GSO Big Bertha Cannon

A 420mm M-grade gun. Technically a naval class weapon, but you can mount it on anything that's big enough to carry it.
Of German origin, the gun was mainly designed by SRQ Technologies Director of Design, Senior Ra'Gequi. It can fire a 820kg high explosive shell roughly 8 miles.

The **GSO Big Bertha Cannon** is a grade 5 Weapon block manufactured by GSO. Like all GSO blocks, it can be crafted with a GSO Fabricator.

It has 16 attachment point(s) and takes up 87 cell(s).

## Usage

Being a cumbersome behemoth, the Big Bertha is truly the beast among all weapon blocks. It launches devastating hits against all enemy techs it can hit and nothing will survive a single shot intact. However, this comes at a huge cell count and significant mass, and, coupled with the lack of APs, basically made it off-limits to even medium techs whereas the Hawkeye Mk3 Battleship Cannon can be easily stacked. It also a slightly slower rate of fire, but has a faster and more precise projectile. Like most heavy explosive weapons, it works well against slower techs and even gets through shields with terrifying ease, where the poor tracking offered by the gun is basically ignorable.

Due to these issues the Big Bertha lacks significant utility, as it's impossible to use it for versatile designs.

## Trivia

* The GSO Big Bertha Cannon seems to based off the infamous German Big Bertha Howitzer super-heavy artillery. This is supported by the block description which mentions it as a 'naval class weapon', and the second part of the weapon mentioning that it's of German origin. because the real Big Berthas were intentionally falsely called *Kurze Marine-Kanone* (short naval-cannon) to disguise their true purpose as army artillery. They also share the same caliber and general appearance, and on top of that they also require an external turret to support the gun.
* NPCs currently do not use this weapon, likely due to the difficulty to create a practical combat Tech with it. As a result Big Bertha is only available via purchasing from Payload Terminals, crafting or, as stated before, as a rare drop from Delivery Crate Missions.
* Despite the obvious lack thereof, the Big Bertha actually can aim like a turreted weapon. However, it is limited to only a couple of degrees, and functions more as a "last mile" assist than actual auto-aim. If you look closely, you can actually see the barrel align itself with its target.
* Formerly, the Big Bertha was an anchored block that acts like a static turret. This makes it the only weapon block to have that aspect.
* Despite it's real-life counterpart, the Big Bertha requires a Gluon beam, which is obviously not available in WWI for anyone and abnormal for a regular artillery. Also, despite the game taking place in far future, all Big Berthas are decommissioned after WWI's end at 1918.
* Big Bertha is one of the few weapons to eject bullet casings, or in this case, shell casings, when fired.
* This weapon is in the game as one of the players - SenorRagequit - had bought the Vice President Kickstarter package of TerraTech and thus could wish for a custom made block. The player's name was referenced in the description as well - The game indirectly claiming that he was the creator of Big Bertha.
* The Big Bertha is not capable of firing a shell that travels 8 miles for game balancing reasons. The description still falsely claims so.
* A real-life Big Bertha is much bigger and almost any tech within the game could have gone down even with a single direct hit.
* In terms of damage per shot, the Big Bertha is perhaps the most powerful weapon available in the entire game, tied with the Hawkeye Mk3 Battleship Cannon at 3000 damage per shot. This makes it perhaps the most powerful GSO Weapon by this statistic.
* With a mass value of 52, the Big Bertha is one of the heaviest weapon blocks - let alone just blocks - in the entire game.