G-83 Laser Projector

Decades prior to the Great War, Kandron Materials designed and mass-produced the local sector’s first fully-functional handheld ‘death ray’ for the mass market. The G-83 Laser Projector became renowned for being precise, lethal and excruciatingly hot when fired for more than a few seconds. The G-83s that populate mercenary and pirate bands’ armouries today tend to be cheap knockoffs however; all it took was the leaking of one confidential blueprint to make it the most counterfeited laser weapon in the known galaxy and now every two-bit gunsmith with a budget is churning out imitations. With each year that passes, the G-83s available on the market seem to become more and more temperamental, inefficient and liable to melt in your hands.

The authentic G-83 is a portable firearm consisting of a gun and an energy pack connected by a cable. After a charging period, the gun emits a laser beam from the muzzle. Rapidly-rotating deflector blades form a spinning helical cone around the end of the barrel, tightening the blast helix and focussing the beam to amplify its intensity.

The operator can sustain the G-83’s beam by continuously supplying power until it overheats or the battery is drained. Using the weapon on heavily-armed targets is risky because the operator must maintain constant line of sight, opening them up to return fire. While this is not so much an issue against weakly-armoured infantry, energy shielding provides resistance against the thermal beam and requires sustained exposure to breach. A Laser Projector is therefore at its most effective when its operator has backup from allies with plasma-based weaponry that can disrupt shields.

Another major drawback of the Laser Projector is its limited effective range. The beam’s intensity dissipates the further it travels from the emitter, making it remarkably short-ranged compared to weapons of a similar size. To be effective, the operator must close the distance on their target, risking exposure to enemy fire. This is hampered by the length of the gun and the weight of the energy pack which both impair the operator's mobility.

The gun’s tendency to overheat is infamous and it is highly recognisable from the red-hot glow of the spinning blades and the belches of steam that emit from the energy pack’s exhaust. G-83s typically allow the operator to manually scale the intensity of the beam by adjusting the rotational speed of the deflectors. A high intensity beam will typically ignite or even vaporise the target while a low intensity beam will cook a dinner – a functionality that has become invaluable for mercenaries on long excursions.