Terra-Ton Range Weapons Project

The Terra-Ton Range Weapons Project was a program undertaken by the Gudersnipe Foundation late in the Kamian Succession Wars to produce an explosive warhead capable of releasing energy in the range equivalent to one terra-ton of TNT. The weapon program goals also stated that the missile should be of a size capable of being fired from then-standard launchers and hard-points. The goal was to make a weapon that was a "battle group killer", one that could be fired into a formation of ships and destroy all of them. The primary methodology was to use antimatter annihilation.

Project Technology

The Foundation developed a still-classified method to instantly transform between 30 and 50 percent of a mass of matter in to antimatter. Since the transformation was incomplete, this would result in an instant reaction annihilation. It is believed that the underlying tech was not intended as a weapon, but rather a fast, cheap method of anti-matter production that was never perfected. When that program failed, the technology was transferred to the care of the TTR project.

Project Failures

The program was technically a success in that it did build and detonate a weapon of the required scale. However, the program failed in it's major goal of producing a missile-sized weapon, the equipment needed simply could not be scaled down far enough. A torpedo was produced instead, which worked by converting five hundred pounds of matter into antimatter. The resulting payload was rated at about nine and a half terra-tons.

A single torpedo, however, cost about as much to build as a destroyer, and could be destroyed by being shot down en-route to a target. Further, the weapon's damaging capabilities were very poor; it could only effectively destroy an entire battle group if they were tightly clustered together AND the weapon scored a direct hit on a capitol-class ship. On the whole, the weapon was deaped impractical.

Four hundred and two TTR Missiles(actually torpedoes) were produced, with two detonated in test-firings. The other four hundred were lost in the Tekron Incident.