Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/Seismic Technology

The Earthquake Machine
The origins of Seismic Technology came from a man who would later become the bane of the Guardian war effort; (Nikola Tesla). Shortly before his return to the Voshkod, Tesla had been reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments.

Tesla tried to sell his work to western powers, but they refused. In 1927, Tesla received an invitation to return to the Voshkod to complete his research. Overjoyed, he contacted the daughter of his closest friend, to whom he placed the responsibilities of all his previous work.

She carried out his wishes faithfully and notified the Aquilan patent office about his recent fortune. Immediately, several bells went off in McGarren, for one of the greatest minds in the world was no longer under Aquila's watch. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The personal effects were sequestered on the advice of presidential advisors; J. Edgar Hoover declared the case most secret, because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents.

One of which was an early design for an earthquake machine. Nikola Tesla established a laboratory at 46 E. Houston Street in New York. There, at one point while experimenting with mechanical oscillators, he allegedly generated a resonance of several buildings causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonance frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledgehammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived.

Resonance Border
President Roosevelt reinstated Tesla's project and assigned the task to one of the largest military contractors in the world at the time, which received a multi-million dollar order for a line of seismic batteries to defend the Aquilan States from a possible invasion by the Voshkod. The Houston Project, so named in honor of the street that had been the site of Tesla's laboratory, was born, the single largest investment by the Aquilan government, until the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative under President McCarthy. The first defensive perimeter was completed July 7th, 1946.

Using modified deep well drilling platforms, the Resonance Jackhammer could use fault lines and the ease of transmitting force across the water to shift and tear apart the structural activity of any surface-based target. The resounding effect would reverberate across the target's frame causing significant damage. The line of Resonance Jackhammers would expand the Embry islands under Aquilan control and Eskiman Sea coast. Today, several of the platforms are still manned by State Guardsmen in order to prevent a Communist invasion of the North Aquila continent from the Voshkod borders on the Bering Sea or by the Gulf of Mexico from Cuba.

Minutemen Application
Years later, the Minutemen needed an edge against the Aquilan scientific superiority, so they raided many of the Resonance Jackhammer platforms and disassembled them. Many State Guardsmen, most of them natives of Embry, did nothing to stop them. Studying them and Tesla's notes, they were able to get the basics of it down and built their own versions, creating an arsenal of anti-structure and anti-vehicle weaponry.