Lapidus Weapon Templates

The Lapidus Weapon Templates are a series of complex information banks discovered on the planet Patean, a presumed former colony of the long-lost Lapidus civilization. Stored on advanced light-based computer systems, the banks detailed design patterns for numerous different kinds of high-density laser weapons.

Discovery
The LWTs were found during an expedition to Patean made by the Coalition of Intelligent Organisms, sometime around the late 3600's. Irregular energy patterns were detected on the planet by passing research vessels, indicating the presence of advanced alien technology. Not many scientists were surprised when Lapidus artifacts were found on the planet, since Lapidus technology was very prevalent in that particular area of space. What did surprise them, however, was that the planet seemed to be dedicated solely to Lapidus military technology, acting as a sort of archive for the various weapons of war the Lapidus had used millennia ago. Obviously, the Coalition was quick to explore the planet and identify anything of use, but were sadly disappointed. Even though the information banks were contained in huge underground vaults, extensive damage had been done to the Lapidus infrastructure on the planet by what appeared to be both orbital bombing and invasion. Like most Lapidus technology, the information banks were very fragile, and almost all of them were too badly damaged to be usable. The only major exception were the LWTs, which were in pristine condition when they were discovered deep underground in a Lapidus vault.

The Coalition extracted the templates and brought them back to Echelon for study. Like all Lapidus "computers", the templates used light to store and transfer information. After collecting numerous different pieces of Lapidus technology that all functioned on similar principles, the Department of Galactic Sciences had learned how to extract usable data from such devices, and were able to decode the templates rather quickly. They uncovered countless blueprints and design data relating to Lapidus laser weapons, which, owing to their mastery over light-based technologies, would have been some of the most advanced lasers in the entire galaxy. The complexity of Lapidus light-based technology, however, prevented Coalition scientists from fully reverse engineering the weapons, though the Department of Experimental Warfare still used them to revolutionize Coalition directed energy weapons. Laser weapons became widespread in the Coalition for the next 2 centuries or so, until the development of ECA shields rendered them mostly obsolete.

Acquisition by the Bedlam Society
After most of the information relating to Lapidus weapons was already uncovered and being actively studied by the DEW, scientists looked deeper into the templates and found small fragments of information that had been overlooked previously. Upon closer inspection, these fragments turned out to be sections of a compendium on various other weapons of war, such as spaceships and robots. However, physical recreations of these objects showed that they clearly were not of Lapidus origin. Rough translation of the hidden information included frequent mentions of something simply called "Black" which supposedly is the creator of the listed war machines. When scientists noticed that the war machines had design similarities to previously encountered Tuoctlo artifacts, they quickly connected the dots and assumed the Lapidus had, at some point, been involved in a war with the Tuoctlo, though they couldn't discern if they were allies or enemies. This revelation caught the attention of the Bedlam Society, who dispatched Blue Hand agents to confiscate all research data relating to these newly discovered pieces of information. While information relating to the whole of the weapon templates was left alone, the "secret data" contained in the templates was never seen again by the DGS or DEW, and why exactly the Bedlam Society chose to take it still remains a mystery.