Approved Ranged Weapon Painwave Fang Mk. I

[Darth Prazutis]

• Intent: A compact, Kainate weapon: A dark "fang" for vessels designed to surgically incapacitate, terrorize, and lethally terminate organic crews and small personnel clusters aboard targeted vessels or installations. The Fang is a predator's tool, the newest in Painwave technology used by the Kainate.
• Image Source:
  • Headers - Teresa Zambrano | Darth Pellax
• Canon Link: N/A
• Permissions: N/A
• Primary Source:
  • Painwave Emitter Mk. I
  • Painwave Obliterator Mk. I

• Manufacturer:
  
  • Malsheem Hypernautics and Manufacturing
• Affiliation:
  
  • The Kainate
• Market Status: Closed-Market
• Model: Painwave Fang Mk. I
• Modularity: No
• Production: Limited
• Material:
  • Bloodsteel Structural Frame
  • Sith Crystal Matrix
  • Alchemized Sarrassian Iron Conductor Lattice
  • Painwave Focusing Array (Bloodpane lenses & Micro-Baffle Assembly)

• Classification: Neural Resonance Emitter
• Size: Small
• Weight: Light
• Ammunition Type: Bloodsteel Charge Cell / Ritual Capacitor
• Ammunition Capacity: Average
• Effective Range: Average
• Rate of Fire: Low
• Damage Output: Very High (Versus Organic) / None (Versus Mechanical)
• Recoil: None

• Adaptive Agony Matrix (Needle / Rend / Latch / Killbridge): The Painwave Fang's core emitter can shift its energy pattern across four distinct modes, each serving a precise and horrifying role in Sith combat doctrine:
  
  • Needle (Precision Neural Coupling): Focuses a razor-thin beam that directly attacks a victim's nervous system, causing paralysis, silence, or instant collapse. Used to eliminate key targets such as bridge officers, pilots, or gunners with surgical accuracy.
  • Rend (Localized Corridor Denial): Expands the same energy into a sweeping blast that floods corridors or decks with waves of crippling agony, forcing crews to abandon their stations or fall writhing to the floor. Ideal for clearing defensive positions without damaging vital systems.
  • Latch (Sustained Agony / Containment): Sustains a continuous pulse that traps survivors in unending waves of pain, disorienting and immobilizing them for boarding or capture. It is not immediately lethal but leaves targets broken and incapable of coordinated resistance.
  • Killbridge (Ritual Kyber Termination): The weapon's ultimate mode, a ritual-fueled discharge that channels kyber-fed dark energy to tear through body and mind alike, killing swiftly at close range. Reserved for targets who cannot be allowed to live.
    
    Each mode transitions seamlessly into the next, allowing the vessel to hunt, disable, and destroy with terrifying adaptability.
• Predictive Pain Targeting: The Fang's guidance system senses life and emotion through its rune-wired optics, allowing it to anticipate where pain will hurt most. It adjusts its pulse a moment before impact, striking with unnerving precision and psychological effect.
• Ritual Safeguards: Every Fang is bound to its ship by Sith sigils. Any attempt to tamper with or steal the weapon triggers an automatic shutdown or a self-purging surge, ensuring that no enemy can ever reverse-engineer it.
• Quick Swap Emitter Head: The forward "fang" of the system can be swapped between missions for re-tuning or cartridge replacement. Routine servicing is mechanical, but full power restoration demands Sith ritual at Kainate facilities.
• Optional Hemophage Link: When tied into a ship's Hemophage Conductor Web, the Fang grows stronger by feeding on nearby suffering. This mode makes it far deadlier, but its presence becomes impossible to hide, and it leaves behind a lingering psychic scar that even allies can feel.

• Bypasses Energy Shields / Targets Biology Directly: The Painwave Fang projects coherent neural/psychic pulses that couple with living nervous tissue, so conventional energy shields don't stop it, the weapon ignores shield health and works through armor. This lets it disable or terrorize a crew without needing to punch hull or overcome shielding, turning survivable hull hits into catastrophic personnel losses.
• Tunable from Precision to Area Effects: The Fang can be set to a razor focus for single-target disruption (Needle) or broadened to flood compartments and decks with crippling agony (Rend/Latch), which gives the drone tactical flexibility between assassination, suppression, and area denial. Pilots and fleet tacticians can therefore tailor engagements: silent surgical kills or brutal suppression depending on mission needs.
• Psychological & Doctrinal Impact: The weapon doesn't just wound bodies, it fractures morale. Even survivors suffer lingering fear and cognitive trauma, making boarding resistance, coordinated repairs, and counterattacks far less likely; the Fang is as much a terror weapon as a physical one, multiplying a vessels battlefield value beyond raw damage.
• Fast Application & Integration with Strike Doctrine: Designed for mounting on a small, fast fighter, the Fang's effects come instantly upon contact and require only brief exposure to incapacitate key personnel, ideal for hit-and-run strikes, interdiction of bridges, or clearing gun crews before a follow-up strike. Tight integration with the Nyctophage's targeting and vectoring systems lets it lock and apply Needle to a single officer mid-run with frightening efficiency.
• Scales with Ritual Feed & Battlefield Suffering: When linked to Kainate power nodes, sacrifice-fed relays, or nearby suffering, the Fang's potency can be amplified via ritual bindings, allowing synergy with other Kainate vessels when present. This makes the weapon a force multiplier in major engagements where the Ship's other dark systems can fuel brutal spikes of output.
• Non-Lethal Option & Capture Utility: In Needle or Latch settings the Fang can incapacitate without destroying infrastructure, enabling capture of personnel, forcing surrender, or producing broken prisoners for interrogation or ritual use. This controllable lethality provides valuable utility beyond raw killing, from precise assassinations to soft-denial of corridors for boarding teams.

• Non-Biological Targets: The Fang cannot harm droids, pure machines, or mechanical control-brains, its entire effect set depends on coupling to biological systems. Any enemy relying on android crews, hardened droid brains, or autonomous turret platforms will be immune to its primary effects, forcing the Nyctophage to rely on conventional kinetic or energy weapons.
• Force Nullification / Neural Defense: Force Nullification devices and active neural dampers massively undercut the Fang's functioning; While under Force Nullification the weapon is severely weakened. Similarly, properly equipped bridge stations with neural-scramblers or psycho-filters can reduce its effectiveness, buying critical time.
• Signature & Telegraphing at High Output: Large area or killing modes (especially Killbridge and maximal Rend) produce a strong dark, sensor signature and ritual spike that can be detected by trained Force sensitives or by the Kainate's enemies. Using the most potent settings therefore risks alerting nearby defenders and drawing countermeasures.
• Maintenance Burden: The Fang demands skilled upkeep and ritual recharge, a logistics and personnel cost the attacker must sustain or risk malfunctions that can render the weapon useless or dangerous to its host.
• Friendly-Fire Risk: The Fang's waves do not discriminate once fired into a corridor or deck: allies caught in the blast without protective insulation or dampers will suffer. This creates tactical constraints for mixed-force attacks and requires careful sequencing or clearances to avoid incapacitating friendly boarding crews or nearby Kainate assets.
• Power & Cooldown Constraints: High-intensity pulses, sustained Latch fields, or repeated Killbridge activations draw heavy power and produce heat and dark strain on the mounting platform. On a small drone hull this requires energy budgeting and cooldown cycles; overuse can leave the vessel temporarily unable to fire, or worse, thermally/ritually unstable during egress.

The Painwave Fang is not an accident of engineering but the deliberate next instrument in a lineage of designs: It is the logical, cruel evolution of the Painwave Emitter and the Painwave Obliterator, forged under the direct supervision of the Shadow Hand. Where the Emitter first harnessed psychic dissonance to scatter and disorient entire battlefields, paralyzing with agony and the Obliterator converted that doctrine into mass extermination, the Fang distills those monstrous principles into a surgical weapon for predators. Conceived in the shadow-forges of Malsheem at Darth Prazutis' behest, the Fang was intended to put the Kainate's signature of terror onto a single point: The mortal mind. Engineers and ritualists worked together, refining amplifier crystals, rune circuits, and pain-resonant geometries until a compact device could project the same devastating neural cascades previously achieved. The Shadow Hand ensured each iteration remained doctrinal, not merely a weapon but a means of enforcing psychological dominion, and the Fang carries that mandate into every boarding throat and bridge it touches.

Right at its core the Fang translates ritualized dark-side resonance into tightly controlled neural coupling. Rather than relying on brute thermal or kinetic force, the system emits coherent pulses tuned to the bioelectrical bands of organic nervous tissue. These pulses pass through hull plating and conventional shields because they do not attack matter, they couple to synapses, overwhelming pain pathways and cognitive centers. The device's internal architecture combines a compact Bloodsteel-wound Pain-Amplifier crystal, a rune-inscribed psychocoupler lattice, and micro-baffled emitter optics that shape the field into a needle or a spread. In practice this means the Fang can be focused to paralyze a single officer, broadened to drown a corridor in agony, or sustained to hold survivors immobile for boarding, the same underlying mechanics, scaled by aperture and pulse shaping, produce lethal or non-lethal effects as the pilot chooses. When ritual feed lines or sufficiently fed hemophage conductor webs are present, the Fang's output can be amplified briefly, allowing even a smaller vessel to deliver a spike of power otherwise impossible from so small a frame.

Efficiency is where the Fang truly shines. The Emitter and Obliterator required large, stationary cores and ritual tenders; the Fang replaces mass with precision. Its crystal matrix is crafted for rapid charge cycles and low bleed, enabling nearly instantaneous output with only short cooldown windows, ideal for the hit-and-run doctrine of the developing Nyctophage-class Wraith Drone. Because the weapon targets biology directly, it achieves mission effects without expending heavy missiles or trying to punch through shields and armor; a single successful Needle strike can remove a gun crew or bridge team from the equation, letting the drone's kinetic armament finish the job. On the battlefield the cost in time and ordnance drops dramatically: rather than burning through salvos to suppress a turret, a Nyctophage bites once and the turret is silent, either because the crew is incapacitated or because its coordination systems have collapsed under psychic shock.

Tactically, the Fang was designed to be a predator's tooth. Integrated into the Nyctophage's targeting stack it favors dynamic engagements where lock windows are measured in heartbeats: a vectoring run that exposes an officer's console for a single second becomes an execution when the Fang's Needle is applied; a close-range bombing run that would otherwise draw heavy flak can be preceded by a Rend pulse that forces crew to take cover, making the munitions' path clean. The Fang is also invaluable for boarding and anti-boarding operations; its sustained Latch mode holds survivors helpless while boarding hooks find purchase, preventing desperate counterattacks and turning capture into a formality. Because it is compact and ritual-tunable, squadrons of Nyctophages can synchronize strikes that amplify one another through shared sigil-wire lattices, turning surgical attacks into cascading collapses of morale and control.

No myth of omnipotence attends the Fang. Its potency depends on biological targets and dark access: droids, autonomous turrets, and pure machines are immune, and Force Nullification or active neural dampers weaken or nullify its power. High-output cycles radiate dark signatures that trained Force users can detect and counter, and ritual amplification requires rare crystals and skilled binders, logistics that limit sustained use at scale without proper support. The compact design also imposes cooling and power constraints; sustained Killbridge cycles or repeated maximal pulses require careful energy budgeting on the part of the vessel and a short ritual cooldown before the Fang can be safely used. Even so, when employed within its envelope the Fang is terrifyingly efficient: it converts brief exposures into decisive human effects, turning relatively small drones into instruments of surgical terror and making the Kainate's doctrine of pain both practical and repeatable across the battlefield.

The Painwave Fang thus stands as the Shadow Hand's answer to modern warfare: the old Painwave devices conquered space with terror and ritual; the Fang conquers bodies and wills with the cold intimacy of a predator's bite. It binds Kainate ritual craft and battlefield engineering into a compact instrument of psychological dominion, a tool equally useful for assassination, suppression, capture, and the orchestration of dread. Mounted on a Nyctophage, the Fang turns a droid fighter into a singular enactment of Kainate philosophy: Violence practiced as craft, cruelty engineered to exact permanent advantage.

 

[Krass Wyms]

Darth Prazutis

Very cool

Approved