Naval Weapons of the Draconian Empire

*For a more general overview of Imperial Military Technology see:* Weapons and Technology of the Imperial Military

The Imperial Draconian Navy has a wide variety of powerful ship-to-ship and ship-to-surface weapons designed to achieve certain objectives and achieve tactical and strategic victory. Weapons within the Imperial Draconian Navy are categorized according to either strategic or tactical purpose, with tactical weapons designed to win individual battles or achieve objectives across a large theater. Strategic weapons are the weapons created by the Empire to achieve its long term goals and defend the Empire's interests. Fleets themselves are considered strategic weapons as are defense platforms and nuclear armaments.

## Strategic Weapons of the Imperial Navy

### Defensive Strategic Armaments

All but three of the strategic weapons of the Imperial Navy fall under the category of Strategic Defensive Weapons. These weapons include orbital defensive platforms, planetary nuclear missiles, orbital nuclear torpedoes, orbital stealth nuclear mines, surface-to-orbit anti-ship beam cannons, and graviton field generators.

#### Orbital Defense Platforms

The Draconian Empire proper and its protectorate states are extremely well defended from attacks in orbit partially thanks the to the Empire's robust orbital platforms.

The most famous and widespread of such platforms is the Imperial Type-11 Orbital Defense Platform:

The Imperial Navy uses the ODP-11 as the primary line of defense for planets under the Draconian Empire's guard. The stations are armed with a MX1000 Mass Driver which can accelerate ferromagnetic slugs to nearly 80% the speed of light, along with multiple long range directed energy cannons, and can deploy two wings of Firestorm Fighter craft to augment its already impressive defensive capability.
The MX1000 mass driver's superconductive fire rails expend large amounts of energy, and can fire three shots in rapid sequence before requiring a full 45 seconds to reset for fire. However, even just one of these slugs carry enough sheer kinetic force to obliterate any ship foolish enough to dare present itself as a threat.
The Stations also serve as orbital service docks for smaller ships in the Imperial Navy, the ODP-11 Types capable of servicing up to four of the Naginata Escort Destroyers, like the one docked for example.
ODP-11 platforms are deployed in a constellation of usually 27 platforms, each in a geosynchronous orbit, within a specific configuration that gives a firing geometry that allows for each station to have total firing coverage of any approach vector to the planet it defends. The constellations could vary in size depending on the size of the planet they defend, its importance, and the actual size of the gravity well. The capital worlds of the Draconian Empire for example, have as many as 810 platforms, arranged in clusters of three, creating 270 battle clusters, making planetary invasion nigh impossible.
These stations have advanced sensors that can detect invariances in gravity waves, essential detecting the wake of a ship, meaning that attempting to approach these stations with stealth is also extremely difficult.

#### Graviton Field Generators

Graviton Field Generators are a classified technology within the Empire. What little details have been provided about them suggest that they make use of the Graviton, a boson responsible for mediating the interaction of Gravity to generate a defensive field that can tear hostile vessels apart from gravitational sheer forces, in an artificially induced equivalent to an extreme tidal bulge. They are apparently extremely rare, only deployed to the most important strategic interests of the Empire. Takama-Ga-Hara is known to have several of these generators in its defensive perimeter.

### Offensive Strategic Armaments

Only three specific weapons are considered Offensive Strategic Weapons within the Draconian Empire. These are the Yomi Class Anti-Matter charge. An anti-matter nuclear bomb so incredibly powerful, it can destroy an entire solar system. The Wave Force Guns on select Imperial Battleships, Battlecruisers and the Daimyo Class Dreadnaught (which have never been used, not even in testing) and the Gamma-Pulse Cannons seen on Imperial Cruiser classes, and up.

#### Anti-Matter Weapons

Anti-Matter weapons are a type of nuclear weapon. They lack passive safety as they require full containment at all times, as any contact with any matter will result in instant detonation. For this reason, their deployment is limited to only a few weapons per capital ship, and they are never found on terrestrial bodies. Instead, planets are equipped with boosted yield fission devices. Anti-Matter weapons are extremely destructive, and the Yomi Class is the most powerful example of this power. The Empire holds a classified number of these warheads and on classified warships. There is speculation that they are carried only aboard prowlers which are infamous for their use of stealth nuclear mines, but there is no evidence to support that these ships are carriers for such weapons.

An Anti-Matter Weapon follows the conservation of energy, in a nuclear reaction that results in almost 99% energy efficiency. Because of the volatility of anti-matter as a fuel source, anti-matter is not used in Draconian Ship designs, which instead use fusion reactors with extremely high efficiencies. Some Imperial Dreadnaughts and Battleships however, make use of anti-matter injectors to provide emergency power in critical situations.

#### Gamma-Pulse Cannon

Seen on Battlecruisers, Battleships, Dreadnaughts, and some carriers, Gamma-Pulse weapons are incredibly powerful directed energy weapons that make use of a powerful tertiary fusion reactor that intentionally is designed to collapse its containment plasma into a critical mass, and then eject the superheated material through magnetic projectors. The simplest way to describe these weapons is as artificial supernova generators. They, like MAC cannons, are built into a ships superstructure, and thus require the entire ship to maneuver into a position to fire.

These weapons take considerable energy to fire and thus require ample support to provide cover while they maneuver into position and fire. These weapons can be arranged ventrally in addition to on the broadsides for planetary assault and excavation, but there has never been a recorded use of a ventral cannon used in anger by the Empire.

The weapons are extremely efficient and have a total energy measurement in the trillions of joules. No ship has ever been known to survive even a glancing blow from these weapons. Given their linear firing solutions however, they are possible to dodge.

Wave-Force Gun

These weapons have never once been fired or used by the Imperial Navy-even in testing. While hypothetical models and theoretical analysis of the weapons show that they will work, they have never been used against any foe. These weapons are extremely secret, and the technology that makes them properly function is a mystery to all but those with the highest of Imperial security clearances. What little is known is that the weapons are capable of exploiting aspects of the interaction between bosons at a quantum level to instigate a simulated/stimulated false vacuum decay of a localized region of space. At one point, it was theorized that such a collapse could happen at random and could result in the death of the universe as modern physics describes it, but a newer understanding of mathematical models has shown this to be impossible. It is however, possible to temporarily cause such a collapse to occur within a specific region of space, if the details of this weapon are to be believed. How this is possible is unknown. It is speculated that given the earlier assumptions of black holes being able to nucleate such events, and the Empire's understanding of quantum gravity and their use of manipulating such with Gravitons, that an artificial black hole may be created and used to trigger such an event-this may be how the weapon operates.

If all of this true, it would mean that a WFG weapon is capable of completely ignoring all aspects of conventional physics, and utterly annihilating a target. To put it simply, if such a weapon were to be used and the models were correct, its use would result in the destruction of a target at an atomic level. The Gluons that hold the quarks joining nuclear material together would decay, and the weak and strong nuclear forces would break down into something completely incoherent. To put it simply, the target wouldn't just be destroyed-it and the principles that made it real, would *cease to exist.*