Starship Weapons

# Offensive Systems:

* Weapon Batteries: Weapons batteries usually are the primary armament for most Imperial warships. Since each battery consists of numerous ranks of individual weapons, whole sections of the starship's hull can be covered by gun ports, launcher systems, turrets and weapon housings.
* Macro Weaponry: Macro weaponry serves as the baseline starship weapons for Imperial warships. Ranks of large cannons or other weapons destroy their targets through powerful broadsides and volumes of fire.
	+ Macrocannon: This Macrocannon variant fires a "shell" of highly-charged, ionized deuterium atoms. These particles cause minimal physical damage to their targets. Instead, they are intended to overload and shut down power transfer systems throughout the target vessels. These weapons are particularly useful for vessels that need to capture their prey intact.
	+ Plasmor Battery: The Plasmor Battery is an ancient variant of plasma macro weaponry that refocuses the power of the plasma "blast," concentrating it into a compressed photonic packet that can be fired over extremely long distances.
	+ Bombardment Cannon: These devastating weapons are designed to reduce planetary defenses to rubble and support military landings. Most often they use linear accelerators to launch massed salvoes of heavy magma bomb warheads, and though relatively short-ranged, these can also be used in naval combat. Often the rumor that orbiting vessels carry them is enough to force a quick surrender.
* Lancers: Lancers are Imperial designed energy weapons of extreme power. A Lance battery is, in essence, a titanic Lasgun, usually mounted in a large and heavily armored turret. Thanks to the available energy from the ship's Arc-Reactor, a Lance can fire prolonged bursts instead of the short "shots" of man-portable las-weapons. Often, a bright shaft of coherent light connects the weapon to its target, hence the name "Lance". Lances use triple or even quad-arranged energy projectors to focus their energy into a concentrated beam, capable of burning through even the most heavily armored hulls and cutting smaller vessels in half. Lance batteries can be used to either apply sustained firepower to one precise location of a target, or, by slightly moving the projector, "rake" across its target. Multiple batteries often combine these two firing modes, in the hope of overwhelming their target's Void Shields and inflicting massive damage.
* Torpedos: Torpedoes are massive self-propelled ship-to-ship missiles. While expensive to maintain, these weapons possess considerable destructive potential, and many captains use an enemy's tendency to avoid torpedoes to dominate a battle, forcing enemies to move in particular directions.

The most common forms of torpedo are over 60 meters long(on Cruisers), 200 meters long(on Grand Cruisers) and 300 meters long(on Battleships) and contain both a powerful warhead and a short-lived arc-reactor similar to, but less stable than those used by starships and Titans. Each torpedo is built to accelerate quickly from its launching tube into the void, hurtling in a straight line towards the enemy.

* Plasmor Warheads: These explosives are the standard armament for Imperial torpedoes. They are designed to blast through a starship's armored hull, using their high speed to punch deep into the target vessel. The Plasmor-Reactor that powers a torpedo's drive forces it deep into the bowels of the ship and then overloads, contributing to the fury of the warhead's detonation. This reduces complexity, making their manufacture simple. Thus, these torpedoes are often a staple of Imperial Navy warships.
* Mollific Warheads: These weapons are even more feared by starship captains than standard torpedoes. Mercifully rare and extremely brutal, Mollific Warheads detonate a precisely-organized series of Mollific charges upon impact with a target, burning through hull plating and consuming sections of the vessel's interior in a roiling conflagration.
* Virus Warheads: In cases when a vessel must be captured intact, but the target's crew are considered expendable, Virus Warheads are seen as an ideal solution. Pirates more interested in inert cargo, salvage, and the possibility of expanding their fleet lust after these rare and unstable armaments.
* Vortex Warheads: Only a few Forge Worlds still maintain the technological craftsmanship to manufacture these rare weapons. The Vortex Warhead is not a crude explosive charge, but an arcane device that tears open a rent in the very fabric of reality, consigning vast chunks of its target to the Void. The swirling energy within this tear in the fabric of reality immediately draws all matter in its blast radius through it, leaving gaping wounds in the target vessel. When attacked by these torpedoes, word of these horrifying weapons spreads like wildfire through target crews.
* Boarding Warheads: More manned spacecraft than torpedo, these torpedoes fulfill a comparable role to that of assault boats. However, boarding torpedoes are less maneuverable and less armored than assault sleds. To offset these flaws, they are also much smaller targets. The crews of a boarding torpedo are able to make minor adjustments to the torpedo's flight path.

* Nova Cannon: Nova Cannons are a classification of exceptionally powerful weaponry that can only be mounted upon capital ships. These extremely powerful weapons can easily wreak vast destruction upon enemy vessels at great range, but are inaccurate and require a stable vessel to fire effectively.

Mounted upon the heavily armored prows of Imperial Navy Cruisers and Battleships, Nova Cannons have few equals in terms of their range or destructive power. While variations exist, a typical Nova Cannon consists of an array of potent gravimetric impellers designed to accelerate a projectile to a fraction of the speed of light. Due to the lethal nature of their warheads, Nova Cannon shells are not armed for a fraction of a second after firing, allowing them to travel many tens of thousands of kilometers through the void before they become truly deadly.

# Defense Systems:

* Defensive Weapon Batteries: Every Imperial Navy vessel is covered with defensive turrets that fire kinetic projectiles or energy pulses that are designed specifically to destroy incoming bombers and torpedoes.
* Void Shielding: Void Shields are protective barriers of gravitic or electrically-charged energy that allow all starships to survive the hostile environment that is the vacuum of space. Shields form an invisible band of energy around the vessel, a variable layer of force that can absorb radiation, interstellar dust, particle showers and weapons hits. Shields have a maximum tolerance and can be overloaded by sustained weapons fire, forcing the generators to shut down temporarily to vent the excess kinetic or direct energy.
* Propulsor Systems: Every Imperial starship is equipped with a Arc-based Plasma Drive for normal propulsion through the depths of space. Running up to a third of the starship's length, the aft section is a mass of drive tubes, engine compartments and plasma reactors. Most Imperial Navy warships employ Void-Drives to breach the barrier that separates realspace from the Over-Void and allow for interstellar travel.
* Armor: All spacefaring vessels are equipped with a certain amount of physical armor, capable of deflecting direct weapon fire upon the starship's hull. The strength and thickness of the armor can vary depending on the starship's size and type, A tiny Escort ship will have a ribbed outer hull maybe a few feet thick or less, while an 20-Kilometer-long Imperial Battleship will have four separate, heavily reinforced Adamantine hull layers, with a total thickness of dozens of meters.