File-02 The Lightwave Particle

The Lightwave Particle are heavy photons and are used by various types of lightwave particle based propulsion systems as well as some of the lightwave defense barriers. This particle has been a subject of research for by many organizations including the PLANTs, Morgenroete, MSWAD, and several others for the last several years. It has only recently when the PLANTs would introduce the LWX1 Lightwave Pulse Thruster early in the Bloody Valentine War which would lead to a more military research being put into the Lightwave particle. It has since become quite notable in being used for propulsion with later research being made into creating defense barriers.

When being used by propulsion systems this particle allows anything equipped with said system to be highly maneuverable but at the cost of no fuel consumption which makes it an ideal replacement for fuel-guzzling high input thrusters. However one of the downsides of any Lightwave particle based propulsion system is that it makes anything equipped with it a sort of wild horse and hard to control which would lead to many stopping any further research into Lightwave propulsion. It was only when the new Lightwave Particle Pulse Thrusters were developed by a joint MSWAD/MarsSec Development that saw Lightwave propulsion being introduced as general use equipment for the first time. This would really be seen when the Republic of Altair would have their new second generation mobile suit line equipped with one of these thrusters as matter of course.

An interesting feature that was found by a MSWAD Development team in late CE70 was that anything equipped with a Lightwave particle based propulsion system could easily fly in full atmosphere. This would lead to development of the warship equipped LWL-X1 Levitation System, or simply titled the Levitator System which was first equipped to the new Earth Alliance Battleship Archangel which allowed the large battleship to fly several feet above the surface when in a planet’s atmosphere. Later Orb developed the LWL-X2 System which would be equipped by their newly introduced Float Ships which doubled the flight ceiling of the previous system thanks in part to some new advancements in magnetics which contain and express the particles. Another interesting development was found by accident by Lord Kira Yamato, pilot of the Lightwave Particle Thruster equipped Vanguard Gundam when the mobile suit’s Lightwave thrusters generated a heavy cloud of Lightwave particles thanks to being overcharged which then blocked a beam rifle shot from an enemy mobile suit. Later experiments done by Orb’s Morgenroete would see the development of the new anti-beam depth charges used by Orb and allied ships during the last months of the Bloody Valentine War. This would later lead to the development of the first true Lightwave particle shield which would come into use by the Second Bloody Valentine War.

While a so-called Lightwave Barrier had been developed by the Eurasian Federation before the start of the war. It was never formed of actual Heavy Photons, i.e. Lightwave particles like its name implies as it actually utilizes a synthetically produced metastable Hadron particle, and the color the fields generate is due to normal photons interacting with the Hadrons suspended in the electromagnetic fields, not to mention the defensive properties of the Lightwave particle had only discovered recently. The reason why the Eurasians called their barrier system a Lightwave Barrier is due to the fact that they had mistakenly believed the synthetically created Hadrons they made were Heavy Photons due to testing limitations in the lab, and even after the ‘mistake’ was revealed, some in Eurasia continued to refer to this system as a Lightwave Barrier, although several groups would instead start to refer to these barriers more accurately as Hadron Barriers.

Thanks to the sheer advantage the Mass Produced Lightwave Particle Pulse thruster give mobile suits both Altair and MSWAD have compartmentalized the information on producing such a unit. Therefore only a handful of people actually know the entire schematics of the thruster unit. The identity of these people are classified as top secret in both Altair and the MSWAD.