Flashfire Systems

Flashfire Systems is a Human engineering firm and weapon mount manufacturer headquartered on Angeli in the Croshaw system. Founded in 2904 as a laser weapons manufacturer, Flashfire nearly went bankrupt after its line of standard lasers failed to gain traction in the market. The company redirected its manufacturing efforts to universally usable weapon mounts after it was purchased by Garvin Snarm.

History

Flashfire began as a clone weapons company. The original Flashfire, Inc. had nothing to do with Snarm or his innovation. It was one of a number of failing laser corporations unable to find market share in the heavily segmented ship component industry. Flashfire Inc.'s weapons lineup was unremarkable, consisting of a variety of standard lasers rebadged with more exciting names such as the "Flashfire Fusion Cannon" and the "Flashfire Atom Gun".

Despite the whimsical nomenclature and similar packaging for its guns, the Flashfire lineup failed to stand out in any way. What the company did have, in addition to crippling debt, were manufacturing facilities. Armed with venture capital for his idea, Snarm purchased Flashfire in its entirety, canceled all weapons development, and devoted both of his new factories to manufacturing the attachment device. Within six months, those two factories had become four, and today nearly every sufficiently industrialized world has at least one facility building mounts. Flashfire mounts were initially sold as aftermarket upgrades, but by the mid 2930s first-party manufacturers had begun including them as standard with weapon and ship designs.

Impact

Before 2904, every private spacecraft had to carry its own line of weapons and upgrade modules. The laser cannons built for a Roberts Space Industries ship could not mount on an MISC transport, the missiles designed for an Anvil dogfighter could not load on an Aegis bomber, and so on. The result was expense and confusion for all parties. Military organizations dealt with ever-expanding supply chains as they attempted to field increasingly advanced spacecraft, while the civilian market was heavily balkanized. Warehouses overflowed with ship-specific parts that each sold to only a small sector of the market.

This also meant that manufacturers had nearly complete control over their upgrade options. MISC and its suppliers could charge ten times the ostensible market value, knowing that transport pilots had no other option besides purchasing another designer's spacecraft and starting anew. Occasionally, a particularly successful spacecraft such as the 2822 Nova gave rise to third-party designers who manufactured clone technology, but even then the result was generally an influx of shoddy, unsupported mounts and munitions that largely argued in favor of paying the premium for manufacturer-specific pieces.

Flashfire changed that situation. In a corporate success story, businessman Garvin Snarm saw an opening and created a product so seemingly simple that it transformed the ship upgrade market: an adapter that allowed almost any weapon to mount to any spacecraft. The power shifted to consumers. Starship captains and freighter pilots could, with Flashfire's inexpensive upgrade option, choose from a wide range of mounts instead of the single choice their manufacturer intended. Competing weapons manufacturers quickly appeared, and the resulting "gun rush" gave rise to significant advancements in laser and ballistics technologies.

The technology

Nicknamed "The Puck" by spacecraft engineers, Flashfire's innovation is a silicon-brickrete molded disc that lock-seals on both sides. The addition of extremely motile brickrete means that both attach points are fully malleable. Almost clay-like to the touch when not in use, the puck adapts to the weapon shape and then atomically locks itself into place when energized.

Physically locking the gun to the ship was only half of the equation. The greater difficulty, and in turn the central innovation of the Flashfire system, came from the ability to transfer highly variable amounts of data, energy, and other materials from the hull to the weapon. The solution is a network of organically generated nano-tubules capable of transferring everything from onboard battery energy to trigger-fire commands from the host ship. Heavily patented by Flashfire, no other corporation has been able to match the flexibility or the durability of the FWM system.

Flashfire mounts are limited by size only. The company manufactures 85 different varieties of mounts, used for everything from the smallest mining laser attachment to the large batteries of UEE capital ships. Flashfire pucks are constructed for every class of weapons mount. Flashfire maintenance is also a non-issue, as the discs are both strong enough to be considered nearly invulnerable and cheap enough that replacement is always favored over repair in the rare cases that they suffer crippling damage. In most cases, a ship will lose its hull integrity or the external weapon itself well before it ever suffers damage to a Flashfire Weapons Mount.

The future

After forty years in business, Flashfire has not attempted to bring another technology to market. Rumors persist that this is not for lack of trying. The company maintains three internal research and development labs and invests heavily in private science concerns. It also has connections to military research, with declassified budgets revealing that Flashfire has multi-billion UEC ties to an unspecified black research base. The claim most likely to be true is that the government is using Flashfire's technology in the study of alien spacecraft. Licensed Xi'an ship designs are already able to adapt to existing Flashfire mounts, and the technology is likely useful in the study of the very different Vanduul charging systems.

Rumors in the civilian world persist that the aging Snarm is preparing to reveal his second great idea, supposedly an evolution of the puck concept that covers other types of ship upgrades, or, more ambitiously, subverts the upgrade system entirely and allows pilots to mount anything anywhere. While a future in which ship captains can mount thrusters to their gun hardpoints or power plants on their missile pods is unlikely, it is possible that Flashfire has a second innovation in development.

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