Slaughterspine

The Slaughterspine is a machine found in North America and is a large combat-class machine.

Utility

Like many large GAIA machines, Slaughterspines are solitary, never being seen in groups. They are frequently found along coasts, patrolling the beaches and attacking any human on sight.
The Slaughterspine is one of the most dangerous machines created yet by HEPHAESTUS, combining agility with a large arsenal of Plasma attacks, as well as incredibly heavy armor which makes damaging the machine difficult. Both varieties of Slaughterspine are resistant to most elemental damages, with Shock and Plasma resistances being shared among them.

Complexity

The Slaughterspine has a design based roughly on a now-outdated reconstruction of the Spinosaurus. The face of the Slaughterspine easily shows the long-extinct creatures' influence on the design of the machine, with a long, slender snout with a split jaw, an orange headpiece, and a pair of quad optical sensors. It is covered head to tail in heavy armor plating, protecting it from plasma, fire, shock, and acid damage. Armor juts around the neck, up to the back. The Slaughterspine has a massive saw-bladed sail across its back, with two smaller, similarly sized spines around the main sail that serve as missile launchers. On its chest, it has a plasma earthblaster that covers a plasma core, and above it is a plasma energizer, which it uses to charge up its attacks. It has two massive legs, with the hips having circular plasma energizers that it uses to further charge its attacks and two long forelimbs with Metalbite sacs on the shoulders. It has a long tail that ends in a three-pronged fan, each prong being capable of opening up to fire out lasers. Chillwater canisters are on its neck and Purgewater canisters are on its tail-limb.
The Slaughterspine can bite the ground and try to charge into Aloy, slash her with its tail or stomp her if she gets too close. It can power up with the Plasma Energizers on its legs and release a massive plasma-infused shockwave, along with a high-pitched screech that can deafen targets, giving the machine a window of opportunity to attack. Using its tail, it can fire 5 plasma beams at Aloy or infuse its normal attacks with Plasma. It can also blast a laser of plasma from its mouth, launch a plasma wave from its earthblaster, and shoot energized plasma missiles from its spinal launchers.
While the Slaughterspine is incredibly deadly with its plasma attacks, it can only do this for so long before needing to recharge. Whenever it needs to recharge (or when the fight starts) it will open the plasma energizers on its hips and above the earthblaster. Hitting these allow for high damage and will cause them to retract, with one energizer fully retracting resulting in its deactivation. Shutting down all three prevents the Slaughterspine from getting enough charge, forcing it to attack with kinetics alone. The Plasma Lancer and Plasma Spine Launcher can be shot off and used against it, though the machine itself is resistant to Plasma, making the weapons virtually useless against it.
Removing the armor around the plasma core in its chest reveals a key weak spot that can be shot for extra damage.
Finally, the machine has a Metalbite sack (Purgewater in the case of the Apex variant) on each of its shoulders, which can be destroyed to cause an elemental explosion that automatically inflicts the status ailment on it.
The regular Slaughterspine is weak toward Freeze and Purgewater, whereas the Apex-variant is weak toward Acid and Fire.

Discovery

Like all combat class machines, the Slaughterspine was created by the rogue Subordinate Function HEPHAESTUS with the sole purpose of combating humans and curtailing the hunting of various machines.