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 mount-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. 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. The weapon, however, was the size of a small starship and could not be scaled down. Assuming a perfect conversation, the weapon would require a reactive mass of over six thousand pounds. The supporting equipment was also heavy and complex, leading to a weapon that could not be scaled down enough to fit a conventional missile.

Instead, a less ambitous weapon was built into a torpedo, the TTR Missile, which had an explosive force of around nine gigatons.