision weapon to deploy these agents.
Incendiary Shell: This shell contains a very small amount of detonite to act as a kinetic impact primer along with a substantial filling of plasticene thermite gel contained in a very thin ceramic shell. Upon impact, the detonite serves to ignite the gel, bringing up the local areas up to almost 5000 degrees Celsius, more than capable enough of starting fires and burning through many armor materials. This shell is commonly used against the Aeravalin of the Bryn’adul.
CryoBan Shell: This slug consists of a thin durasteel shell that contains condensed CryoBan. Upon impact with a hard surface, the tip of the durasteel slug deforms to release the CryoBan, ideally directly into actual organic tissue or focused up against armor. The focused release of this agent is designed to create deep, penetrating cold injuries into the target, making it more of a precision weapon than an area of effect munition. This shell is commonly used against the Baedurin of the Bryn’adul.
Most of the initial production run has been slated to go to groups currently involved in fighting off the Bryn’adul campaign of systemic genocide in the Galactic Southeast. Large numbers of weapons have also been found in the hands of the Silver Jedi Concord and the Directorate, where it is frequently used as a close-quarters weapon by marines. The sheer versatility provided by this weapon’s munitions, its excellent stopping power, and robust system of operation seem likely to make the Firespray a solid seller for the company for some time to come.
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