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Hey folks, thanks for stopping by Memorable Weapons. I’m Leilani Palakiko and this lovely little guest star here is my M-7 Lancer, Pepper. So, the premise of this series is to take a look at weapons that everyone thinks they know and give them a closer examination. Just really take a look under the grill and get a feel for where they sprung from, how they worked in service, and--if they didn’t do so hot--what went wrong for them. And I can think of no better place to start than the dumped ex-girlfriend of every armchair general, the M-7 Lancer, “the gun the Alliance should still be using.” We’ll… have a sit-down conversation about that, kay? It got really weird.
So to start off with, the Lancer is a fully-automatic assault rifle, though you’ll find ones that have been modified to be burst-fire like Pepper here. Right off the bat there’s a misconception to get rid of: That tube on the top isn’t a second barrel, that’s its optic. It’s intended to be used alongside a personal helmet, visor, etc. The Lancer is also, rather uniquely (for the modern era) a weapon that doesn’t require thermal clips, but I’m sure you already knew that. She’s pretty accurate, controllable thanks to some recoil dampeners, punchy with an oversized internal eezo core, and she’s light to boot. This here’s my go-to weapon in the Armax Arsenal Arena. In fact, Pepper has her own unique story, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Now, where did the Lancer come from? Well, skipping over some still-prickly politics, suffice to say the First Contact War was a wake-up call for the Alliance. Among the long, long, long list of things that the Alliance military wanted replacements for after the war was a new assault rifle. In fact, let’s not mince words, they had already ordered a replacement before the war was over. The general consensus I’ve found in reports was that the Alliance weaponry of the time was barely adequate, well-made but not really up to snuff against Turian shields or armor. They made it work, of course, but veterans of the campaign still came running up to R&D howling for more power. However, here’s where things get dodgy.
Luckily (from the Human perspective), Alliance R&D had managed to get some Turian rifles, mostly older-model Phaestons, and parceled them out to any defense contractor with more than three guys in a shed. However, either they didn’t recover enough thermal clips or did a bad job of explaining how few they had, because the defense contractors burned through all of them. (I know some of you are raising your hands about post-Geth-Invasion thermal clips, we’ll come back to that I promise.) Anywho, because of this, the Alliance competition that finally popped out was for a weapon that used the old static heatsink system, but they wanted something that was harder hitting than the Phaeston while also being lighter. You engineers in the audience can probably see where this was going.
Safe to say, everyone had a nightmare of a time. A Kassa Fabrication sales rep famously said, “If we knew the Alliance would want the impossible, we would’ve invented a genie lamp first.” When the one-year check-in came around, only Rosenkov and Hahne-Kadar showed up with anything. The Rosenkov rifle was a decent enough weapon according to the testers. It was a little slow-firing but punchy as all hell and seemed pretty resilient to punishment. However, it was also a bit heavy and, probably most-crippling, non-collapsible. Rosenkov swore up and down that the prototype’s bulk wouldn’t represent the finished product. Thing was, the soon-to-be M-7 was already finished.
See, Hahne Kadar had already been building the M-6 Vanguard of First Contact War fame… which was itself a modification of the M-5 Kittyhawk. Truth told, prototypes of the gun that would eventually become the M-7 Lancer were already in limited field trials at the time and saw a bit of service during the war. However, the Phaeston had the engineers scrambling to find places to bulk up the gun and provided a much higher benchmark to measure it against. So naturally, they carefully considered their options, chipped away at the problem, refined every piece as much as possible to… nah I’m just screwing with you. They crammed as much alien tech as they could fit on the gun, fired it until it broke, redesigned what broke, and did it again and again until the trial date. An engineer in the company called the Lancer, “The sloppiest masterpiece we ever made,” and I believe it. It weirdly brings to mind things like the 20th century fighter aircraft, the F-4 Phantom, in a weird way: something with all kinds of bizarre kinks and angles that make no sense, but somehow it just works.
Anyways, the Lancer popped out of the trials without any opposition and entered service almost immediately, basically out of fear that the Turians would come looking for another go. To say Hahne-Kadar went overboard was an understatement. They started pumping them out right away, shortcutting their tool-up process by converting old M-6s to the new M-7 spec. They tried to do the same with Kittyhawks, but those had a teensy little problem with the frames exploding if you fired more than twenty rounds at a time. This issue would prove… slightly prophetic.
Even once they burned through the old models, Hahne-Kadar kept scaling production like they didn’t just want to replace every assault rifle in the Alliance. They wanted to replace every gun in the Alliance. To be fair, I don’t think anyone wanted to complain. The Lancer was well-liked by the troops at the time. It was handy, effective, easy to store, and didn’t seem to care what sort of dirt you ran it through. Even once it started seeing combat, folks found that it could usually take direct impacts from other rifles and shrug it off. However, there was one design flaw that took its time rearing its ugly head: that darn heatsink.
So, let’s get back to the heatsink debate, the great elephant in the room and what the armchair generals looooove to criticize the Alliance for. See, the first big myth to put to bed is that the Geth didn’t invent thermal clips. The tech has been around forever; you see it in older designs like the Krogan Graal Spike Throwers or the pre-Geth Quarian “Widow” anti-material rifles. In days gone, if you stepped a single pinky toe out of Alliance space thermal clips would still be common, just not the universal answer. In short, clip-cooled weapons were actually more reliable, easier to maintain, and easier to repair in the field if they suffered a melt-down. Sure, you need to keep them fed, but I would argue that they actually simplified supply chains. The real downside is that they didn’t like it when field engineers tried to squeeze more juice out of the guns; more kinetic energy creates more heat, as does a greater rate of fire. Those old clips had a very hard ceiling on what they could handle, and if you overheated them they tended to blow up, which I think we can agree isn’t a happy thing, even if most gun designers try to held direct that energy. That’s where the static sink comes in. What the static sink brought to the table was a higher peak load, allowing the technically-inclined to put more load on the weapon and provided more wiggle-room for people to do what they wanted to the gun. Even when they melted down, they failed safe, almost* never harming the user (put a pin that “almost”). However, static sinks have the extended cooldown problem--especially in space--and if you push that sink too far it’s not an easy battlefield fix. Your static sink melts down, and that’s it. You are out of the fight until you find something else.
What the geth did was introduce a better type of sink. It’s just an overall refinement of the design that solves the peak heat load problem of older thermal clips, meaning they’d no longer explode in the gun if you went too far with modifications and, even better, they had superior performance to most static sinks. It was also easy to replicate and adapt, allowing for basically everyone to start making variants of the clips compatible with their weapons which used this newer standard. Overnight, the largest advantage to static sinks, their resilience to experimentation and tampering, was gone. The impact of Geth thermal clip technology is a biiiiiig discussion, but for our story about the Lancer here’s what needs to be understood. The Alliance was already an outlier in using static sinks in frontline guns, since every other major military mostly relegated them to spec ops and heavy guard roles where atmospheric combat was more likely. Truth be told, the process that would create the M-8 Avenger was already under way; however the M-8 wasn’t slated to replace everything until the Geth provided the better thermal clips. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves now.
Okay, all that said, back to the Lancer. Even from the beginning it was a known issue with the Lancer that it really didn’t like vacuum. As I mentioned, it’s a central problem of static sinks: you stick them somewhere with an atmosphere, where they can transfer that heat to air, and they’re pleased as punch. Thermal radiation in a vacuum, on the other hand, is a slow process and Lancers were known for being prone to getting deadlined after the briefest firefights. The practical solution here would’ve been to have an atmospheric rifle and a vacuum rifle, or some way to quickly switch something over--which would get suggested by Hahne-Kadar themselves. However, the Lancer’s entire reason for existing was to counter thick Turian defenses and the engineers at the time didn’t think they could get enough oomph out of thermal clips, so that was out of the question. So Hahne-Kadar found another solution: mod the guns’ nuts off.
They provided all kinds of aftermarket support, both for their own mods and other companies’. This allowed units to tailor their Lancers to whatever environment they were set up in, and generally let unit armorers fix any identified issues where the Lancer didn’t get along with the environment. Working on a ship? Better heatsink. Working around bad thunderstorms? Hardened electrical systems. Serving as the unit marksman and can’t get any marksman rifles? Here’s a recoil dampener and scope, godspeed you poor bastard. Which is great! However, not all of these mods were exactly… intended for static heatsinks. The big engineering challenge with static heatsinks is that they stay somewhat hot and transfer some of their energy to the rest of the gun. Safe to say, not everything likes being cooked like that. Aftermarket sights would get their electronics fried, modified barrels would start losing accuracy, recoil dampeners would start smoking or even catch fire, and so forth. What really made this a problem, however, is that the Lancer was almost too easy to modify. Before long it wasn’t just the armorers and small arms repairmen modifying them, it was the soldiers, and I don’t just mean the specialists. I mean good ol’ Bubba from the colonies who put this here scram rail on it; if it’s good enough for pa’s Varren huntin’ rifle, it’s good enough for the marines. Even worse, not all of these modifications are being documented, especially in the units out on the fringes. Suddenly, about ten to fifteen years after the gun was introduced they start having some pretty dramatic meltdowns. The most publicized ones are cases where the heatsinks exploded because some genius decided to put scram rails and explosive rounds on these poor things and then ripped out the safeties when the gun cried for mercy. As it turned out, static sinks were resistant to catastrophic meltdowns, but if you pushed them hard enough even they would have much more dramatic meltdowns than thermal clips would. Well, those detonations started to get some publicity, and while it might be forgotten now there was actually a really big outcry to fix the Lancer at the time.
So, that’s when we get the M-8 Avenger. We’ll talk about it more another day, but basically the Avenger is just a Lancer that was taken to Elkoss Combine and modified to take thermal clips to finally stop this nonsense in mainline units. Then modified some more to be cheaper. Then modified some more when they needed to switch to new production. You get the picture. Again, this was something of a rush job. From the first publicized heatsink detonation to the Avenger being accepted for service was only about two years; a few companies had already been fiddling with the idea for a while. However, by that time this concept of personalizing the gun let soldiers get really attached to their Lancers, even as more and more of them kept melting. It was just so much better than anything they’d had before, and it’s hard to articulate without getting hands-on time, but the Avenger just feels worse. It’s just less punchy, more cumbersome, clankier, mushier trigger, just an overall less pleasant gun to shoot. And these… what are these? Magazines? What is this, the twentieth century? Yeah, the frontliners really didn’t like these things coming from the (seemingly) low-maintenance Lancer.
Sooo… they didn’t change over. Or tried not to.
Suddenly this weird tug of war started as the Alliance procurement higher-ups wind up in a battle with smaller units’ own procurement officers that devolved into a game of parents trying to feed their kids vegetables. “Take your Avengers!” “I don’t wanna!” “Take it!” “NO!” It got extra bad when the entire spec ops N-branch--probably meaning well--said that they genuinely needed Lancers for their specialists and would just document their jury-rigged modifications better. That placated the procurement heads, but as Lancer parts dried up for the other vocations and Avengers filled their place, people started getting an insidious little thought that always comes up when spec ops gets its own toy. “If spec ops has it, it must be the best.” Soldiers clung to their Lancers even harder, to the point that MPs had to go from unit to unit confiscating them. And even then some people found aftermarket shells to make Lancers look like Avengers. A few even bought black market Lancers with their own money after the MPs had left.
Eventually that mess sorted itself out through a mixture of attrition, soldiers’ exhaustion with the whole mess, reality setting in that the Lancer really was a flawed weapon, and finally the Geth thermal clips. The Geth clips really were the death knell of the Lancer. The moment those appeared, even N-vocation soldiers started fishing for other things to replace the Lancer--things that weren’t the Avenger--and it abruptly dropped out of service. Not that it’s ever stopped having a niche. Again, commandos love the things. Famously, Turian Spectre Relkin Actus has been using one and has petitioned Hahne-Kadar to restart production, which is a twist of fate I imagine made for a fun board meeting. Unfortunately, most Lancers got changed to Avengers by Elkoss Combine during the transition, which is why there are so few of them surviving today. Most survivors are, frankly, stolen Lancers that have meandered their ways into the hands of mercenaries, explorers, wildcat miners, and other people living in far-off corners where thermal clips can be tricky to source. Custom gunsmiths love these things as showcases of their skills; nowadays every surviving Lancer is somebody’s custom baby.
While the Lancer had its bittersweet ending and the military has come to terms with it, the great kerfuffle around it has earned the Lancer an odd mystique in the eyes of casual gun enthusiasts. People seem to take a very surface level read on adding thermal clips to the supply chain. On a moment-to-moment basis they’re inconvenient, and at a glance they seem like an unnecessary complication. Then you start factoring in the trainwreck that led up to the Lancer’s departure from service. The mountain of replacement parts, the dead-lined guns, the soldiers blowing themselves up, the other soldiers getting hurt because their gun jammed on them again, and the utter mountain of bureaucratic nightmares trying to keep track of everything. Take all that on-board, and the pros of the Lancer start looking less shiny.
That said, it’s still beloved in my book. See, my sweet Pepper here was a rifle at the “N-school,” where Alliance spec ops go for supplemental training. My mother was an instructor there, basically from just after the First Contact War onward, and she used this cutey as a trainer for modifications, allowing the more promising candidates to turn Pepper into whatever they felt like. She’s kind of Theseus’s rifle; probably nothing on her is still original and there’s some pretty funny artifacts leftover here and there from old mods. A lot of people have done a lot of things to this gun. Back when he was famous, I drunkenly bragged that Pepper was Commander Shepard’s “first true love,” but honestly if the good Spectre ever touched her, it’s just because she was the training facility’s bicycle. Everyone got a ride. When she retired, my mom took her home and made her the first assault rifle I ever touched, and eventually she became my weapon of choice when I took my first steps into the black. I’ve gotten caught in a few pretty hairy crossfires, and she’s never failed to deliver. Her greatest moment of glory was probably when a certain Turian prick decided to paint Citadel Tower a particularly ugly shade of cuttlefish. I’m no C-Sec officer or anything, but in the frantic scramble for survival and trying to provide emergency aid to people, I wound up holed up in a hospital with nothing but my Armax arena armor and Pepper between the flashlights and a gruesome death. Not sure how many Geth I scrapped, probably not more than six or seven, but considering I held out basically from the big squid’s landing until Shepard came in with half the Alliance, I think Pepper and I held out pretty well.
So yeah, I love the Lancer, controversy and all. It’s not a perfect gun--nothing is--but it will always hold a special place in my heart, both for what it’s done for me personally and for just what a weird story it tells. Hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and I hope to see you around next time. Thanks for coming by.