The Rebel Faction

Disintegration Warhead

Disintegrator Field
this was a particularly vicious form of defensive shield that consumed matter and disintegrated it. Deemed illegal on many worlds, disintegrator fields were used to guard some of the galaxy's most valuable possessions. (From http://www.cuswe.org/)

The Disintegration Warhead is built on the technology of these disintergrator fields. Since these field generators are reather large in size they can only be fit on larger capital class projectiles. Light other projectiles, such as proton or concussion, they can be triggered by direct impact, delay timers, or proximity fused.

Upon triggering, the weapon instantly uses internal power supplies to activate the disintegrator field generator housed within the projectile's body. When actived the generator produces a field of various diameters (upto 20 meters for larger bunker buster bombs) and everything within this field gets instantly disintegrated. This is close in similarity to what happens when a thermal detenator goes off. Everything in the field is molecularized while everything outside is left completely untouched.

For this reason, these weapons can be used for precise targeting, with smaller projectiles able to take out specific targets and leave everythign outside them in one pierce. For example even a single build within a metropolis could be hit and disintegrated, with all surround building left unharmed. It also erases all collateral damaged that might be caused by an explosion or explosive debris

Because of the nature of this field, even buried targets could be hit. Since the field disintegrates everything it touches to the molecular level, it pretty much negates armor of all kinds and can penerate deep into ships to cause tremendous amounts of damage. The damage is caused in a uniform sphere pattern causing damage in all directions at once.

Since this technology is a variation of older ones the research costs are kept down as well as the cost of each warhead. The downside, as said earlier, is that these weapons have to be large. These generators can't fit inside smaller fighter launched missiles or torpedoes, but can be carried on board larger bombers. Their complexity also allows for things to go wrong. Where are chemical warheads almost always explode, these might have a small chance of failure do to all the technology used. At times the generators might fail or some of the other internals such as the power supply might.

That being said these fields could also be used as mines, both space and ground. Other uses might also be found for their use later.