Frostpick: Overview

Standard issue rifle used by all GDS personnel. Semi-auto, capable of single and three round burst fire modes, uses iron sights and loads via PTT ammo en blocks. Simplicity and reliability are at the core concept of the Frostpick’s design.

When I first joined up, GDS wasn’t segmented into Legions or anything like that. That meant the entire Vanguard “Legion” was me and thirty other people, but we were gettin' issued the merc's favorite rifle, an IFA-2. The gun had a 30-round mag and three fire modes you got to choose from; single shot, burst, and full auto. As God is my witness you couldn't get the fuckin thing to jam no matter what you did to it. Now that sounds like the perfect service rifle for an up-and-coming PMC’s kill squads, except for a few things.

First was that the IFA-2 came with these holo-sights that, if some stray dust on the wind hit it at the right angle, would scratch the glass to shit and make it useless. I can see your messages now, “Ma’am, respectfully, why not swap out the sights with a cheaper third-party option?”.Well honey, that sounds great, except the IFA-2 and the included sights had a fucking proprietary rail system, any adapters kept losing their zero after ten rounds, and custom machining each rifle to fix all that was too damn expensive at the time.

Second, the IFA-2 was both dependable and insanely average at the same time. It did the job of your average rifle, but it wasn't gonna shred through cover or do much besides denting your opponent’s body armor if they had anything above level III plates.
Lastly, it had a full auto option.

This isn't really an issue by itself, though there's this myth that if you give a frontline grunt a full auto option that's all he'll ever use. C'mon, they're retarded in most aspects of life but they know how to conduct themselves in a firefight like nobody else. My issue with a full auto rifle as the standard issue service weapon was that it went against the doctrine I was developing after I’d been forced at gunpoint to become the chief bitch of the Vanguard Legion. Well actually it wasn’t gunpoint, Iza just beat the shit out of me. _{Revise this to include the fact you agreed to the terms of the fight, or I’ll do it again. – Iza}

So, the IFA-2 went against my developing doctrine, the holo-sights kept getting ruined and weren't cheap to swap out, and it did okayin regard to stopping power. While I was still among the grunts of the Vanguard Legion, I found it did pretty alright. Certainly did the trick for killing people, but it always felt… I dunno, it felt like I was running around with a gun I got from the bargain bin at a charity store.
After being direct commissioned for some godawful reason, despite never having even finished high school, I started making moves to fix our IFA-2 problem. To save on page space, I’ll summarize it by saying that my efforts didn’t go anywhere until I got beaten into the head position of a Legion, which meant I finally had the one thing that makes the magic happen here at GDS.
The authority to annoy the fuck out of Acris with endless requests at all hours of the day.

I might have still had on my dress reds from the promotion ceremony as I was kicking open their office door. My very first demand was a brand-new standard issue service rifle for GDS, utilizing the new plasmatic tech we’d only just started poking around with. To my credit, I think the degree to which I annoyed them was so great that it led to the Frostpick being completed in a single week just to make me shut up. From what I was told afterwards Acris huffed over to what was at the time our weapons lab, gutted an ISW-Grand someone was using for testing, shoved proto-plasmatic tech into it, fired a single shot to ensure it worked, then stomped off while ordering the team to “make it less shit”.

Thus after a week of improvements and like four days of testing, we got the one and only version of the Frostpick as we know it today. I dunno the details, I just use the damn thing. I remember Iza was actually legit happy with me because it was such a cheap weapon to fabricate, but that lasted like two days before I was on her shitlist again.

Our new Frostpick solved a few issues, the first being that you only needed one shot to drop a target. Training was quickly turned around to focus on iron sight skills to an honestly painful degree, so no more holo-sight or scope issues. Advanced targeting is now handled by the legionnaire's helmet, or optional attachable sights if the legionnaire wants to bring them along in their bag. As a side note, we spent like two months doing R&D on our helmets to ensure you could get a reliable cheek weld with the stock of a Frostpick. Most use the targeting system built into it that can account for the offset to the iron sights, buuuuuuut y’know just in case.

On top of using iron sights the Frostpick is as simple as could be, to the point that if any issues actually did come up then a legionnaire would easily be up to the task of repairing the weapon in the field. Due to the plasmatic ammo consisting of only the projectiles instead of full FMJ bullets, a legionnaire can carry 750 shots and 2 charged shells, which is nuts compared to how much the equivalent would weigh for the IFA-2. And each of those PTT rounds is fully capable of dropping anything from an enemy solider in body armor, up to Chaff Wraiths and even a Severian if you catch em off guard.

After it was done with testing and in mass production, the Frostpick became our standard issue rifle for all Vanguards and Security legionnaires. I don't need allof my boys and girls annihilating entire buildings under the pretense of "Well we needed covering fire" and racking up an ammo bill that's gonna have Iza using my neck as a stress ball.
Single shot, single kill, simple design, simple repairs.

Lastly, this was one of the very first plasmatic weapons we ever made, and the idea of using wood for gun bodies to add durability at a lower cost took hold in all future weapon designs. It's kind of the template from which almost all of our infantry level armaments are based off of.

I have strict marksman and training requirements for our legionnaires all because I know that no matter the situation, I can stick a Frostpick in their hands and it’ll be capable of handling just about any situation you can throw at it.

-FrW Nahli Lok-Riveria