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Aircraft Design Company- Matsura's Planes Are Always Fastest!

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Character Sheet
  • Informational


    • ​
    Stress
    0​
    Office Stress
    0​
    XP
    5​

    Matsura Asuka
    Head Designer for Ohara Airworks
    Age 24 (Legally 25)
    Year 12 AF (After Flight)

    Design Stats
    Aerodynamics Engineering - +2
    Structural Engineering - +2
    Chemical Engineering - +1
    Mechanical Engineering - +1
    Ballistics Engineering - +1
    Electrical Engineering - 0

    Personal/Political Stats
    Social Skills - 0
    Politics Skills - 0
    Importance - 2
    Income - 1
    Investments - Ohara

    Resources
    Power - 0
    Wealth - 2

    Designs
    Type 1 Series - Military Variation (Designated T1M1)
    Type 2 Racer (World Speed Record October 1910-April 1911, 180kph)
    Model 2 Scout (Designated T1M2)
    Navy Scout Prototype (Drowned Rat)
    Dive Bomber B1M1 "Duck"
    Machine Gun Carrier R1A "Dragonfly" (World Speed Record May-July 1911, 200kph)
    Naval Rescue Water-Landing Supply Plane NR1M0 "Dolphin" (World speed record 240kph)
    Rhino Demon Train Hunter
    The world's first airliner
    The world's first pulsejet airplane

    Assets
    Slide Rule
    Computator (1 Reroll per Routine)

    Languages
    Albian
    Gallian

    Familiar Vices
    Drinking
    Prostitutes
    Dancing

    Family Life
    - Engaged to Arita Yachi, formerly the leading Ace in the Imperial Army. Designated #1 Cutest Army Boy, he's having some serious problems with PTSD right now.
    - Taking a second try at dating Mikami Kiho, ex-dockerwork from the south.

    Upgrades
    - 3 XP to upgrade a stat.

    Ohara Airworks
    Start Up, Imperial Capital, Akitsukuni

    Owner
    - Mr. Ohara, Rich. Aircraft Enthusiast. Business guy.

    Engineers

    Kibe Koume, 26, Office Manager
    Tiny & angry, Kibe went to school in Albia, picking up the language, the religion, and a fuckload of swear words. Speaks Albian.
    Mechanical +2, Ballistics +1
    Office Manager: If Kibe is not assigned to a team, the Office Stress is reduced by 1.

    Sakane Jun, 26, Second Team Leader
    A soured patriot, Sakane is married and has a young child being raised gender-neutrally. His two brothers who fought in the war.
    Structural +2, Aerodynamics +1
    Team Leader: If there are any additional projects, Sakane will lead them.
    Joinery: Sakane has training in the traditional Akitsukuni carpentry art of joinery, creating complex self-supporting joints with no fasteners or glue. When working with non-monocoque wooden spars or ribs, +1 Structural.

    Tezuka Kenji, ???
    A stoner with occasional flashes of insight. Nobody really knows what he does, but he's probably useful?
    Aerodynamics +2, Chemical +1
    Flashes of Brilliance: Each natural 10 rolled by any team Tezuka is assigned to gives +1 forward to the next research roll.

    Hasegawa Morio, 26
    A hopeless nerd with a photography habit, mostly on account of developing his own film, Hasegawa seems to do nothing but work and stack card houses, but somehow has an incredible attractive boyfriend. Speaks Gallian.
    Chemical +2, Ballistic +1
    Silent Workhorse: Hasegawa can work on two different projects at once for no cost to Office Stress, providing they use different stats.

    Kawamura Yosai, 25.
    Serially successful womanizer and incredibly attractive, Kawamura doesn't seem to have much of a personality outside of seducing women. Well, except for that time he seduced Asuka, which nobody talks about. Speaks Dyske.
    Structural +2, Electrical +1, Social +1
    Easily Distracted: If Kawamura is working on the same team as a female or non-binary employee, the team is at -1d10.

    Koide Hatsu, 24.
    One of the few female graduates of an Akitsukuni engineering school, Koide is brilliant and incredibly driven, but her first job at Akibara was both humiliating and exposed her to an abusive coworker. Her father is a rich businessman with factories in Joseon, and she's engaged to Ken from Castles of Steel. Speaks Joseon.
    Mechanical +2, Structural +1
    No Sleep: If you let her, Koide will work herself to death. She can work a second project for no Office Stress, but all her stats will be reduced to 1 for the routine.

    Kobayashi Ayao, ???
    Disowned heiress of the Kobayashi family, all Kobayashi wanted was a career and to be a modern woman. For her trouble, a cousin threw acid on her, scarring her face, neck, much of her torso, and her left arm. Despite appearing serene and above it all, she's actually an avowed communist activist and baseball player.
    Aerodynamics +2, Social +2

    Adachi Ren, 24
    Adachi learned chemistry from her father, one of the most famous chemical engineers in the country, rather than through formal schooling. She's married, has a kid, and takes spirituality very seriously. Yes, you did the math right, she had Yuki when she was 17. It's 1912, folks.
    Chemical +2, Electrical +1
    Young Mother: Adachi will cause double Office Stress if she has to work multiple tasks.

    Uyeno Sei, Ballistics Engineer, 31.
    The oldest member of the crew, this is Uyeno's second career. Her first was as an officer in the Imperial Navy with specialized technical training: her very promising career was cut short by her transition. Her work in a naval arsenal on machine-guns landed her the job here. Briefly dated Satomi (the age range is a bit creepy but again, 1912), she's missing a piece of her ear and is deaf on that side, from an exploding cannon. Recently returned from Varnmark from experimental surgery, she's known for her skill navigating gendered bureaucracy.
    Ballistic +3

    Mi Kyung-Jae, 23
    A recent graduate of the Imperial College of Heijo, Mi is from the recently annexed territory of Joseon. For those keeping track at home, that means he's a Korean national living in Imperial Japan in 1912. We haven't seen much of his personality because he's rightfully terrified of everything around him. He has a specialty in endurance engine design and modification. Speaks Joseon.
    Mechanical +1, Chemical +1
    Endurance Engines: Mi has an excellent understanding of metallurgy and tolerances. Any engine he works on gains +1 Reliability if a 16+ is rolled.
    Pulsejet Wizard: Mi is now one of the world's leading experts on the pulsejet engine. He can be given his own project to custom-craft pulsejet engines, and he gives +1 to any pulsejet-related project.
    Joseon National: Mi does not have security clearance to work on any top-secret projects.

    Miyoshi Shigeri, 23.
    A non-binary person and admirer of Asuka's work, they were in an support role in the Army before joining the company.
    Structural +1, Mechanical +1, Aerodynamic +1
    Mechanic: Miyoshi has some experience repairing and refurbishing aircraft. They get +1 if assigned on the clean-up phase.


    Other Employees
    - Ohara Satomi, 22, Mr. Ohara's niece and the company test pilot, Ohara is a general lesbian disaster. She's good at flying planes, driving cars, and kissing girls. She's bad at being patient, being respectable, and sticking to literally anyones conceptions of gender roles. Deeply in lesbians with Coralie D'Amboise.
    - Fujkikawa Sotatsu, old, modelmaker. He's an old man and toymaker and we don't see much of him because he locks himself in his workshop a lot. He's friends with Kawamura?

    Assets
    - Engine Test Rig (Allows engine tweaking and optimization.
    - Wind Tunnel (+1 Aerodynamics)
    - Rapid Prototype Lab (+1 Clean Up)
    Expanded Cast

    Akitsukuni Industry
    - Homura Mohoko: Head Engine Designer for Kobayashi. First female engineer in the country. A lot of sex appeal.
    - Okumura: Head of Akibara aircraft design.
    - Yamanaka Hajime: Kobayashi engineer. Young and eager.
    - Igarashi Masazumi: Kobayashi engineer. Reserved and experienced.
    - Admiral Akibara Toru: Imperial Navy Admiral. Maximum nepotism. Maximum douchebag.
    - Lt.Cmnd Akibara Shinzo: The above's son. A hottie but very forward.



    Character Families
    - Matsura(?) Mizuko: Asuka's sister. Was paralyzed in an accident in Asuka's first flight. Lives Elsewhere and is married now. Can't forgive Asuka, even though she's tried.
    - Adachi Motoki: Adachi's husband, an accountant. Legally blind.
    - Adachi Yuki: Adachi's 7 year old daughter and wannabe pilot. Very adorable.
    - Yachi's Brother: Exists.
    - Sakane's Wife: Exists. Drives him a bit crazy, but he loves her.
    - Yachi's Brother's Wife: Exists. Is statistically likely to be pregnant.
    - Lt. Coralie D'Amboise: Gallian pilot in exile. Satomi's girlfriend. 25. Accomplished bisexual duelist. She flew in the war for a single day, and for her troubles got a hole blown in her cheek and had her left arm paralyzed.

    Akisukuni Army & Ex-Army
    - Lt. Torio Tanaka: Yachi's former observer as an enlisted man. Was jumped up to fly Ducks and lost a leg on his first mission. A trained painter, married to Torio Saya.
    - Captain Amari Shiro: A Dragonfly pilot who ended up flying as Yachi's partner. Kind of delightfully twinky. They sorta slept together at one point, which wasn't great. He lost his previous boyfriend in the April Offensive and turned his plane into a shrine. He was shot in the gut and is still recovering.
    - Major Izuhara: Logistics officer, Imperial Army, this bespectled officer stood up to the Caspian Crown Prince and accidentally kicked off the Akitsikuni-Caspian War. The guilt was so much that, after almost a year of running Army procurement, he shot himself in a phone both.
    - Captain Nakai Sekien: Army scout pilot. First person to drop a bomb from an airplane, later head of the Duck Squadrons.
    - Captain Teshima: A Desk pilot that fought with Yachi. Lost an arm in the process, took over for Major Izuhara after his death. Seems cheery despite it all.
    - Captain Nashio: A real piece of shit dude and probably a rapist, he's also a war hero as the second-highest scoring ace on the Akitsukuni side. He was a young shitty kid in way over his head but it's no excuse.
    - Lt. Kinjo: Kind of a dumb lump and Nashio's friend, one of the desk pilots. Dead at 19.
    - Lt. Okazaki: Yachi's friend from before the war and pilot, he died in a spin in his dragonfly. His death probably hit Yachi the hardest.

    Westerners
    - Rose & Antoinette Sears: Pioneers of flight. Sisters. Black in 1910s not!America. Yikes.
    - Timina Guasti: Famous aircraft designer from Otrusia. Likes big planes and green.
    - Prince Protasov Vasilyevich: Crown Prince of Great Caspia. Real dick. You gotta hand it to him though, a decent flier.
    - Count von Zeppelin: Invented rigid airships. Runs a successful airline business. Damned impressive.
    - Bennhold: Aircraft Engineer. Experimenting with metal aircraft.
    - Aileen Middlemiss: Albian reporter for the Artimis Times. Well meaning and oblivious.
    Available Tech
    • Materials: Wood, Duralumin, Molded Wood, Wood & Silk Composite, etc
    • All engine mounts
    • All wing types
    • Basic reinforcement
    • Wing warping and ailerons
    • Basic water radiators
    • Flying Wings
    • Semi-Monocoque design (requires at least half the slots have frame pieces)
    • Valved pulsejets
    • Basic weapon mounts and turrets
    Tech not Yet Developed
    • Custom engines
    • Monocoque construction
    • Cantilever Wings and associated tech
    • V and T tails
    • Tailless designs
    • Aluminum and titanium
    • Cellulose surfacing
    • Any kind of radar
    • Weapon accessability mods
    • Interruptor gear
    • Geared propellers
    • And Maybe Other Stuff
    Akitsukuni
    Island Nation

    Government
    Constitutional Monarchy
    - The democratic portions of the government are dubiously legitimate.
    - The head of state is the Empress of Akitsukuni. She gives her blessing to newly formed governments.
    - The Navy and a small number of families have undue influence on politics.

    Economy
    Developing Mixed Market
    - Most industry is controlled by a small number of wealthy, family-owned companies.
    - The state provides most contracts to industry. Consumer good market is anemic.
    - Exports are few, mostly cultural.
    - Imports are raw minerals, food, oil, and expertise.
    - Currently suffering an economic crash after the last war.

    Politics
    The Diet is currently ruled by a Constitutional Nationalist government. It has a system of nonlocal proportional representation, with representatives appointed by the party in accordance to their share of the vote.
    - Constitutional Nationalists: 50%
    - Purity Club: 9%
    - New Independents: 26%
    - Fairness Association: 11%
    - United Communist League: 2%
    - Monarchists: 1%
    - Assorted Fringe Parties: 5%

    Demographics
    Akitsukuni is mostly very ethnically homogeneous. Around 5% of the population are various minorities, most from nearby countries. Roughly .1% are westerners here for business or in advisory positions.
    - Population: 55 Million
    - Religion: Mostly Kodo. Roughly 2% of the population follows western religions.
    - Wealth: Most wealth is concentrated in the top 5% of the country. Nearly 20% of the population lives in conditions indistinguishable from peasantry.
    - Urbanization: Heavily urbanized for a small economy: 35% and rapidly growing.

    Military
    At Peace
    - Imperial Akitsukuni Navy (IAN): The 6th largest in the world, and the most experienced.
    - Imperial Akitsukuni Army (IAA): 150,000 highly experienced soldiers, and a considerable reserve.

    Aspects
    - Poor Resources: Aluminum costs +1.
    - Damn Akitsukuni Engines!: Engines have -1 Reliability.



    The Main Character Of This Quest Is Nonbinary And Uses They/Them Pronouns.

    I Am Putting This Here Because The Next Person To Misgender Them Is Getting Yeeted Into The Trash

    Also here's the Gayaverse TV Tropes page, because why not.​
     
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  • Informational
    • Donut was a bit of a joke, since we named the duck and dragonfly for their appearance. I see no compelling reason to stick with D names, but if we were to break from it I think we can do better than referencing terms from insect anatomy that no one who will be flying this plane is likely to have even known there was a word for.
     
    OneirosTheWriter said:
    Remember, if there's any project we can slip the budget a little, it's the emergency anti-tank/mobility attack plane. This is for rescuing the land war.
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    The money for the airplanes doesn't magically appear from the ether. The army has a certain amount of money to buy these planes. If we go over budget, then there will be less planes in the sky. So it's only worth going over budget if we thing that the reduced number of planes will still produce a better result than more, cheaper planes would.

    So, for example, if we went with a 2 x 25 mm twin engine plane, then our choices might be 'an unarmored one for 28 or an armored on for 39'. But you can make some pretty good arguments that going over budget for the armor means that so much less planes would be shot down that 'more, cheaper planes' would be less effective.

    But if people think that 1 x 25mm gun would be good enough, we can almost certainly produce a single engine armored plane to carry that gun, and there's no real excuse for going over budget.
     
    I'm still for a twin engine plane with the gun in the nose hooked up to an electric motor. Whether there's a second guy in the back with an LMG for fending off interceptors is up in the air for me though.

    The main reason I wan an electric drive for the gun is it avoids all the complicated gearing needed to hook it up to the engine without borking the entire thing if the gun misfires or something.(plus, if we go twin engine trying to mechanically hook it up from engine pods is gonna be tricky)
     
    Personally, I'll feel a lot less worried about lacking a rear MG if the plane is agile enough to do at least not horribly when pulling double duty as an energy fighter. How are things looking on that?
     
    Gnarker said:
    Personally, I'll feel a lot less worried about lacking a rear MG if the plane is agile enough to do at least not horribly when pulling double duty as an energy fighter. How are things looking on that?
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    Some Designs currently being played with are faster than anything the Caspians have and have a handling around -1 to 1 or so.
     
    Gnarker said:
    Single or Double-engine ones? With armor?
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    Looking back at my spreadsheet, I was mistaken. More like handling -2 to 0. But yes, single or twin engine, with or without armor, all fit that basic mold. Some designs are just faster than everything the Caspians have now, while others are probably also faster than their next fighters will be. I've even got a few way over budget ones that are the fastest plane in the world by a large margin before optimization, but that's all based on two liquid cooled engines and is a really bad plan.

    Edit: by "with or without armor" I mean with or without added cockpit armor and an enclosed cockpit. I'm not even seriously looking at designs that aren't made of silk composite.
     
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    Fun thing is that if this thing can be built to be sufficiently faster than anything the Caspians have and with at least acceptable manueverability, it also should be absolute murder against any Caspian aircraft. Might be worth setting up mixed squadrons of Demons and Dragonflies to obliterate Caspian air presence; the Dragonflies kill anything that tries to dogfight, the Demons kill anything that tries to run, and trying to gain advantage against one just makes you more vulnerable to the other.
     
    Glau said:
    I'll be voting for armor. The main additional risk from ground attack is rifles, and there are a lot of them. So we aren't going to avoid them by going fast, and manueverability isn't going to save us from massed riflefire the way it will from interceptors.

    Let's please armor the cockpit enough to weather that at least.
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    Plus, sooner or later, someone's gonna start taking empty flat cars and mounting MGs or worse on them.

    Jeboboid said:
    I meant more that it's a plane designed to hunt trains, so a mean name makes sense to me, but sure.
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    How about Shrike?

    Gnarker said:
    Single or Double-engine ones? With armor?
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    Thinking a Double-Engine, if only for redundancy.
     
    Crasian01 said:
    It's probably only necessary to make the wings, crew compartments, and landing gear silk composite. Some armor has to be bolted on over he fuel tanks and engines and I'm not sure if Sketch models detonation of onboard stores.
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    Only parts of the wings:



    brmj said:
    I would love for this to be fast enough to outrun any Caspian fighter currently in the air, because that makes it much less vulnerable to interception. This is probably much easier than armoring and arming it enough to fight off enemy fighters all the way to the target and back. That's why speed matters to me.

    @open_sketchbook, do we by chance know the top speed of the Caspian fighters? This would be useful information to have.
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    Navy designers and Ohara engineers, simultaneously: "SPEED IS ARMOR!"
     
    brmj said:
    Looking back at my spreadsheet, I was mistaken. More like handling -2 to 0. But yes, single or twin engine, with or without armor, all fit that basic mold. Some designs are just faster than everything the Caspians have now, while others are probably also faster than their next fighters will be. I've even got a few way over budget ones that are the fastest plane in the world by a large margin before optimization, but that's all based on two liquid cooled engines and is a really bad plan.

    Edit: by "with or without armor" I mean with or without added cockpit armor and an enclosed cockpit. I'm not even seriously looking at designs that aren't made of silk composite.
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    All right, I'm convinced towards 'no rear turret'. Now how many of '2 25mm', 'crew armor', 'faster than next-gen Caspian planes', and 'in budget' can we get on one plane?
     
    All this talk of armor frustrates me because it's a plane not a tank. Also we don't need two guns for it to do what it needs to do. We're getting a lot of feature creep here before we even have something that gets off the ground.
     
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    Artificial Girl said:
    All this talk of armor frustrates me because it's a plane not a tank. Also we don't need two guns for it to do what it needs to do. We're getting a lot of feature creep here before we even have something that gets off the ground.
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    No one is talking about tank armor. The point of the little bit of armor we are talking about is to make it better able to tolllearate the heavy ground fire we expect them to take. It isn't going to be able to resist machine gun fire from fighters, except maybe protecting the pilot sometimes. What it is for is making rifle fire from the ground and fragments from distant flak less lethal, reducing losses. It cuts into the budget a little, but not enough to go over budget with a single engine single gun plane, and the silk composite actually improve DNE too. If we used the money we could save cutting armor for something else, we could no doubt get a little for it, but probably not as much as you think since we are still constrained by mass. I may have to try a couple designs to see what we can do, but the point is we don't actually have to choose.
     
    People should be aware that the rules have changed/are changing enough that I am no longer confident in the numbers I've been sharing remaining accurate. Until we've got an updated spreadsheet, I can't really say exactly how it will impact things. One thing I can say, though: the single engine design has gotten a little less competitive due to a change to how trust works.

    Also, I'm wondering if maybe we want more fuel than we'd currently been planning on for longer range train-hunting. We should give some thought to how far into enemy territory we want it to be able to fly. One upside of this might be that we could spread out the fuel such that we don't need to armor the fuel tanks, since a typical hit results in a leak rather than a fire. That could be useful.
     
    You know it occurs to me that we can switch from 2 engines back to 1 or vice versa. @open_sketchbook lets us backtrack that way.

    So really the question is which gun to get. We should come up with votes on the matter even though we've done a lot of talking about things. Based on my read of the thread, here are what seem to be the big choices everyone wants:

    1) 20mm or 25mm? The consensus is that the 37mm is excessive and that we don't have enough engine power to justify it. 20mm has higher armorp-piercing and is lower drag, but would require reloads or more research rolls to get the belt feed to work. Conversely, 25mm has much more drag, but it's already belt fed and links up relatively easily to a drive system so it's not that big of a deal.

    2) 1x Ogre/H-series or 2x Hobgoblin? One engine may be problematic due to new rule changes, but it really depends on the performance desired. Going for 2x Ogre/H-series isn't really being considered at the moment, nor is the use of a Pegasus Rotary. The concern seems to be losing the radiators for the inlines, while the rotary has the whole destabilization problem to contend with if you go single engine. 2x Pegasus hasn't been discussed much, but @open_sketchbook has already said that they'll cancel each other out and there won't be a destabilization penalty. Note that the Pegasus has much, much higher fuel consumption than the Hobgoblin.

    3) Tailgunner or pilot armor? The argument for tail-gunner is that it's going to be impossible at the current technology level to actually armor the cockpit, so putting on a tailgunner to ward off interceptors will at least do something. The argument for pilot armor is that something good enough to stop a rifle bullet is all that we really need, and that's probably a doable plan.

    Personally, I don't think we care either way between the 20mm or the 25mm. It's really just a case of picking a poison and running away. The main question is how many engines and which ones. I think 2x Hobgoblin is perfectly reasonable as long as people don't expect the aircraft to out-dogfight the Dragonfly.

    What plans are currently posted? We may as well get this vote over with, because I don't think there's much more arguing to be done. We've sort of reached a point where all the major arguments have been described and people are going to vote they way they're going to vote.
     
    Crasian01 said:
    What plans are currently posted?
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    Here you go:
    Adhoc vote count started by Wiadi on Dec 22, 2018 at 10:07 PM, finished with 11646 posts and 15 votes.
    • [X] Send a more reassuring letter. Respect his apparent desire for distance. (+1 Stress)
      [x] Hobgoblin Semi-Radial: This retooled Goblin Engine, running a 100 horsepower, is almost the same beast with some mechanical changes for more power, at the cost of reliability. 4 Mass, 4 Drag, Thrust 4, Cost 5, Reliability -4, 9 Fuel per Tank.
      [X] Pry. Ask him what is happening directly. Tell him he had a duty to let you know what was happening. (Social Roll)
      [X] Pry. Ask him what is happening directly. Tell him he had a duty to let you know what was happening. (Social Roll)
      -[x] tell him what just happened. The train test, the cheer, the suicide. Tell him you are worried about the same thing happening to him, and that his letters are making you more worried, not less. Tell him you want him back here, and the war over, but most of all you want him to be able to be honest with you, and to feel safe expressing what he feels.
      [x] Plan: Give 'Em an Inch
      -[x] Light cannon in a forward facing fixed nose mount
      --[x] 25mm rotary with electric motor
      -[x] MMG on turret mount for rear and side arcs
      [X] Plan Drake's Teeth
      -[X] Single 25mm mechanical gun mounted in the nose
      --[X] Driven by mechanical connection to engine if possible.
      -[X] No machine guns
    Click to expand...
     
    It sure looks like we're looking at 25mm rotary guns for sure, and probably 2 hobgoblins as the popular choice. If we consolidate the "Pry" votes, which I think is reasonable, I think we have update materials.

    Castles of Steel is gonna get an update, then I'll do the one for this.

    Roll me 2d10.
     
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