Omake: B-65 Colonial Defense Rifle

Production information

Manufacturer: Primitech Solutions (Guild of Commerce, Production and Protection Subsidiary)

Type: Slugthrower rifle

Cost: 300 Credits

Physical and technical specifications

Size: Medium

Materials: Common metals

Weight: 3 Kg

Capacity: 20 round magazine

Range: 150 meters

Rate of fire: 30 rounds a minute

Usage

Availability: Civilian

Roles:

• Minimum industry service rifle

Affiliation:

• Colonial militaries
• Fringers
• Remote farmers

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Description
"Alright got a good number of generators, some air and water filters, some rations, the prefabs, and some B-65s. Anything else we need before setting out?" - Expedition leader prior to setting out to establish a colony on a remote world.

The B-65 Colonial Defense Rifle is a weapon designed by the Outer Rim for the Outer Rim. Following increased interaction between the Myto and Braxant sectors, Primitech Solutions started exploring potential opportunities in the latter's primitive firearm market. The result was a semiautomatic slugthrower marketed as "a young military's first service rifle". A low power, yet reliable firearm meant to allow colonies isolated by choice, age, or circumstance to be able to field a standardized military.

Design

"What makes a B-65 so easy to maintain? I can count the amount of moving parts in the thing with one hand." - Toydariantalking about the B-65.

The B-65 was designed from the ground up to be simplistic, easy to maintain, and requiring next to no offworld support outside of the initial purchase. To accomplish this both the firearm and the ammunition were made out of metal and other materials commonly that could be produced on most worlds such as steel, aluminum, and brass. The chemical makeup for the gunpowder was also kept to commonly available variants.

Weight was kept light due to expecting soldiers not to have access to vehicles and have to march on their own feet. Most able bodied sentients could lug a B-65 around in long marches without too much difficulty. A wooden stock was sometimes used to further lighten the weapon, but a metal option was more widely used.

However what truly made a B-65 a dream for armorers was the lack of moving parts. There were only three moving parts in the whole firearm: the trigger assembly, the magazine and the recoil spring. B-65s had no firing pin, rather they relied on a milled-in nub that served to smash into the rimfire primer and set off the cartridge as the bolt slammed forward. There wasn't even a dedicated ejector for the shell casings. Instead the B-65 was manufactured in such a way that the blowback was directed so the casing would be ejected out of the barrel in reaction to the gun being fired.

Overall the B-65 is an efficient slugthrower that sacrifices quality and performance in exchange for ease of manufacture and reliability. The simplicity and cheapness allowed the B-65 to be produced en masse without too much industrial investment on Primitech's part to keep costs low. The firearm can be used for decades without much decrease in functionality if it is kept in decent condition and storage.

Performance
"Might not have the same punch as a high quality hunting blaster, but I can crank out the parts and ammo in my workshop and I don't have to take a trip to the Starport every month. - Fringer discussing the maintenance benefits of the B-65.

Performance wise the B-65 is fairly lackluster. Choosing to scrimp on the materials did lead to a decrease in long range accuracy. The B-65 was designed with unarmored sentients or local wildlife as the main intended targets. It can penetrate leather and armorweave even if it may struggle a bit. However things like durasteel are almost entirely resistant to a round from a B-65, let alone things like an armored vehicle or a megafauna. Droids were also fairly resistant, although of a round can hit the joints or make it to the internals it can still do some damage. Even a sentient with fairly tough skin such as a Trunsk can take over a dozen good hits to incapacitate. Most of the time colonial militaries use things like explosives such as grenades or rockets, or fixed defenses like turrets rather than relying on their B-65s for the heavier opponents.

So how does a B-65 make up for its poor firepower? Mainly through quantity and volume of fire. Remember the B-65 is designed to be used as a service weapon. It is meant to be used on the squad level, not the individual level. When you are being shot at by a B-65 it is usually not just one rifle, but rather ten to a dozen firing at once. Whatever small raid or pack of animals that is attacking tends to be smaller than a colonial military in total. If they can bring those numbers to bear, then quantity can usually outweigh the quality of the weapon.

For that reason the B-65 is encouraged to be used in a defensive manner. In order to more easily concentrate as many firearms to the location under attack as possible. B-65s are optimally used behind a fixed position in a large group. Thankfully most new colonies only have one or two locations worth defending anyway, so this situation tended to happen without much intention. As an added benefit, a defensive stance usually meant most colonial militaries are right next to their main supply base, negating most of the logistical downsides of using large amounts of slugthrowers.

Sales
"Do you know far out from the common hyperlanes we are? The shipping costs for the gas alone would break our budget. Just order some B-65s, spend a few weeks training a new armorer to keep the things working, and move on." - A yearly budget meeting on a newly settled world discussing defense spending.

The B-65 targeted a very specific clientele at a specific point in their lives. B-65's were marketed towards new colonies in the process of setting up their first military formations. While it is not that hard to acquire a blaster in the Outer Rim, getting hundreds of fairly uniform blasters and the infrastructure to keep them running was beyond most colonies in their initial years. Even more so if they were in a remote part of a sector away from the main hyperlanes. Also at those amounts an organization had to almost always buy new instead of used given tracking down hundreds of used guns of a specific model is usually not worth the additional effort and time needed. To say nothing of the erratic rate of equipment failure that would cause in a military.

Analysts at Primitech estimated the period a colony starts forming a military beyond an emergency militia was around when the main settlement started getting above the 20,000 number in permanent residents. Large enough that the colony could sustain raising a company of soldiers out of the unemployed and the unspecialized, too large for the few squads of law enforcement to handle every threat, and still too small to reliably import or manufacture blasters. The B-65 was meant to arm these initial colonial militaries with cheap and reliable weapons until their budget and infrastructure grew large enough to equip their military with blasters like most PDFs. The B-65s were often kept past this period as a weapon to be given to third and fourth line formations instead of spending the extra Credits on blasters for soldiers unlikely to see any action.

Primitech primarily sold in bulk orders with their most popular size being the company size. Company size was enough B-65s in to arm every soldier in a company and enough ammunition for a quiet training year for about 50,000 Credits plus shipping. By the time the purchased ammo runs out a local workshop is usually converted to make spare parts and ammo which means no more reliance on offworld trade or industry.

For reference, arming a similarly sized company with new A280 blaster Rifles would cost 187,200 Credits. To say nothing of the additional cost in infrastructure and supplies needing to be built, shipped in, and staffed to maintain all those blasters. If a frontier colony could acquire that kind of machinery in the first place, which it likely could not in its starting years. Even if a colony had the option to outfit their military with A280s, most would probably prefer a company of poorly armed soldiers over a platoon of decently armed ones to patrol all the hopefully empty land surrounding their still developing colony. If a patrol with the B-65s gets eaten, then at least it was a smaller percentage of their forces and the colony now knows which direction to position the rest of the military.

In a bid to make the B-65 more marketable to its customers, every order of over fifty rifles came with complementary detailed technical manuals for how to set up manufacturing for spare parts and ammunition for the B-65. The manuals used simple language and had options for manufacturing by hand or with whatever machinery could commonly be found in a workshop in a new colony. This often meant Primitech lost sales in those ammo and parts, but its buyers were often so remote that the shipping costs would have eaten up all the profit anyway. Also a colony that survived was more likely to purchase B-65s for a second and third company than one that ran out of supplies and died to pirates or hostile wildlife.

Another group of buyers Primitech found for their weapon was among isolationist worlds and communities. Worlds that for one reason or another wished to keep industry and starship traffic artificially low. These could be Luddites who reject advanced technology, nature worshippers who despise pollution, hyper-specialized artisan communities who do not want to commit the resources for extensive arms production, or just isolated exclaves seeking to remain separate from the wider galaxy for ideological or other reasons. These fringe communities saw the B-65 as a way to increase their self sufficiency while not sacrificing too much collective self defense capability.

Sadly the B-65 found far less success among individual buyers. Outside of the occasional fringer wanting to play hermit, a farmer looking for some self defense, or the occasional slugthrower enthusiast, most individual buyers preferred purchasing blasters over the B-65. This was especially true in the Guild with its robust logistics network. Mercenaries saw the rifle as a weapon meant for hicks in remote worlds and generally not worth the space it would take up in their loadout when even a sporting blaster could perform better in a lot of metrics.

Overall the B-65 is considered a financial failure by Primitech. The target market was too niche and the profit margins were too small to warrant the capital spent on the project. For every military contract they made with a colony, that often equated to less than 250,000 Credits in sales with higher expenses than was standard due to the remote nature of their clientele. Other military firearm contracts broke a million Credits per world easy even if it was just a support weapon. Even if the B-65 did break even, it barely did more than that. Prices couldn't be raised and improvements couldn't be added lest the B-65's small market share dry up to the then cheaper alternatives. Add in its durable nature and ease of maintenance and repeat sales per world were limited at best. The gun was made too efficiently for the company's own good.

Production was only kept open due to a combination of good PR, government subsidies and contracts, the current rate new worlds are being settled in the galactic area, and the prestige that came with the B-65 being included in development aid packages. The moment any of the above four start waning, Primitech is likely to halt production. However that would do little to stop the usage of the B-65, as the dissemination of technical specs in the manuals means copycat designs are liable to appear to pick up the slack should that occur.

Conclusion
"How did this dirtball get so many frakking guns!? *gasp!* Killshot nooooo! Don't go off into that bright looiiiiight! - Pirate experiencing the effectiveness of coordinated B-65 fire.

Two words that can be used to describe the B-65 would be purpose built. The gun was made for colonial militaries in their infancy to defend themselves and it does that job well enough. It gives any world in the galactic area a solid dependable floor in terms of military strength. B-65s may not be used for long in the relative scale of a world's history. However more and more planets are going to have their PDF's history started with some former day laborer clad in nothing more than fatigues and a helmet, carrying a B-65 in their arms.

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Meet the B-65. A tier zero rifle designed to be used by military formations on distant underdeveloped worlds. Something you would see starter units use in a RTS game before you did any research in the tech tree or built any special buildings. Worlds isolated enough from the rest of the galaxy's logistics network can often struggle to maintain blasters long term. No matter how snazzy a gun is, most militaries won't adopt something en masse unless they can maintain it reliably.

The B-65 was created to showcase the difference between a mercenary wanting to arm themselves out of their own pocket and a squad of infantry being armed with a defense budget. In the latter case, quantity and reliability often win out over quality and flashy bits. The B-65 was tailor made for the best case scenario for using large numbers of slugthrowers in Star Wars, and even then I struggled to justify making it more than a barely profitable niche product due to the logistical costs and the Forever Pencil Problem. Blasters won the war for logistics and mass quantity for a reason.

Inspiration for this one is the Gevarm E1, a semi-automatic rifle made by the French in the 50s.

Crossposted on SB and SV