WESTINGHOUSE MODEL M-25 PHASED PLASMA RIFLE

"He threw a glance up into the blasted spires of the collapsed building and saw a dark shape moving against the night sky; the H-K's turret.  Its searchlights swept down through the ruins.  Reese checked the "Pulse Remaining" level on his Westinghouse M-25.  The rifle had only one plasma pulse left.  Take a shot.  Blind the son of a bitch.  Resse aimed up at its eyes, the infrared lenses of the gun mount.

Reese flipped up the rifle's flexy sight -Oh, shit, faster, faster- stared into the CRT scope- Move, Goddamnit, move- and squeezed off a burst of high-energy plasma.

The H-K's ultra-high sensitive lens exploded into a shower of glass and melted microchips.

Then the gleaming black monster fired.

Reese and Ferro dove out of the building as the H-K vaporized what was left of it.  But Reese had blinded it on one side.  Good.  And now I'm gonna kill you, he thought."
 

-Frakes and Wisher, THE TERMINATOR

HISTORY:

When SKYNET leveled the world, personal energy weapons were still on the drawing boards of the Americans, the Russians and the Chinese.  It wasn't a matter of "if" so much as it was a matter of "when."  Though no standing First World army had any examples of these weapons in their arsenals, they were on the drawing boards and at least America had two working prototypes in development, Russia wasn't far behind and China was trying its best to steal either of the other two countries designs since its own designs were still lagging behind.  Most scientists agreed that the first working field issue prototypes would probably appear within the next two decades, give or take a handful of years either way.  The unexpected destruction of most of the human race, of course, stalled any further development of these types of weapons and, except for the American designs, destroyed the research and development facilities where these advanced weapons were being tested.  The American High Energy Testing Center (HETC) at White Sands survived the exchange with little damage, thanks in part to SKYNET's protection of what it considered a critical and core asset of its future expansion ability.

SKYNET was very careful in its initial exchange to destroy what it could of anything that could be used against it, namely strategic assets (long range missiles, ICBMs, big nukes and any orbital weapon systems) as well as the theoretical and practical technology centers of the Russians and the Chinese.  The fact that most of these centers were located near large civilian and industrial complexes made collateral damage to those secondary targets an added consideration.  The return exchange from Russia and the very limited exchange from China wrecked wide spread devastation over American population centers but for the most part spared not only those areas that had been key in the construction of SKYNET but also those areas which could quickly be brought back online after the exchange.  SKYNET protected its assets with ballistic interceptors and its own emplaced, high energy weapons both ground mounted at Cheyenne Mountain and in orbit above (part of the overall SDI project).  This allowed SKYNET to recover a large amount of military industrialization in the years immediately following the exchange, industrialization that SKYNET used to quickly produce a large standing military force and furthermore to equip that force with the best weapons and defenses ever devised.  SKYNET's rapid spool up to an automated industrial conglomerate was key to its plans and tantamount to the early critical successes that SKYNET enjoyed in the first decade after the War.

SKYNET, as part of its core operations, had been programmed with all the theory, research, application and science of American designed personal high energy weapons and it continued to develop this chain of technology as rapidly as it could, realizing the potential advantage.  As SKYNET learned and developed at an incredible rate, so did it's ability to research and develop practical as well as theoretical technologies.  Three years of research into magnetic fields allowed SKYNET to produce smaller and smaller magnetic bottles for the containment of plasma reactions.  This led directly to the advent and introduction of the first infantry-class high energy weapons.

The first truly portable infantry-class personal high energy weapon, the M-25A1 phased plasma rifle, was developed at the Tulsa, Oklahoma Westinghouse automated macro-assembly plant in 2008 A.D. by SKYNET using automated production routines.  The weapon was considered acceptable, at the time, for use by SKYNET's ground forces and mass production began in late 2008 A.D.

The operation of the M-25A1 plasma weapon was simple. A magazine held a power cell and a small amount of refined hydrogen fuel. When the trigger (firing actuator) was pulled, both hydrogen and energy were siphoned off from the magazine and fed into their respective parts of the weapon. The hydrogen was injected into a magnetic bottle where it was compressed by powerful magnetic fields. The siphoned energy from the magazine powered a rapid flex high energy pulse laser to nearly instantaneously superheat the compressed hydrogen to a highly volatile, excited plasma state, producing an ionized gas with a temperature of several thousand degrees. The magnetic bottle was then opened on the 'barrel' end and a series of staged magnetic fields both guided and accelerated the superheated plasma bolt down the barrel.  A high intensity infra-red pilot laser in the weapon vaporized a line of sight path through the atmosphere to the target a microsecond before the actual bolt was produced, resulting in less atmospheric diffraction of the bolt and tighter cohesion of the plasma packet.  The plasma bolt followed the pilot laser beam at a muzzle velocity in excess of 8500 meters per second, packing a considerable amount of kinetic energy as well as thermal energy upon impact.  With the trigger held down, this routine happened several times a second, allowing rates of fire equal to the best large caliber automatic rifles.  Excess temperature was a problem, and full automatic fire often resulted in overheating and premature weapon shutdown, with some extreme cases resulting in weapon damage or even catastrophic detonation of the fuel cell on weapons with low serial numbers and early batch production codes.  Cyclic fire selectors were built into the design, allowing for single shots or short bursts and offered the weapon time to cool to safe operating temperatures in part to .  Heavier weapons were built with integral cooling systems and thus were capable of higher rates of sustained fire.

Armor was easily penetrated by the super hot plasma bolt which could burn its way through more than a half meter of case hardened steel (one quarter meter of composite laminate) in an instant. Organic targets struck by the bolt suffered severe kinetic damage from the hyper velocity impact of the semi-solid bolt as well as massive collateral and thermal damage from rapid fluid expansion, bolt dispersion and subsequent plasma splash over. The high temperature plasma effected super heating of standing body fluids, resulting in massive steam explosions which could explode apart a living person or neatly amputate and cauterize a limb. Near misses produced horrible third degree burns.  A close hit against a more substantial material (such as armor plate or a concrete wall) produced a 'splatter' effect where some of the plasma became deadly, high speed super hot fragments. Modern personal body armor (Kevlar) proved to be useless as protection against phased plasma weapons with heavy vehicular composite armor such as Chobham and other late development laminates providing largely diminished and only somewhat effective protection.

Weighing in at only a kilo more than the standard issue American M16A2 5.56mm assault rifle, the M-25 was housed in a polymer one piece stock, in a compact bullpup configuration. The magazine (battery and fuel cell) for the M-25 was only slightly twice the weight of a standard 30 round M16 magazine.  In 2011 A.D., the M-25A1 was supplemented by the M-25A2, a product improved model with slightly longer range and superior cooling capacity.  By 2012 A.D., the M-25A1 phased plasma rifle began showing up in the hands of armed human resistance.  Several shipments of M-25A1 rifles, produced at the Westinghouse macro-plant, were hijacked by coordinated human elements early in 2013 A.D.  These weapons were then used against SKYNET's forces in a variety of operational theaters and priority fronts in the Midwestern United States.

Examples of the M-25A1 were smuggled out by Australian and Japanese mercenaries in late 2015 A. D. and the Heckler and Koch plant at Sydney, Australia began producing (and distributing) a much better phased plasma rifle, the H&K GP32, in 2019 A.D.  Several lots of GP32 weapons found their way back into America from smugglers entering the West Coast, the deep South and coming up through the Mexican / United States border between 2019 A.D. and 2026 A.D.  SKYNET's capture of several H&K GP32 units (in varying states of functionality) from resistance elements led to its development of the larger, heavier M95 series phased plasma rifle.

Throughout the War, from 2013 A. D. until the destruction of SKYNET in 2029 A.D., the M-25A1 (and later the A2) variants formed the mainstay of human weapons put into use against the Machines.  Human modifications to the M-25A1 and A2 series included reworking the upper stock for the addition of various mechanical and digital vision enhancement devices (most notably the TI M12 described below) as well as using a clip to hold an extra magazine to the side of the magazine already inserted (thus allowing for quick change during combat by dropping the spent magazine, flipping it in your hand then slamming the fresh magazine back into the weapon) and the inclusion of fore and aft swivels for combat slings.  Some resistance fighters mounted flashlights or infra-red spots under the fore grip of their weapons, especially veterans with some years of experience in the field.

WESTINGHOUSE M25A1 PHASED PLASMA RIFLE
SHOWN WITH FLEXY SIGHT ATTACHED

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