With the creation of the Aegis shield, the subject of armament and weapons needed to change – projectile slug-based weaponry was almost entirely useless against a target protected by an Aegis. Largely, the innovation has happened in two ways.
The first way is a return to ancient weapons… largely bladed knives and short swords, quick enough to get inside defenses but slow enough to penetrate the defensive Aegis shield’s repulsive effect. Hand to hand combat technique has never been absent from the military, but has only increased in importance as it became one of the most reliable ways to injure or kill someone protected by a field, as hand-portable weapons had difficultly generating enough energy to overload one. Most soldiers carry some kind of knife in their uniforms in modern times.
The second way was the creation of plasma weaponry. Often referred to as “laser” weapons or “blaster” weapons, and while the weapons look like they discharge a laser, creating a man-portable power source capable of generating a laser high energy enough to affect an Aegis is currently beyond the reach of humanity. Instead, weapons use magnetic containment and spinup to create the early stages of initial plasma fusion using deuterium. Using compressed tritium from a magazine-like reservoir and ionizing it using a low-yield laser, the spinnerets in the barrel of a plasma weapon rotate a thin membrane of plastic to keep the plasma from floating over less-dense gas when released. That sheath is very quickly melted through once the plasma is ionized, but given the speed it travels at, nearly ten times the speed of sound, it last long enough to impact against targets with an effective range of about four hundred meters.
The ionized energy leaves almost a tracer-style afterimage behind it, and moves quickly enough that it appears as a solid beam of energy, leading to the misnomer that the weapon as laser-based, but it is effectively making bullets of highly energized, highly ionized plasma deuterium. This impact contains enough energy to leak some through even an Aegis field, and enough of it can drain the system of energy rapidly.
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