RCFC R&D

[Rusty]

Once the bullets were cooled, it was time to set them in the casings.

This was by far the simplest part of the process.

Once it was done, Rusty had 5 shiny new .50 BMG rounds to play with.

The big rounds were his preference for testing for a number of reasons. Firstly, it served as a happy medium between rifle and cannon-sized projectiles. Its firing characteristics had much more in common with small bore cannon, but it could easily be scaled down the rifle sized.

Secondly, they tended to be crazy accurate, even at a distance. Rusty definitely liked knowing more or less exactly where they would go when he pulled the trigger. This was as true at five meters as it was at 500. There were few rounds that could match it in terms of reliability, both in accuracy and kill power.

That led to the third point: they were freaking huge. 650 grains was a conclusive end to any argument, and these iridium rounds felt like they'd come in at about 675. That would probably mean a slight drop in muzzle velocity, but not so much that it would overly affect accuracy.

For now though, it was time to open the shop for the day's business. Test firing would have to wait until the next night.

 

[Rusty]

For this test, Rusty really needed a working lightsaber. Unfortunately, he didn't have one, and couldn't make one in the traditional sense.

Modern lightsaber design depended almost entirely on the builder's connection to the Force. As Rusty understood from his studies of publicly available texts on the matter, the Jedi or Sith in question would often take several days just preparing for the build, meditating and cleansing their minds of anything that wouldn't help them build the blade. Assembly was heavily ritualized, a necessity for the near alchemical melding of machine and Force that produced one of the most efficient and deadly constructions in known civilization. Even relatively pacifistic Jedi built and carried lightsabers, as they were a sign of their connection to the Force and a symbol of their status as much as anything.

Rusty could not call upon the Force. He could no more call upon the arcane powers of the armed mystics that seemed to control the fate of the galaxy than he could stop a star from exploding. He could, however, research.

One alternative to lightsabers was the lightfoil, a lightweight, elegantly balanced variant that even normals could build and use. Unfortunately, lightfoils were often seen as inferior knockoffs. Their focusing crystals tended to be inferior to those favored by Force users, and without the Force to meld components together on a molecular level, they lacked anything even close to the power or efficiency of a true lightsaber.

For testing purposes, that simply wouldn't do.

Some digging had turned up something that Rusty had actually found quite useful: early lightsabers were, for all practical intents and purposes, siege weapons. They were large, cumbersome, and inherently unstable. As such, Force users tended to stick with traditional blades imbued with the Force until some enterprising soul figured out how to make them more practical.

Rusty might not be able to build something he could use in a fight, but he could [bleep] sure build a siege weapon.

And so, after months of work, the test saber was born. It was large, about a cubic meter, and weighed over 100 kilograms. Much of that weight was armor; it wouldn't do to have a testing tool that could be disabled by a poorly placed bullet. Internally, it held a power generator salvaged from an E-web, as well as several capacitor banks. When activated, the cooling system was far and away the loudest part. The [bleep] thing sounded like an old diesel groundcar engine. The pumps had to be massive in relation to the rest of it to deal with the massive amounts of waste heat produced by the beam.

The beam itself was bright red, and a little on the unstable side, since he had salvaged the focusing crystals from one of his myriad Sith kills over the centuries. Without the Force, Rusty couldn't chase down the harmonics that gave it that little bit of a wobble, as none of his equipment was sensitive enough to detect it. As a result, it usually shut itself off after about 30 seconds, and the crystals had to be realigned before each use.

Honestly, the thing was such a pain to use, the Shard didn't break it out unless it was absolutely necessary. Today, however, it was.

After about an hour of tinkering, all the indicators were in the green. Rusty set the activation timer for three minutes, which would give him plenty of time to make it to the firing point some 25 meters away. He hustled back to the firing line and loaded the first round into the rifle. His weapon of choice was a big bolt action .50 cal that weighed well over 20 kilograms. It was a beast of a gun, 130 centimeters long, with a barrel heavy enough to handle nearly any load he cared to put through it. For today's test, he had it attached to a tripod that would ensure absolute stability and perfect aim. He dialed the T&E mechanism in to the precise point of aim required for the test, the exact center of the blade.

Once the three minutes were up, the test saber coughed to life with a roar. The brilliant crimson blade spat out harshly from the emitter, casting a hateful red glow over the back of the firing range.

Rusty hated that color.

After taking a second to make sure that his aim was on, the gunsmith pulled the trigger.

The recoil was enough to slide the tripod back a good three centimeters, the metal feet throwing up sparks against the duracrete floor. From the other end of the room, there was a brilliant, blinding flash as the bullet struck the blade, and the sharp metal ping of impact as what was left of it struck the metal backstop.

The blade flickered and died, right on schedule, and Rusty stood up from behind the weapon. From what he could tell, the extra density of the iridium rounds, combined with the high powder load he thought might be necessary to force them down the barrel were responsible for the recoil. He'd need to reduce the powder load by about a third to bring it back down to acceptable levels.

Even then, this wouldn't ammo for the faint of heart or weak of wrist. He was reasonably certain he could get it down to pistol size, but that would still be the equivalent of a magnum or P++ round. Not a problem for a professional shooter, but definitely enough of one that the hobbyist would be scared away. That was fine by him. Most custom home defense rounds were much more harsh than their target counterparts, and no one bothered to shoot them unless they really needed to.

Once he cleared the weapon and made his way back to the target, the Shard couldn't help but pump his fist triumphantly. The paper target on the other side of the blade had two angry, scorched, and irregular holes in it, with about 20 centimeters spread. He'd have to check the high speed camera to be sure, but he was reasonably certain the bullet had performed as anticipated.

 

[Rusty]

The high speed camera shot was a thing of beauty.

The camera was directly overhead of the beam, with a filter over the lens to cut out the harsh red brilliance of the blade. It was set to record at 100,000 frames per second. If Rusty had recorded all three minutes and 33 seconds of the test, it would have taken several hours to watch from start to finish.

Fortunately, he had set the camera up to be triggered by the blade's activation, and it would shut off after ten seconds. That still left a whole lot of nothing in the video file, but it was a simple matter to trim out the excess. What was left was, quite possibly, the most gorgeous thing Rusty had ever recorded.

The bullet struck dead on.

That in and of itself was something to be proud of. Rusty had made tens of thousands of match grade rounds over the years, but even he had difficulty predicting how a new substance would react in flight. Computer modelling could only do so much, but after the first few centuries, Rusty had given up trying to mess with them.

Once the bullet struck, there was a brilliant flash. That would probably be the copper jacket vaporizing. The flash took on a different, almost rainbow-like hue as the iridium began to vaporize. The metal was known and on many worlds prized for the brilliant iridescence it took on when heated properly.

The projectile lost a little velocity as it passed through the blade. Rusty couldn't tell if it was dense enough to offer some resistance, or if the gas burning off slowed it down, by the loss was negligible compared to the overall speed of the projectile. The two halves began to separate and tumble, likely pushed apart by the rapidly expanding gas and plasma from the portions that contacted and were devoured by the blade. It was clear in the high speed footage that they were glowing brightly, and might even have partially liquefied. That would reduce their efficacy against armor. Rusty wasn't sure, but he suspected that they lacked the power of a blast-forged copper projectile used in armor piercing rounds, largely because said projectiles were riding a high explosives-induced shockwave that was several times faster than a mere rifle bullet.

They'd also likely not cause a whole lot of bleeding, as they'd almost certainly cauterize the wound channel on their way through the body. Excruciating, and absolutely deadly if they hit the right spot, but not necessarily a certain kill if an artery was nicked.

All in all though, Rusty was happy with the results. All that was left was to do it again. And again. And again. And again.

If all five rounds behaved in a similar manner, this would be something he could market.

 

[Rusty]

By morning, Rusty was equal parts elated and frustrated.

The bullets had all performed spectacularly, but the test saber was on its last leg. It would need a complete overhaul before more testing could commence. That was going to take a week at least.

That was the price of doing business, he supposed, but that didn't make it any less tedious.

Oh well.

In the mean time, he was going to have to make more bullets in a variety of calibers in order to see how viable the round was. As a sniper's tool, it had proven great. The ballistics suggested it would have something like half the range of a traditional .50 BMG round, otherwise the average organic shooter wouldn't be able to handle it. Trying to use it for automatic weapons would be both prohibitively expensive and insanely wasteful.

If the Shard could make iridium rounds work for handguns, however, then he'd have a truly marketable product. Batches would be limited and hideously expensive until he could find a way to mass produce, but to the right crowd, it would be worth it.

And so he loaded the crucible up with more iridium ingots and fired up the 3D printer to turn out more moulds, this time in .357, 9mm, 10mm, .45ACP, .45LC, and .500 S&W.

5 rounds in each caliber, each one fully jacketed in copper. It would take almost as long to get them all made as it would to fix the test saber. That was fine by him. Now that he knew how to do it, he could program the milling machine to handle most of the work. The swaging and loading would have to be done by hand, but that wasn't terribly difficult.

Now off to fix that [bleep]ing test saber.

 

[Rusty]

A week had passed, and the shop hadn't opened the doors once.

The Captain was probably getting [bleep]ed, since he was overdue returning back to the Wicked Grace, but that couldn't be helped.

The handgun rounds were finished, and a variety of slugthrower pistols were sitting out on the shooting bench.

First up was the .357 magnum. This was a handgun that had a reputation for stopping power and being relatively manageable. The gleaming stainless steel revolver looked like a holodrama prop, something a villain would use to intimidate the good guys. Despite its fearsome reputation, Rusty wasn't overly fond of it. While it worked fine on most humanoid targets, it tended to lack true stopping power against anything larger, and had trouble with armor.

The Shard loaded the five rounds into the gun, snapped the cylinder shut, and waited for the beam to activate. There would be no checking the target in between shots. He couldn't guarantee more than five or six successful activations of the test saber, and he wasn't about to try and rebuild the thing for a second time in a month.

The blade snapped on, this time at the five meter mark.

BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM!

Five shots in three seconds. No human shooter would have been able to pull that off. Precious few wookiee shooters would have been able to manage, assuming they could fit their hands around the comparatively tiny grips. Rusty had robotic limbs and centuries of experience on his side, and even he thought the recoil was a bit much.

He quickly dropped the pistol and picked up the 9mm, jacked in the magazine, and stepped over to the next station. The test saber, this time mounted on a robotic dolly, moved in front of the next target.

BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM!

The recoil was noticeably milder with the 9mm. Though it was similar in diameter to the .357, it was shorter, lighter, and carried a lighter powder load. Rusty would have compared it to running P++ rounds through it. The high performance rounds weren't really good for the gun, but they'd work so long as you didn't use them for everyday target practice.

Next pistol, next target. This time, the 10mm. It was the answer to people who thought the 9mm lacked stopping power.

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

For the first time, Rusty had to space his shots out, ever so slightly. Though the recoil was still less than the .357, the 10mm's semiautomatic design was less inherently stable than the revolver, and the Shard had to reacquire the target in between shots. It would have been one thing if he'd just been trying to hit the target, but he was trying to hit a bloody lightsaber blade, and that took some precision.

Time for one more gun before the test saber would shut itself off. The gunsmith shuffled over to the next station and picked up the semiautomatic .45.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Whereas the reports of the first three guns had been hollow and sharp, the .45 was a whole different story. It sounded like bottled thunder, kicked like a mule, and would have brought a smile to the face of any professional shooter who had a face to smile with. Rusty didn't, but he still managed to emit a slightly less than manly giggle as the big pistol bucked in his hands.

This wasn't a weapon for the faint of heart, but it was adored by gun nuts the galaxy over.

The blade snapped off, and the Shard went to check the targets.

The first two were disappointing, to say the least. Both the .357 and the 9mm had caused considerable spalling to the target, but it looked like the rounds had been too small to survive the blade intact. They would be a painful nuisance, but not a fatal one.

The 10mm round, though only slightly larger in diameter than the 9mm, had a little more [bleep] behind to it. It had held up much better, though the spread was somewhat erratic. Rusty decided that it was just doable as a commercial round.

The .45 ACP, on the other hand, looked a lot like the .50 BMG. The rounds were shorter, so when they yawed they made much smaller holes, but Rusty was willing to bet they'd be fatal if they hit something vital, and would definitely make the target rethink some of their life's choices if it didn't.

Now it was time to reset and go for the big boys.

 

[Rusty]

The blade sprang into life. Rusty cocked the hammer back on his trusty Colt revolver and unleashed hell.

BOOOOOM! click BOOOOOM! click BOOOOOM! click BOOOOOM! click BOOOOOM! click

There was no time to savor the moment, as delicious as it was. The Colt was a work of art, finely tuned and balanced to the point that Rusty could use it as effectively as a carbine in terms of accuracy. It by no means had the range of a proper rifle, but it could reach out and kiss someone at ranges most people thought impossible for handguns, if only you knew the ballistics.

The felt recoil was higher than what Rusty was used to, but not by much. Unlike some people, who packed as much powder into the .45 LC cartridge as possible. Rusty capped his muzzle velocity to 850 feet per second, on the grounds that anything more tended to overpenetrate, which was definitely not a good thing on board a ship.

The .500 S&W was up next. It was, for all practical intents and purposes, the king of handguns. The .50 A&E was more convenient, and the .44 magnum more popular, but neither of them could stop an angry bantha dead in its tracks.

Rusty thumbed back the hammer, eliciting a sinister ratcheting sound that belonged on some instrument of torture rather than a handgun.

clickclickclickclickBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

clickclickclickclickBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

clickclickclickclickBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

clickclickclickclickBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

clickclickclickclickBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

It took a full second to recover after each shot. That was just too much. There was no way in the name of the Force that anyone smaller than a wookiee would be able to tame the beast with iridium rounds. Even with mechanical arms, Rusty was sure he missed the blade at least once towards the end. In the confined space of the firing range, the report almost rivaled Gertrude, and the muzzle flash would be blinding.

"Son of a [bleep]," he said as the echoes faded. "I'll kill more Sith with that thing just giving them out as Life Day presents."

Using normal loads, the .500 S&W was quite manageable for most humanoids. It had a variety of features incorporated to reduce recoil to bearable levels, but the extra mass of the iridium rounds rendered them useless. Or rather, they had made the firing experience survivable, but only just.

A check of the targets confirmed what Rusty had suspected. The .45LC had performed magnificently. The .500 S&W was erratic. Not once but twice was the blade missed altogether, and one other hit had been a glancing blow. The two rounds that hit performed to standard, but no one would call the massive bullet a success story.

Now that the testing had concluded, the Shard simply had to come up with a viable means of production. That wasn't vital, however. He could continue to churn the rounds out in small batches as needed, especially since he'd somewhat automated the process. Hopefully, someone would see the utility of rounds that could punch through a lightsaber blade and come out relatively intact, and would be willing to spend lots and lots of money to make it happen on a grand scale.

 

[Rusty]

Rusty had always wanted to build an assassin droid. He had used a fair few of them as chassis over the years, but he'd never purpose built one himself. His current body was actually adapted from a suit of power armor, and while he was proud of his work, it wasn't quite the same as building something from scratch.

His next build wouldn't quite be from scratch, but it was as close as he'd ever come.

Today, he'd be converting an R2 unit into a killer of Force users.

To start, he had a standard R2 series astromech. The droid brain had been fried to a crisp, but the shell was still good. What he had in mind would take up a lot of space, so it would be necessary to strip it down to nothing.

The vast majority of the inside of the R2 was devoted to the various tools of its trade. In addition to a myriad of different cutters, welders, saws, computer interfaces, and other assorted goodies that everyone saw on the outside, there was a lot of internal hardware that made it all work. That could all go.

The droid brain itself was massive in relation to the rest of the body as a result. It had to be to handle all of the responsibilities of an astromech. Newer, more modern models had smaller and more efficient droid brains, but most spacers preferred the original. There was a reason the design never quite managed to die out, even centuries after its inception. Experienced spaces knew R2 units to be endlessly resourceful, quick thinking, and even though they could be temperamental, they were supremely reliable under pressure. Plus, reproductions were oodles cheaper than brand new designs, largely because they relied on outdated but dependable technology.

By comparison, assassin droids used relatively small processors. Though still intelligent and capable of making snap decisions, an assassin droid simply didn't need all of the processing power an R2 could bring to bear. Killing a target was far simpler than fixing a space ship, after all.

Once everything had been cleared out, all that was left of the original droid was the frame, the shell, and the wheeled legs that would allow it to move.

 

[Rusty]

The next step was to mount the weapon system that would transform this astromech into a true killer.

In Rusty's opinion, there were two optimal ways to overpower someone with a lightsaber. The first was by using a round too fast and too powerful to be blocked or dodged. Unfortunately, those were hard to come by. Verpine Shatterguns had a fearsome reputation, but that came at a price. The weapons were expensive and fragile, and took a lot of skill to use effectively. Spraying and praying might work, but that was near sacrilege for such a precise weapon.

Disruptors were also effective in the right hands, but the slow rate of fire meant that the first shot had to count, and that wasn't always an option.

Flechette guns were notoriously effective, but also more bulky than Rusty could afford. It wouldn't be hard to chop one down to make it fit, but there was no way to squeeze in enough ammunition to make it count.

That left Rusty with the other option: sheer rate of fire. Even a blademaster could be overcome if enough shots came in from odd angles. A skilled hand with a Z-6 rotary cannon could make mincemeat out of Force users. Unfortunately, a Z-6 was way to large to fit inside the astromech.

That didn't mean that the concept was bad, however. The Shard had a toy that should do nicely.

It was similar in appearance to the Z-6, though dramatically downsized. It had only three barrels, each 30 centimeters long. They were chambered for the .22LR, a small, almost comically weak round that was almost universally overlooked in military applications. Individually, a single .22LR bullet was maybe powerful enough to kill a small rodent. It could kill a human with a lucky shot to the eye or neck, but it often wouldn't penetrate the rib cage.

This gun, however, threw out 40 rounds a second.

One round might not be fatal, but a three second burst would rip out enough lead to chop a bantha in half. If the target was armored, they'd probably be okay, but the sheer volume of fire would be disconcerting and distracting, and if it went on long enough, would almost certainly find a chink.

 

[Rusty]

The weapon itself was only useful if you could feed it.

For that, Rusty planned to take advantage of the R2's circular shape.

The body of this R2 was 96 centimeters tall, with a circumference of 144 centimeters. Rusty would use a drum magazine with a circumference of 130 centimeters, stored internally. The drum was deceptively simple. The same drive that would turn the minigun would in turn rotate the drum, which was geared down so that, each time a barrel entered the load position, a single round would be gravity fed into the chamber. The drum had 200 compartments, each wide enough to accommodate a single bullet, but tall enough to stack many more. The drum was 30 centimeters tall, allowing for a total ammunition capacity of 6,000 rounds.

That might seem like a lot, but the R2-FKU could easily blow through that in under three minutes.

The drum was not without its issues. Because it was gravity fed, the R2 had to be mostly upright when firing. It wouldn't work in microgravity, or even in reduced gravity below .7 G. Too much gravity would cause it to jam, meaning it wasn't effective on worlds with more than 1.2 G.

While the .22LR had near as not no recoil, if the R2 was jarred overmuch during firing, it was possible that rounds could bounce out of the feed chute that led from the drum to the weapon, which could also result in an interruption in firing. If a malfunction did occur, the droid would have no way to correct it, short of cycling to weapon until it went bang again.

The biggest danger, however, was the threat of rounds cooking off if the R2 was subjected to excess heat. It took about 200 degrees Celsius to cook them off, and a well placed blaster bolt barrage of lightsaber strike could easily superheat the interior, with catastrophic results.

All that, however, was a small price to pay for putting 6 kilograms of lead downrange in a minute.

 

[Rusty]

Before installing the drum, Rusty would have to mount the minigun, which was easier said than done. It wouldn't do for it to be sticking out. Though not immediately recognizable as a weapon to those who weren't intimately familiar with firearms, the protruding barrels would be different enough to set off alarm bells in the wary target's mind, nevermind any passing mechanics that got a look at it.

There simply wasn't enough room to conceal it horizontally within the droid body, and the gravity-fed drum meant that it would have to be stored low.

The solution was a spring-loaded pivoting mount. Stored normally, the weapon would sit vertically within the droid, barrels pointing up. When released, it would slam down and lock into place. It was mounted so that, when locked into firing position, it sat at the base of the droid's body, centered between the legs. The low center of gravity would allow for for a greater degree of stability, which in turn meant more accurate aiming.

It also meant that the cloud of smoke wouldn't obscure the optics, which were mounted in the dome, as per usual.

A special door on the outer shell, concealed so that no one would even be able to tell it was there without a very close inspection, would cover the thing.

It took some time to fabricate the mount, and to mount the mount, which struck Rusty as an incredibly redundant statement, but once it was done, he could move onto the next step.

 

[Rusty]

Since the weapon system was mounted, Rusty figured it might be a good time to address the problem of the spent shells.

Specifially, how in the hell was he going to get 6,000 of them out of the [bleep] thing?

The answer came in the form of another trick door. A chute would lead from the ejection port to the droid's exterior, which would be covered by a spring-loaded door. Once the firing started, the door would kick open, and the rounds would quickly clutter up whatever corridor or room it was in at the time. And as an added bonus, it'd be better than a [bleep] ton of marbles for tripping up anyone trying to get close to the droid.

"I love my job."

 

[Rusty]

Once all of that was installed, it was time for a test firing. The droid had no brain yet, so the Shard had to stick it on a cart and wheel it out to the firing range. Once in place, he locked down the cart and loaded the drum.

It was heavy as hell.

Seriously, that was enough lead to make a decent club, and he was going to be firing it at people.

"I really love my job."

For today's test, there was a duracrete barrier about ten meters from the firing point. Drum was in, gun locked into attack position, the cart aimed roughly at the center of the barrier.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT!
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT!
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT!
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT!

Rusty cut loose with four long bursts, each about three seconds long.

This definitely wasn't an accurate weapon by any means. At ten meters, from a stationary firing position, the point of aim deviated as much as fifty centimeters from the center.

That, however, was good news. The more unpredictable the pattern, the harder it was to get away from.

The wall itself was little more than dust and gravel at this point.

"I really, really love my job."

 

[Rusty]

The test was a success by any reasonable standards.

Once the massive pile of brass was swept up, the firing range cleared, and the now empty drum removed, Rusty wheeled the droid back into the shop to finish the assembly.

The droid's shell would require some work before it was mounted, and there were a couple of other little details to handle before that. For starters, the retractable third leg would have to be locked into the out position, as the minigun took up the space that it normally occupied inside the droid. Most of the access hatches on the shell would have to be sealed shut, as it wouldn't do to have them flap open at the wrong time.

And then there was the matter of installing the doors for the weapon and for the ejection port.

All of this was onerous and time consuming, but Rusty didn't mind. He was happy to have such a kick[bleep] project in his shop.

Once everything was finished, the Shard mounted the shell onto the body. Anyone that got a look on the inside would immediately know that they weren't dealing with a standard astromech, but he highly doubted anyone would. After all, the stubby little droids were ubiquitous in star navies the galaxy over. No one paid them any mind.

That did, however, bring something to mind.

Even with the bulky drum and the gun, there was still a lot of leftover room inside the body. The droid brain itself could be housed inside the dome, and it seemed like a waste of space to just leave it empty.

Surely he could fit another surprise in there.

 

[Rusty]

"Yup, it fits."

It, in this case, being several kilograms of detonite. Enough to take down a small building.

Every nook and cranny that didn't involve moving or heated parts was packed.

Downside: if the droid got hit by a stray blaster bolt, the rounds cooking off would be the least of its worries.

Upside: if the gun wouldn't do it, the explosives surely would.

To make things extra interesting, the detonite was studded with small ball bearings. They would fly out at several thousand meters per second, adding even more shrapnel to the party. Unlike the droid's casing, which would likely disintegrate from the blast, they were hardy enough to survive, and would bounce around in an enclosed space like a hypercaffeinated Kowakian monkey lizard.

It would take some extra coding to convince the assassin droid's brain that this was a good thing. Perhaps he could give it some sort of code of honor. The Shard had no illusions about the surviveability of the thing; even if it did kill its target, escape was almost guaranteed to be impossible. This way, once the mission accomplished, it could go out in a literal blaze of glory. Honorbound societies loved that sort of thing.

 

[Rusty]

Alright, now it was time to program the droid brain.

That, in all honesty, would probably be the part Rusty liked the least.

It wasn't that he was bad at programming, or even that he found it boring. No, the issue here was a moral one.

Shocking, right?

As a Shard, Rusty knew better than most that droids could be alive, at least from a mental standpoint. They could have thoughts and feelings and opinions of their own. Sure it was all just code, but at the end of the day, what was a brain if not a biological computer?

The idea of programming a droid whose sole mission in life was to die gloriously made him vaguely uneasy.

Still, that didn't stop him from doing his job.

There were a lot of protocols that had to be included. Target acquisition. Stealth. Combat. What to do if you succeed. What to do if you fail. How to react to questioning. The list went on and on, and he was making most of it up as he went along.

By the end of the night, the result would be a perfectly functional set of assassination protocols that would allow the droid to function. Like most R2 units, it would only have limited self-awareness, but that was the goal. Too smart a droid often ran into trouble, and doubly so for assassins. An assassin with a personality could potentially go rogue, or decide it didn't like the idea of blowing itself up after the mission.

It was aware enough that the rudimentary code of honor made sense. Accomplishment of the mission by any means was its highest purpose in life. Nothing was more glorious than to die after assassinating the target without being detected, preferably in as high value an area as possible. It made Rusty feel dirty to include it, but there was no way this thing was going to work without some guiding principles.

In addition to all that, he had to tie the targeting system for the new weapon into the droid's consciousness. It had to be intimately familiar with its most important tool. While pinpoint accuracy wasn't a problem, knowing when to fire was almost as important as where.

 

[Rusty]

And now it was time to put the final piece on: the dome.

While not as tedious as programming, getting all the wires right and all the data hookups in place was infinitely more difficult, and took almost as long as the rest of the build put together. Rusty was really cramming to make the 0800 store opening, and he was pretty sure he wouldn't make it.

Sure enough, it was 0830 before the thing was put together. Oh well. Business had been slow as of late, and Rusty didn't really mind turning away a customer or two to make sure his masterpiece was done right.

The end result looked just like an astromech. Until it entered kill mode, it would act just like an astromech. Once it engaged the target, it would transform into something far more unwholesome, which was the whole point of the exercise.

Since the shop was already late in opening and there were no customers, Rusty decided to go ahead and keep working. Before it could be declared operational, there was a lot of debugging to be done, both in the software and hardware. A poorly worded line of code, for instance, would have caused the droid to detonate upon hearing the words "fruit salad." How that particular error had come about, the Shard had no clue, but he was glad that he caught it.

Fruit salads probably weren't common among Sith, but it seemed like a very Jedi-like thing to eat.

He had also neglected to include a targeting reticule for the droid. The weapon was zeroed to the center of its field of vision, but nothing really replaced a nice green dot.

It was well after lunchtime before he was finished.

He had replaced dozens of lines of code, oiled multiple bearings, and in fixed a problem with the weapon mount that would prevent it from folding the gun back up.

In the end though, it was well worth the effort. The R2-FKU was ready, and it was beautiful.

 

[Rusty]

This next project was going to be a doozy.

The goal was deceptively simple: create a shotgun round that could penetrate armor.

There were about a zillion ways to go about this.

Simple flechettes were great for punching through light armor. The small, high velocity darts were little more than nails with fins, but their small point of impact gave them great penetration power. Unfortunately, they were all kinds of suck for actual kills. They might punch through armor, but they weren't big enough to cause large scale trauma that would take a fighter down and keep them there. Sure a shot to the heart or through the skull might be fatal, but Rusty had seen far too many folks hit with gut shots get up and break their assailant's skulls open to want to put all his eggs in that basket.

There were certain kinds of acid that could melt through armor, and could even be stored with reasonable assurance that it wouldn't melt through the container. The big problem with that, however, is that it had to be used fairly quickly. Even when stored in an inert container, there was still the chance for leakage, and if the round was to burst inside the barrel, the weapon would be ruined.

Standard armor piercing rounds weren't an option either. Most relied on a steel core penetrator an bullets that traveled at immense speeds; a shotgun round might break 900 feet per second. Rifle rounds routinely exceeded 2,000 feet per second. Fat and slow might do the job against an unarmored target just fine, but that wasn't the goal here.

But what if I were to take a known method of penetrating armor and scale it down, Rusty thought to himself. Standard RPG rounds, with their shaped charge warheads, were cheap, simple, and one of the most devastating light anti-armor weapons ever invented. Surely he could fit something like that in a shotgun shell, right?

Right?

 

[Rusty]

This was not a project that would be accomplished by throwing stuff at the wall to see what would stick.

Any time Rusty worked with explosive projectiles, he always took the time to model the device digitally before ever trying to make it real. The reasons for doing so were numerous and obvious. The biggest was that it would be a shame to blow himself up without getting paid.

Given the amounts of explosives involved here, he wasn't too worried about being killed. His droid chassis was durable to the extreme. But he could wreck his shop, and that was no bueno.

Okay, first step was to come up with the design for the outer shell of the projectile. Once he knew the approximate dimensions he was working with, the Shard could tailor the explosive charge to fit.

A shotgun shell's external dimensions varied based on length and gauge, but the dimensions of the standard 3 inch 12 gauge shell were 76.2mm in length by 18.5mm width. Came out to about 20 cubic centimeters to work with, after rounding down and accounting for the fact that the inside was somewhat smaller than the outside. In a normal shotgun shell, the bottom quarter of the shell would be filled with powder. Then there would be about 20mm worth of wadding, followed by the shot.

Here, Rusty didn't have to worry about the wadding. It was necessary when dealing with shot. Without something solid in between the pellets and the powder, there was a better than even chance that your shotgun would suddenly become a pipe bomb when the shot and the powder mixed. And if somehow the shot and the powder miraculously stayed separated, the expanding gas would just rush by the pellets. Here though, Rusty could make sure that the projectile itself formed a tight seal with the shell, thus eliminating the need for the extra mass.

At first, he was undecided on whether or not to rely solely on powder for propulsion, or if he wanted to incorporate a rocket into the projectile. Both had their advantages and disadvantages. By just using powder, the round's speed would be lower, but without having to waste space on fuel, the warhead would be larger. A rocket would allow for a higher eventual top speed, but would require a minimum travel distance before it would have enough velocity to be dangerous. Early handheld rocket weapons were notoriously unreliable for that same reason; the round could be stopped just by plugging the barrel with a finger. In a world of Force users, that could be a fatal flaw.

Eventually, the Shard settled on a hybrid. A boosting charge of smokeless powder would propel the projectile out of the barrel, giving it enough initial velocity to be effective at point blank range. The powder would also light a short fuse, which would ignite a solid rocket motor and send the projectile screaming towards the target at a much higher velocity than either propulsion system would be able to achieve on its own.

As an added bonus, the gas pressure from the boosting charge would be sufficient to cycle the bolt on a gas operated weapon, which was handy, given that Rusty had just built the client an S-12.

 

[Rusty]

A standard powder charge was anywhere from 1.2 to 2 grams worth of smokeless powder. Rusty opted to split the difference and go with 1.6 grams. Given the weight of the projectile, that would probably give a muzzle velocity of about 400 meters per second. That was slow for a solid slug, but would still be more than enough to get the job done. The only downside was that it would kick like a mule. Even on a semi-automatic shotgun, firing more than a round per second would be ill advised, unless the shooter liked the idea of dislocating their shoulder and spraying high explosives in random directions that only vaguely menaced the target.

Given that the projected total weight of the projectile would be about 75 grams, Rusty did some back of the napkin math. His rocket engine would produce 30 newtons worth of thrust for 1.5 seconds. That would give him about 390m/s2 worth of acceleration, for a maximum velocity of about 985 m/s. Figure in air resistance and the actual number was probably closer to 950 m/s. At peak velocity, that would give an impact energy of about 24962 ft lbs. That was way lower than Gertrude, but roughly on par with an equivalent sized slug launched from a high powered rifle.

Honestly, Rusty was pretty sure he could market the thing even without the armor piercing head, but that would come later.

 

[Rusty]

The casing for the projectile would be made out of ultralight composites. Rusty figured he could get it down to five grams, including the spring-loaded fins that would keep it flying straight. The combustion chamber for the rocket would be another five grams all on its own, as it would need to be made of sturdier stuff. Another five grams of propellant, .5 grams for the rocket's fuse, 2.5 grams for the shaped charge's fuse.

That left 57 grams for the charge itself. The copper disc would be 20 grams, so that left 37 grams of detonite. That was a pretty hefty punch, all things considered.

There were a few downsides to all this. The shaped charge wouldn't be strong enough to punch through heavy armor. It might handle personal armor with ease, but probably wouldn't be much good against armored vehicles. The light casing also had its downsides. Though it would be sufficient for the task at hand, it wouldn't add much in the way of shrapnel to the mix. Sure, the concussive force of the blast would be disorienting, but it wouldn't do much in the way of killing secondary targets.

The design, like most armor piercing rounds, required a direct hit perpendicular to the plane of the surface it was striking, otherwise the effectiveness would be greatly diminished. A glancing blow that detonated the shaped charge would still send molten copper everywhere, but it wouldn't necessarily hit the target. Might be interesting the see it glance off a chest plate and catch them under the chin, but that was a low probability event.

A clean strike would burn through the armor and send molten bits of copper spalling through the torso, but that didn't necessarily mean a kill. The wounds would be cauterized by the extreme heat, which would prevent excessive bleeding. While the internal spread would likely be impressive and incredibly traumatic, if they didn't immediately hit a heart of lungs or sever the spinal column, there was a slim chance the target would be able to continue the fight. It would likely take a near fatal dose of painkillers or mastery of the Force, but hey, stranger things had happened.

And finally, the exhaust trail from the rocket would give a Force user a visual reference for the round's location. At close range it probably wouldn't make much of a difference, but at longer rangers, it might give them time to dodge. Trying to block it with a lightsaber would likely be hilarious, as they would suddenly have to deal with the explosion and bits of copper flying at them, but the event alone probably wouldn't be fatal, unless it proved distracting enough to open a gap in their defenses.