Virai Mining Teams

Virai either build their own mining equipment for their work – and combat – or those of other nations they find and scavenge. As they tend to destroy Antarean nanospore, the tools and weapons they scavenge and repurpose are those that require little in the way of power output or advanced technology, such as mag weaponry, or which match the weaponry they already know, such as fractal mining and demolitions weaponry.

We have datafile on oft-used Virai weapons that is worth a run-through.

The Virai’s most popular piece of equipment used as a support or heavy weapon is a mining-tool-turned-weapon: the frag borers. Heavy (Demolishers) and light frag borers are normally perfect tools for mining operations but become discouraging weapons on the battlefield when used against enemy vehicles! A favourite trick is to fire at a vehicle, then for an architector to overclock the weapon team and for the team fire again, instantly gaining the fractal lock bonus – typically adding and extra +3 or +4 onto their SV. If they can do this across turns (a Block Army Option is useful!) then the SV that is hitting the target becomes intolerable.

A Virai’s preference is to use their weapon drones for battlefield situations, but some security-focused Secondary Architectors are known to repair and reuse scavenged mag weapons, including the heavy mag cannon and mag heavy supprots. These are not overclocked very often, unless there is a particular tactical advantage in doing so, but they are still potent.

If they can, Virai swarms tend to optimise production schedules and produce specialised crew constructors for use in managing their support weapons/heavy mnining tools.  These are identical to normal constructor drones, but have only a single set of appendages geared up to handling the weapons and heavy mining tools.  Occasionally, normal constructors can be seen managing these weapons but this only indicates that the production Secondary Instance hasn’t yet optimised production!

Assembly

Rocky’s War Room have rapid-assembly videos for some of these (offsite).