Heat Inducing Flare Burning AutoCannon Ammo

Heat Inducing Flare Burning AutoCannon Ammo, or HIFB AC Ammo for short, is a special ammunition that allows ACs to fire burning flare tracers.

Development
In an increasingly chaotic battlefield where rules dissolves and the Word of Blake revived total war, it was key to bring order and good chances of hitting your enemy. Clouds of smoke, nuclear mushrooms and night made it harder and harder to sucessfully attack in conventional battle. While Steiners just ordered artillery to blindfire at everything, the Capellan Confederation coudn't afford such wanton waste of resources. Adapting technology gained from the Word of Blake itself, they created a type of AutoCannon ammo able to let them enhance target acquisition. As a bonus, its high-powered flares were also able to burn the targets, thus positively synergizing with the Confederation's increasingly common Plasma Weaponry.

HIFB Ammo was purposelly designed with simplicity in mind, in order to be quickly manufactured at different worlds, even in retooled civilian chemical factories and firework plants. This relative simplicity was also somewhat the Confederation's undoing, as Davion spies leaked some of the procedures, and in mere years the whole IS was able to more or less reproduce the process - tho Capellan munitions remained of the best quality and quantity, and were exported in big numbers during the coming decades.

Decline
Half a century passed, and the new era of warfare with augmented armor types and extreme use of electronics made the HIFB ammo rather obsolete. The last Capellan factory went out not with a bang, but with a whimper. Some HIFB Ammo deposits remain, but the chemicals can't remain active forever as they decay to become inert with the years. As such, many of the cartridges were re-adapted for civilian use, sometimes for utility or industrial use, and sometimes for entertainment. Some AC/2 ammo is even hadled by kids and used to have fun in backwater and periphery worlds. In this way, ironically the ammo type came full circle back to its humble origins.

Dates

 * Prototyped: 3052
 * Production: 3062
 * Common: 3068
 * Extinct: 3134

Rules
HIFB AC Ammo exists for all types of AC that allow alternate ammunition, in all sizes (2,5,10,20, etc). It has half the shots of normal AC ammo for that type, rounding .5 up.

Heat Inducing Flare Burning AutoCannon Ammo is fired in the offboard firing phase, just like a TAG. A 'Mech firing an AC at this phase can't fire the weapon again in the normal firing phase of that turn. This firing is unique; you can't fire additional times the same AC in the same turn, even if rules for normal ammo would allow it.

HIFB ammo deals half its AC rating, rounded up, as heat damage to the target (1 heat for AC/2, 3 heat for AC/5, 5 heat for AC/10, 10 heat for AC/20, and so on). If the target does not track heat, it deals that much damage to it instead. This replaces the normal damage dealing.

In addition, all weapons fired in the weapons fire round that target a unit sucessfully hit with HIFB ammo that turn will gain a +1 bonus to their to-hit roll, or +2 in the case its night, or the target is behind smoke. This HIFB bonus only stacks to a maximum of +2 in any case.