711-MarkCL Rivet Gun

The 711-MarkCL Rivet Gun was a high-pressure rivet launcher manufactured by Timson Tools and commonly carried by deep space miners and engineers for repair work. Like the Plasma Cutter, the Line Gun, and the Javelin Gun before it, this piece of industrial equipment found a second purpose as a weapon in the hands of survivors fighting the Necromorphs.

Design and origin#

The 711-MarkCL was a rivet gun, a high-pressure launcher built by Timson Tools for the deep space miners and engineers who used it on repair jobs. A model very similar to it, if not the same one, was also manufactured by Bradley Tools. In form it resembled an industrial nail gun scaled up for heavy work, firing rivets in quick succession from a magazine. Its rivets were cheap and plentiful, the sort of consumable that any working ship would keep on hand, which left survivors well supplied with ammunition once the tool was turned to fighting.

The Rivet Gun carried a secondary function that set it apart from a simple launcher. Rivets that had been fired into a Necromorph, or driven into a nearby surface, could be detonated, scattering them as shrapnel through anything close by. This let a survivor pack the nearest creature full of rivets and then turn it into a shrapnel bomb, spreading damage across a whole group at once.

Use in the outbreaks#

As a weapon the Rivet Gun was at its best against tight clusters of weaker Necromorphs. A survivor could fire rivets into a charging creature, sever a limb with a careful shot, and trigger the detonation so that the embedded rivets tore into the rest of the pack. The same principle worked against surfaces: rivets driven into a wall or a doorway could be left in place and set off as the creatures crossed them. It proved well suited to fighting the smaller and more numerous forms such as the Pack, Slashers, Crawlers, Exploders, and Swarmers, and survivors also used its rapid fire for the ordinary work of closing hull breach safety doors. Against the heavier creatures, those with only specific weak points, the rivets were far less effective, hard to place and weak where they struck.

The tool appeared in the hands of more than survivors. Aboard the USG Ishimura, the Unitologist scientist Challus Mercer used a Rivet Gun, one not produced by Timson Tools, and turned it on the engineer Jacob Temple, killing him with it. Later, on Tau Volantis, survivors recreated a comparable rivet-firing weapon by mounting a telemetry spike on a compact engineering frame and fitting it with an explosive module, carrying the design forward into the final campaign.