Rail Weapons
Lacking the materials required to manufacture gunpowder in the necessary quantities, firearms have not been prevalent since before the Great Cataclysm. In their place, Ketharians have developed a small array of magnetically powered rail weapons.
In most cases, these devices expel spinning discs that are propelled down a flat rail, using a sliding magnet. As ingenious as this invention has been, it comes with a few problems. First, the range of accuracy is fairly low.
An average, twohanded rail gun, firing a three-inch disc has an accurate range of about thirty feet. If you spend a little more, you can get your hands on a nicer system firing the same size disc and increase your range to fifty feet.
Another problem with these weapons is that, with most of the projectiles being discs, they’re essentially slicing weapons that experience difficulty penetrating armor. When fired on a stone wall, all you’re likely to get is a wrinkled and damaged disc, the wall suffers little to no damage. Not to mention, these discs also fail in an extreme drop in accuracy once they’ve passed their maximum accurate range.
Even with the nicer, fifty-foot range weapon mentioned above, at a range of fifty-five feet, you’re just as likely to hit a bystander as you are the person you are combating. The nature of the disc simply makes it an erratic and unreliable tool as soon as it loses too much speed. In other words, it won’t just tumble a little and fall, it will sway and waver as it falls.
Kern LRRG
Albeit uncommon, the Long-Range Rail Gun, known as the Kern LRRG (often spoken as lurg), is able to extend these problems out to an extreme range. A skilled marksman using a Kern LRRG can be accurate up to three-hundred-sixty feet. The erratic nature of the one-inch discs passing that range remains the same as with other disc-based rail weapons, and it’s still not effective against a stone wall, but most people ignore these negatives in deference to the incredible range.
This achievement in rail gun technology was made by, of all people, a Kern Clan jeweler named Kelle Interatte. By all accounts, she was a great jeweler even before trying her hand at the science of magnetically powered weaponry. Known far and wide for her expertise in crafting Starlight Gems, Kelle was drawn into creating a better rail gun by King Everett Kern.
King Kern became aware of her problem-solving prowess during a science and research exposition covering the light trapping processes of starlight gems. In the middle of her speech on Understanding the Importance of Time and Weather, an operator was experiencing difficulty with the image slide machine for her talk. She walked off of the stage, climbed the stairs in the back of the theatre, spent about ninety seconds disassembling then reassembling the slide machine to repair it, and returned to the stage without ever losing her place in her speech.
The King was so impressed by how confidently she held herself while performing multiple tasks, he went to speak with her immediately thereafter. The jeweler Kelle was intrigued by the offer to explore this problem and accepted on the spot. It didn’t hurt that she, along with everyone else in the kingdom, knew that war was just several years away.
Proving her genius, Kelle Interatte was able to improve the barrel rail gun design to create the LRRG. With specialized tools, she devised a way to improve the mechanical performance but was only able to double the range to one-hundred feet. When she used Ice Steel though, a steel forged from the Volcanic Iron of Yuck, her improvements were more than seven-fold.
While this deadly weapon has expressed an incredible advantage over its counterparts, in its success lies its problems. Unlike other weapons, there are less than thirty people on all of Kethar that know how to craft this weapon. The skill involved in creating a Kern LRRG is as extreme as the weapon itself. And the only place known to have volcanic iron is the northern wastes of Yuck.
The final problem means that an expert LRRG marksman always knows to keep other weapons with them; the nature of ice steel is that it wants to interfere with magnetic fields. Between each shot, a LRRG must be magnetically aligned to its magnets and ammo. This process usually takes at least twenty seconds.
All in all, this is an uncommon device that is difficult to make and source materials for. If you want a Kern LRRG, you are going to search hard and pay well for it.
