Lance

The Lance family of weapons is one of the primary heavy armaments of capital ships of the Union Armada.

Description
The Lance is a large warship mounted weapon whose origins have long since been lost to the sands of time. The Lance empties banks of supercapacitors into a specially manufactured “ignition pellet” to trigger a powerful but controlled fusion reaction in a magnetic focusing chamber. The focusing chamber directs the resulting blast of hard X-rays, gamma rays, and high energy particles through the barrel of the Lance and out towards the enemy.

The result of this is a lethal luminal beam that shatters shield matrices, deflagrates armor belts, and burns lesser ships to ashes and dust. The high-damage output and long reload time of Lance weapons mean that they, like most capital-grade weapons, fire in volleys punctuated by charging times rather than in continuous bursts.

Over the course of the Sapient Proliferation, the designs for the Lance have been acquired by disparate nations and the venerable weapon has been sighted on the hulls of warships of a dozen different navies.

Various patterns of the Lance exist, each fine-tuned to fit one purpose or another. The 23L7 “Dazzle” Disruption Lance leaves its victims vulnerable to attacks upon its armor as its shield matrices fight to seal the breaches opened up by the static-gray Disruption beams. The 23L86 “Cone Snail” Radium Lance channels and directs fast neutrons from fusion sources with neutron reflector mirrors to irradiate prospective targets, weakening materials and melting the skins and bones of unprotected victims. Though ethically controversial, the Radium Lance remains in the arsenals of a few states. The 23L51 “Squash” Electron Lance generates a beam of relativistic electrons that, upon impact against shields or armor, spallates into a storm of Bremsstrahlung x-rays that will irradiate anyone unfortunate enough to not be behind more shields or armor.

These and many other patterns make up the sea of Lance types available to the navies of the Local Cluster. Of these patterns, however, only one succeeded in becoming as ubiquitous as its predecessor.

23L15 "Solar Lance"
The Solar Lance, conceptualized near the end of the 2nd Solar Crusade, designed during the interwar period, and put into mass production shortly before the start of the 3rd Solar Crusade, is the equivalent of a heavy Lance. It consumes significantly more power than a standard Lance but releases the additional energy in golden beams that immolate armor into plasma and flay shields into storms of energy feedback. The Solar Lance has two major sub-patterns: the Flare pattern makes use of a triple barrel setup while the Ejection pattern mounts a quadruple barrel setup on one turret. The Solar Ejection pattern Lance consumes a prodigious amount of energy and the installation of such a weapon comes at the cost of other weapons removed to free up power. As with its predecessor, the Solar Lance has its own family of other sub-patterns each designed for a specific purpose.

23L1P "Pulsar Lance"
The conceptualization of the alpha strike also led to the development of even larger Lance weapons. The strategists and tacticians who conceived the alpha strike believed that, in order to complement the alpha strike, certain super-capitals should be outfitted with super-heavy Lance weapons (or equivalent) of a far greater magnitude of power than the largest of Solar Lances. Such a theoretical Lance weapon will deliver a devastating opening strike against the enemy at long range. Such an idea quickly gained traction with the higher echelons of the Armada whose fixation on ever larger weapons fit with the theories on the spinal Lance. With the eventual approval of the Executive Council and the political support of the Armada Marshals, MoD DSI issued calls to various defense sector companies for credible proposals and prototypes for a super-heavy Lance weapon and promising military contracts to the group whose proposal and prototype are accepted by the MoD.

The 23L1P Pulsar Lance, derived from a submission from Martian Directed Energy, is a spine-mounted supersized Lance weapon of incredible power usage and similarly incredible destruction. It is named after the powerful electromagnetic beams generated by rotating neutron stars that irradiate unfortunate neighbors, alluding to its power relative to lesser patterns of Lances. Its design is deceptively simple for a device of its size; it operates on mechanisms identical to those of the generic Lance but is orders of magnitudes larger than its predecessors. Huge towers of supercapacitors and batteries, each larger than entire Solar Lances, circle the Pulsar Lance’s focusing chamber and siphon torrents of charge from the primary reactors of the warship in question. When the firing sequence is carried out, the combined charge of the towers are dumped into the focusing chamber alongside large quantities of fuel to trigger a yellow-white eruption of plasma and radiation directed forward towards whatever is in its way.

The act of actively charging the capacitor towers of a Pulsar Lance at full speed draws usable energy from other systems, noticeably reducing the combat capacity of the ship wielding the Pulsar Lance. Even at full charge speed, the Pulsar Lance requires significant time to be brought up to fire-ready status and longer for maximum power. Armada naval doctrine thus calls for pre-charging of the towers before an expected battle against an adversary of near or greater tonnage in order to allow for a greater alpha strike against the enemy. However, some captains may still order charging of the Pulsar Lance even in the midst of a slugging match with opposing super-capitals. A full discharge of a Pulsar Lance can cripple a super-capital, atomize lesser ships, and deliver significant devastation to space stations and attack moons - an amount of firepower that might be able to turn the tide of a battle, an amount that may be worth the reduced damage output during the charging phase.

Due to the significant effort required to equip older dreadnoughts with Pulsar Lances, owing to the mass restructuring required to free up space for the spinal weapon, and the high economic and logistical cost of constructing and maintaining Pulsar Lances, only a small portion of newer dreadnought patterns are equipped with Pulsar Lances. These dreadnoughts usually serve as the lead ships of their respective divisions, privileged with more numerous escorts and tasked with the purpose of delivering lethal opening alpha strikes against near peer adversaries.

23L1Q "Quasar Lance"
The 23L1Q Quasar Lance, a successor of the Pulsar Lance developed over decades of gradual improvement, is greater in magnitude than the Pulsar Lance in every field - hitting harder and farther while draining more power and costing more to construct and maintain. Following the naming convention of the Pulsar Lance, the Quasar Lance is named after the electromagnetic storms around active galactic nuclei that sterilize any and all life unfortunate to exist within many light-years of the nuclei without protection.

Its creation was spurred by the Armada Marshals, who saw the increasingly large and chaotic battles of the later Solar Crusades as indication that the Pulsar Lance was no longer sufficient. However, Pulsar Lances are already pushing the limit of what can be fitted in a dreadnought. Any significant upgunning of the Pulsar Lance will require a corresponding increase in size, support equipment count, and logistical trail. Installing such a weapon within a conventional dreadnought pattern will lead to an unacceptable drop in conventional combat capacity.

Due to the logistical limitations, Quasar Lances are deployed sparingly on the small number of attack moons and select Terminus dreadnoughts fielded by the Armada. The former contains sufficient volume to contain the additional support elements of the Quasar Lance and still maintain a tolerable conventional armament while the latter are flagships of the Armada and thus are equipped with both more powerful weapons and more capable support modules compared to the line and file.

Its capacity for devastation matches a weapon of its logistical footprint; a full charge direct hit from its blinding white beam is lethal to nothing less than an attack moon and only well established planetary shield networks can survive a Quasar Lance hit without falling. Despite the usage of larger hulls to contain its support modules, however, super-capitals equipped with the Quasar Lance still suffer from firepower drops when charging the weapon at full speed. This, alongside the longer charging time, relegates Quasar Lance equipped units to using their superweapon in their opening salvo to immediately neutralize one or more enemy high value targets.

23L1B "Blazar Lance"
The final evolution of Lance weapons was created by the desires of a few to create the ultimate wunderwaffe of directed energy weapons.

The 23L1B Blazar Lance started as a paper weapon, a device only discussed in documents, due to the impracticality of such a weapon. The conclusion of various DSI experts puts the construction of a Blazar Lance as a supremely expensive undertaking, an effort that would equal that of building entire dreadnoughts. These experts know of no problem that the Blazar Lance can solve that cannot be also solved by several Pulsar Lances, and thus the weapon was deemed by most as nothing more than a fanciful thought experiment.

However, despite these issues, the few voices urging for the creation of a Blazar Lance as a proof of concept received significant support from higher powers. Though the official documents provide no additional information, an unknown number of Council Envoys placed their implicit or explicit support behind the motion to construct a Blazar Lance. The motion was fast-tracked through the Ministry of Defense’s procurement system, superseding several other projects in resource allocation priority. The planning and execution of the Special Project established to create the weapon occurred during the height of the interwar peace between the 11th and 12th Solar Crusades, and its first and only produced unit saw battle in the latter conflict.

The Blazar Lance’s name, following the naming convention of previous Lance weapons, references the luminal jets of energy ejected by supermassive black holes at the center of active galactic nuclei. The Blazar Lance takes the concept of a spinal Lance weapon to its logical conclusion by disregarding cost and logistics and min-maxing for pure destructive power. Its capacity to threaten anything and everything that either the Union or the Accord can field in battle is offset by the immense logistical trail required to maintain and operate it and the incredible (even for Terminus dreadnoughts and attack moons) amounts of energy required to power it.

Due to the extreme cost of constructing such a weapon, only one Blazar Lance has been produced. The sole example, serving as a proof of concept, is currently installed within the Empire’s Shadow, a Terminus dreadnought operated by the Armada and modified to allow it to wield this wonder weapon. This modification allows the Empire’s Shadow to wield the Blazar Lance as a lesser ship would a Pulsar Lance, with the downside that it is comparatively weaker to standard Terminus dreadnoughts in terms of conventional weapons.

Naval Doctrine
See Also: Alpha strike, All or nothing (weapons)

Standard and Solar patterns Lances are the longest ranged, fastest acting, and most powerful direct fire weapons on Armada warships capable of containing them, striking first against the enemy while other weapons are either out of range or still in transit due to much slower payloads. Due to these tactical advantages that Lances provide over other weapons, entire portions of Armada naval doctrine have been built around offensive or defensive usage of the Lance.

The “All or Nothing” armament scheme is a method of Armada warship armament, especially those of the super-capital tonnage class (colloquially known to most as battleships and dreadnoughts), where the warship in question is equipped with uniform main batteries of (Solar) Lance (or equivalent) weapons, secondary area defense missile arrays, terminal CIWS / C-RAM point defense batteries, and no medium size weapons of any type. Armada doctrine requires all super-capitals in active service to deploy with a sizable contingent of escorts at all times; it is thus believed that secondary batteries of medium tonnage weapons will be made obsolete by the cruisers and destroyers accompanying the super-capital into battle. The new super-capital under the all-or-nothing armament scheme is an ironclad beast intended to duel with other battleships while its escorts screen against torpedo boats, destroyers, and strike craft that might endanger the super-capital by outrunning the slow traverse speed of most capital grade turrets.

Complementing the all or nothing armament scheme is the alpha strike, conceived during the interwar period between the 3rd and 4th Solar Crusades, whereby a formation of ships fire their weapons in such a way that their target(s) will be hit by a mass of attacks in a short window of time. The standardized capital weapons of the all or nothing scheme simplifies fire control calculations and allows for alpha strikes of uniform weapons instead of disorganized bursts of weapons of varying metrics.