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| - Synth manufacturer founded in 1975 by Wolfgang Palm and operating out of Hamburg, Germany. (The name is an acronym for "Palm Products GmbH", and has nothing to do with Pittsburgh Plate Glass.) Although the company got its start making modular synthesizer equipment, it is best known for its wave scanning designs, particularly the Wave 2 series.
- When fired in an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, the intense heat of the super-heated helium plasma projectile causes a distinctive optical distortion as it expands the air around it. PPGs are the sidearm of choice for most space-based fighting forces, as the plasma bolt is effective against organic targets and thin metals but will dissipate quickly when striking denser surfaces. This means that while in a pressurised environment, a stray shot will not cause a hull breach, as is the risk with Slugthrowers. Sustained fire will burn though some thick metals, but alloys with a high heat dissipation rate such as beryllium will simply ricochet the shot.
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| abstract
| - Synth manufacturer founded in 1975 by Wolfgang Palm and operating out of Hamburg, Germany. (The name is an acronym for "Palm Products GmbH", and has nothing to do with Pittsburgh Plate Glass.) Although the company got its start making modular synthesizer equipment, it is best known for its wave scanning designs, particularly the Wave 2 series. The company was a pioneer in digital synthesis and merging computer interfaces with synths. PPG introduced its first digital synths, the 340/380 series, in 1979. It was used extensively by Thomas Dolby and a few others, but the system was considered difficult to use since much of the processing had to be done "offline", prior to performance time. In order to improve performance capabilities and reduce cost, PPG added analog VCFs and VCAs and simplified the user interfaces, and this became the very successful Wave 2. The design was subsequently improved with the Wave 2.2 and 2.3 (there doesn't seem to have been a 2.1). The computer interfaces which had been deleted to reduce the cost were made available separately as the Waveterm; this system allowed Wave 2.x owners to build their own wavetables from samples or drawn waveforms, and do more sophisticated processing. In 1985, PPG embarked on a very ambitious project called the Realizer. This was to have been a multi-algorithm synth capable of running several different software applications supporting different methods of synthesis, including virtual analog emulations of synths such as the Minimoog. The Realizer had a large video display surrounded by controls whose panel graphics were to have been coordinated with the video presentation. The project was too big and too ahead of its time; it ate up PPG's cash flow, and the company ran out of money and went under in 1987.
- When fired in an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, the intense heat of the super-heated helium plasma projectile causes a distinctive optical distortion as it expands the air around it. PPGs are the sidearm of choice for most space-based fighting forces, as the plasma bolt is effective against organic targets and thin metals but will dissipate quickly when striking denser surfaces. This means that while in a pressurised environment, a stray shot will not cause a hull breach, as is the risk with Slugthrowers. Sustained fire will burn though some thick metals, but alloys with a high heat dissipation rate such as beryllium will simply ricochet the shot. Most PPGs feature different settings that allow the user to balance the power of each discharge, the time between recharges (allowing for more or less rapid fire) with the energy used, and thus number of shots from a single energy cap. As a rule, pistols tend to have slower recharges between shots and a lower capacity energy cap, while larger rifles have a much shorter recharge cycle and larger energy caps. Though a lower-level PPG shot will normally burn and cauterize a wound, leaving the target down but alive, a well-aimed and/or close-range PPG shot is easily capable of causing instant death; penetrating flesh, fusing bone and incinerating internal organs. Higher settings, on the other hand, will burn straight through an organic body, cause massive internal burns and trauma to the internal organs and even melt clothing right into the skin. Such high-powered, lethal shots are rarely used as it consumes more energy, reducing the number of shots between reloads and increasing the time between recharge cycles.
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