Mass Effect: Weapons: Heavy Weapons

# **Heavy Weapons**

Heavy Weapons are a class of weapon designed to deal destruction greater than conventional means. These weapons typically damage through all types of protection but suffer from high power consumption, making their usage situational but devastating given the right conditions.

## **Arc Projector**

The arc projector ionizes targets with a nonvisible laser to ready them for a high-voltage electrical attack. As the lightning-like bolt hits its first target, a sophisticated autotargeting system paints succeeding targets with the ionization laser, allowing the electricity to take the path of least resistance and arc between them. An entire enemy strike team can be shocked to death with a few pulls of the trigger.

## **Collector Particle Beam**

Precise and lethal, this focused-radiation weapon is very effective against shields, barriers, and armor.

The amount of energy required to create a destructive beam is several orders of magnitude more than the amount needed to launch a high-velocity projectile via a mass effect field.

## **Geth Spitfire**

 File:Mass Effect Geth Spitfire.png
Like the geth plasma shotgun, the Spitfire is not a true energy weapon. Instead, the minigun magnetically flings clusters of superconducting toroids. These donut-shaped projectiles are designed to shatter upon impact, arcing electricity between the fragments and flash-converting them to plasma. The gun's punishing, automatic blasts impact with the heat of a cutting torch.

The weapon's stopping power has garnered the attention of both Alliance and quarian intelligence, who theorize that the Spitfire may have been designed to destroy other geth. Enough Spitfires have been found in the field to suggest that the weapon is out of the prototyping stage, and that a schism among synthetics may have forced them into production.

## **ML-77 Missile Launcher**

Rapid-fire missile launcher with seeking projectiles. Effective against armor, shields, and biotic barriers.

Missile launchers are surfacing with increasing frequency among the Terminus Systems mercenary bands, but their origin is unknown. Each projectile features a friend-or-foe recognition system, ensuring it will find a hostile target -- though not necessarily the one in the crosshairs. In urban situations, it is useful for taking out snipers and other entrenched enemies, so it is popular with the Blue Suns mercenary band. It is nearly impossible to duplicate, as it uses Fabrication Rights Management (FRM) technology.

## **M-100 Grenade Launcher**

Rapid-fire grenade launcher favored by Blood Pack vorcha mercenaries. Capable of taking down multiple enemies with a single well-placed shot. Effective against armor, shields, and biotic barriers.

## **M-451 Firestorm**

Short-ranged, the Firestorm suppresses the regenerative capabilities of vorcha and krogan. Effective against armor, shields, and biotic barriers.

## **M-490 Blackstorm**

The Blackstorm, colloquially called the "black hole gun," encases particles of matter within a high-powered mass-increasing field, elevating them to near-infinite mass. This creates a gravitational singularity that draws nearby enemies and objects inward for a short time. The rapidly-increasing gravity near the singularity's event horizon rips the objects apart. The mass effect field soon destabilizes and returns to normal mass, with explosive results.

## **M-560 Hydra**

 File:Mass Effect M-560 Hydra.png
Before the introduction of the M-560 Hydra, missile launchers either focused on bringing down a single armored target or simultaneously neutralizing multiple unarmored opponents. With the Hydra, a soldier no longer needs to choose between the two.

The Hydra releases a barrage of miniature missiles, each guided by an independent homing system that seeks out exposed enemies. On impact, three shaped charges per missile explode in sequence. The first overloads the target's kinetic barriers before the second destroys its armor, clearing a path for the third warhead to detonate inside the target.

## **M-622 Avalanche**

Cryo Round technology is used to modify standard weapon slugs. A cooling laser collapses the ammunition into Bose-Einstein condensate, a mass of super-cooled subatomic particles capable of snap-freezing impacted objects.

Normandy's scientists have found a way to apply this technology on a large scale: by generating a mass effect containment "bubble," this proof-of-concept large weapon technology is effective against armor, shields, and biotic barriers. It is nicknamed the "Cryo-Blaster."

## **M-920 Cain**

The effectiveness and efficiency of mass-effect-based weapon technology has rendered large-scale deployment of highly explosive weaponry all but obsolete in infantry weapons.

Normandy's scientists have prototyped a modified version of traditional high-explosive rounds that is applied to a 25-gram slug. When accelerated to 5 km/s, the round is devastating. Though a technically inaccurate label, this prototype weapon is nicknamed the "Nuke Launcher," and its high-explosive matrix generates an archetypical mushroom cloud on impact.

Inflicts high damage with a large area of effect. Very effective against armor, shields, and barriers.

## **Reaper Blackstar**

 File:Mass Effect Reaper Blackstar.png
The Reaper weapon nicknamed "Blackstar" is so advanced that Alliance scientists can only offer speculation about how it works. The gun appears to exploit an element zero core and mass effect fields to fire gravitational singularities - micro black holes - that revert to their natural lethality when they impact a solid object. Researchers theorize that the blast tears apart the strong nuclear forces that hold the target's atoms together, resulting in a localized fusion reaction in light atoms and a fission reaction in heavy atoms. If that hypothesis is correct, the weapon alters nuclei, thus changing the chemical composition of the target. It destroys organic tissue, corrodes surviving armor, and leaves a visible trail of light-emitting particles.

Although some might argue that the Blackstar's single-launch capability makes it a liability, its capacity for utter destruction is essential when the user requires large-scale, instantaneous damage.

## **Source**

* Mass Effect Wiki: Heavy Weapons
* thedemonapostle