Hand armaments: Dolph plasma rifle, power rated at 1.25 MW, with mounted grenade launcher, holds 6 grenades.
Fresh off his success with the CF-06 Grenzmark II, Seed Corp head combat frame engineer Tesla Browning found himself painted into a technological corner. The breakthrough he needed to advance CF technology beyond the dead end it had evolved to came in the unlikely form of Zane Dellister’s custom Dead Drop combat frame.Upon Dellister’s arrest, Dead Drop was confiscated by the Coalition Security Corps and transferred to Seed Corp for study. Dellister refused to cooperate with the CSC, forcing Browning and his team to reverse-engineer Dead Drop on their own. Their analysis yielded advancements in directed energy weapon technology sufficient to mass produce CF-scale plasma weapons. Presented with these findings, CSC Director Sanzen Kaimora ordered Browning to design a mass production combat frame optimized for energy weapon use.
Browning and his team quickly determined that developing a mass-produced version of Dead Drop would be faster and more cost-effective than designing a new combat frame from the ground up. To that end, the Seed Corp team greatly simplified Dellister’s design. They devised a handheld plasma rifle to replace Dead Drop’s popup plasma cannon/sword and augmented its already considerable firepower by mounting a grenade launcher under the barrel.
In terms of defense, titanium was substituted for costly and difficult to manufacture palladium glass, while a thin layer of aerographene was retained between the armor’s ceramic layers to insulate against EM and thermal blowback. The resulting composite material gave better protection than Grenzmark II armor at a substantial reduction in weight.
Two prototypes were constructed before the third iteration was approved for combat use. Dubbed the CF-014 Ein Dolph, the first mass production CF to carry plasma weapons boasted a 1.25 MW rifle approaching the power of a capital ship gun. Though no match for Dead Drop’s speed, the Ein Dolph captured the record for fastest mass-produced CF with a top speed of Mach 1. The Dolph’s total lack of fixed weapons and relatively modest ground speed let it get by with a much smaller and less expensive generator than Dead Drop’s massively powerful reactor.
Though undeniably superior to any other mass-produced CF of the time, the Ein Dolph possessed one serious drawback. Its rifle’s integrated capacitor gave the weapon only eight shots before needing to be recharged, forcing the pilot to rely on the underslung grenade launcher. Though the launcher could be reloaded, its standard six-grenade magazine limited the weapon’s utility. When all plasma charges and grenades were spent, the Dolph was effectively disarmed.
Browning set out to correct the design flaws caused by the Ein Dolph’s rushed production. His efforts would come to fruition in the CF-015 Zwei Dolph.
