Mecha Design Quest

After a great deal of soul- and budget- searching, you finally settled down on a pilot-loader design, as well as the… rather dubious… decision to take in the 12N engine. Fundamentally, it made sense. If you placed the stabilizing gyroscope behind the articulation point of the leg in a digitigrade fashion, then you could put the engine under the pilot, and the transmission under the loader. This lasted for about half an hour, before Yves shat on that plan on grounds of making it bloody impossible to keep the control mains free. He wanted the pilot in front of the engine, as far forward as possible. Matthew then objected in return, listing that he couldn't make the engine sit like that, it was completely impractical. He suggested an engine-aft design, which you then objected to because you needed room aft to put your bloody weapons system in.

Design meetings were adjourned for a week while the question of the transmission was addressed and parts were acquired. The eventual Hotchkiss-Foucault 1500rpm gyroscope was chosen since it had the lowest power draw to stabilization, and you were actually inordinately proud when Workshop 1 sent a formal request to use a copy of the design. That, right there, was what victory looked like.

What victory did not look like, however, was staring at the utter slew of guns across the armory floor that Niels had brought to your attention. Everything from the new 7.5mm light machine guns to a monsterous 120mm gun-mortar were laid out, and you were honestly quite lost. Fortunately, Niels had a plan to 'simplify' matters.

The new mecha needed a large, dangerous anti-mecha weapon. That was what the big guns were for. It also needed an anti-personnel machine gun. That was what the little guns were for. Therefore, to make things easy, you'd decide on both separate the other.

For machine guns, there were plenty of options. The newest gun was the Reibel, a drum-fed in 7.5x54, the 'new service cartridge of the nation' according to Niels, it would be a very solid choice. You weren't personally so sure of the drum magazines, since a 150-round pan was, well… lacking. Sure, it was better than strip feed, but you were a personal proponent of belts.

The old Hotchkiss mle.1908 and mle.1914 stood by, but neither you nor Niels wanted to talk about them. Both were showing their age, and you weren't feeling it about designs as old as you. Worse was the fact they fed old 8mm Lebel, a round that was loosing traction rapidly. Their one benefit was that the new mle.1914/1926 refits could accept up to 500 round belts: more than enough ammunition between reloads.

Fortunately, however, new hotness was next to them. The Hotchkiss mle.1927 was a massively upsized mle.1914 with parts of the guts cleaned up, with the entire design rechambered into 13.2x96mm. While not as powerful as the 11mm Antichar rounds, it still possessed a respectable heft, and Internal Testing revealed that it would reliably penetrate a 15mm flat plate at 150m out of the standard 76 caliber barrel. It wasn't a proper anti-armor weapon, but it was more than enough to handle light vehicles and scout mecha- and more importantly, buy you some extra wiggle room if your choice in explosive weapons wasn't up to snuff.

The high explosive weapons, meanwhile, were more varied.

First on the docket was the old reliable SA 18 cannon. With a 37mm shell and a 21 caliber barrel, she wasn't a looker in the race. The gun had been a staple on the old Araignée, and very few people would look askance if you decided to re-use it, right until technical testing began. Each shell weighed 670 grams with 30 of that as fill; not nearly enough to meet the 750 gram fill requirement! A secondary weapon, if you needed one, but hardly a first choice.

Following along was the canon de 65 M mle.1906. A bit of an antique, it was a mountain gun that was nonetheless both light and incredibly soft-recoiling. While it wouldn't pass the fill requirements, it would be incredibly easy to mount the gun so that it wouldn't cause recoil issues if you needed to go for a high weapons mounting. The one thing worth noting was that there wasn't a huge, ready supply: if you picked this gun, there might be actual museum pieces getting refurbished until Schneider could pick up a contract to produce some for you new.

Lastly, and certainly most prominently in the full-up artillery section, was the venerable Soixante-quinze; the Matériel de 75mm mle.1897 gun. In her appearance here, she was one of the 1914 Schneider builds, with a new recoil control spring and longer barrel. More than capable of fulfilling any shell requirements (and if she couldn't the board would be forced at gunpoint by the Artillery Branch to abandon such foolishness) it also came with the benefit of a massive pre-existing supply of guns. The catch was, however, recoil and weight. The full length barrels made them heavy, and while the recoil dampeners would control the weight of a 75x350R shell, control was not the same as cancel. Either you would need to be very conservative in mounting this gun, or you'd need to cut down the barrel and accept losses in accuracy and power.

Finally came the small weapons, those oddballs not so mighty as to take another task. First among them was the Crapouillot, or more formally the Mortier 58mm type 2. While the launcher was an inconspicuous clump of metal, the bomb of 18 to 35kg on a long stick was not. With 5-10kg fill, depending on bomb size, it would absolutely massacre whatever you hit it with. The issue, however, was hitting things. Even with guidance fins, the bombs were very much area weapons, and their high angle of fall made them near impossible to aim. It took little discussion with Niels to determine that if you were to use these, they would require extensive work to make palatable- but if you wanted to put that work in, the resultant weapon would let you strike like a god.

Next was the rockets. First, but not least, was a copy of the Soviet standard mecha rocket. At 65x400mm, they were a hefty rocket, each with 2kg fill. Standard use had them socketed into ten-rocket racks, tied to a common electric fuse for ignition. One would shoot the entire pack en masse, or not at all. Accuracy was debatable, since you didn't have secret Russian documents, but information from the Germans that had been acquisitioned by people in dark rooms reported that on average a single rack at 150 meters tended to fill a 10x25m square with 8/10 rockets.

Of course, some people couldn't stand the concept of a Soviet weapons system, and had taken pains to Frankify it. The result was the 96x650mm rocket: a much heavier weapon, with 3.2kg fill. The issue was, all you had was the rocket: there was no established weapons mounting for it, or much use data at all. In truth, the only reason it was here was because it had been decided at Higher Levels than you to develop a heavy weapon to mount on the Lièvre and Requin in limited numbers to give them mecha-killing firepower. If you committed to it early, the result would be the ability to dictate a weapons system with incredible firepower, and more importantly one you could port forward across multiple mecha.

Of course, this didn't solve the problem of aiming any of these, but that was a cockpit integration problem. Since trying to design a universal aiming system was foolishness, you'd rather instead get the topic of which weapon to use nailed down first.

Naturally, this is when you walked back into the workshop, hoping to get back to work and instead watched the engineers and tradesmen race wagon wheels out into the fairway with the H-F gyro. Needless to say, they would start getting rather bored if you didn't wrap this weaponry nonsense up soon.

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Votes

Light Weapons
[] mle.1914 Hotchkiss 8mm
[] mle.1926 Reibel 7.5mm
[] mle.1927 Hotchkiss 13.2mm

Heavy Weapons
[] SA 18 37mm canon
[] 65mm montagne cannon
[] 75mm mle.1897/14
[] 58mm Crapoulliet mortar
[] 65mm rocket pack system
[] 96mm rocket