RCFC R&D

[Rusty]

There were days when Rusty reveled in tinkering with the latest in high tech. He knew his way around a droid brain as well as any sentient that used one. He could both program and slice, maybe not with the skill of some astromech droids, but well enough for his purposes. He could build a blaster from scratch with nothing but spare parts, and if you gave him good parts, he could build one that would satisfy even the most jaded Mandalorian.

There was something to be said, however, for doing things the old way.

It was night. The shop was closed, and the day's sales had been good. He had a few projects going, but none that required his immediate attention save one: the blastsword.

Originally developed on an obscure world called Adumar, blastswords were exactly what the name implied. They were swords with integrated blasters that replaced the thrusting point of most swords. When the tip contacted something solid, a blast of plasma was fired into the object, causing the sort of horrific damage that only a point-blank blaster bolt could cause.

Once Adumar had been folded into the New Republic, the blastswords had come and gone into and out of fashion several times over the years. These days, they were decidedly out of fashion. No one would ever accuse them of being practical; between the limited number of charges and the fact that, outside of a handful of head cases, only Force users used melee weapons, and most of them used lightsabers, there were few real world applications outside of collections or the occasional formal duels.

Rusty had built a few over the years, mostly for kicks and grins. He was familiar with the mechanics, and confident that he could squeeze the tiny charric into a smaller than average sword.

That would come later, however.

First, he had to forge the blade, and that he planned to do by hand. Why? Because he needed to work with his hands every now and again. True, he didn't have muscles like most smiths, couldn't feel the satisfying burn of a good workout. One of these days, he was going to buy an HRD for a chassis, so he could get that extra bit of satisfaction. That said, there was still a visceral thrill to shaping metal with nothing but a few simple tools and his hands.

The first step was to make the billet. For that, he took three bars of durasteel, two of the high strength alloy he had specced out to the customer, and a third of a softer alloy that would form the spine. He sandwiched the soft bar between the others and tack welded the corners. On the end, he welded a long metal rod that would allow him to manipulate it in the forge. The Shard placed the billet in and settled down for a long wait. Durasteel could be forced in a similar manner to its more primitive counterpart, but it took a lot more heat, which meant a lot more time.

 

[Rusty]

Eventually, the billet reached the correct temperature. Rusty removed it from the furnace and took it over to a press, which compacted the layers together. He did this time and time again, heating and mashing, until it was one solid lump of steel. On a traditional steel blade, this is usually the point where he'd score the billet, fold it over, and repeat the process again. However, durasteel lacked the imperfections and inconsistency that made this step desirable. Given the style of blade he planned to forge, it would actually be counterproductive, as the blade would require the soft center to maintain flexibility, something not possible with a more homogeneous billet.

By now, well over an hour had passed. Rusty stuck the billet back in the forge to let it heat back up again. The next step was to draw it out into the form of the sword, and that would require it to be glowing hot once more.

 

[Rusty]

The resounding clang of the power hammer would have deafened organic ears in the confines of the smallish workshop.

If it wasn't for the extensive soundproofing, Rusty could only imagine the uproar from the neighbors. This wasn't a part of town where law enforcement liked to come without a damn good reason, and noise complaints rarely made the cut, unless the noise was blasterfire. Knowing his luck, they'd show up as a mob, and then he'd have even more bodies to dispose of. Captain wouldn't like that.

Eventually, he was done with the ancient tool. The billet had been drawn out into a bar about 60 centimeters long, roughly sword shaped, and ready for the finer touch of a smith's hammer and the anvil.

Actually hammering out the final shape of the blade was the longest, most laborious part. Rusty couldn't feel fatigue, and didn't know much about boredom, but even he had to admit that the process of hammering, reheating, and hammering some more was borderline tedious. Eventually though, the weapon started to take shape. The blade's final length would be about 75 centimeters, not counting the tang. That was considered extremely short, but then again, so was the customer. It had to be long enough to actually count as a sword, but short enough to fit in a scabbard without dragging the ground when she walked.

After about three hours, Rusty was finally to the point where he'd temper a normal blade. That part would come, but before he did any of that, he wanted to bore out the channel that would hold the blastsword's inner workings. For this part, he was more than happy to employ modern machinery. He had a drill press that was, if anything, more droid than simple tool. It was probably not what an Adumari smith would have used, but it was more than up to the task of boring out the sword. The Shard set it in the machine, programmed in the parameters, and let it do its thing. It would take it slow and steady, eating up about an hour.

In the meantime, he sat down at the work bench with the charric and started taking it apart. It was always tricky with these Chiss weapons, trying to see what he could get rid of and what was necessary. By the time the drill finished, he should have it figured out.

 

[Rusty]

Finally, Rusty had reduced the charric down to the components needed for the blastsword, and the drill press/milling machine was finished. It was nearing morning by this point, almost time to open up the shop and start receiving customers. Before that could happen though, the blade needed to be tempered and quenched.

Once more into the forge it went, heated until glowing. This was where it got tricky. The channel for the internal components was sealed up with a bit of heat resistant clay, in order to prevent the soft core from getting too hot. That was important. The core of the sword had to be less rigid than the edges. That would allow a degree of flexibility, while also helping to absorb the shock from whatever impacts it might encounter.

Once the blade was heated, it went into a trough of specially prepared oil. Shorter blades could be much more rigid, and you could stick them in a high-carbon oil just fine. The steel would bond with the carbon atoms and become stronger for it. Unfortunately, on a blade this size, that would make it hard, but also brittle. This oil had a much lower carbon content, allowing the sword to pick up some, but not enough to make it shatter the first time someone looked at it wrong.

The Shard monitored the process carefully, listening and feeling for the distinctive pinging sound of the blade cracking. He was also able to observe that it didn't warp in the process, which was fortunate. A solid blade could be straightened fairly easily, but the channel in this one greatly increased the chances of it breaking. And it wasn't like he could have tempered it before drilling, either. That would have pushed the hardness beyond what the drill press could easily handle. It could probably do it, but the extra effort would throw out more heat, which might ruin the temper, even with the coolant that the bit excreted as it went.

By now, the sun was up, and it was time to open the shop. Once he was satisfied that the blade had tempered correctly, he sat it in yet another trough, this one filled with a concoction that would prevent corrosion. Tomorrow night, he would assemble the components, and then it would be time to present it to the customer.

 

[Rusty]

Another day, another credit. The shop out front was closed. It was time for the real work to begin.

The blade was removed from the anti-corrosion cocktail and cleaned thoroughly. There wasn't time to waste. If he didn't get the powder coating on within minutes, it would start to rust.

It was a very near thing. By his estimate, Rusty had maybe another three or four minutes after he got the last specks of liquid off before the first signs of oxidation would work their way across the blade, but he managed to get it in the paint booth before it was too late. This was another area where he was perfectly happy to let machines do the work. He didn't have all night to sand and spray and bake and do it all over again, and the booth was much faster than even him on his best day.

While the booth was beginning its work, the Shard started assembling the components for the blastsword itself. The style of the blade was colloquially known as the scholar's sword. Short, lightning fast, and with a razor sharp edge, it was perfect for smaller beings. The hilt and pommel, as it happened, were perfect for building a blastsword.

The pommel would contain the power cell. It wouldn't be very heavy duty, enough for about thirty charges. He also managed to contain a matching gas canister. When the weapon was completed, a quick release would allow the pommel to be swapped off with one loaded with fresh charges as needed. A lightweight, smallbore carbine barrel would slide down the channel of the sword. At its base, it hooked up to the reaction chamber, which would be stored in the hilt itself.

It took a bit of milling to get the pommel itself right. It was milled from a block of durasteel, and would also be powdercoated white, to match the blade. There were no decorative patterns on it, mainly because the shop's milling machine had difficulty with anything too ornate. He made three total. It wasn't exactly a preponderance of firepower, but it should give the little Jedi enough to get by.

The grip would be white bantha leather, treated to be made stain resistant. It would be difficult to smudge under the best of circumstances. The handguard would also be made simply, though that didn't mean it couldn't look good. Rusty had a block of iridium left over from an ongoing project to design slugs that would punch through the blade of a lightsaber. Iridium is quite dense, and highly refractory. For that purpose, it would probably serve well.

For the guard, it wasn't the density, but the shimmering iridescence that he was after. Once he had the form milled out, he heated the surface lightly with a blowtorch, bringing out the shimmering colors that the metal was known for. On worlds without asteroid mining, iridium was insanely expensive, easily more valuable than gold or silver or indeed platinum, in some places. It was, however, relatively easy to come by in Breehara, though certainly not cheap.

The paint booth dinged. It was time to retrieve the blade.

 

[Rusty]

The blade came out of the paint booth looking more like a bleached and polished bone more than a metal killing too. Stark white, pristine, it was actually kinda beautiful. It had even honed the edge, putting on a precise hollow grind that would make it deadly for slicing. This wasn't a weapon for hacking off limbs. This was a weapon for precision slashes, meant to sever tendons and muscles and arteries.

Honestly, Rusty wasn't even sure why he called the paint booth the paint booth. It was a [bleep]ing miracle worker.

It was midnight now, with about eight hours to go until the shop opened. That was plenty of time to assemble everything.

The carbine barrel slid nicely into the channel. The tip was threaded, allowing the Shard bladesmith to screw on the muzzle. It was a custom design he had worked out years ago, designed to trigger on impact and maximize penetration power. He put a few drops of a special epoxy on the threads, in order to ensure that it couldn't come loose under duress. When the epoxy hardened, it would actually form a bond much stronger than the substrates in question.

A few dabs of that same epoxy affixed the hilt to the truncated tang. On a normal blade, the tang would go all the way through the hilt, and the pommel would tie everything together. That wasn't an option here. Fortunately, the epoxy would hold everything together just fine. Once everything was installed, Rusty secured the pommel. After testing the quick release to ensure that it wouldn't accidentally come undone in the heat of battle, he took the weapon to the underground firing range for testing.

The firing range ran underneath the shop, and was backstopped against anything short of a heavy turbolaser. He powered up the weapon. The effect of the eerie green glow of the charric against the ghostly blade was striking. He lightly jabbed it into the first target, an unarmored flesh analogue.

Nothing.

"[bleep]."

After powering down and tinkering for a few moments, he discovered the issue: the impact trigger was set on its highest resistance setting. It would take exactly 50 kilograms of applied force to set it off. The Shard cursed again, the shrill bleep echoing through the empty room.

It took a good hour to get the muzzle apart to tweak the pressure sensitivity, and another to get it all put back together. Time was running out. The shop would be open in another three hours.

Again, Rusty powered up the weapon, and again, he jabbed it into the target. This time, he was rewarded with a resounding CRACK of discharged energy. The torso was knocked clean off its stand by the kinetic element common to the Chiss weapons, a gaping hole large enough to fit a fist through in its sternum. The kickback was high though, almost enough to make the Shard lose his grip. That wouldn't do for the customer, even if she was a Jedi.

It took another two hours to make the proper adjustments. Rusty was really cutting it to the wire on this one.

The next test was much better. The weapon scored a neat hole in a fresh torso, about three centimeters across and fifteen centimeters deep. That was a kill, no matter how you looked at it.

The reduced output meant that it fared less well against armor. Plastoid was no issue, and neither was standard 5mm durasteel plating. 10mm durasteel attenuated the blast enough that the wearer would have been severely burned, but not killed, and 15mm stopped it dead. The weapon would be useless against any sort of heavy armor, but if it came to that, the customer had a lightsaber. Tests against other sorts of armor provided similar results. It was decent against light armor, nonlethal against medium, and as useless as sneezing when up against heavy.

With fifteen minutes to go, Rusty trudged back upstairs and took out the pommel he had been working with. The gas cartridge was ejected and replaced with a fresh one, while the power pack was put on a quick charger. By the time the customer arrived, it should be ready to go.

All that was left to do was program the fabber to make a matching scabbard. It would be white plastoid with iridium accents to match the weapon, and shouldn't take more than a few minutes to make. It would certainly be done by the time the customer arrived.

0800 in the morning. Time to open the shop doors. One of these days, Rusty thought to himself, he was going to get to run a sleep cycle, just for fun. But not today. There was work to be done.

 

[Rusty]

Well, it was going to be a busy week.

The grenades were going to be tedious, but he probably wouldn't have to start assembling them until the following night. They were going to take some custom parts, and that would mean turning loose the milling machine and 3D printer, both of which would churn out a series of parts that would allow the Shard smith to turn out a finished product. He would check on the machines throughout the night, they didn't require his direct attention. Unless something went catastrophically wrong, he'd come back to the workshop tomorrow evening to find most of the components for the grenades neatly laid out and awaiting his magical touch.

For now, the priority was armor. Rusty didn't really know where to start with that. Armor was, by definition, a custom job. The Empire might have used one size fits all plastoid plating, but they got what they paid for. It was near impervious to impact, but it didn't take too terribly powerful of a blaster bolt to burn through it. Mandalorian armor shared a common design, but the real stuff was tailored to the individual user by their never to be sufficiently [bleed]ed smiths. Any sort of powered armor had to be tuned to the wearer's nervous system, lest it inadvertently tear them in half by incorrectly interpreting user inputs. Rusty had seen that sort of accident before. Thank the Force it hadn't been one of his designs.

What came to mind here was armorweave. The customer required something flexible, but able to shrug off a few blaster bolts. Certain types of armorweave could stand up to lightsaber blades for a time and soaked up blaster bolts like a sponge. Unfortunately, that stuff was crazy expensive, and usually required the sort of epic quest to find normally reserved for protagonists in fantasy holos. The Shard new better than to think of himself as the protagonist of anyone's story. He was just the creepy guy that stood in dungeons, hawking legendary weapons for outrageous prices. He might help you beat the final boss, but he was going to make sure you went in broke as a a bored Sith's peace treaty.

Fortunately, cheap armorweave was pretty common. It could stand up to limited blasterfire, was as flexible as any other thick cloth, and could more or less be cut and sewn like it, too. It wasn't very stretch though.

The Shard had a few bolts of it in the back room. He went and grabbed one in a mottled brown and green that would work decently well as camouflage, cut about a square meter off, and took it to the firing range. When using the cheap stuff, it was always a good idea to test it. With that in mind, he went to the front shop and picked up a medium blaster rifle, more or less at random. After hanging the square of cloth in a floating frame, he programmed it to hover about twenty meters from the firing point. Once it was at the designated mark, he blaster the everloving hell out of it, just to see what happened.

The cloth didn't hold, not completely. It soaked up the first several shots no problem, with nothing but some light scoring to show for it. The next dozen or so made it smoke. It was on fire by twenty, and the first shot burned all the way through not long after. It definitely wasn't the good stuff, but it was as good as he could get without the aforementioned quest, and far exceeded the specs laid down by the customer.

The downside to the armorweave was that, while it was flexible and far sturdier than one would expect at a glance, it wasn't stretchy. Stretch armor tended not to last very long.

It didn't take a prodigy to realize that interlocking panels were the way to go. If the customer shrank too small, the whole thing would basically become a turtle shell. If she/it/whatever pronoun it preferred went too large, there would be gaps. That, however, was to be expected. He had warned the customer, and they had agreed to the stated limitations.

Now that the quality testing for the cloth was done, it was time to actually figure out how to make everything hold together. That would be vital, and was far trickier than making a jigsaw out of random bits of cloth.

 

[Rusty]

The first method that came to mind was a series of elastic bands that would hold everything in place. That idea was quickly discarded, because any sort of elastic band would wear out. Also, it would look like a cheap attempt at cosplay, which is not something the discerning assassin was likely into. Certainly not something they'd pay good money for.

The next idea that came about was a series of retractable cords that would spool out the proper amount to allow the armor to expand and allow it to retract as needed. That too was discarded. Even if the Shard could get it to work, it would be near impossible to put on without an extended slapstick comedy routine, something he else he didn't think the customer would pay good money for.

The next thing that came to mind was a bodysuit of some sort, something flexible that would expand and contract with the shapeshifter. If he attached the panels at a certain spot, they'd be able to move with the suit. It was an intriguing idea, but one that would require some research.

 

[Rusty]

What about a stretchy bodysuit?

That was Rusty's next thought. There were materials that could stretch and relax and stretch and relax while still retaining structural integrity. It should be a simple matter of layering together the cloth, cutting out panels, and affixing them to the suit by an edge. If he did it right, when the suit expanded, the panels would be allowed to move and arrange themselves to provide maximum coverage. When it contracted, they would overlap, which would allow the suit to remain compact, but would also provide extra protection. He reckoned a network of small electromagnets could tie it all together. If the customer needed to shift, they could hit a button and kill power to the magnets. Hit it again to restore power and everything should smooth out. It would give them pretty decent protection across a wide variety of shapes and sizes.

It took a couple hours to draw up the plans for everything in the Shard's CAD program. The panels would be easy enough. The fabber was capable of layering, sewing, and compressing the cloth into the flexible panels that would give the customer maximum mobility and as much protection as he could fit.

The bodysuit would be the hard part.

 

[Rusty]

There were a number of potential candidates for the bodysuit material. There were several off the shelf versions he could order from shops around town, with varying degrees of practicality.

There were, for instance, suits made of a material known as memory latex, which could go through insane amounts of deformation and still return to its original shape when the tension was released. Unfortunately, it didn't breathe. For a normal being, it wasn't all that difficult to integrate some sort of climate control, but that went out the window when you realized just how much stress a shapeshifter could put on any system. It was possible to pump cool air directly into the bodysuit without having to rely on tubes to circulate coolant, but that would inflate the thing like a balloon. Good for comedy, bad for assassination.

Flexible cloth, on the other hand, could breathe, and could do it well. Unfortunately, it couldn't handle as much stress. There were absolute limits to how far cloth could stretch, regardless of what material it was made of, and that would severely limit the suit's utility.

Eventually, Rusty was forced to conclude that he'd have to make his own. He could use the memory latex to form most of the suit's structure, while incorporating panels of flexible cloth in areas that wouldn't have to stretch as much, in order to allow for heat exchange. That was annoying. Not because he couldn't do it, but because it was after midnight and there weren't any shops open he could order the material for.

Oh well. Looks like he'd get to power off for a short sleep cycle this week after all. He placed orders over the holonet for the material he'd need, then snuggled up to his charging station and called it a night.

 

[Rusty]

The next evening, Rusty fed the plans and the bolts of memory latex and a durable synthetic cloth into the fabricator. It would assemble the bodysuit on its own, with far greater precision than he could manage. For all his strengths, the Shard was terrible with a sewing machine, and he wasn't about to [bleep] up 4,000 credits worth of material. Bonding the material would take time, which let him move onto the panels themselves.

They reminded him of the Kevlar inserts used in slugproof vests more than anything. About 7 millimeters thick, heavy for their size and rather dense, they were still extremely flexible. It was the density that would afford the customer some protection against impact. Most slugs would be unable to penetrate the tightly interlocking layers of synthetic fiber that was, gram for gram, stronger than normal steel. However, the kinetic energy of the impact would be transferred to the flesh below, and that was no joke. On worlds where blasters weren't in fashion, he'd seen first-hand the sort of damage the impact could do to a person, even if the slug failed to penetrate. Ribs broken, sometimes pushing shards of bone into the heart or lungs, bruised organs, and once, memorably, the impact had struck an unlucky officer of the peace in between heartbeats, stopping the organ and killing him dead.

Armorweave was near miraculous when it came to soaking up energy blasts, but the customer was on their own for the slugs.

Once the panels had all been inspected, the Shard got to work installing the network if electromagnets that would hold it all together. As he envisioned it, each protected area had three panels the anchor would go on the bottom and would be firmly attached to the bodysuit. The anchor panels would contain the actual magnets, arrayed in such a way that the expansion panels could attach in a variety of configurations. The expansion panels would have an outer edge attached directly tob the suit, while the side closest would be fitted with a strip of woven durasteel ribbon made of wire so fine that it acted like cloth. The magnets would hold it firmly in place while activated. When deactivated, the client could shift. Once power was restored, they'd lock down in the new configuration.

The power levels involved were minuscule, as were the cells he was affixing to the anchor panels. A sufficiently sensitive sensor could pick them up, but in the bustling cities, there would be enough energy flowing around that it should baffle the system. They could, of course, be completely deactivated in case of emergency. For that contingency, each anchor panel would get a rare earth magnet at its corner that could attach to the inert electromagnets. It wasn't anywhere near as sturdy that way, but it would hold things together, assuming the client didn't try anything too strenuous with them off. As a bonus, they'd stop the panels from flopping around during shape shifts.

Installing the magnets was time intensive. It was well after midnight by the time he finished and had everything checked and double checked. The fabber had, by now, finished the bodysuit. It was almost time to put it all together.

 

[Rusty]

If the customer wasn't a shapeshifter, Rusty would have probably scrapped the project the minute he pulled the bodysuit out of the fabber. When he had designed it in the computer, he had placed the sections of cloth in low stress areas that would allow the body to vent heat as necessary. What he didn't anticipate was that the final outcome would be so...risque. The garment looked like something some spiced out starlet would wear to a trendy club without the armor panels.

Oh well.

The Shard doubted the shapeshifter was particularly concerned with modesty, and once the panels were in place, no one would be able to tell anyway. And hey, in the event of an emergency, the panels could be ditched and the customer could use it to blend in with a crowd.

Before he attached anything, Rusty took the suit and wrestled it onto a mannequin. Sure enough, once you stretched it out a little, the cloth portions were transparent. That wasn't his problem. What he was worrying about now was test fitting the panels. It would probably take the rest of the night to get everything adjusted right and ready for the final install.

 

[Rusty]

It took til 0745 to get everything arranged just so. It was like working a jigsaw puzzle, only Rusty had only the most vague instructions, the pieces didn't all like up, and he kept sticking to the magnets. He must have spent an hour just peeling the [bleep]ed panels off his arms or chest or wherever the heck else they got stuck.

By morning, his temper was well past the breaking point. Everything was tentatively on the mannequin, but he'd still have to take it all off and put it back together again, only this time permanently.

The finished design was fairly simple. When everything was contracted, the suit would fit a being about 120 centimeters tall tall. The expansion plates would touch edge to edge over the anchor plates. At 180 centimeters tall, the panels would be fully unfolded. The edges of the expansion would lay flat against the outside edges of the anchors. From a mechanical standpoint, this was the optimum position. It would provide protection to the majority of the body, but since nothing overlapped, the wearer would be afforded maximum flexibility. At 220 centimeters, the suit would start to feel uncomfortably tight. Most of the vital areas would still be covered, but there would be gaps between panels that you could pilot a starfighter through. 300 centimeters was the absolute safe limit of expansion before a break was guaranteed, and it could only be sustained for a few moments. The Shard couldn't think of any practical reason why the customer would need to get that big, but you never knew. Either way, that wasn't his problem.

He had been commissioned to create shapeshifting armor that would provide lightweight protection against blasterfire in a variety of shapes and sizes, and that's exactly what he did. Tomorrow night, he'd get everything permanently attached, get the electronics up and going, and hopefully be done with the [bleep] thing.

 

[Rusty]

The next night, Rusty reluctantly retreated to the workshop to finish the armor.

Honestly, this was turning into more trouble than it was worth, but he didn't want to start on the grenades until he had this nailed down. They would require testing at the quarry in the later phases, and he couldn't afford to divide his time, not when the customer was coming for pickup tomorrow.

Painstakingly, piece by piece, the Shard took off each panel, taking careful notes about their exact locations. That by itself took almost two hours.

The memory latex, while durable, didn't exactly respond well to sewing. The cloth portions were attached via a strong, flexible epoxy that would stretch with the bodysuit. The panels would be held on with a similar epoxy, but it was a bit different. When hit by a specific radio freq, it would degrade almost instantaneously. There would be a little heat, but not enough to damage the bodysuit. When it came time to replace the panels, they could be taken off one at a time via a highly directional beam, or in the event of an emergency, dropped all at once. The frequency in question was very obscure; nearly nothing ran on it because it lost energy after a few meters, even at high power. That was one of the downsides of getting into the high terahertz range. There were terahertz-wave radar and imaging systems, but they ran at the lower end of the spectrum. The higher you went, the more quickly the energy bled off into the atmosphere.

Putting the panels back on took even longer. The hardest part, after getting each one precisely positioned, was not making a mess. The epoxy was relatively clean, but there were several times when the Shard had to go through with a freq gun to carefully remove excess.

By the time he was finished, it was well after 0200, closing in on 0300.

Despite the hassle, there was still a sense of bloodyminded satisfaction to be had. In his younger days, Rusty knew he wouldn't have had the patience to see this project through to the end. That was one of the reasons he had never opened up a shop before, despite the obvious profit to be had for someone with his skill. He had never had any problem tinkering with his own toys, but until he met the Captain, he had a hard time bringing himself to do much of anything that didn't benefit either him personally or the Shard species as a whole.

Though she didn't know it, the Captain had taught him what it's like to put someone else's needs above his own. It was terrifying in many ways, but exhilarating. And so, before moving on to the last finishing touches, Rusty took a minute to admire his handiwork.

 

[Rusty]

The key to making this whole thing viable was a means to control it. For that, Rusty turned to an old standby: the wrist-mounted datapad. He had several around the shop, of various makes and models.

For this project, he chose a fairly simple one. The only thing it really needed to do was key the electromagnets on and off, and broadcast the self destruct frequency. It would take some custom tuning to pull that off, so he sat down at his electronics bench with some spare parts and a soldering iron.

This part, at least, went smoothly. The Shard was an old hand at making electronics do their thing. It didn't take much to tune the datapad to the specific freqs the suit would need to operate, and then program a few simple command chains that would work the electromagnets and the self destruct. All he had to do then was make a wristband out of some military-grade elastic material that, though too thick for the bodysuit, demonstrated many of the properties of the memory latex. It would stretch and contract with relative ease, and that was the important part.

 

[Rusty]

It was 0600 in the morning, and the suit was just about ready to go. Rusty went through the final quality control checks, ensured that all the panels were attached properly, and that the datapads could engage and disengage the magnets. He wasn't about to try to test the self destruct mechanism on the live suit. That was too much work. It did its job under controlled conditions, so it should work in the field. If not, well, that's what refunds were for.

Now that everything was together, all that was left was to assemble a spare set of expansion panels, prepare a freq gun so the customer could make repairs on her own without having to bring it in for a full overhaul every time they got shot, and prepare a shelf-stable version of the epoxy. Easy.

By 0800, everything was good to go, save the panels. The fabber would need another few hours to finish turning them out, but that was just the way of things. If the customer got there first thing, they'd just have to wait until they were finished. There was nothing he could do to speed it up.

Pain in the [bleep] though it might have been, Rusty was proud of his work. It had taken several nights of more or less non stop labor, but the armor was good to go. More importantly, it was a product he was proud to sell. There was plenty of satisfaction in that, to be sure. He was glad that he'd finally be able to get to the grenades now, because they promised to be fun. But that would have to wait until the sun went down again and the shop doors were closed.

 

[Rusty]

And now for a project near and dear to Rusty's mechanical heart: anti-lightsaber projectiles.

There were a number of approaches, each on more unfeasible than the last.

Beskar was impossible to find outside of Mandalorians, and the same properties that made it ideal for combat against lightsabers made for poor projectiles. In order to catch onto rifling, a bullet has to deform slightly as it travels down a weapon's barrel. Beskar didn't tend to deform unless one had an even higher grade beskar barrel, and that required not just one but two impossibilities.

Rusty had considered discarding sabot rounds, but not only did that involve the impossibility of getting the materials, he had no idea how he was going to mill or cast one of the most durable materials in the galaxy into the precise shape necessary.

Phrik was more common, but not by much, and faced many of the same problems. On top of that, it wasn't all that dense, which presented its own series of problems.

If that wasn't bad enough, Rusty had the nasty suspicion that the same properties that made both metals resistant to lightsaber blades would also allow the blades to deflect them. It wouldn't be easy and would royally suck for the target, but it was possible.

Cortosis was too brittle to be practical as a projectile. If Rusty could ever get ahold of some, he had the idea of making a nose cap for hollowpoint projectiles. It wasn't uncommon to see plastoid nose caps for high powered rifle rounds like that, but the Shard wasn't too terribly sure cortosis was stable enough to survive. One of these days, he was going to get in on a mining operation so he could test it out.

For his purposes, Rusty wanted something highly dense and highly refractory, with a high melting point. That ruled out the vast majority of the periodic table. There were two candidates, however, that came almost immediately to mind: iridium and osmium.

Both were viable candidates. They had similar properties, though osmium was a little more dense and a little more brittle. Both were extremely hard, up there with diamond. Iridium was nearly impossible to corrode, and while osmium more easily corroded and alloyed, it still took a whole [bleep] of a lot to make it happen. That they were both in the top 10 for melting points and remained mechanically stable at extremely high temperatures.

On the other hand, both were stone [bleep]s to work with. Rusty had a foundry that could melt them, but he'd have to get the castings near perfect. It didn't help anything that he didn't have a rifle barrel that could handle either one, and he didn't want to try to machine something as delicate as a sabot out of such a hard material. That meant copper jackets.

Well, nothing to it but to do it.

The Shard filled two crucibles, one with chunks of iridium, another with chunks of osmium. It would probably take well over an hour to melt them down. That would give him time to 3D print off moulds. Fantastic.

 

[Rusty]

Well, it was a start.

The mould held, at least. As the glowing liquid poured into the mold, Rusty couldn't help but worry there was some tiny imperfection he couldn't see that would cause the whole thing to shatter. That would have royally sucked, and probably burnt the shop down to boot. At the temperatures he was dealing with, nearly anything would combust. Finding a synthetic medium that could resist the heat and still work as a mould had been a right pain, and was one of the reasons he didn't try this centuries ago.

It would probably take several hours for the liquid to solidify, if not days. The Shard wasn't about to ruin things now by cracking the mould open too soon. He settled down with a book. It was going to be a long night.

 

[Rusty]

When the time came to crack open the mould, Rusty was rewarded with ten projectiles: 5 osmium and 5 iridium.

They were rough as hell, but there were no signs of air pockets, and the mould cavities hadn't deformed under the intense heat. He could live with that.

The next step was to get them cleaned up. That was going to be a pain no matter how you looked at it.

Both metals were up there among the hardest naturally occurring substances known to man, and both were rather brittle. Not quite glass, but fragile enough that the Shard was definitely going to have to be very careful until he could get them wrapped in copper jackets. He wasn't leaving this in the hands of some machine. Well, some machine other than himself. He set the belt sander up with a fine-grit diamond sanding belt, one that would be hard enough to wear away the material, but delicate enough not to stress it overmuch.

For a while, everything went well enough. The iridium projectiles took hours to get cleaned up, but they cleaned up nicely and were ready to be jacketed. The osmium bullets, on the other hand, were staunch nonconformists. The first one shattered in his hands. The second threw out sparks hot enough to light the duracrete floor on fire, and refused to go out. The third and fourth went fine, but on the fifth one, Rusty discovered that finely ground iridium and osmium particles were quite flammable, and when mixed with air and ignited by the right spark, made for an explosive mix. The blast threw the Shard clean across the workshop. Thank the Force he didn't hit anything really expensive, instead crashing through the door like a cannonball.

Most of the other equipment survived the blast intact, as they were all rough and ready pieces of kit designed to work in harsh conditions. The belt sander, on the other hand, was a total loss. One look and Rusty knew he'd have to have it replaced.

What followed next was a rapid stream of bleeps that could have passed for Morse code as his restraining bolt saved the world from the fierce invective he unleashed upon it.

 

[Rusty]

The osmium projectiles, Rusty decided, were a bust. Another batch might yield better results, but then again, he might blow up something he couldn't afford to replace.

Instead, he focused on jacketing the iridium rounds.

On a normal lead round, the softness was the key to the process. When swaged, the lead tended to flow into the copper, causing it to expand. Once the pressure was released, the copper attempted to return to its original diameter, which caused it to grip more tightly onto the projectile.

That wouldn't work here.

Instead, Rusty made the copper cups that would eventually hold the bullet a little smaller than they needed to be, and then heated them up slightly before using the swaging press to force the two materials together. The end result was the same: each bullet was clad in a uniform layer of copper, one that would allow the projectile to deform grip the rifling in the barrel.

The Shard was worried that the iridium might crack under the pressure, but it seemed the copper did an adequate job of bracing it. He couldn't detect any signs that the rounds were off balance, at any rate. That would have been a pain. If they were cracked, the cracks were small enough that they didn't significantly alter the characteristics of the projectile. If it was cracked and hit a lightsaber, well, that would be all kinds of fun. Some small, childish part of the Shard gleefully imagined dozens of tiny pieces of glowing hot iridium spalling all over the Force user that tried to block it.

He cackled, then set the rounds aside to cool before loading them into their casings.