Magnate War Arcana

It all looked so easy on the napkin.

Cornucopia

The idea was simple: miniaturised, accelerated fabricators based on velan nanotechnology. The next generation of production that would transform the logistics situation. The cornucopia project was the darling of the Special Solutions Committee from 2174 until 2176, when it was admitted that nobody had the faintest idea how to achieve any of the technical specifications.

Dronebombs

If a drone were immobilised using electromagnetic clamps and then launched into enemy asteroid fortresses, it could then proceed to infest the asteroid and render the location unsustainable. After the seventh clamp design failed to produce anything more than a very angry drone, the project was sidelined.

Gangur Project

During the darkest days of the war on Sarreva it was proposed to deploy a gene-select bioweapon targeted at Dawn replicas. The project was shot down before feasibility studies were concluded due to superior Magnate biotechnology and leadership unwillingness to deploy a potentially unstoppable plague.

Operation Hamelin

A scheme to beleaguer Magnate shipping by leading a hybrid drone swarm behind their lines with false codes. The fleet despatched to Faery reported initial success, but two days in the apparently docile drones surrounding the test ships suddenly executed a pincer attack, having 'drifted' into ideal positions for the manoeuvre. The ships were lost with all hands and the remote observer barely escaped intact. The existence of Operation Hamelin is still denied by authorities.

Nova Cannon

Advances in the theory of plasma weaponry suggested that extremely large increases in bore size and field intensity could deliver greatly improved range and power density. The plasma of such a weapon would be intense enough to generate trans-ferric elements in the manner of a stellar explosion, hence the name 'nova cannon'. It was abandoned over concerns about the feasibility of sufficiently strong and precisely controlled magnetic bottles, or of shielding that could prevent the fusion reaction destroying the vessel, not to mention the lack of a solid tactical rationale for such an unwieldy weapon.

Operation Perseus

A scheme to defeat Solomon's space defences using giant mirrors. Quietly cancelled after the Solomoni consulate mailed a complete copy of the latest project report to the SSC before they received the original from the project proper.

Primary Beam

Ingenious use of divergent magnetic fields and delta-matrix jacketing promised to solve the problem of long-range firepower in space, by creating laser weapons with an order of magnitude more power at the cost of destruction of the lasing element. The project was shelved after all test models suffered, in the words of the report, 'unacceptable loss of directional specificity', taking much of the laboratory with them.

Sunbeam

An imaginative proposal to force stellar plasma to output gamma-range lasers using giant magnetic field projectors. Unfortunately no techniques to induce a star to lase were ever discovered.