Here's a variant/overlapping case, still looking at the same sort of tech level.
Helicopters are great, but they can't carry really big guns or serious ammunition loads - you can stick sixteen Hellfires on an Apache, but all it can then do is kill tanks. If you have an M1 Abrams with a 120mm smoothbore gun, you can can carry 40 rounds, and shoot HEAT or kinetic DU or canister or the latest iteration of CLGPs (such as the XM1111). So it would be really nice to have something a bit more mobile than a tank but still packing the tank's big gun. Also: the current trend in projectile lethality vs armour seems to be towards the former. To the point where armouring against a full-on tank round is becoming impracticable even on the front face. Survival starts to depend on not being spotted. So you start with something like a tank turret, with derated armour, and build a platform to go underneath it and move it from place to place. Legs if designed right allow you to move suddenly in any direction, rather than having to slew a tracked body around until it's pointed the right way. A pair of chicken-type legs lets you shoot over cover, which the multilegged crawler approach can't handle; it also gives you good mobility over and through destroyed buildings, which tanks can't handle. With sufficient cleverness, you can also use this to slew and elevate the gun, which saves complication (you'll have quite enough of that keeping the legs working). A small height advantage lets you choose whether to shoot the fronts or the tops of enemy tanks, and you can bet they won't _both_ be armoured. Adding arms gives you the option of crawling. In this mode you're slower than a tank, but you can hide in anything it can. Powerplant (applies to tanks as well as mecha): the gas turbine gives you lots of power, but has the basic problem of no idle throttle setting: if you aren't moving, you're either ready to go and consuming lots of fuel as if you were on the move, or consuming no fuel but several minutes away from power-up. So you probably want to go for a more conventional, or more advanced, power plant. This is mostly a weapon for dealing with conventional tanks and other vehicles, rather than infantry. The tank can bring the same gun to the fight but is more vulnerable, and slower over many terrain types; the attack helicopter gets there faster but doesn't have the same flexibility and has to go home sooner. R _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
