Editing Setting:Nutopia/Fluff (section)

====Ammunition====
Weapons designers realized as early as the late twentieth century that conventional chemical propellant firearms were reaching the apex of their development. Outside of various small improvements in cartridge design, niche calibers and novel ignition methods the firearm as we know it had essentially begun to reach the edges of what the concept was capable of. The advent of railgun technology allowed for by room temp super conductors and super-dense batteries proved to be the next great leap in design, but the technology was expensive to produce, and while offering more power than any traditional weapon, was wanting in a few other key areas.

This lead to a focus on the development, both for rail and conventional platforms, of more exotic varieties of ammunition capable of filling a variety of roles. 

For Railguns there are three primary varieties of ammunition: Standard darts or flechettes made of some dense material delivered singly or in bundles, the dual purpose SLAM round and TGR "Tiger" guided munitions.

SLAMs (Solenoid Launched Attack Munitions) can be used against both armored and soft targets, and were designed with the intent of allowing operators to seamlessly engage a variety of threats without the need for changing magazines or internal feeds. While the exact method and mechanism varies somewhat depending on the scale of the weapon, the basic idea is that a small charge within the projectile can, with the press of a button, turn an armor piercing projectile into an anti-personnel one. In large diameter weapons this is done with an airbust, the round exploding in front of or above the target and creating deadly high velocity fragmentation effect. Smaller bore railguns typically use the charge to either split open flanges on the round just before impact, causing the dart to bloom like a flower just prior to striking the target, greatly increasing surface area and by extension the damage caused, or simply use it to blow up the round on its way through the target. A round is told which terminal effect to use at the gun, although the method by which detonation is triggered varies.

TGRs (Terminal Guidance Rounds) are the most expensive variety of railgun ammunition. Typically only fired from the largest guns, these rounds use fins and micro thrusters to allow a round to do limited course correction as it nears a marked target. This really only comes into play when a railgun is being used to fire rounds on a ballistic trajectory, and even then the extreme velocity of its projectiles makes such corrections difficult.

Conventional firearms have a great deal more variety. Old classics like jacketed hollow points and armor piercing rounds are still the order of the day, with incendiary and explosive effects becoming quite common as well. Compressed tungsten frangibles are the most common anti-personnel round for those who can afford the cost and don't like to risk collateral damage associated with explosive options, and the absence of legal strictures has allowed the bundled flechette concept to make a comeback, allowing a mixture of accuracy, ability to defeat armor and gruesome terminal ballistics.

An interesting development in conventional rounds are bullets coated with a liquid "metallic glass". Originally designed for high wear tool manufacturing, the material is capable of storing immense elastic energy. A bullet coated with it, if it penetrates a target or strikes any hard surface, will immediately ricochet. The erratic nature of the round and the fact that for maximum effect the projectile must be spherical greatly limit its utility, but it has found a home as an enhancement to traditional pellet loads for shotguns and can be used to augment fragmentation weapons of all kinds as well.

Coilguns, a technology related in concept to Railguns, have found a niche as an excellent way of "soft launching" large loads from relatively short barrels. Pioneered first as mortars and artillery pieces, coilgun technology can be found now in man portable anti-tank missiles and even some advanced grenade launchers. They can heft everything from simple explosive projectiles to canisters of ball bearings or flechettes. Due to the comparatively lower velocity compared to railguns, coilguns get a much greater effect from TGRs, and outright missiles are quite common as well.