Brain Dagger: Overview

A sniper rifle issued to Marksman Vanguards, packing a higher caliber than the Frostpick, more ammo variants, and mount points for advanced optics. With the right wind and conditions, a Marksman Vanguard can drop a target with the Brain Dagger from up to 3 or even 4km away.

I hate to burst your bubble after putting you through months of training with iron sights, but when it comes to serious marksmanship we insist that legionnaires use scopes and other optics. Not because I think the legionnaires in question lack skill, but because “serious marksmanship” means a target that’s over a kilometer away. If you told me to nail a target 2km away, with iron sights and without using my Nerve Harness, I’d rip your nuts/tits off for being an ignorant dickwad.
Even with the best eyesight, your target will be completely indistinct at the ranges we’re talking about.

Back in ye old early GDS days, our dedicated marksmen used a rifle called the AG-U “Scout”. It was a bolt action, .308 rifle used for long range killing and counter sniper operations. Anytime the protection detail for the Emperor of the Unified Empire would upgrade to the latest AG-U model we’d get the old, refurbished ones from the manufacturer. Gotta admit, they really didn’t have any issues that I can think of, and we could have comfortably kept using them if we’d ever figured out how to convert them into using PTT ammo.
After three test rifles exploded in the faces of numerous weapon lab techs, we abandoned that idea and set off to make our own.

I stuck around for this one’s development and it was actually pretty cool to watch.
First we started off with just a mechanical skeleton of the weapon, nothing but the barebones needed for a charged shell to send a .308 PTT round downrange, all mounted on frame. A lot of the tests at first were how the barrel held up to the pressure, what produced the best velocity, the best spin on the projectile, the best heat dispersion, just a whole lot of physics shit that I understand up until numbers are involved. We kept testing until the setup had a MOA at 1000 yards that wasn’t ass.

For our optics we had to really, reaaaaaally dig deep into the Science Legion for help. I severely underestimated how complex that shit can be, cause we needed something compact and lightweight while also allowing for intense magnification. When you start shooting past a kilometer, the scopes and optics start getting retardedly large to the point of being way too unwieldy. I think our first optic for the Brain Dagger cost around the same as manufacturing ten Frostpicks, which meant they were issued to specialists only or the legionnaire who wanted one had to pony up the cash themselves.

Given the power requirements to run the processors that cleared up image resolution, allowed magnification, and powered the built in ballistics calculator/range finder, it needed to be connected to the weapon’s charged shell. That required further engineering to allow power transfer from the chamber to the rail, and also dropped the total shot count, but eh, it’s a goddamn sniper rifle.
I tested out our first optics by sitting on top of the Mountshire office roof and using it to see how well I could check out activity across the city. At one point I was able to call Claire after she left a local tea shop that was 2km away and tell her she had a stray nose hair sticking out.

Weeks of work later we had our first Brain Dagger prototype for testing, and our marksmen were able to consistently hit the target’s center of mass over 4km away, usually through all manner of body armor. Though there was an issue where the power needed to send a three-o-hate round that far was producing harmful levels of recoil. Most of the marksman were developing bruises and abrasions from where the rifle’s buttstock had given them a thrashing after a handful of shots. This led to the Science Legion developing recoil bleeders, which just about every gun in GDS has due to how much oomph a charged shell puts behind a PTT or PSS shot. Recoil exhaust systems are the more extreme versions of the bleeders, but those didn’t come till later.

But lemme tell ya, my favorite part of the Brain Dagger is the ammo variant that it spawned.
I was talking to the engineering team about how we can ensure lethality from multiple kilometers away when one of them said “We could make the PTT rounds explode”.
Oh fuck me, that’s all I needed and wanted to hear.

I left them to it and a few days later I was brought in to give the new rounds a whirl. The target was a ballistics dummy they’d posted up a few kilometers away, and these were the fancy ones that had the sim organs and blood shoved inside. And because we like to make sure our weapons always go the extra step, the target was equipped with the highest level of body armor and head protection we had on hand. I think it was some Unified Kingdoms gear we’d found after they’d left one of their FOBs and forgot to clean up after themselves.

The rifle was already zeroed and had the sights adjusted for the range, so all I needed to do was land the shot. Took a second to get it all lined up, exhaled, and pulled the trigger.
A few seconds of flight later, I watched through a 10x scope in full detail as the dummy fucking exploded in a burst of plasmatic fire and gore.

I was lying prone and my legs still quivered.
_{No. Revise this. – Hansuke
Nahli, you make me sad with your choices. Every single day. – Iza}

- FrW Nahli Lok-Riveria