Bolt Stucker: Overview

A siege rifle that's more akin to a cannon, used by Heavy Vanguards when assaulting large bases or dealing with tightly packed enemies. Fires a shell that, when enhanced with an Illit field, can impact and explode with the force of a static artillery emplacement.

Is this a rifle? It’s straight up a cannon, cause you don’t gotta be accurate so… well it’s already here, so we’re gonna say it’s a rifle. Bolt Stuckers are one of my favorite rifles simply for the fact it turns our Heavy Vanguards into walking tanks.

While rocket launchers are generally superior weapons for anti-armor jobs, we found that they’re not so great at handling assaults on enemy fortifications or bases. Enemy vehicles might have rocket or missile countermeasures, but those tend to be limited in their operational capacity. By that I mean it can only hold off attacks for so long before something gets through, or the system runs out of ammo. With countermeasures such as reactive armor on tanks it’s fantastic for the first attack, but God almighty you had better take out the threat before it gets a second shot off in the same spot.

Fortifications and bases are another monster entirely, as they’re often toting countermeasures that have an entire warehouse and supply chain to keep them running. Say for example we’ve got a contract where someone wants us to take out a base for them, and when our Vanguard squadrons reach it, they find that their rockets or missiles are being shot down by the base defenses. I know this violates combined arms doctrine, but we’ll assume there’s no armor on the way, and artillery isn’t ready for bombardment yet. You can try to barrage the base with rockets, but as cheap as they are a tactic like that is going to rack up a bill way faster than you’d imagine, and I can guarantee the base defenses have more ammo than a couple dozen Vanguard squadrons.
That’s where the Bolt Stucker comes into play.

On top of their range, a Bolt Stucker can deliver overwhelming howitzer level bombardments while still being squad portable. Fuck me this sounds like I’m pitching the goddamn thing at a weapons expose.
Anyway, we made the Bolt Stucker to allow Vanguard squadrons to lay siege to a base and have a far easier time of it. Think of it as highly mobile artillery that makes up for the lower destructive power with a faster rate of fire. Currently, we teach our Heavy Vanguards to keep a consistent, steady rate of fire when using a Bolt Stucker to ensure they get full saturation of the target or target area. When you add in other squadrons they can stagger their bombardments, meaning someone is firing, someone is taking aim, and someone is reloading. The ideal end result is a constant, unceasing BOOM-BOOM-BOOMtype situation that never stops, where the enemy doesn’t even get a chance to move so much as come up with a counterattack.

The gun uses these enormous .90 caliber shells, or 22.86mm if you wanna get annoyingly precise. That’s slightly below the caliber of the main gun on an average Unified Empire APC, so the recoil exhaust system in these is doing a shitload of the heavy lifting.
Also in terms of heavy lifting, Bolt Stuckers are egregiouslyheavy due to the gun’s size and the weight of the PSS ammo. PTT rounds consist of only the projectiles so they’re usually super lightweight, but PSS rounds are way bulkier, doubly so for something that clocks in at a .90 caliber. A Heavy Vanguard being the only one in the squadron that uses a Bolt Stucker isn’t just due to their training, but also because they’re only ones who can reliably tote them through a battlefield. Try getting a Marksman Vanguard to heft that thing up a hill and you’re gonna hear knees snapping after a hundred meters.

While the main purpose of the Bolt Stucker is to act as a siege cannon you can shoulder, it can also be used for anti-armor strikes and crowd control if the enemy is trying to swarm your position. During the testing phase of the rifle’s development, I was told that a Heavy Vanguard managed to slot a shell right through the driver’s hatch of an old tank they were using for target practice. Apparently the explosive force of a Bolt Stucker shell is so fuck off big that, without any ammo in the tank to speak of, it still blew the turret off the main body and sent it 400+ meters downrange.

One day during testing, a legionnaire had this brilliant idea to see if the Bolt Stucker would work as an AA cannon. Testing showed that yeah, if you nail a jet or a gunship with a .90 plasmatic explosive shell, it will swat it right out of the air. The issue of course is when you miss, and that high explosive cannon shot has to land somewhere. We eventually decided to add “Don’t shoot at aircraft despite the temptation” to the weapon’s training course, since none of us want to do the paperwork when you accidentally smoke a preschool.

Lastly, the Bolt Stucker can make use of numerous PSS ammo variants, including this absolute armor shredding sabot type. That means no matter the problem you need the Bolt Stucker to solve, it’ll handle it in one way or another. Assuming you’re able to actually pick it up.

Goddamn I’m actually gonna go take one for a spin before I get back to this.

-FrW Nahli Lok-Riveria