Weapon & Rockets
The gun used to live bolted onto the claw, an arm with teeth. It has its own slot now — nine mounts, four firing styles, and a rock-solid rule underneath all of it: no weapon in the water carries a Pearl socket, on purpose, ever.
01 Why the gun needed its own slot
Every claw in The Salvage Arm still does exactly what it always did — reach, reel speed, lift capacity, the numbers that decide how well you haul a wreck or prise a shell. Firepower used to live on that same part, which meant the one claw fitted in your claw slot was quietly tuning salvage lift and siege damage at once — upgrade one and the other moved whether you wanted it to or not. The weapon slot exists to end that: a claw is a claw again, and a weapon is its own object, drawn as its own layer on the hull, fit independently of whatever’s on your arm.
What a fitted weapon actually decides today: it’s the weapon’s own rarity tier — not the claw’s — that sets a Breachstone strike’s rank, and rank is the number the siege’s own damage table reads. See The Breachstone for the real strike math.
02 Nine mounts, one ladder
One weapon ships stock — the Single-Tube Flare Launcher, bolted on at the yard, enough to matter against a wall and nothing close to enough to finish a siege alone. The other eight climb the same five-tier ladder as everything else in the water: eight are built at the Workbench once their own depth gate is crossed, and one — the Breach Cannon — is pulled from a wreck with the salvage arm instead (see The Salvage Arm).
Every weapon in the catalogue
| Weapon | Tier | Style | Blast | Salvo | Rocket cap | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single-Tube Flare Launcher | Coastal | Launcher | 4 | — | 4 | Start |
| Arc Cannon | Twilight | Cannon | 9 | — | 1 | Craft, 1,000 m |
| Twin-Tube Launcher | Twilight | Salvo | 2 | 1 | 2 | Craft, 850 m |
| Breach Cannon | Midnight | Torpedo | 15 | — | 5 | Salvage |
| Cluster Launcher | Midnight | Salvo | 5 | 2 | 3 | Craft, 1,700 m |
| Maw Cannon | Abyssal | Cannon | 26 | — | 2 | Craft, 2,600 m |
| Siege Launcher | Abyssal | Salvo | 14 | 3 | 4 | Craft, 2,450 m |
| Leviathan Lance | Leviathan | Torpedo | 40 | — | 3 | Craft, 3,900 m |
| Warden's Battery | Leviathan | Salvo | 20 | 4 | 6 | Craft, 3,700 m |
Every row on this table trades something for something — a bigger blast number never arrives free. Cannons and torpedoes both cut into cargo capacity and acceleration; every salvo mount costs speed. Read a weapon’s full effect list on its own card in the Workbench before you build toward it.
03 Four firing styles
Every weapon declares one of four styles, and the catalogue enforces it — a weapon row with no style, or an unrecognised one, fails to load at all. Cannon and torpedo mounts fire a single rocket; a salvo mount empties several tubes on one pull, staggered rather than simultaneous:
The four styles, as authored
Fast and flat — 0.45× the baseline flight time, almost no arc at all. Arrives before you've finished the thought.
The baseline arc every strike already throws — the stock mount's own arm, unmultiplied.
Fires its whole salvo count on one pull, each rocket landing about 140ms after the last — a burst, not one shot.
Slow on purpose — 1.8× the flight time — but lands with a 35% wider blast on arrival. The heaviest hit in the family.
Said honestly: this is the profile each style is written to fly by, validated content, not yet a live effect. A strike’s actual flight today still uses the siege’s one shared arc regardless of which style is fitted — the visual split between a flat cannon shot and a slow, heavy torpedo is designed and waiting on a follow-up pass to wire it into the projectile itself.
04 Rockets — one round, no compatibility matrix
A rocket is an item now, not an ammo stat baked into the gun. There is no magazine to model and no per-weapon round to match up: whatever’s in your locker fires from whatever’s fitted in your weapon slot, full stop. Two rows exist, and they are identical in flight — the second is priced steep purely for the finish on the casing, never for extra force:
The rocket locker
| Rocket | Tint | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Signal RocketThe ordinary round — warm-gold nose, dark charcoal body. Every launcher in the family fires the same one. | Twilight | 120 ⬡ |
| Warhead RocketSame fuse, same fire — identical in flight. What the price buys is the finish: gold seams over black iron, nothing more. | Leviathan | 1,500 ⬡ |
The Warhead Rocket’s tint is drawn from the Leviathan end of the rarity palette the way every other item’s tier is — the one deliberate exception on the site: it does not mean the round hits harder. It is a flex purchase, not a power purchase, stated as such on its own card.
Rockets are bought, and only bought. They are not scattered on the seabed for you to stumble over — the ordnance locker is a counter, the same as the one that restocks your nets. That keeps them a decision about crystals rather than about luck.
Said plainly, because the manual only ever describes what you can reach today: the two rows above are real, priced, tested content and the Workbench’s Rockets rack is wired to a running game — but nothing in the cockpit spends one yet. No firing action calls into the hold to take a round. A Breachstone strike costs one of your ten daily strikes and nothing from this locker (see The Breachstone). Build it out here rather than pretend it’s wired — the same rule that keeps Luck Potions off this page’s promises too (see Hardpoints & Pearls).
05 No Pearl sockets on any weapon
Look for a Hardpoint on a weapon’s card and you won’t find one — of every slot on the AV-1, weapon is the single one the game refuses to cut a socket into, on every tier, without exception.
A socketed, refined weapon would put raw firepower on the deep upgrade ladder. That ladder is where Pearls and Refinement already live for every other stat — keeping the gun off it is a deliberate line, not a gap waiting to be filled.