Babylon 5 Matter Weaponry

## **Matter Weaponry**

The next stage in weapon evolution beyond the invention of ballistics, matter weaponry uses the Gauss Principle to accelerate ferrous matter toward a target with tremendous force, speed and accuracy. The weapon systems are designed around an ammunition feeding system that sends the object rolling down a series of polarized magnetic coils or rings. Each magnet pulses at a precise moment, exponentially increasing the speed and force behind the shot. By the end of the accelerators, the object has enough momentum to do significant damage to anything that gets caught in its path.

The Centauri Republic and the Earth Alliance are the galaxy’s leading users of matter weaponry, choosing them as efficient and destructive secondary weapons. Ammunition tends to be cheap for these systems, as they are able to basically use any piece of ferrous material as a missile.

There is a significant power drain involved whenever the matter weapon system fires, in order to power the magnetic coils, but many shipbuilders simply route more couplings to these systems from the reactor to compensate. They do leave a very distinctive electromagnetic signature behind when they fire.

#### **Matter Accelerator**

The most basic of the matter weapons, the accelerator is more or less a bin of oval-shaped ferrous slugs fitted to a feeding neck that drops them into the first primary magnetic coil. The coil pushes the slug down an extended barrel. The matter accelerator is not terribly different from the other varieties of this weapon type, but far less efficient – and therefore far less expensive.

#### **Matter Cannon**

The refined variety of a simple matter accelerator, the matter cannon actually uses groups of larger slugs to hurl at once. The theory is that the collective cloud of hurled matter will tear great holes in a target – which they do fantastically. Devised by the Centauri Republic early in their expansionist movements well before the Dilgar War, the matter cannon is a derivative of several pieces of Dilgar technology. Many hulls in the Centauri fleet had older versions or completely different weapon systems replaced by matter cannons after they were ‘perfected’.

#### **Blast Cannon**

* Light Blast Cannon: Fire Control: -1D

Short-ranged modified versions of matter technology launch volleys of solid pellets.

#### **Railgun**

After several years of testing and researching the true nature of the Gauss Principle and seeing what the Centauri matter cannons were capable of, Earth Alliance researchers developed the powerful and elegant railgun. Instead of firing rough shot or even groups of smooth-bored slugs, the railgun accelerates a cylindrical flechette round of super-dense material the size of a small child into the target. It lacks the collateral damage capabilities of the matter cannon, but it seems to be far more accurate over longer distances.

#### **Mass Driver**

* Fire Control: -4D

Mass drivers were outlawed by nearly every sentient race after the Dilgar used them time and time again against ‘unworthy planets’ during the early 2230s. They are basically gigantic matter accelerators that use localized tractor beams to pull in drifting space debris (asteroids, starship hulks) into their gaping accelerator rings to be sped up and directed toward a target.

These weapons were never intended as anything but weapons of mass destruction. They are cumbersome and can only be fitted to vessels of capital scale or larger. They take up far more space and power from a ship than any other weapon system and are almost always built specifically into a ship at its design.

Any mobile target that is targeted by a mass driver can add the result of a piloting skill check to their Defense against the slow-moving mass driver shot. When actually fired at a planet, moon or installation, the Game Master should use the Offense rating of the weapon as a minimum, due to other adverse effects of having an asteroid plummet into a populated area.

Mass drivers may only fire once every three turns due to their extremely slow loading times.

#### **Source**

* Babylon 5 Ship Builder's Manual (page 50)
* thedemonapostle