A century and a half ago a press ganged young man named Dean Hawkins served on the twenty gun frigate Falchion Her Majesty's Imperial Navy raiding the commerce of the Kingdom of Dorion in the Second Colonial War where he took in lieu of the regular cut of the prize money a bit of the cargo for himself, an all metal mechanical lathe made by a clockmaker. This he sent back home to his brother, a gunsmith married to the daughter of a tinkerer, who two years latter replicated the device and was using it to produce new flintlock pistols in bulk and selling them at half the price. Thus began the illustrious rise of Hawkin's Armaments, one of the nation's largest gunmakers. Thirty years latter, their enterprise had grown for the the Third Colonial War and they delivered some 125,000 Mark-I percussion rifles and 30,000 revolvers to the Imperial Army in less than a year's time, earning them contracts that secured them as the prime providers of small arms to the Imperial Forces in the conflicts between the Doronese Commonwealth and the Lyronian Empire continued and both of the industrial powers of the world conquered and colonized more territory.





The Hawkins Mark-IV Conscript Rifle was the most recent creation of Hawkins Armaments. In the last few months of the Sixth Colonial War, the insidious Dorionese Commonwealth began issuing it's soldiers with self loading rifles. No cocking of levers or operating of bolts was required by the user to bring another round out of the magazine, all that he needed to do was pull the trigger. In response, the government commissioned that something better be made from Hawkins Armaments. Something which was deadlier and cheaper to be issued in bulk across the Empire for the millions of conscripts. What they got was this: the Mark-IV Conscript rifle. Easy to produce in large quantities, able to fire 7x42mm rounds at 600 RPM or semi-automatically with a 25 round magazine and so simple that even the least educated colonial conscript can master it's maintenance while it cost very little to make. Soon enough, millions of these rifles were rolling off the assembly lines. Even so, it was not without it's teething problems as it's construction (especially when made from colonial armories) was not the highest in the world and the fact that it ejected cases upwards could be problematic to soldiers in the field.

