Directorate Officer
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
- Intent: To provide an anti-armor grenade in Lucerne Personal Defense's catalogue
- Image Source: here modified by yours truly
- Canon Link: N/A
- Permissions: N/A
- Primary Source: N/A
- Manufacturer: Lucerne Personal Defense
- Affiliation: Directorate, Silver Jedi Concord, Lucerne Personal Defense customers
- Market Status: Closed-Market
- Model: LPD-56 Firewrecker Anti-Armor Grenade
- Modularity: No
- Production: Mass-Produced.
- Material: Durasteel sheel, Detonite priming charge, Baradium Nitrate - Thermite primary charge core, chemical propellant, typical grenade components
- Classification: Anti-Armor Grenade
- Size: Large
- Weight: Heavy
- Explosive Type: Baradium Nitrate - Thermite
- Delivery Method: Self-Propelled
- Effective Range: Long Range
- Area Of Effect: Personal
- Damage Output: Very High
- Impact-Primed: Firewrecker uses a detonite-based impact primer, meaning that exceptionally sudden jolts or significant physical impact will detonate the grenade. This does mean that the Firewrecker can go through light brush and thin barriers or even be skipped off the ground without detonating.
- Shaped Charge: Firewrecker basically is an example of a self-propelled thermal detonator but in a shaped charge configuration. Effectively, the explosion is channeled almost solely into the front of the shell to form a narrow but highly concentrated jet of superheated metal and air that burrows through the armor plating found on many tanks, walkers, and other armored vehicles before igniting a firestorm within the compartment it penetrates to kill the vehicle's crew or burn out and destroy internal equipment. Thus, while it creates a relatively small hole from an outside view, the inside damage can be absolutely horrific. Firewreckers can often completely destroy the internals and kill the crews of a light or medium armored vehicle or cause significant but localized damage in extremely large and/or heavily armored vehicles. It has also been employed against heavily armored aliens and troops wearing power armor with deadly results.
- Backwards Compatible: Firewrecker is a self-propelled grenade that be fired out its own, single use disposable tube launcher, or more commonly through existing grenade launchers, notably the Hammerstrike Grenade Launcher and the Crasher Underbarrel Grenade Launcher.
- Heavy Hitting: The Firewrecker has the brute strength of a thermal detonator in a very focused form, making it quite capable of inflicting significant damage to even heavily armored vehicles.
- Long-Range: The Firewrecker has a fair amount of chemical propellant in it, which gives it a high muzzle velocity and consequently a fairly straightline trajectory with long range. This allows most users to effectively engage enemy vehicles in a matter of hundreds of meters.
- Localized Effect: The Firewrecker is unlikely to completely outright destroy most vehicles unless they are very small or only lightly armored because its shaped charge nature. It also means that is not an effective weapon for taking out large clusters of soft targets, such as enemy infantry squads.
- Bulky: The Firewrecker is a bulky and heavy weapon, with no internal space that isn't occupied either by chemical propellant or explosive save for the hollow element of the shaped charge.
The Firewrecker is a relatively modern example of an anti-armor grenade designed to give the average, individual soldier a fighting chance against heavily armored tanks and walkers. At its core, the Firewrecker is a simple self-propelled rocket grenade with a shaped charge set off by an impact primer. When the Firewrecker makes solid contact with a hard object, its shaped charged shoots a concentrated jet of molten metal and gas that can rapidly eat through meters of metal before releasing toxic gases and superheated air into the compartment of the armored vehicle. Controls, sensitive electronics, and other vehicle components are often destroyed by this intense heat while the target's crew often dies or is incapacitated from burns or asphyxiation. While primarily designed for anti-vehicular use, Firewrecker also seems some limited use in destroying field fortifications (or more often, the fighters inside them) or against heavily armored individuals, battle droids, and creatures otherwise too strong to be attacked by most individual weapons. As Firewrecker fits into most common grenade launchers including underbarrel launchers, it is often available in limited numbers to many formations to help deal with these threats, especially in light fighter infantry formations that place a priority more on mobility than heavy firepower. Firewrecker is a basic piece ordnance that most armies need to at least some degree, so it is likely to remain in production by Lucerne Personal Defense for some time.
