>(from the FD "Mojave" thread)
>
>I thought about doing this as an FD, but it seemed a bit too precious
>somehow, so I'm just going to tell you about it.

Well, for what it's worth, this would make a heck of an FD, in my opinion. Probably as a Galactipedia entry, because it has that "this article was written by someone who is a colossal nerd about the esoteric subject at hand" tone, but also possibly as a set of IPO inter-office memos attached to Upward Mobility as ancillary materiel.

Of course, you're talking to a man who reads old West End Games sourcebooks purely for the tech porn.

> Designing and building weapons was never her
>actual job, inasmuch as she never received a paycheck or
>punched a time clock for an arms manufacturer, but she did design a
>fair number of weapons that ended up being mass-produced by some
>pretty big names in the field.

Well, if she got royalty checks, I'd say it was her actual job, but Kei's job is basically "Galactic Badass", which means that a whole host of other professions that would in most people be entire careers end up being ancillary to her main line of work.

>So it's kind of a grey area as to whether she was really a hobbyist,
>as such, but she did do most of her work in a home workshop

Yeah, but a home workshop on the Wayward Son by a senior WDF officer is probably the equivalent of a well-equipped R&D lab with its own fabrication shop anywhere else in the galaxy. :)

>OK, so, quick fake history lesson. In the 21st century, BlasTech (the
>Corellian company, makers of such giants in the field as the DL-44,
>the E-series, and the DC-series) came out with the BlasCap, which was
>marketed as "blaster ammunition for conventional firearms". The idea,
>basically, was that you would load a regular gun with BlasCaps, and
>then when you pulled the trigger, what would come out was a blaster
>bolt instead of a bullet. They touted it as adding a new dimension of
>versatility to conventionally armed forces etc. etc.

One imagines that this was in response to the Earth markets opening up to them; there would have been an awful lot of people who wanted to get on the new energy-weapons train but wondered what to do with all their old slugthrowers. The BlasCap would probably have served that market incredibly well if they'd been able to get costs down. Probably also easier to smuggle.

>The third, which likewise no one ever seemed to be able to do anything
>about, was that they were and are redonkulously expensive.
>Which isn't really a surprise, when you think about it: Each one is,
>in effect, a very miniaturized single-shot holdout blaster in the
>shape of one round of conventional ammunition. There's microcircuitry
>in there, and a big capacitor, and a tiny tibanna gas reservoir (both
>of which had to be charged during the manufacturing process), and
>whatnot.

They probably also have a pretty limited shelf life, then. I mean, regular cartridges don't keep forever either, but...

>The result is that a typical BlasCap small-arms round - a .308 SNS
>(Salusian Navy Standard) round, say, of the kind fired by an
>MA5-series assault rifle - costs about a hundred times what a normal
>cartridge of the same type would cost. Given that the book calls for
>a Royal Salusian Marine in battle dress to carry 350 rounds of
>ammunition for his or her rifle, that... adds up a bit.

I would expect that, while they no doubt use slugthrowers in a variety of roles, the Royal Salusian Marines would have a blaster as their standard rifle, really. Assuming that their primary zones of responsibility are "shipboard security/boarding actions" and "be the tip of the spear when it comes to establishing a spacehead on a hostile planet" (I could be wrong about that)... in the former case you'd want weapons with the lowest chance of puncturing the hull and still being effective, and in the latter case you'd want to keep your logistics chain as simple as possible, which means tibanna gas cartidges, charge packs, and a few field generators to recharge said charge packs. Still a lot of gear, but much simpler to handle than tons and tons and tons and TONS of slugthrower ammo.

As my own aside, as noted above in the thread by others, this actually clears up one of this niggling questions I'd had about CSI:NA for awhile. I'd always assumed somehow that a BlasCap was some kind of uberstealthy one-shot holdout blaster that produced wounds that were largely indistinguishable from regular blasters, which meant people would waste time looking for a weapon that doesn't actually exist.

It turns out that I wasn't actually wrong about that, I guess, but I wasn't right in the way I thought I was either. It wasn't precisely keeping me up nights, but it was one of those little things.

>Sure it is. It's the only logical thing to call them!

For all I knew, they'd stuck with "gunsmith". :)

-Merc
Keep Rat