I posted something obscerd the other day while under the influence of sleep debt, and was told that I probably ought to give it its own thread. So, here we go... Names are based on some models of stellar evolution because I live for bad puns, and descriptions "borrow" increasingly heavily from the famous Turbo-Encabulator, by the not-so-famous John H. Quick. (If you don't know what the Turbo-Encabulator is, take precautions against sudden, violent laughter (be careful with those beverages!) and then view this video on youtube.)

"The Black Dwarf uses sweeping nycton beams to hungrily devour ambient warmth, light and unfortunate souls, providing ample power to drive an encabulating resonator. The resultant pulsed antigraviton radiation has enough potential to flash-freeze even the mightiest of monsters and beverages." (3-star weapon)

"The Neutron Strobe improves on the Black Dwarf's performance by the crudely conceived, yet effective expedient of using more of everything. The girdlespring now supports a third grammeter, resulting in a 50% increase in detraction throughput. Before consuming chilled beverages, consult the manual's intructions for calculating safe exposure limits." (4-star weapon)

"The Dark Star brings perfection to the concept by augmenting the turbo-accretive armature with a retro-perturbic Shannon oscillator, increasing depleneration efficiency beyond the Schwarzschild phase boundary. Exercise extreme care to avoid direct contact with any beverages when consuming." (5-star weapon)

It sounds like a giant capacitor bank charging and discharging with terrifying quantities of energy, set contrastingly against the deep hum of a big heavy transformer- I'm thinking the 60 to 200 Hz neighborhood. This cacophony cuts off abruptly at the end of the attack with an anticlimactic pop, like a tube burning out, and maybe a fizzle sound. The model needs three important features: Leyden Jar-looking doodads kinda like Alchemers, a big glowing purple coil or two, and shiny horn-like "cantenna" with central post as the "muzzle." Brassy colour is used rather than more modern steely colour.

I feel like I'm forgetting something... ah, right, what it actually does! It's an Autogun that sucks, since that functionality was replaced with pushing, and I'm apparently not the only one who misses the fantastic negative knock. It's also Shadow-damage and inflicts Freeze more or less like the Pepperbox inflicts Fire; because we have dearth of light and dearth of warmth as themes, it strikes me as odd that they're not combined. (An Iceburst Nightblade or Voidtech Alchemer would be nice, but something more unusual would be even nicer IMO, and the negative knock that the Autogun used to have is both unusual and thematically appropriate.)

That's not what's most distinctive about it, though; it's got base damage identical to the Pepperbox and Toxic Needle lines for the normal attack, but identical to the Blitz line for the charged attack. Like many of the most powerful weapons, it incorporates clockworks and Gremlin technology- specifically, the Catalyser's annihilation mechanic: the charge attack pulls a monster (or cluster of them) right into your face, but doesn't deal its damage right away! It also then puts you into a recovery animation that prevents shield-cancel for a long time in typical Autogun fashion, after which you must hit the target(s) with normal attacks to get that awesome Blitz-level charge damage. This cuts deeply into overall DPS due to not being able to constantly spam charges, but the normal attack's Freeze is probably more likely to come in handy than Pepperbox' Fire infliction, hopefully making the two attack modes feel more balanced in terms of usefulness. The big idea here, besides the annihilating opposites theme, is to make the weapon require more thought to use correctly than the other powerhouses like Blitz, Combuster, Pulseguns and such. I rather like how the new Shard Bombs are underwhelming for lone-wolfing it, but crazy effective when a party stacks a bunch of them, but don't like how constantly messy they are; a weapon with a more deliberate feel like BAB, Suda and that Blitz would be more my speed for a heavily coop-oriented weapon.