Trope-a-Day: More Dakka

More Dakka: While, by and large, they are not found on normal battlefields, those wonderfully clever people at various research and development establishments have gone a long way towards the wonderfully dakkalicious, both through sheer scale and through quantities of fire.

Skipping over the more normal options available and actually used – even the IMS standard IL-15i Battlesystem, the standard-issue assault rifle/shotgun/SMG/anti-material sluggun/grenade launcher/missile launcher combo-pack, offers a respectable quantity of dakka – let’s just look at a couple of proposals, here:

On the one hand, for example, is the not-yet-built-or-engineered proposal for using the Dyson bubble at Esilmúr as a fleet killer, with the addition of a perfectly normal wormhole pair, one end of which would be axially mounted on a regular lighthugger – which would be quite the weapon when the entire output of the Esilmúr sun was magnetically focused down the wormhole using the harvesting arrays in reverse.  You could melt planets with that – although it’s probably impractically slow to actually get in position, the speed of light being what it is.

On the rather more practical hand, of course – well, thinking of things you can assemble from modular components, consider that a sluggun can double as a bore-compatible grenade launcher, that multibarrel/Gatling slugguns do exist, and so do antimatter grenades.  In short, you can assemble – using off-the-shelf components – a device which will let you high-rate (as in, thousands of rounds per minute) cycle-fire mini-nukes full auto!  (What you could possibly realistically want to use this piece of comical overkill on, and how exactly you’d go about surviving firing it, never mind paying for the ammo, are left as exercises for the reader.)

Nonetheless, it’s never enuff.

5 thoughts on “Trope-a-Day: More Dakka

  1. Pingback: Trope-a-Day: Awesome, but Impractical « The Eldraeverse

  2. Pingback: Trope-a-Day: BFG « The Eldraeverse

  3. Seems like a bad idea in an atmosphere, but on airless bodies it might actually be a useful weapon. Or you could just do orbital nuclear bombardment, by hand, out of an airlock.

  4. Actually, the antimatter gattling grenade launcher sounds like the sort of thing Admiral Caliéne Sargas would mount on a non-sophont drone before sending it on a suicide mission. Shock and awe turned up to 11.

    Of course, if the drone was sufficiently rad-hardened, and the grenade launcher had sufficient range, it wouldn’t necessarily even BE a suicide mission.

  5. Heavy infantry armour. The mission pack would be an antimatter-grenade gatling, a magazine of ammunition, and some sort of enterprise-grade regenerative kinetic shielding (absorbs and recycles impact energy, not just withstands or deflects it.)

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