Back in early 800 AS I was doing a little trading around sigma-17. One of my trading partners was delayed and I was forced to hang around sigma-17 while waiting for him. I decided to treat myself to some good ale and entertainment so decided to head over to Freeport-7. While sitting at a bar and having a good time I ran across a smuggler name Syd (God rest his soul). After a few hours and a great deal of ale he became very talkative and had a lot of interesting stories which he was more than eager to share with me. It is understandable because I was the guy who was picking up the bar tab.
While sipping ale Syd told me stories of beings with glowing eyes, and battleship wrecks that occurred during a brief encounter between Rheinland military and the Corsairs who ambushed them in the Dark Matter Storm on the edge of the Munich system. He also shared with me what are the best items to smuggle as well as the best smuggling routes. While Syd is a great story teller and the stories themselves are were pretty entertaining I did not take any of them seriously. Few months later after Freeport 7 got destroyed by unidentified ships and strange events started to occur in liberty and other house systems I started to think that maybe Syd was not as crazy as I thought and maybe there is something to his stories.
One day I was on trade run in a Frankfurt system and when I was done I had some time to kill before my next run and I was trying to figure out what I should do for the next several days and then it hit me, Munich system was just one jump away. So I decided to check out Syd's story about the battleship wrecks in Dark Matter Storm Nebula. I spent a whole day trying to find the wrecks but the only thing that I found was lighting from the storms. It was everywhere and it was causing havoc on my ship systems causing me to cut my search short and start heading back to Frankfurt system. While on the way back the storm knocked out my long range sensors so I was flying almost blind. All of a sudden my proximity alert went off and caused sharp deceleration. After close examination of my surroundings I noticed something huge almost dead center in front of me. It turned out that Syd was right and there were several battleship wrecks in front of me. After a closer examination of the wrecks I confirmed that one was a Rheinland Battleship and the other was a Corsair Legate. Unfortunately, my ship was damaged by the storm and it was not equipped for a major salvage operation. I recorded the location of the wrecks and decided to come back when I was prepared for this type of salvage operation.
A month later I chartered a large transport and a salvage crew and went back to the Munich system. During our salvage operation we quickly realized that those ships were not regular military ships; there were a number of things that were very different from regular combat ships. Primary differences were the guns and the subsystems that pertained to them. Also, another irregularity that stood out was the fact the ship contained strange looking crates in the cargo hull that were full of unusual looking weapon systems. The guns in the crates had no markings on them whatsoever and we were not able to determine anything except that they had to be mounted on something fairly large, like a Battleship or a Battlecruiser. We could tell that guns which were mounted on the ship hull were larger and looked very different than the regular battleship guns. The guns were too complex for us to be able to get any useful information during the salvage operation.
After the salvage operation was complete and the guns were stored under lock and key I decided to contact a friend of mine, who is one of the top scientists in the Order, and asked him to help me out in understanding what I have salvaged. After about a week my friend contacted me and gave me all the juicy details on the guns that I have found.
SLEDGE TURRETS
The guns that were mounted on the Rheinland Battleship turned out to be: RBT-84h "Sledge" Heavy Battleship Prototype Turrets which never advanced past early trials. The Sledge follows typical Rheinland trends: A very heavy, slow firing, high powered weapon suitable for use on Rheinland's massive battleships, and optimal against targets of equal size. The trials were promising, but the project was expensive and ultimately deemed unnecessary with the end of the Liberty conflict. A few of the remaining prototypes had apparently gone missing and have since shown up in unexpected places.
GAYLE CANNONS
The guns that were mounted on the Corsair Battleship were: RA-20 "Gale" Battleship Cannons. The “Gale” Cannon is an ancient Corsair design, an ambitious project to create a weapon that is fast, powerful, and has extensive range. The design succeeded in meeting these goals, but politics prevented it from entering production, as the family supporting the development of the now-universal RA-72 used their greater influence and wealth to suppress the Gale's adoption. The prototypes, dusty but functional, were recently rediscovered in a centuries-old abandoned warehouse on Crete.
BATTLECRUISER PARTICLE PULSE ACCELERATION CANNONS (PPAC)
The guns that were in the crates could not be identified to lack of marking on them and the fact that not one had ever seen one before. The guns had no identifying information, design patterns, emissive signatures, or manufacturing marks, and do not seem to be based on any existing weapons design. The curious turret is designed to be mounted on the reinforced hardpoints of Battlecruiser-scale heavy weaponry, and is effectively four particle accelerator cannons with intentionally-uncalibrated alignment coils that produce a single, four-barrel “shotgun” blast. My scientist friend from the order that was studying the guns has given them a name: Battlecruiser Particle Pulse Accelerator Cannons (PPAC)
Engineers assessing the PPAC’s construction and apparent purpose tend to be confused by the appearance of sloppy production, though most will agree that the sloppiness also appears to be entirely by design, as if someone had given a brilliant madman access to a weapons lab somewhere far away from civilization and then came back to check on the progress six months later.
I have since sold all the guns to an unnamed organization making a pretty good amount of credits for my efforts. I think it is time for me to look into some of the other stories that I have heard from Syd!!!
