Surgeon’s Hammer: Overview

Fires a blade of plasmatic wreathed allog, allowing it to shred through armor and proactive gear with ease, compromising any structural integrity in the process. This sidearm is often employed by legionnaires who find themselves up against heavily armored enemies such as drones or mechs.

PTT bullets gnaw through armor as is, but the weapons lab wanted to see if they could make an anti-armor handgun without it being a total wrist snapper.

I wasn’t there, so I’m gonna throw some assumptions into the mix given what we got as an end result. See, PTT rounds will zip through armor without a care in the world but that only matters if you can hit something vital. Let’s say you pop a 7.62 PTT round through someone’s ballistic vest, does that mean they’re dead? Nah, you could nail their torso in such a way that it misses every vital organ, artery, bone, and nerve. And since PTT rounds have penetration power out the ass, the exit wound isn’t going to be as traumatic than if you’d ripped into them with a .45 FMJ. Remember that PTT wounds cauterize, so you gotta ensure you hit a crucial spot to make the most of it.
They won’t bleed out as fast, but there’s no fixing someone’s lung or guts getting ignited.

Now back to the Surgeon’s Hammer, I think the idea wasn’t “Can it penetrate armor”? It was more like “Can it penetrate armor, and destroy it along the way”? It isn’t enough to slash through someone’s vest, I want it to be compromised to the point that it’s useless. Here’s yer thought experimentation, imagine a wooden shield.
_{“Thought experimentation”? – Iza
You can visualize objects in your mind? – Dr. Baddarick
“Yer”? – Ye-Jun}

What most people fail to realize is that wooden shields are disposable, cause if someone hits that thing with an axe its gonna splinter and shatter to shit. Now you’ve got a useless bundle of shredded wood hanging from your arm.
A Surgeon’s Hammer does that but with bulletproof vests and armor.

Took an hour or so, but I sorted through all the reports and shit that the weapons lab wrote up for this thing and it’s preeeetty cool in my books. The allog blade it shoots has a flare to its shape that makes the whole thing act like a sledge in a log, just absolutely breaks apart the integrity of whatever it hits. In one of their tests they managed to split a 10 centimeter thick bulletproof shield right down the middle with two shots, and you gotta remember that the blades this thing shoots are the size of your thumb.
Which kinda made me wonder what the point of “armor breaking” was when the shot that breaks the armor simultaneously turns the target’s internal organs into powder. Seems redundant.

A bit more reading tells me that I’m right, since a Surgeon’s Hammer isn’t really meant to be used like a standard issue sidearm; it’s designed to engage armored exosuits, armored vehicles, and destroy protective cover in a way that opens it up for further punishment.
You could be rocking a 15-centimeter-thick ceramic armor plate over your chest, and a Surgeon’s Hammer will crack that right open so someone can land another shot right through the heart. Same deal with vehicles, crack open the armor that protects the ammo vault or engine to make it easier to disable.

These found a lot of use in the Celestial Throne against anything that had a carapace like a cliff face. Normal PTT rounds would embed into the creature’s armor but not go all the way through. A Surgeon’s Hammer would split that apart real damn quick, letting everyone else mag dump into the enemy’s joints or organs. Also works wonders versus anything sentient that’s packing combat armor made out of materials we never even knew existed, cause a high velocity plasmatic sledge doesn’t really care what it hits.

Once saw footage of a Vanguard using a Surgeon’s Hammer on a sniper that was held up behind a concrete wall. Crumbled the entire thing right on top of the sniper’s head.
Spent the entire video wondering how the fuck that guy got his hands on a Surgeon’s Hammer in the first place.

-FrW Nahli Lok-Riveria