Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Techpriesthood (section)

==Unique Items==

Any Forge World so far removed from Mars in doctrine and distance will inevitably develop a few quirks.  Culturally or technotheologically, worlds like Cognomen go their own way on matters.  The other worlds of the Sector have also developed various devices or customs that allow them to survive the absence of Cognomen’s attention, as Cognomen is unable to provide all of the finished goods that the worlds of the Sector need.  Some few of these devices are listed below, along with their world of origin.

* 	The Maskos machine: Always referred to with an improper noun following the name of its host world, this machine is an enigma to the Adeptus Mechanicus.  The STC for its manufacture was found on the world Maskos, a mere few years after its formal induction into the Imperium of Man.  The Template was stored on an obviously third-party data preservation matrix, not that of the original Standard Template Constructor.  The original device is lost to time, as are the associated ancillary files of the STC in question.  This includes the optimal material atomic composition, date of invention, principal designer and engineer, and other information that has not been recovered from the Martian databases.  The Maskos machines are the ultimate word in subterranean mining, especially that of worlds with low oxygen content in the crust.  The devices can be controlled by remote operation, usually that of an Enginseer, at distances of up to half a mile, or more if relays are used.  The machines are extremely expensive, and can be made more so by constructing its components out of materials more complex than steel.  However, they quite rapidly pay for themselves.  Their advanced boring tools do not rely on thermal tunneling beams, instead scooping raw material into itself using a combination of drills and abrading devices.  More advanced models are also able to navigate themselves along veins of ore, although this is generally not needed.  The machines are roughly seventeen meters wide, and power themselves using internal batteries, or from an external feed connected to them.  They deposit materials in containers that the machine then extrudes from itself for collection.  Oxygen can then be sprayed from the machine to make the tunnel it leaves behind itself breathable for the comfort of its operator.
* 	Petals: This unique drug is a product of the Drimmerzole flower fields.  It is an antibiotic, called P-n-benzene-triarsenolysitide, which is able to lyse any known gram-positive bacteria’s cell membrane and wall without damaging human cells.  However, it is also destructive against some human normal flora, and is thus generally used only in emergencies.
* 	Harpes: The Harpes are bladed weapons, pioneered by the Chlorit Reapers, and previously exclusive to them.  With the destruction of Chlorit, and the removal of all of the world’s residents to Foraldshold, the Harpes has caught on with some of that world’s defenders, including its Tech-Guard.  Some of the more inventive Adeptus Mechanicus personnel of the world have even found a way to create a Power Weapon variant of the blade.  It is approximately three feet of handle followed by eighteen inches of blade, curved inwards toward the wielder, but edged on the outer edge and serrated on the inner, originally used for harvesting the plants of Chlorit’s farms.
* 	Razor autorifle: The Razor rifle is visibly descended from an Age of Strife-era hunting weapon.  During the madness of Old Night, the Martian nobility (prior to their extermination by the nascent Techpriesthood) would sometimes alleviate their ennui and bloodlust by using their gene-mod labs to create abominable beasts, and unleashing them in the wilderness of Mars.  When the climate control machines failed, the atmosphere that allowed this practice to continue ended, but the weapons that were abandoned did not simply cease to exist.  Cognomen expatriates collected some of these weapons when they departed to establish their new home, and began exporting them to the Hapster colony in trade shortly after its establishment.  Since then, many stockpiles of these weapons have made their way into the arsenals of Cloudburst military formations.  The rifle uses the expanding gasses left behind after the explosion of the primer and powder of the cartridge to clear the chamber, like most modern guns.  It comes in semi-automatic, automatic, and burst-fire modes.  Cognomen spent thousands of years fine-tuning this design, and it is easily the match of the more popular Accatran and Voss patterns.
* 	Cognomen Siege Dreadnought: The most heavily armed of the Castraferrum variants, this Dreadnought is the preferred close-in combat Dreadnought of the Blue Daggers and Deathwatch.  The Castraferrum Dreadnought chassis mounts the typical Siege Drill and integrated Heavy Flamer of the Martian template, with an Inferno Cannon mounted on the other arm.  The distinction is a coaxial heavy stubber on the Inferno weapon, as well as a Storm Bolter mounted underslung from the main chassis.  Coordinating all of these weapons can be intimidatingly difficult for a newly-interred Battle Brother, especially if the optional searchlight, Fragstorm package, triple Hunter-Killer missile rack, and smoke discharger are equipped as well.  However, the sheer amount of room-clearing power the Cognomen Siege Dreadnought allows its occupant to employ at once is telling.  More than one bunker of heretics or aliens have thought themselves impervious to the Imperium’s hate, right up until it knocked a wall down and set them on fire.  Mars is aware of this development.  Cognomen Magi successfully argued that this is not an act of Heretek, the sin of innovation.  All they did, they explained, was affix a coaxial gun to a flamer, which some models of Imperial Knights already have, and put a Storm Bolter on something that carries them as a matter of course in other configurations.  Since Cognomen has built a grand total of nine (one prototype, six for the Daggers, two for the Deathwatch) and there is no evidence of insanity in the known occupants, Mars suspects that there is no harm in keeping the template active.
* 	Cognomen-pattern Storm Bolter: Storm bolters are an ancient technology.  Cognomen, called upon as it was to make the initial armaments of an entire Space Marine Chapter and the guns of untold billions of Guardsmen, created its own design based loosely on the Martian template to fill those needs.  The weapon is bulky, even for a Storm Bolter, but quite versatile.  This is because of its variable attachment points.  The rear of the weapon has a point whereupon an ammunition feed, a stock, or a remote trigger could be mounted, while there are attachment points in front of and behind the magazine well.  As such, the same device can be used as a co-axial mount on a cannon, a pintle mount for a tank, or an infantry weapon.  The infantry variant usually uses a stock, a rear grip with trigger, and a forward pistol grip, while the Terminator variant uses a remote trigger and two armor mounts.
* 	Precision Guidance gloves: These are the other claim to fame in Maskos’s innovation history.  These gloves are the design of a brilliant clothier who lived on Maskos shortly after it became a Subsector capital world.  The gloves are now made exclusively for the military, and are twice the cost of standard Munitorum gloves.  They are designed to allow for the least possible interference in the aim of a held weapon, while also being tightenable with a strap system on the back of the hand, allowing for instant closure of blood vessels by constriction in case of laceration of a blood vessel.
* 	''Glowing Light'' colony barge: The region that contains the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit is bathed in radiation from ancient supernovae.  This is not generally a problem for ships that travel through the Warp, since radiation in one realm of existence does not affect the other.  However, for ships that must spend great lengths of time unprotected by a planet’s magnetosphere or outside of the Warp, like colony ships, this can necessitate the addition of military-grade hull shielding, which few civilian ships are outfitted to mount.  Enter the starship-smiths of Nauphry.  The Nauphry-unique ''Glowing Light'' colony barge was designed specifically to travel through the deep, uncharted wastes of the Sector and Circuit, to find and populate worlds.  Its power plant and hull were custom-engineered to repel the effect of the ambient radiation of the region, and its powerful engine allows the ship to reach speeds usually reserved for Imperial Navy ships.  Of course, this makes it a bit more expensive than most colony ships, but that improvement can pay for itself if the whole colony seed population reaches its destination unhindered by mechanical failure or cancer.
* 	Ballista Energy Artillery System: An ancient relic of the Terran Federation’s military forces.  This weapon system uses a complex array of interleaved magnets, electric coils, and gated accumulator chambers to impart pulses of energy at incredible speeds to a sphere of gaseous metal molecules.  The metal molecules are then collapsed into a tight pellet and flung out of the weapon at incredible speeds, using Dark Age technosorcery to keep the pellet as small as possible until impact.  Upon impact, the pellet disperses in an instant, discharging vast amounts of electrical and thermal energy into the target.  The weapon is extremely expensive and is of limited range, but its power annihilates light infantry and punches through simple walls as if they weren’t even there.  Thanks to the high power requirements and delicate ammunition feeds, these weapons can’t be mounted on a moving vehicle, and the fact that only one copy of their STC has ever been found means that only Hapster and specific regiments equipped by Cognomen are ever outfitted with them.  They are a favored tool of Septiim Guard and Hapster Bronze Legionnaire artillery regiments, and sometimes also find a home in the arsenals of the Ordo Reductor of Cognomen.  Given that these weapons are only slightly more destructive than conventional shell artillery of equivalent tonnage, they are not popular with most regiments, but those that do use them swear by them.