Artillery

There were two main forms of artillery used by the Calanthites near the time of their fracture: Bio-artillery, and Polar-artillery.

Bio-artillery was created by the Darwinists, and is typically comprised of a mix of animal, plant, and insect organs reinforced with various manufactured pieces designed to prevent the manufactured animal from crushing itself. This particular danger to Bio-artillery was due to its ability to shoot 5 ton loads of living ammunition at a speed of up to 2 km/s, leading to their slogan "Shatter the ground, Burn and Melt the skies; Bite the hand that feeds you", as when fired on the ground of a moon, bio-artillery is capable of crushing not only itself, but 20 meters of ground around it, causing a small crater in the surface, as well as an accompanying earthquake in the nearby area. Bio-artillery is generally used for inter-lunar fighting, but there have been notable examples of its uses in intra-lunar combat, one example of which being its use in the White-crested wars, where 273 bio-artillery were arranged in a line following the coast, and subsequently fired simultaneously, not only firing death on their enemy thousands of miles away, but creating a tidal wave that swallowed the invading army, pulling it down into the ocean where it was eaten. Bio-artillery and their ammunition are raised separately so as not to create feelings of attachment or affection between the pair, which has been known to cause technical difficulties. The goal of bio-artillery is power over speed or accuracy; a weapon that shoots a massive living organism into space that can only slightly guide or accelerate itself

Polar-artillery was created by the Prometheans, and is composed purely of magnetic and conductive materials. The main utilization of Promethean weaponry is guided inter-lunar attacks, opting for speed and accuracy over power, harnessing the ability to trap small pieces of human minds into software, creating ammunition that can think and predict, adapting to situations in order to kill most efficiently. This shard of mind can move its magnetic parts with electricity as if it were a brain, reorganizing its magnetic parts to alter direction and acceleration flexibly. A well known strategy is to fire many shots at once that share pieces of minds, allowing a slightly slower, but more linked connection between ammo, with different groups that more efficiently push each other towards targets, or the artificial magnetic asteroid belts created by the Prometheans to allow timed attacks, sometimes planned to strike hundreds of years in the future. The Polar-artillery itself is far less complex than the ammunition, being comprised of 2, 80 kilometer long magnets that allow for shots of 1 kg loads at 25 km/s. The artillery is unusable for intra-lunar attacks due to the unreasonably high velocity of its ammo.

Written by Treith Merindao