Riley Weapon Systems
Riley Weapons Systems of Fort William was founded in TN 1763 by Riley Haakon. Riley himself had experience in the area of weapons production, having been an upper-level technician for Northco for over thirty cycles. Riley had been engaging in independent contracting for several cycles, which Northco did not approve of, and as a result he and several others were suspended without pay. The men decided to use their expertise for their own profit and left the company altogether. They then pooled their capital together and bought out a small manufacturing plant at the edge of Fort William’s corporate area. Later that same cycle, Riley Weapons Systems was producing rugged, reliable autocannons. Amazingly enough, Northco was one of Riley’s first clients, although some say the whole thing was a scam created by Northco executives to give the engineers the creative freedom they needed, and the Riley Weapons Systems was, in fact, just another of Northco's subsidiary. To this day, Riley Weapons Systems fights against this stigma.
As the arming of Terra Nova’s two hemispheres began to escalate, Riley found itself with more business than it knew what to do with. Several other companies, including Shaian Mechanics and Hartmore Motor Company, were using Riley-made weapons for their vehicle designs, and company revenues soared. Riley soon branched into other types of weapons, refining a series of mortar designs brought with them from the design tables of their former employers. By the time the powerful Grizzly lumbered off the assembly lines at Northco’s Rapid City facility, it carried with it a powerful and accurate Riley-made guided mortar. Riley’s production lines, already in full swing when CEF forces invaded Terra Nova, increased their output tenfold, producing not only vehicular weapons, but also a series of automatic rifles and heavy anti-armor weapons for infantry.
Near the end of the War, several of Riley’s experimental weapons systems made it into the field, including the now widely-used M25 “Pack Gun” and the devastating M88-5RA1 Ram Accelerator Cannon. The huge cannon used exploding in-barrel gases to propel massive solid projectiles, with three times the force of a landship railgun. Only five of the awesome weapons were ever produced, and the remaining one currently adorns the main gate to Riley’s facilities in Fort William.
CEO Cameron Jacosta is also in the process of re-negotiating her company’s service contract with Northco. The current agreement favors the industrial mammoth too much and does not providing enough for fluctuations in the common market.