S-11i Mamabear

Trope-a-Day: Our Weapons Will Be Boxy In The Future

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Our Weapons Will Be Boxy In The Future: Averted in most cases; most guns, while still being fundamentally gun-shaped (ergonomists cringe at the thought of trying to actually hit something with the remote-control-styled ST:TNG phaser, for example) as appropriate to the manipulators of the species they’re designed for, still follow The Aesthetics of Technology in being sleek, curvy organic shapes.  After all, they’re nanofactured – grown, not assembled – and all the field-replaceable parts are modular, so…

Played absolutely straight in just one case by the S-11i Mamabear heavy sluggun, because the Mamabear is a brutally overpowered weapon designed – well, the designers appear to have been thinking about building a weapon to fight kaiju at close range. It looks like a large vaned metal brick with a stubby barrel sticking out of one end because that’s precisely what it is; the mass driver is sufficiently overpowered that the whole mechanism of the thing is built into a giant heat sink to keep it at something close to a reasonable operating temperature. Although if you fire the thing multiple times in close succession, reasonable operating temperature means “only radiating in the red”.

(It has some other disadvantages too, like small magazine size, slow reloading rate, inaccuracy at long range, and a recoil that inflicts compound fractures on anyone who fires the thing whose bones aren’t reinforced with hard-wearing synthetic composites, but sometimes that’s worth it for the ability to one-hit kill damn near anything you’ll ever find yourself staring down the barrel at.)

Trope-a-Day: One-Hit Kill

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One-Hit Kill: Your mileage will almost always vary, given the amount of variant tech out there, but a sluggun – and the S-11i Mamabear in particular (see: BFG) – will do this to most regular infantry (they are, after all, designed as anti-materiel weapons), and one in which you put antimatter-grenade slugs will one-hit kill just about anything… assuming you’re in the sort of war and on the sort of battlefield where they let you use weapons like that, which tends to be the problem there.

Trope-a-Day: BFG

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BFG: Oh, several.  Let’s start with “that created by any excuse to shove antimatter rifle-grenades in your sluggun (see: Abnormal Ammo) or battle carbine and cut loose”, shall we?  There are also a variety of multibarrel miniguns, and yes, hypothetically even some that you can shove antimatter rifle-grenades into (see: More Dakka).

Specific examples would include the S-11i Mamabear, a souped-up sluggun which requires heavy bone reinforcement of most species in order to cope with the recoil, but can pull off one-shot kills on just about anything you care to name; the E40 Motherstorm, a very overpowered electrolaser that is unsafe at any setting, but very useful against mechanicals if the environment will let you use it; every single hunting weapon ever on Paltraeth, the kaeth homeworld, where the apex predators are oversized velociraptors with natural scale-mail plating; and the EI-12d Valkyrie target designator, which on its own is a tiny weak modulated laser, but which if there’s an orbital defense grid or an assault cruiser owning the local orbitals, can unleash more hell than everything else in this entry added together.

In the Fire Breathing Weapons category, the plasma-belching sets-fire-to-everything-around power-armor-mounted weapon of doom that is the KF-11 Dragonspume.  Even if its primary use is taking down cyberswarms and nanoswarms through thermal overload.

In the vehicle-mounted weapons category, that minigun-class weapon which is fitted to a G7-BU Sunhawk (see: Cool Plane) and which necessitates – as does the main weapon of the aircraft to which it is a homage – some special care in using to avoid find yourself flying backwards.

And any number of the one-off custom designs from Eye-in-the-Flame Arms, whose weapons designers (drawn, substantially, from the Cyprium-ith-Gislith line) consider the existence of any practical purpose for the weapon distinctly secondary to generating more and more extreme levels of overkill.