Psibuster
Description: a metal cube, typically carried in a cloth bag with straps. There is an obvious firing pin at the top that must be unlocked with a key before it can be removed. The lock is not particularly difficult to pick: the idea is more to keep the Psibuster from being accidentally activated. A Psibuster is generally set to ‘detonate’ when thrown against something hard, but can be primed to go off when any physically present psi actively uses a power within one yard of it.
It’s basically a satchel charge that can only be used against psionic targets. It does kind of affect non-psis, but not very strongly: anyone within its area of effect (1-yard sphere) when it goes off will feel briefly queasy, and possibly get a touch of vertigo. Those with some sort of natural psionic resistance will feel nothing at all.
But people who are psionic (very much including people using psychotronic technologies)? Hoo, boy. The effects start out with vomiting, loss of bladder/bowel control, and random muscle spasms. Anyone actively using a psionic ability at the time of detonation will likely be knocked out — possibly bleeding from the nose in the process — and God help a teleporter caught in the moment of transition, because the after-effects are rarely pretty. Mind gestalts and other shared psionic activities can get absolutely shredded in the sudden feedback loop. Psychotronic technologies fare no better: they invariably burn out, sometimes explosively. And so on.
Mind shields do protect from the effects, but only if they’re actually up. And they’ll take a beating in the process; it’ll be actively painful for the psion to raise or lower shields for the next day or so, and the psi will not sleep well for the next week. Extremely well-designed and maintained psychotronic tech can likewise survive a Psibuster blast, but even then immediate maintenance will be required to bring the tech back up to full capacity. Psibusters are simply extremely dangerous weapons to use on psis.
Psibusters also make no distinction between friendly and hostile psis, are extremely expensive to make, and provide hideous amounts of overkill for most psionic-related infractions; it wasn’t hard to demonstrate that they weren’t cost-effective in most situations. There’s also the minor detail that when the first devices became available, they were not very well-regulated, to the point where some ill-advised psionic regulatory agencies even tried to have them available as standard issue for field teams. This practice quickly stopped when it became clear that teams carrying Psibusters tended to end up in the kind of encounters where ten people go into a room and maybe two come out, and those two aren’t really all that functional anymore. The items could be counted on to escalate every psionic-themed conflict into a battle royale to the death, and that wasn’t optimal at all.
So when a team is issued a Psibuster these days, it’s generally considered a warning. Anything worth using a Psibuster on is likely to be extremely nasty at close quarters, should something go wrong. So hit fast, hit hard, and don’t miss the first time. Because if someone misses, the target’s going to react vehemently.