When we say "edge treatments" what that means is alterations, augmentations, and enhancements that have been done to the "point towards enemy" part of a close combat weapon. That can mean blades, the part of a hammer that beats on shit, hell I once saw Fabrication get bored and create an edge treatment for a socket wrench. Anything you use to thrash someone in an up close manner likely has an edge treatment variant available for usage.

Officially, y’know on paper, this is all done to make the weapon better at making widows while pretending we care about efficiency per swing. Personally I like ‘em cause I can cleave someone literally in half without worrying about sharpening the blade afterwards (I mean not always but still).

Far as I'm aware, being a complete idiot and all that, we have the following edge treatments:

• Plasmatic: It's inert plasmatic matter till you send a current through it to activate it, then you're in business.

• Magma: I can tell you that it ain’t literally magma, we just call it that. But I also have no idea what the hell they make this stuff out of, all I know is that it’s extremely expensive to manufacture and shares a few traits with plasmatic matter. Same consistency, same usage, but holy hell it's in a different league. According to this napkin I wrote on a few years ago, the temperature of plasmatic matter sits around 2300 C on average. A weapon that's got a magma edge treatment sits at 6000 C.

• Shade Steel: This can only be used on stuff with a blade, last I was told. Or a sharp edge, whatever. One hell of an effect though, since it doesn't rely on active/inert matter like the others. This shit just straight up makes it sharp enough to peel tank armor like it was a potato, and we gotta use a holster with it that clamps down on the blade from the side to prevent it from moving. I distinctly remember when we had an incident where a knife with this treatment cut right through the holster, fell blade first into the ground, and embedded itself in a slab of concrete up to the hilt.

• Entropic: Well honestly there’s not much I can say about these, but understand they’re about as deadly as we can get (for now). Due to the operational requirements, you’re almost never ever gonna see these in your career unless you go to… uh… places. Places some people go if they show they’re capable of cool shit, and know how to shut their mouths. _{Unlike this entire paragraph. – Ye-Jun
  I’m not sure new legionnaires need to know about entropic armaments quite yet Nahli. – Hansuke}

Bear in mind that if you only recently graduated from conditioning training, you’re gonna get issued a Winter Nail with zero edge treatments whatsoever and you’re gonna like it.
Unless you’re an Assault Vanguard, in which case you’re mommy’s special needs child and I let you have an Armor Zipper with a Shade Steel blade.

Y’know what’s fun about edge treatments? Going around base and figuring out what they do and do not work on.

-FrW Nahli Lok-Riveria