Lunar Spear: Overview

Fires a bewilderingly dense 70kg plasmatic magma edged Zephatun blade capable of punching through the carapace of a 25 ^th Ascension wraith. Almost exclusively fielded by Intelligence Legion operatives, the Lunar Spear is brought to bear against threats that would rate as a Colossus or Arbiter.
Often this weapon is only employed when Iza isn't paying attention given the cost of each shot.

Remember the Assassin’s Hammer from a few pages ago?
Eh wait fuck… Jesus that was more than just a few, how long have I been writing this garbage?
_{It would be “a few” if you’d stick to writing about the weapons instead of shooting off on wild tangents. – Hansuke}

Well, the Assassin’s Hammer rifle is how we kill big shit.
So what we if wanted to kill really, really big shit?

That’s where we arrive at the genesis of the Lunar Spear, when a bunch of weaponry researchers crammed themselves into a conference room at Frostfall, set an Assassin’s Hammer on the table, and asked the question “What if we made it kill better?”. The unsaid part of that being “…and three times more expensive” but you just let Finance find out that one for themselves when the invoices arrive.
_{Christ above, I wish it was only triple the cost. – Iza}

For a long time after they’d worked out creating magma edge treatments for our close combat weapons, there was this goddamn surge of shit that made use of it. Fairly certain the Lunar Spear falls into that category, something where a bunch of dorks with a blank check thought “Oh shit let’s cram this into something and see what happens” without much regard to the final use case. The fact we turned it into an alpha strike big-bad killer was decided afterthey’d already made the damn thing.

I wasn’t there for the testing, but I managed to dig up the progress notes and reading through them is boring as fuck because half of it is them bitching about funding, then the other half is them bitching about Acris taking forever to approve finalized designs._{Almost like I’m busy with everyone dumping work on me. - Dr. Baddarick}
Though with a touch of annoyed diligence, I managed to throw together a summary for you fine fucks.
_{Nahli, that’s absolutely not how that phrase goes. – Hansuke}
How it work then?

The main idea behind the Lunar Spear was to take the same operating principles of the Assassin’s Hammer, and then scale it up while broadening the weapon’s operational capacity. Take some kind of bladed projectiles, make it hurt shit more, shoot it at the enemy with both precision and a travel time that’s some number of negative seconds.
It’s got a larger magazine, more operational time due to better cooling, built in Gray Conduits, software plugins for use with our helmets, all kinds of neat shit. The main thing with the gun is obviously the projectiles and how they differ from the ones used by the Assassin’s Hammer.

But then some problems came up after they decided on the weapon’s tech.
Y’see, magma edge treatments for close quarters weapons require the blade or surface or whatever to be made out of Zephatun. Can anyone in the class guess as to why that is?
Well if you’d actually bothered to read all that shit I put earlier in this book you’ll know that plasmatic matter has a temperature of around 2700 C on the surface, little higher further in.
Y’remember what temperature the magma edge treatment clocks in at?
6000 goddamn C, around the temperature of our planet’s core.

If you apply a magma edge treatment to a tungsten blade, it will literally boil the metal.
If you apply a magma edge treatment to an Allog blade, it will also boil the metal .
But if you apply a magma edge treatment to Zephatun, you have serviceable weapon of immense harm potential.

Except them there blades shot by the Assassin’s Hammer aren’t made of Zephatun, and Zephatun is the densest material we’ve got (that’s actually employed in widespread use).
What I’m trying to get at in my own retarded fashion is that the ballistics science stuff between an Assassin’s Hammer and a Lunar Spear are waaaaaay different. The energy required to shoot a tungsten projectile is nowhere near the amount needed to shoot a Zephatun projectile. Close your eyes for a second, dive deep into that imagination of yours, and picture what it’d be like to try and use your Frostpick if the PTT rounds were replaced with lead bricks.
You can also imagine how much heavier a Lunar Spear is as well, cause it’s absolutely crippling if you aren’t ready for it. This is not the loadout you take along for a ruck unless you wanna see your shin bones explode out of your shoulders.

Again referring back to these here notes, it took a ton of work before they could even get the Lunar Spear to fire in a dependable manner. Their initial tests usually resulted in a Zephatun blade falling out of the barrel or traveling a max distance of… 1 meter. Christ.
Once the firing mechanisms had been built up and verified as ready, they installed the magma edge activation system (similar to how a Charged Shell activates plasmatic matter) and had to handle the issue of trying to keep all of that heat from destroying the weapon. Magma edged weapons are usually out in the open being swung around, not held inside a firing chamber building up heat while the legionnaire is trying to aim.

Like a lot of our high-end weaponry, a Lunar Spear uses liquid helium in a coolant loop to keep everything at a manageable temperature, but like I don’t… ah shit I don’t know the details of this stuff, I’m asking Acris for help here.

“ I’ll give a summary, as this is usually the case with any weapons that make use of liquid helium loops save for a few edge cases that I sincerely hope you aren’t writing about.
There’s two kinds of helium we make use of for coolant purposes: helium 4 and helium 3.
Helium 4 is common.
Helium 3 is rarer.
Between these two, helium 3 is the one that can reach colder temperatures and is thus the type we use in systems that have exceedingly demanding operational temperatures. For other systems we use helium 4 or simply settle for liquid nitrogen. An example would be the optical systems within a Wisp making use of helium 4, while the Lunar Spear requires helium 3.
However, at the temperatures we require for the Lunar Spear’s operation, the liquid helium becomes a superfluid and thus acts as though it has no viscosity. There’s a lot of interesting aspects about superfluids, but what we’re concerned about here is the viscosity (or lack thereof). If there’s even the slightest pore or gap, that liquid helium will pass through it and we have a problem.
This requires us to use double walled coolant tubes that have a vacuum between layers, as well as having the interior of the tubes and coolant loop be vacuum pumped to reduce atmospheric pressure on the coolant. Remember that atmospheric pressure influences the boiling points of liquids, so keeping that under control keeps the coolant’s temperature at a consistent level.

What that means for your purposes, is that weapons like the Lunar Spear are hazardous to the user if those coolant loops are compromised, as well as requiring far more conscious handling of the weapon itself. Should the coolant loops become compromised in some manner, or anything influences the atmospheric pressure that’s placed upon the coolant itself, this will lead to the weapon malfunctioning in a catastrophic manner. That’s not even to speak of the consequences if a legionnaire gets hit by liquid helium on any unprotected part of their body.

Weapons that make use of liquid helium or liquid nitrogen coolant loops need to only be handled by those trained extensively in their use.

Let me know if you need clarification on anything else.”

I’m hoping what you take from all that when you hit this class of weaponry, things start to get very particular in the way they’re used and handled. Frostpicks are in their class mostly due to their level of firepower, but also because you can use the goddamn thing as a club, a door jam or throw it off a cliff and it’ll still work without a hitch.
Stuff like the Lunar Spear? It’s rugged and built for combat, but the moment you fail to utilize it properly you’ll either fail to kill your target or you’ll end up as a grease stain on the wall.

Anyway, where does all that backstory in complexity and shit leave us in terms of firepower?
During its development trials, the lab set up a Lunar Spear in a cradle and aimed it at targets that were all made up of different stuff. Then they took those targets and lined up 10 of them in a row to see how much the projectile would destroy, as well as how far the projectile would travel before losing lethality.

Lemme say, even though I’m just referencing someone else’s notes, I do love reading these results.

Here’s what the Lunar Spear was capable of in a lab setting:

· Concrete Block, 10m thick: Destroyed, 0% loss in lethality.

· Concrete Block x10, 100m thick: Destroyed, 0% loss in lethality.

· Steel Block, 10m thick: Destroyed, 0% loss in lethality.

· Steel Block x10, 100m thick: Destroyed, 0% loss in lethality.

· Tungsten Block, 10m thick: Destroyed, 0% loss in lethality.

· Tungsten Block x10, 100m thick: Destroyed, 0% loss in lethality.

· Allog Block, 10m thick: Destroyed, 0% loss in in lethality.

· Allog Block x10, 100m thick: Destroyed, 0% loss in lethality.

· Zephatun Block, 10m thick: Damaged, 75% loss in lethality.

· Zephatun Block x10, 100m thick: Damaged, 100% loss in lethality.

Other development notes include:

• “Do not test fire weapon without a Zephatun backstop, it will continue traveling otherwise.”
• “Tests on organic matter targets should be carried out in a well-ventilated area.”
• “Test firings are expensive, DO NOT conduct tests without approval.”
• “Keep the weapon stored in its shielded container, normal armory storage is not adequate.”
• “BSsgt Arla in Fabrication has a fat ass, my God.” _{What? – Hansuke}
• “That woman must squat concrete barricades, we are blessed.”
• “Fabrication costs are earning us the Arbiter’s ire, STOP SHOOTING IT WITHOUT APPROVAL.”
• “Boys, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but her ass is the result of uniform modification. Twenty stiches, some thread and an hour of work later, you get a pushup bra for your ass.”
• “Bullshit Sena.”
• “Yeah, you’re gonna have to prove that one.”
• “Get on Frostfall’s intranet and search for ‘Wagon Hitch Stich’ under the personal legionnaire sites category.”
• “GODDAMMIT.” _{Your submissions, without fail, continue to give me a headache. – Hansuke}
• “After testing with a few Gray Cores on loan from the Science Legion, we’ve verified that Deathchill type Chaff manipulation can render the projectile inert.”

I almost never, ever see Lunar Spears get checked out of the armory except for super special events that you boys and girls don’t get to know about yet.

To give you an illustration… visual… story or fucking whatever the word here should be…
During an expedition, one of the deadliest, most dangerous entities we can come across is a Dreamer of Possession. I can’t get too into it detail wise, but they’re what’s considered an “Expedition ending event” for a very good reason.

We once used a Lunar Spear to sever one of its hands.

-FrW Nahli Lok-Riveria